Moses Brown

1738 – 1836

Moses Brown was a Providence, Rhode Island merchant who broke with his family's slave-trading business to become one of Rhode Island's leading abolitionists, co-founding the Providence Society for Abolishing the Slave Trade in 1789. His public disputes with his brother John Brown, who continued trading enslaved people and was later the first American convicted under federal slave-trade law, played out in Rhode Island's courts and newspapers.