Justice for the Edifice: Praying Compensation for Rhode Island College, 1770–1800 Free

Founded in 1764, Rhode Island College launched from temporary quarters in a parsonage in Warren, Rhode Island. To find donors to fund a permanent building, the Corporation targeted the colony's port towns, which dominated North America's carrying trade in slaves. Few of the tens of thousands of African captives Rhode Islanders transported around the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century returned home with them. Their ships mostly brought back goods, supplies, and money. All this cargo latched the local economy to the slave trade and enriched potential college supporters.⁴

Providence families donated almost eighty percent of the total raised by the college's subscription drive. This led to the purchase of an eight-acre parcel for a campus on Providence's Prospect Hill, now College Hill. The site commemorated the “home-lot” of the Rev. Chad Brown, the “first Baptist elder in Rhode Island”—the kind of “first” that historian Jean O'Brien has flagged as a rhetorical device to push Native nations to the margins of public memory. More than a century before the college's birth, Narragansett dispossession underwrote the deeds that enabled the college to take ownership of its hilltop home with views of the town and ships in the bay.⁵

Workers broke ground for the College Edifice in March 1770. Robert P. Emlen, the Brown curator who reviewed the construction records for the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, identified four enslaved laborers—Pero, Abraham, and two others, named only as someone's property—among a workforce mixing white, Black, and Indigenous individuals. Their experiences onsite remain elusive. We know, for instance, that sixty-two-year-old Pero wielded a shovel and got a customary share of the workmen's rum, but we can only imagine how it felt for him to be barked at to dig faster or to enjoy a drink in the sun. Maybe he joked with other workers. Maybe he scanned the horizon for his daughter's gravestone, placed about a mile away the previous spring. Given the local talk of abolition, and that Pero must have known of acts like college president Rev. James Manning's manumission of his enslaved manservant, it would not have been odd for him to have dreamed of a future for her in freedom and mourned the lost possibility.⁶

The construction results track more easily. First came an excavation, then the cornerstone-laying by John Brown, a slave-trading scion of a family of college supporters whose members split over abolition. John's father's firm managed the worksite where the Edifice's brick walls rose four stories from a footprint 150′x46′ with 10′x33′ extensions in the middle. Most of its rooms were student accommodations above a ground floor with spaces for teaching, administration, study, and dining. By early 1771, the Edifice was in use before the finishings were done and notable as a plainer version of its inspiration, Nassau Hall at the College of New Jersey, a building the Princeton and Slavery Project has shown also drew on slave capital. One of the accomplishments of the investigations inspired by Brown's Slavery and Justice report has been to clarify the ubiquity of this funding pattern.⁷

Partially supported by slavery, the Edifice once stood as not only the largest building in Providence, but the largest in Rhode Island. Institutional growth has since diluted its grandeur. “I just see it as another one of the pretty buildings on the Main Green,” a Brown student said at a 2023 event on the Edifice's ties to slavery. Back in 1770, boosters cheered the structure's “Forwardness” and likened it to the Second Temple of Jerusalem. Even haters marveled as they compared it to the arrogant Tower of Babel. No one denied the project's ambition. At construction, Rhode Island College had twenty-one students and built the Edifice to accommodate one hundred, though a later army inspection proposed cramming in six hundred beds.⁸ The cost to get the building up, £2,599 by my estimate, may look trifling after 250 years, but it was extraordinary for such a tiny institution at the time.⁹

How much would that be now? On the low side, “real cost” indexing pegs the 2023 equivalent at a paltry $320,000, a small fraction of what Brown paid for a provost's residence in 2023. On the high side, an “economy cost” index inflates it to an astounding $1.7 billion, comparable to the price of megaprojects like casino resorts or skyscrapers. A simpler approach keyed into Brown's most important source of revenue asks how many tuition-years the Edifice cost in 1770 and what that budget level would be today. The answer was 722, which in 2024–25 equates to nearly $50 million. That figure fits comfortably in the price range of major recent additions to Brown's real estate portfolio, like the 270-bed “resort-style” River House apartments purchased for $75 million in 2021.¹⁰

Today the university has hundreds of buildings, any of which could be closed for a few years without threatening the institution's viability. In contrast, for its first half century, the Edifice marbled with slavery's profits stood alone as academic and living quarters for students. Practically speaking, it was the college in 1776, which made it all the more devastating when American troops seized it and put it to work for the war effort. We know Pero was alive when Manning started trying to free it from captivity. Abraham and the others probably were too. We can only imagine what they thought.¹¹

When it came to American independence, Rhode Island College supported the cause but hoped to avoid the fray. After Lexington and Concord in 1775, President Manning cancelled commencement but otherwise pledged to maintain operations. That spring British vessels started seizing ships off Rhode Island. That fall they bombarded nearby Bristol. Providence's location at the back of Narragansett Bay sheltered it from harm, but rising prices and supply shortages stung its economy. “Colleges have suffered greatly,” Manning wrote of the war in 1776, “though I believe we have not suffered more than our Neighbors.” Under the circumstances, the college initially proved resilient. In the term after the Declaration of Independence, the Corporation gave out honorary degrees, reinvested its endowment, and kept enrollment up, at least until disaster struck on December 7, 1776. That day a British flotilla landed six thousand soldiers at Aquidneck Island at the mouth of the bay. As the redcoats took Newport and set up camps visible from College Hill, fears of a ground invasion triggered a countermobilization at Providence. American forces desperate for barracks “marched into the College & dispossessed the students,” Manning recalled. Within twenty-four hours of the British landing, the US occupation of the Edifice had begun.¹²

Two days later, Manning formally announced the college's temporary shutdown. The college neither opposed the requisition nor had a choice. In theory, the “doctrine of necessity” permitted the seizure. In practice, Rhode Island's Council of War sanctioned it. Council members agreed with the state's Chief Engineer that the college was the best place to concentrate defenses due to its high vantage, level ground, ample housing, and proximity to town. With troops still on site in January, the Council ordered the artillery regiment stationed at the Edifice until further notice and the campus converted into an artillery park. By spring, most soldiers in town lived in the Edifice or adjacent temporary structures. In May, the army further fortified the site, forcing Manning to announce the college's indefinite closure.¹³

The Edifice took major damage in 1777, albeit not from the British. Instead of invading the mainland, British forces held Aquidneck to support a blockade and launch raids that never reached Providence. As long as they lingered nearby, about 1,000 underpaid and underfed American soldiers remained in town drinking heavily and causing destruction. In March 1777, the Council of War began investigating “Damages done to the College Edifice by the Troops who have been barracked there.” They broke “windows, doors and floors” and committed “other mischief.” By year's end, the Edifice was “so greatly damaged” that the Assembly had to authorize £100 of repairs to keep it habitable. They also ordered the commanding general to prevent further “devastations,” which seems to have helped.¹⁴

Officer vigilance notwithstanding, the army's partial transition of the Edifice into a hospital likely influenced a decline in abuse over the next two years. More injured soldiers in house meant fewer able-bodied ones taking out aggression. So did making space for medical staff, like the midwife Mary Bennett, who was living in an upstairs room in the spring of 1779, more than a century before female students would call any of Brown's dormitories home. The only new complaint about the occupation in this period came from the College Corporation, which alleged slapdash repairs had left the building exposed to weathering.¹⁵

That complaint came a few weeks after the British evacuated Aquidneck in 1779, in a petition to the Council of War requesting the Edifice's return. Writing for the Corporation, Manning and Stephen Hopkins, the Chancellor and Rhode Island's signer of the Declaration of Independence, noted that the college obeyed the “Authority of this State” and “resigned” the Edifice, and argued the British evacuation made reviving its educational mission possible. “We need not hint to your Honors the Importance of encouraging Education,” they pled. Two days later, the Council granted their request. Even if Manning and Hopkins made a strong case, it is hard not to see the swift action as a perk of having high-placed friends. One of the seven council members who heard the plea was the nephew of a college founder. Another was a current trustee. A third was Stephen's brother, Esek Hopkins. A fourth was Jabez Bowen, current fellow and future chancellor. All four joined the Council after the requisition.¹⁶

The redemption proved short-lived. Demobilization took five months and by the time Manning reopened the college in May 1780, a French fleet was sailing toward Newport as part of an alliance that stipulated that a hospital would be ready for them upon arrival. To start preparations, Gen. George Washington dispatched Dr. James Craik, the Continental Army's Assistant Director General of Hospitals, to Providence. During Craik's visit, he found Manning and fifteen students in the Edifice using just one room. He declared the building the perfect site for the hospital and told Washington that he expected to requisition it easily.¹⁷

This time Manning and his Council allies resisted. Although Manning argued a re-appropriation threatened his income, student welfare, and the Edifice's safety, he got the most traction from stoking fears about sick soldiers importing contagion from abroad. The Council stunned Craik by denying his requisition request and directing him to stick the French in “Dirty vile Huts” far from town. Undeterred, he turned to the Assembly, which seemed poised to overrule the Council until Manning changed their minds with a remonstrance from Providence's inhabitants, who had been convinced “a Disease not less mortal than the Plague was to be brought in by the Fleet.” The second denial rattled Craik, who knew the French Commissary General, Ethis de Corny, would be arriving shortly to takeover preparations.¹⁸

Craik predicted Corny's anger but not how quickly he would steamroll the Council. Upon arrival, Corny sent a letter telling them that the Edifice was not theirs to withhold because Benjamin Franklin, their nation's diplomat in Paris, had already given it away for “the Sick of the French Army.” The Council broke instantly and rubberstamped his demand. To diffuse the “disagreeable” situation, they offered to find Manning a temporary residence further from the Edifice than the president's house. Less than 48 hours passed between the writing of Corny's letter and the re-shuttering of the college.¹⁹

The acrimony increased as Corny hired locals to demolish part of the north wall for a patient entryway and attach stalls to the building. Incensed by the renovations, trustees John and Joseph Brown caused a brief work stoppage by threatening to ruin the carpenters. When rage burned hottest, John urged the townspeople to “blow up the Hospital” before the patients arrived. As tempers cooled, the trustees aired grievances at a private meeting. They said the renovations weakened the Edifice's structural integrity and looked awful. They also complained that the Council capitulated without their advice. David Howell, the college secretary, took their concerns to the Assembly, where he asked for the creation of an Edifice inspection committee made up of Corporation members empowered to block alterations. The Assembly agreed and no major renovations followed, but nothing was undone, either.²⁰

The first wave of sick French soldiers entered the Edifice about six weeks after the renovations began, and soon there were 340 patients in care. This was likely the high point for an occupation that lasted almost two years and proceeded without major incident after the initial controversy. As the French army aided the campaign to Yorktown in 1781, the patients at the Edifice thinned, leaving it mostly empty by early 1782. Some final drama came as the French prepared to leave and Manning heard the soldiers were selling boards, hinges, doors, locks, and windows for scrap. He tried to stop them but only collected a few taunts. The soldiers, he told the Browns, said the items “belong to the King.”²¹

The wartime occupation ended quietly in April 1782, when the French Commissary returned the keys to the Lieut. Governor and left. The following month, the Corporation again petitioned for the building's return. Along with Manning and Hopkins, fourteen trustees and fellows signed. They asked not just for control of the Edifice, but also for assurances that the building “Shall not again be appropriated to an Hospital or Barracks.” They only got a ruined building back, stripped for parts and stinking from the stalls.²²

It took until the end of the year to get students back into the Edifice and until the end of the century for the college to get reparations. No one doubted the back-to-back requisitions stunted the institution's growth, causing what John Brown called “a great Stagnation.” Nor did anyone argue that the loss of college income or damage to the Edifice resulted from broken laws. The question was: Would the society that benefited from commandeering the Edifice make the Corporation whole because doing so was just? Like others who petitioned for Revolutionary War reparations discovered, the answer was not automatically yes.²³

The college's campaign began with Manning and Hopkins' 1779 petition to the Rhode Island Assembly. In addition to asking for the Edifice back, they explained how the state “appropriated” the building and caused “very great Damage,” and requested emergency repairs be made in advance of “proper Compensation.” Beyond the specifics, the request was not unique. It formed part of a practice that crossed the Atlantic with the English. As early as 1647, Rhode Island's charter government sanctioned petitioning to address wrongs that “cannot be righted by any Law extant among us.” Residents petitioned to shape policies, seek permissions, or obtain relief, including but not limited to indemnification for property loss and damage. In the decades before the Revolution, the Assembly received hundreds of petitions. During the war, the rate increased. The Corporation's 1779 petition was just one of seventy-six received that year, filed alongside pleas seeking redress for impressed rum, horses, services, and more.²⁴

Recent scholarship on early American petitioning has stressed that the practice provided political access for women and racial minorities, while also showing that most petitioners were white men. An analysis by Maggie Blackhawk indicated that over ninety percent of the nearly 146,000 petitions sent to Congress between 1789 and 1865 came from this demographic. There is little reason to think the proportion differed much in preceding decades. In fact, Rhode Island petitions would have tilted more heavily to wealthy white men if this constituency did not sometimes receive promises of restitution in advance for adverse policies. Most notoriously, the Rhode Island Assembly prevented a wave of angry petitions when it instituted the first systemic scheme for slaveholder reparations in the United States. The 1778 law empowered enslaved men to free themselves through army enlistment and pledged to indemnify owners up to £120 for the loss.²⁵

In addition to reflecting a common practice by its usual demographic, the college's petitioning of the state was typical for its failure. In advance of the first return of the Edifice in 1780, the Assembly only provided a few “absolutely necessary” fixes and referred the Corporation to the national government for restitution. At the height of the Corporation's worries about Corny's renovations, the Assembly ignored a request from the trustees for recognition “of the rights of this Corporation with respect to the rents & Dammages of sd Edifice & estate while occupied.” When the Assembly returned the Edifice in 1782, it refused to provide any repairs or compensation at all.²⁶

The Assembly's response prompted the college to draw up its first congressional petition in May 1780. Following convention, it began with a salutation, attested to facts, made a request, and signed off. President Manning, Chancellor Hopkins, Treasurer John Brown, Secretary Howell, Fellow Bowen and ten other Corporation members attested that the army “compelled” the requisition and left the Edifice “totally unfit for the Purposes for which it was originally designed.” Invoking the college's benevolent mission, they argued that the public should save the institution because the Corporation lacked the means. Declaring themselves “emboldened, mostly humbly to pray,” they asked “that the Damages sustained while the Building was appropriated to the public service, may be fully repaired at the public Expence.” The groveling tone was standard, adopted to temper the assertiveness of calling on authorities for discretionary action. A draft of the petition retained by the college contains changes that reveal how the Corporation calibrated language toward this end. At one point, an editor crossed out the word “seized” and replaced it with “taken,” softening the description of the Edifice's appropriation. At another, they condensed the phrase “may be ordered to be fully repaired” to the less pointed “may be fully repaired.” For the time being, the careful wording did not get the chance to produce the desired result, as the French requisition the following month put plans to submit the petition on hold.²⁷

Left on its own, the Corporation had to self-finance repairs. After getting the Edifice back in 1782, a college committee aided by master builders assessed the total damage and calculated the most urgent fixes alone would cost £200. By November, they had scraped together the minimum and had the Edifice cleaned up enough to welcome new students. Manning's fundraising efforts over the next few years offer a glimpse into a hardscrabble revival that followed. His pitches leaned on woeful accounts of the “rude and wasting soldiery” and the building's “almost total demolition” coupled with promising signs of postwar regrowth. By 1785, he could report the piecemeal repairs reaching the Edifice's third floor. In 1786, enrollment passed pre-revolutionary highs. Manning's letters acknowledged the local sources funding the comeback: a trickle of endowment income and trustees who repeatedly “advanced money out of their own pockets.” As he asked prospective donors to emulate them, he betrayed the claims of penury in the 1780 petition as, at best, an exaggeration.²⁸

Through the revival, the college never stopped insisting it deserved restitution. At the same meeting where the trustees resolved to self-fund repairs, they also voted to pursue payment of “Rents Due & for Damages done the College Edifice, during the Time, it was occupied.” By then, they had reason to think their prospects had improved, as one of their own, David Howell, had been elected to the Confederation Congress. Once rumors of peace began, Howell reached out to offer his assistance “in making an application to Congress to compensate the damages done to the College edifice.” But as the war's end brought the scope of the national debt into relief, delay mounted. By mid-1784, despair at being “denied compensation” crept into Manning's letters. He complained of the Edifice being “delivered up, or rather taken possession of by the troops” and sustaining injuries for which he foresaw “no Prospect of obtaining Compensation.” A few lines later he touched on Rhode Island's new gradual abolition law and his conviction that the state never should have permitted slavery, but made no mention of debts the manumitted might be owed for their servitude. Perhaps he considered their suffering “an old story,” which was what he feared would rob the college of recompence “not only just, but greatly wanted at present.” Anxious to act, he asked Howell to find out if Congress would welcome a new petition in 1785. If so, he pledged to deliver it himself, a common tactic used by petitioners to increase their chances of success.²⁹

The trustees approved a plan to make that delivery just before Howell's pessimistic response sent Manning into a fit of desperate bargaining. Rumors of a land office opening in contested Native territory north of the Ohio River got Manning thinking the college might take a land grant in lieu of cash. “I beg leave to enquire what you think of the Probability of our procuring a grant of some part of the western Territory,” he asked Howell, arguing it could make the college whole without adding to the national debt. “Rather than get nothing,” he reasoned, “I should be glad to accept this.” Although the Corporation would later accept a grant of expropriated Native land through the Morrill Act of 1862, Manning's idea was too precocious. The post-revolutionary trustees wanted cash and charged ahead with their new petition.³⁰

In May 1785, Manning hand delivered a dossier documenting the wartime ordeal of the college's “elegant Brick building” to Congress in New York. The packet included the undelivered petition from May 1780 and a supplement continuing the story from Corny's takeover, enabled by Franklin, they noted. The petition argued that given the Edifice's “excellent Situation, salubrious Air, and the length of time which it subserved their purposed, the Armies of the United States and of France are indebted to no place more than this, for the comfortable Accommodation and Recovery of their sick and wounded.” While the trustees and fellows asked for any relief Congress deemed fit, they wanted it “immediately” and provided an itemized bill to guide deliberations. Based on the assessment of the damages in 1782 and what they deemed reasonable charges for rent, they claimed the unpaid debt amounted to £1,309. Rounding out the submission, they provided a certified statement swearing that “no Compensation has been made Either For Rent or Damages to my Knoledge” from the barracks master who had taken control of the Edifice in 1776.³¹

Congress considered the petition after forming a committee to report on its merits. Not content to wait idly, the Corporation asked Howell to discover the report's findings early. If unfavorable, they urged him to block its release. Otherwise, they wished him to “obtain the prayer of our petition.” Plainly stating they had no one else in Congress so inclined “to serve the interests of the college equal to its Secretary,” the Corporation urged Howell to secure the funds “so justly due” before term limits swept him from office. As it turned out, the committee favored the claim and recommended paying it under a 1784 law authorizing compensation for buildings “hired” in the war. Howell, however, could not get Congress onboard. Although no record of the debate survives, one can imagine concerns raised about the applicability of the hiring law or the addition of an unobligated burden to the national debt. Howell, for one, blamed the defeat on less high-minded factors, specifically a combination of congressional absenteeism and revenge exacted by his political enemies.³²

Unyielding, Manning returned to Congress in 1786, this time as Rhode Island's newest representative. Given the Corporation's worry about Howell's departure, the just so story of Manning's appointment strains credulity. Supposedly, he wandered into the state house one day out of “curiosity merely” at which point Esek Hopkins, then an assembly member and college trustee, spontaneously nominated him. If the nomination's circumstances sound suspicious, Manning left no doubt why he took the job. The move was so out of character that Manning felt compelled to inform friends he had no actual intention of transitioning to politics. “I have accepted an appointment of the State to a seat in Congress,” he confided, “purely with a view to obtain, if possible, a grant to compensate the rents and damages for the use of the edifice by the public during the war.”³³

Manning fared no better than Howell as new bureaucratic hurdles arose and the government dissolved. As the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787, the Confederation Congress passed a rule requiring unresolved claims routed through the comptroller of the treasury. Manning collected the college's paperwork so he could organize the application, but the ratification of the Constitution rendered it moot. Rather than being upset about the setback, he was angry Rhode Islanders had rejected the new union. Manning's stint in the Confederation Congress, where he found “Injustice, under the sanction of laws,” made him a staunch supporter of change.³⁴

The rise of the new government delayed a re-petition for three years. Rhode Island's late adoption of the Constitution played a role, as did Manning's growing workload, which forced him to step down from his external ministerial duties in this period. The Corporation may also have been waiting to see how others fared. The first Congress (1789–91) received dozens of petitions seeking compensation for property damaged or lost in the war. One claim in particular—for the occupation of the building of Delaware's Wilmington Academy—was an obvious bellwether. Unfortunately, Manning did not live to see its outcome. In July 1791, he had a fatal stroke, which robbed the campaign for redress of its longtime leader.³⁵

The Corporation voted to submit a new petition shortly after Congress agreed to compensate the Wilmington Academy in 1792. In a plausibly deniable attempt to grease the wheels of justice, they also elected Rhode Island Rep. Benjamin Bourne a trustee and conferred an honorary doctorate on Alexander Hamilton, who would evaluate their case as treasury secretary. More directly, Jabez Bowen, now chancellor, enlisted support from the state's congressional delegation. Citing the Wilmington Academy's success, he encouraged Rhode Island's senators to ensure “that the same Justice will be done us.” To prepare for the campaign, he asked them to inspect the papers entrusted to Bourne, who had agreed to submit the petition on the Corporation's behalf.³⁶

The trustees approved the final petition in December 1792. As it humbly explained, the Corporation had “applyd for Redress” to the Confederation Congress just before its expiration and now came to “your Honourable Body for Reparation of the Damages the Building sustained and for Reasonable Rent while it was occupyed by the Publick.” After revisiting the facts of the occupation, the petitioners acknowledged that the Corporation had already fixed the Edifice “with the greatest Difficulty” and restored the college to “a respectable footing.” Still, they urged Congress to accede to the college's “Just demands,” predicting that “the Publick at large will applaud your doings.” To evidence the aging claim, the trustees included a half dozen supporting documents, some drawn from the previous application and a few others attesting to occupation dates. This included the bill drafted in 1785, to which John Brown, as college treasurer, added £991 in interest going back to the war. The update brought the total debt claimed to £2,300, nearly matching the original cost of the Edifice. In a letter delivering the dossier to Rep. Bourne, Bowen described the amounts demanded for rent, damages, and interest as “verry Reasonable” and sent him off with an encouraging word that their fellow trustees “Doubt not for on the Justice of our claim that you will be able to get a Reasonable allowance.”³⁷

If the trustees hoped for a speedy resolution, then they were severely disappointed. The college's prayer dragged through the House for years before fizzling out. Bourne inaugurated this process by reading the petition on the House floor on New Year's Eve 1792. Following standard procedure, the House then referred the petition to the treasury secretary for review. Hamilton's report took two years and came back positive: he validated the college's story, likened its case to the Wilmington Academy's, and advised indemnification. In 1795, Bourne prompted the Committee of the Whole House to discuss the findings, but after hitting an impasse, they referred the petition to the newly formed Committee of Claims for another review. Although the Committee of Claims’ 1797 report echoed Hamilton's and suggested a compensation resolution, the Committee of the Whole House tabled it without introducing a compensation bill. This was a bad sign. Unlike suing for economic damages, petitioners asked Congress to grant prayers by passing a law, not enforcing one already on the books. Procedurally, this meant that an explicit decision was only needed to succeed. Failure mostly happened quietly by indefinite tabling.³⁸

The stalled process was not for a lack of lobbying by the Corporation. Their push began with efforts to expedite Hamilton's report and thickened over time. Frustrated with the delay in 1796, John Brown reached out to Sen. Theodore Foster to ask him, as a college alumnus, to lean on the chairman of the Committee of Claims. “We ask nothing from Congress but what is justly due,” Brown wrote as he illegally sold slaves from his ship Hope, “therefore a delay of justice is doing injustice.” Next the Corporation formally petitioned the state's delegation to work together to see the “demands” met. The meta-petition claimed the college had nowhere to turn “except to the justice of Congress” to improve the Edifice, omitting that it had topped the building with a decorative cupola a few years earlier. Behind the scenes, Bowen fumed. “They make such frivolous Excuses,” he complained, echoing Manning's postwar despair, “that I begin to think there is no Justice or Virtuous publick Spirit remaining in the Committee of Claims.” Still, he pushed, continuing to gather support across state lines and telling those who would listen that remuneration would enable the college “to make a better Figure in Future.” Both Bowen and Brown pointed out that other institutions had obtained war reparations. “Ample Grants or payments for Dammagis Sustaind under Simmuler Surcumstancis” went to other schools, Brown told Christopher G. Champlin in 1798, alerting Rhode Island's newest congressman to the college's claim. Beyond the Wilmington Academy, the Corporation had learned that both the College of New Jersey and Harvard College had received compensation for the requisition of their buildings supported by enslaved labor. Bowen emphasized that the College of Rhode Island was occupied longer, by allies, and at George Washington's specific request. “I say,” he vented, “that we can obtain no Redress is hard and Unjust.”³⁹

Opposition from three directions in the House thwarted the Corporation's efforts. First, some members categorically opposed “any advance of money from the Treasury” for war claims. More mildly, a second group objected to holding the United States accountable for the French occupation of the Edifice. The Committee of Claims report reflected their influence. Whereas Hamilton had generally advised paying the debt, the Committee of Claims only recommended assuming responsibility for the American occupation. The Committee's 1797 resolution to this effect did not satisfy a third group who opposed the college's claim out of a vindictive sense of equity. This contingent of erstwhile war reparations supporters, who could be found arguing that the nation must do “what was right” and “pay a few more just debts,” blocked the college's claim after the House denied equally worthy petitions for procedural violations, tipping the balance toward tabling the partial payment resolution in 1797.⁴⁰

John Brown's election to Congress tipped it back into consideration. After beating charges for slave trading with the Hope, Brown won a seat in the House, where he devoted his energy mainly to weakening restrictions on human trafficking. Still, he did “not Forgit the College Claim.” After reaching Philadelphia for his first session in late 1799, he told his son to assure Jonathan Maxcy, Manning's successor as president, that “I have been & Shall be paving the way for the Claim & hope to Succede.” The following month, the petition escaped tabling purgatory and started barrelling toward a final disposition.⁴¹

Champlin re-introduced the petition to the House in January 1800, resurrecting the claim and forcing a new debate of the Committee of Claims’ resolution in the Committee of the Whole House. The critical turn came in March. After failing to pass a motion to include payment for the French occupation, Champlin and Brown “pressed the justice of the case with much zeal” by insisting that the college deserved to be remunerated like other occupied schools and succeeded in getting a bill to the floor. Brown sent word home that night, his excitement tempered by the fact that the bill only covered damages “by our Troops, but not for the French Troops.” The vote scheduled for a few days later hit a last-minute snag when several congressmen, angry about a widow's claim for a requisitioned horse denied on a technicality, insisted the college's claim should be barred. The debate forced a postponement over the weekend. Fearing he lacked the numbers, Brown used the time to urge opponents of the bill to abstain and on Monday only three-quarters of the representatives showed. The absences tilted the results back in Brown's direction and resulted in a tie of forty-one to forty-one. The Speaker then added his vote, breaking the tie in the college's favor. “I beleave you Don't wish I had beene out of the House too,” he quipped to Brown right after the vote.⁴²

Three weeks later “An Act for the relief of the corporation of Rhode Island college” passed the senate without controversy and the president signed it into law. The act ordered the Treasury Department to tabulate payment for the American occupation from 1776 to 1780, excluding both the French occupation and claim for interest. Applying these conditions to the bill John Brown had drawn up in 1792, an auditor at the Treasury Department determined $1,344.44 in rent and $1,434.69 in prorated damages were due. On May 6, 1800, the department remitted a certificate for $2,779.13, ending the college's twenty-one-year campaign for redress. Behind the outcome lay not just the facts of the college's suffering, but the resources it had to persevere and the advocacy of Corporation members doing double-duty in Congress. The remuneration they obtained provided a lasting benefit. The college placed the windfall with its other permanent funds—the germ of its current $7.2 billion endowment—and invested it in bank shares.⁴³

Brown historians have called this payment “partial justice” and “very inadequate.” There is good reason for this: excluding restitution for the French occupation and interest meant that the sum barely covered a third of the debt the Corporation demanded. The significance of the amount itself, however, gets lost in these assessments. Even at the reduced level, the payment exceeded every donation the college received up to that point in its thirty-six-year history. It was only surpassed a few years later by a $5,000 donation from Nicholas Brown, Jr., considered so munificent that the trustees renamed the university after his family. As with the construction costs of the Edifice, converting the reparation payment to current dollars offers a range of possibilities, from a low CPI-based “real wealth” value of $70,000 to a high GDP-based “relative output” value of $159 million. Again, tuition rates offer a straightforward measure of its worth in terms of the college's finances. In 1800, the payment was equal to 174 tuition-years of income. The 2024-25 equivalent would be $11.9 million. This was for an institution with just 107 students.⁴⁴

Put another way, if the Corporation wanted to, it could have allocated the funds to cover tuition for every student for 1.6 years each. That may not appear extravagant, but as financial reparations it compares favorably to more recent initiatives in the United States. Perhaps the most well-known is the $1.6 billion distributed to Japanese Americans forced into internment camps in World War II. The $20,000 payments to individuals starting in 1988 could have bought victims as much as 1.5 years of Brown tuition at the time. Examples closer to Providence provided less. In 1978, a federal settlement act compensated the Narragansett Indian Tribe for their dispossession across Rhode Island, including at Brown's campus. Back then, the $3.5 million payment could have enrolled members of the nation at Brown for less than a semester each. If that looks stingy, fast forward to 2022, when Providence's Municipal Reparations Commission persuaded the city to invest $10 million in closing the city's racial wealth gap. Had all the money gone into the “Resident Scholarship” part of the program and come out as Brown tuition vouchers, every Black and Indigenous resident of the city could have attended the university for about a day and a half each.⁴⁵

Like its ties to slavery once were, Brown's place on the receiving end of reparations is hidden in plain sight. While it is difficult to find an account of the college's development that does not briefly note the wartime occupation or subsequent compensation, it is impossible to find one that recognizes it as part of a broader history of financial repair. The money the college received in 1800 made amends for a harm that, however unjust, had not been illegal. It did not help students impacted by the occupation or Manning, who was left destitute by the war's end. Nor was it essential to restoring the Edifice or to ensuring the institution's survival, though it certainly helped. Instead, after a hard campaign, the discretionary compensation partially righted an historic wrong done to property partially made by slaves.

To recognize that it did so on relatively generous terms does not mean that the college was undeserving. The harm Brown suffered was real, and its reparations appear to have been middling in its day. It certainly looks that way next to the Rhode Island masters whose slaves escaped into the army: most received the equivalent of thirty-three years’ worth of Brown tuition for the loss. Others fared worse, like those slaves-turned-soldiers, who also wanted “their just dues from the public” after being deprived of military wages but got nothing. What this view from College Hill suggests is that financial reparations in the United States were more accessible centuries ago when claimants were wealthier, whiter, and more politically connected. That may not be surprising, but it should not be overlooked. Cropping this strand of restorative justice's history out of current debates risks making reparations appear more modern than they have been and less obtainable than they should be.⁴⁶