Conventional wisdom states that New England was unsympathetic toward the South in the decades before the Civil War. The region's attitudes, however, were not homogeneous. In Newport, Rhode Island, a town dependent upon tourism and real estate investment, residents empathized with Southerners and the sectional issues that concerned them.

During the 1840s, the town meeting minutes of Newport, Rhode Island, recorded the names of local residents who voted. Correlating this information with census data, one can determine that African Americans who voted were more likely to be older, wealthier, native-born Rhode Islanders who were civic and religious leaders in their community.