In the spring of 1798, Richard Williams’ second birthday was approaching. Someone close to the little boy took the opportunity of being in the teeming port city of New London, Connecticut, two days’ sail from the family’s home in Potapoug Point (now Essex) on the Connecticut River, to shop for a gift that would express the Williams family’s hopes for this fifth son, born shortly after his forty-five-year-old father’s rise to the top of maritime Connecticut’s economy.   

New London’s deep and well-protected harbor on Long Island Sound had become the region’s portal to the lucrative West Indies trade in the seventeenth century. Caribbean planters committed to sugar as their sole crop were dependent on the mainland for virtually all of their staples, most especially food sources for the massive number of people they enslaved. New England’s farmers and fishermen shipped live animals, produce, and salted fish, as well as timber and other supplies, down the coast and across to island plantations in exchange for sugar, rum, molasses, spices, and salt. Seeking a gift for Richard in New London would have entailed pushing past porters loading and unloading the numerous ships docked at the city’s many wharves, clerks with ink-stained fingers rushing to and from their desks, the savvy merchants orchestrating it all, and the one out of every ten New London residents who were enslaved to them and the city’s ministers.

Because of its prime location in the increasingly connected circum-Atlantic world, New London offered shoppers a dazzling array of imported goods from which to choose. On June 6, 1798, the Connecticut Gazette advertised, for example, that the Eleven Sons was in from Liverpool with one hundred crates of crockery ware “among which are a number of elegant Dining, Breakfast, and Tea Services.” While an elegant serving dish might have pleased Richard’s mother or one of his older sisters, the gift seeker moved on, stopping only when the wares of a local potter drying in preparation for firing revealed something that seemed like it would help pave the way for the child’s future success: a four-and-one-half-inch-tall savings bank made of durable stoneware clay.

While people have been stashing their savings in clay and other types of containers for millennia, it was the creation of both a national bank and a mint after the American Revolution that must have made the idea of gifting a savings bank particularly appealing. Here was a place a growing boy could store the nation’s new decimal coinage. The bank would promote one of the habits the recently deceased Benjamin Franklin had been praising as essential in every edition of Poor Richard’s Almanac published since 1732. So popular were his adages about saving and other virtuous behaviors that a British publisher had begun printing a set of playing cards in 1793 that illustrated them. One of the cards features a young, well-dressed man avoiding the town stocks by eschewing horse race gambling. “For age and want,” the card recommends, “save while you may, no morning sun lasts all the day.”

The New London savings bank must have additionally appealed to Richard’s gift seeker because it also promoted industriousness. Fashioned in the distinctive shape of a skep or the upside-down straw basket used for millennia to house honey-producing bee colonies, the bank asserted that saving depended on persistent hard work. When Paul Revere included a skep encircled by bees in the top right portion of the border of a Masonic summons he engraved in 1772 for a meeting of St. Peter’s Masonic Lodge in Newburyport, Massachusetts, he was following a long Masonic tradition of using the beehive symbol that would soon be explained by Boston-born Thomas Smith Webb in his Freemason’s Monitor or Illustrations of Masonry, the first edition of which was published one year before the savings bank’s creation: “The beehive . . . teaches us that, as we came into the world rational and intelligent beings, so we should ever be industrious ones.”

What may have appealed most to Richard Williams’ gift seeker, however, was that the beehive-shaped savings bank was not yet leather-hard and therefore presented an opportunity to record a personalized message on its broad surface. When mixed with water and brushed on the bank, powdered cobalt oxide imported from Europe’s Ore Mountains would settle into any incisions the potter was instructed to add. Later, after the repeated addition of salt to the kiln over the several days of firing that stoneware requires, the message chosen for the toddler would appear in bright blue under an attractive glass-like glaze produced when the salt vaporizes:

Richard Willimas [sic]

Mind and Save your Silver Money so that you can be a Man

Be comming

New London, Jun 9th 1798

Called out by name, or at least a recognizable version of it, Richard is urged to save his money and thereby become a certain kind of man, namely a “Be comming” or “becoming” one. While the position of the adjective may have been necessitated by the bank’s size and shape, its placement after “Man” underscores the hope that Richard would become not just a wealthy man, but a gentleman. The Bible’s “God Almighty” and Shakespeare’s “the devil incarnate” are two examples of well-known postpositive adjectives that the bank’s purchaser may have been imitating in the hope that by instilling in the two-year-old the habit to save, he would grow up to be a member of the elite.  (It is possible that there is also a pun here that plays on the savings bank’s shape. Richard will hopefully come to be an industrious man or bee.) 

While, at first glance, the New London savings bank and its eloquent message thus appear to follow Franklin and Revere in asserting that one’s own labor and personal discipline will be enough to propel a child into a prosperous adulthood, a closer look at its composition and its owner’s family reveal that slavery was an inextricable part of how wealth and the props of the wealthy were created in early national maritime Connecticut. 

Of the many Richard Williamses in the vicinity of New London in 1798, the one of an age to most likely warrant being given a savings bank was baptized in Essex on June 19, 1796, the son of a shipwright whose rise was a direct result of his involvement in building the ships that supplied the slavery plantations of the West Indies. Samuel Williams was born in 1751 to the owner of a river-powered ironworks on the Falls River branch of the Connecticut River. Samuel expanded his father’s business vertically, adding a gristmill, a sawmill, and finally a shipyard, as revealed by archival records and a thorough archeological excavation conducted by a team at Wesleyan University in 1990. By employing some fifty men and boys at any given time, the Williams Shipyard produced slightly more than one ship a year out of nails, fittings, boards, planks, and timbers all produced on site. A proto-industrialist, Richard’s father became wealthy enough from supplying ships for the West Indies trade that he was able to convert the small cape-style home he owned into the full two-story home where the savings bank likely found its place overlooking what had become a sixty-acre empire.

In their forays back-and-forth between Connecticut, the West Indies, and ports in between, Williams-built ships would likely have conveyed the main ingredients used in making the bank and then glazing it: stoneware clay, a deposit of which was discovered in the late seventeenth century extending from South Amboy, New Jersey, to Staten Island and Long Island, New York, and salt, which was imported from the West Indies in greater amounts than sugar, molasses, and rum. 

Salt’s ability to extract water from fish muscle and transport the salt into it, leaving the remaining, less active water less accessible to microorganisms, helped transform Britain’s small seaboard Atlantic colonies into a new nation by allowing its fishermen to preserve the cod they caught on Georges Bank for long-distance export. So central was the role of salted cod in moving the North American seaboard from the periphery to the center of global trade that it continues to be celebrated in the form of the “Sacred Cod” that has been hanging in the chambers of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, first in the old state house and now in the new one, since the first half of the eighteenth century. 

Salt was so ubiquitous in fishing communities that when Samuel Williams’ Connecticut River neighbor Venture Smith, the African prince stolen into American slavery at the age of six, was a young man working and saving to purchase his freedom in the mid eighteenth-century, the means on hand to test the prodigious strength he employed to that end was salt. He wrote in his autobiography, which is marked with the same place (New London) and date (1798) as Richard Williams’ savings bank, “I took up on my knees a tierce of salt containing seven bushels, and carried it two or three rods. Of this fact there are several eye witnesses now living.”  Astoundingly, Smith carried a cask containing 420 pounds of salt between thirty-three and almost fifty feet. (Today, the world record for lifting an Atlas Stone is 630 pounds, but this does not entail carrying the stone any distance except up and over a 48-inch-tall bar.) Such was his strength that Smith was able to work enough hours to save the far above average amount his master charged him for the liberty that was rightfully his own. Unlike Richard Williams, however, Smith was forced to bury his savings in the ground after one of his masters opened his chest and stole one of the promissory notes he had hoped to use towards his self-rescue. Worse, the reward for Smith’s bee-like industry was tainted by repeated examples of continued ill treatment even after he became a free landholder in Haddam Neck, Connecticut. 

One such occasion took place when Smith was returning home from New London by ship and a hogshead of molasses was lost overboard when the ship docked at a Captain Hart’s wharf in Saybrook at the mouth of the Connecticut River. Even though Smith had already gone onshore when the accident happened, Captain Hart forced him to pay for the loss. ‘‘Such a proceeding as this,” Smith writes in his Narrative, “would in my native country be branded as a crime equal to highway robbery. But Captain Hart was a white gentleman, and I a poor African, therefore it was all right, and good enough for the black dog.’’ Captain Hart’s molasses had traveled from a West Indies plantation, the product of the same kind of enslaved labor that Smith had expended throughout his young adulthood. For planters, merchants, and captains alike, the treatment of people of African descent could be justified by this idea, so formidably expressed by Smith, that they were akin to animals.

New England summers are not long or hot enough to allow for the evaporation of large amounts of salt water and thus the price for salt was driven almost entirely by the high cost of importing it from abroad. Salt was shipped from Liverpool, where brine was pumped out of mines and evaporated by heating it, and from Portugal and other Mediterranean countries where salt was raked from where it had evaporated in shallow ponds or along rocky shores. After the British claimed ownership of what is now Turks and Caicos in 1764, Britain’s mainland colonies imported the cheaper coarse salt raked there by enslaved people until the American Revolution disrupted this and all other foreign trade. Connecticut’s General Assembly went so far as to offer a bounty to anyone who could create a salt works and be the first to produce five hundred bushels of salt. When this failed to yield enough for the colony’s needs, the Council of Safety deputized an agent to impress ships of sixty to one hundred tons for service in acquiring salt from the West Indies. A list in Connecticut’s state library of the ships chartered reveals harrowing accounts of the trials endured in the pursuit of salt, such as those of the Betsey, which returned from the West Indies to New London with 3,000 bushels of much-needed salt in August of 1777 only to be captured, scuttled, and set on fire by a British frigate off of Montauk Point the following year. 

By the time Richard Williams was turning two in 1798, large quantities of salt were once again arriving regularly in New London from multiple foreign ports. On June 6, 1798, three days prior to the date on his savings bank, the same advertisement in The Connecticut Gazette announcing the arrival of one hundred crates of crockery ware also announced that six thousand bushels of salt had just arrived via Liverpool. However, potters’ preference for coarse and thus less expensive salt makes it likely that the salt whose vaporization in the kiln produced the glaze on Richard Williams’ bank was not from this or a similar Liverpool shipment but rather was raked from one of the islands where climate factors combine to evaporate sea water quickly and where there was enslaved labor to collect the salt left behind. Mary Prince describes in her 1831 autobiography the miserable decade of her young adulthood she spent enslaved raking salt on Turk’s Island:

I was given a half barrel and a shovel, and had to stand up to my knees in the water. . . . Our feet and legs, from standing in the salt water for so many hours, soon became full of dreadful boils, which eat down in some cases to the very bone, afflicting the sufferers with great torment. . . . If we could not keep up with the rest of the gang of slaves, we were put in the stocks, and severely flogged the next morning.

It was a relentless circle of brutal exploitation in which the salt raked by Mary Prince and other enslaved people was sold to northern fishermen who sold it back southward in the form of salted fish with which to feed the enslaved who raked the salt.

Those who benefited from the circulation of salt came to include Richard Williams, who became a successful Essex shipwright in his own right and whose prominence there got him elected to the Connecticut state legislature in 1851. The only cause for doubt in attributing the salt-glazed bank to this Richard Williams is Samuel Williams’ decision to give his son a middle name that honored one of Essex’s three original families, the Pratts. In the archival records, Samuel’s son often appears as Richard P. Williams. While it is troubling that there is no “P” on the savings bank, it could be that it was Richard who decided to use his middle initial in adulthood. If the survival of his savings bank in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts is any indication, the Richard Williams who owned it seems to have believed that his rise was a result, not of his connections, but his individual efforts. Rather than smashing the bank once it was full of coins, as was and remains customary for clay and glass piggybanks, either he or someone who also appreciated the tenets of individualism used a chisel to carefully enlarge the coin slot and thereby extract the saved silver coins while preserving all the words incised in it.

No one, it seems, was ever bothered by the transposition of two letters in the name Williams. Perhaps the bank’s purchaser did not notice the error upon receipt of the fired bank. Readers recognize words by global letter patterns, not by the identity and position of each letter, and they are thus quick to silently correct transposed adjacent letters without even realizing it. Given that the bank’s purchaser did not reject the bank after it was completed, he or she may not have noticed the error until arriving back in Essex. Today, however, the transposition seems fated, a small reminder of something much larger baked into American salt-glazed stoneware produced prior to the demise of plantation slavery. In her autobiography, Mary Prince testified to what she endured to produce its attractive glaze:

Sometimes we had to work all night, measuring salt to load a vessel; or turning a machine to draw water out of the sea for the salt-making. Then we had no sleep—no rest—but were forced to work as fast as we could, and go on again all next day the same as usual. Work—work—work—Oh that Turk’s Island was a horrible place!

This article has traced the hidden double role of slavery in the salt-glazed stoneware savings bank, first in a family’s firm conviction that individual virtues were the reason for their rise even despite its patriarchs’ involvement in the West Indies trade, and second in the labor of the enslaved in raking the salt that gives the bank and its message its deceptive luster. Of course, just as another Richard Williams may have owned this savings bank, there could be early American stoneware that was glazed with salt from England or Europe. However, to insist on as much is to erase Venture Smith and Mary Prince’s experiences. Their voices make clear that the circulation of salt and salted fish between New England and West Indies slave plantations shaped everyone’s lives as indelibly as cobalt oxide seared in fire.    

 

Further Reading

On New England pottery: Lura Woodside Watkin, Early New England Potters and Their Wares (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950).

On Connecticut River Shipbuilding and the Williams Family: Essex Historical Society and Essex Land Trust, Falls River Cove, vol. 1 of Follow the Falls, https://engage.overabove.com/follow-the-falls-volume-1-falls-river-cove/0627097001526997901; Shirley H. Malcarne and Donald L. Malcarne, “The Williams Building (Boat) Yard, 1790-1840: A Study of an Early Essex Ct. Enterprise and the Ships it Sent to the Sea” (1991); Wick Griswold and Ruth Major, Connecticut River Shipbuilding (Charleston: The History Press, 2020).

On salt: Konrad A. Antczak, Islands of Salt: Historical Archaeology of Seafarers and Things in the Venezuelan Caribbean 1624-1880 (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2019); Cynthia M. Kennedy, “The Other White Gold: Salt, Slaves, and Turks and Caicos Islands and British Colonialism,” The Historian 69 (no. 2, 2007): 215-30; Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (New York: Walker and Co., 1997); Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History (New York: Walker and Co., 2003).

On slavery in New London, Connecticut: Taylor Desloge, “New London: A Fault Line in the Story of Freedom and Slavery in the Atlantic World,” Segregation and Community on New London’s Hempstead Street, https://segregationnewlondon.digital.conncoll.edu/why-new-london-a-fault-line-in-the-battle-over-slavery-and-freedom-in-the-atlantic-world/.

On Mary Prince and accounting, see Katrina Dzyak, “Atlantic World Accounting and The History of Mary Prince (1831),” Commonplace: the journal of early American life, accessed June 11, 2024, https://commonplace.online/article/atlantic-world-accounting/.

 

This article originally appeared in August 2024.

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Elise Lemire is Professor of Literature at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of Battle Green Vietnam: The 1971 March on Concord, Lexington, and Boston and other titles. Her book Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts is available on Audible.