Ezra Stiles, Unfreedom, and the Life of Newport Freeman
By: Michael J. Simpson, M.A., A.M.
Turned westward from its original south-facing position and tucked among the homes on Newport’s historic Clarke Street, the house now known as the Ezra Stiles House stands with a complicated story. Built in 1756 as a parsonage for the Second Congregational Church across the street, its surviving receipts at the Newport Historical Society show that both an enslaved man and an enslaved boy were used in its construction.[1]
The home is often remembered for its association with Reverend Ezra Stiles, the Congregational minister, Redwood Library librarian, co-founder of Brown University, and future president of Yale College. In this house Stiles observed the 1769 transit of Venus with his neighbor and prolific slave trader William Vernon.[2] It was also a site of Black unfreedom and home to Newport Freeman, an African boy whom Stiles enslaved and who later secured his freedom and petitioned for divorce in a Connecticut court.
The building survives as a rare witness to colonial Newport’s religious, intellectual, and deeply contradictory world.
Ezra Stiles House, 14 Clarke Street, Newport—an 18th-century home later associated with Yale president Ezra Stiles.
Ezra Stiles
Born in North Haven, Connecticut, in 1727 and educated at Yale, Ezra Stiles became one of colonial New England’s most prolific intellectuals. He arrived in Newport in 1755 to assume the pulpit at the Second Congregational Church and quickly emerged as a prominent figure in the city’s religious and civic life. He conducted astronomical observations, corresponded with scientists and theologians in Europe and America, and kept a detailed diary that records both public events and private thoughts. Much of what we know about pre-Revolutionary Newport comes from that diary.[3]
Among those entries is the narrative of a young African-born boy whom Rev. Stiles named Newport Stiles. The purchase occurred in 1757, the same year Stiles moved into 14 Clarke Street. The name “Newport” marked the place where the young boy was formally enslaved. Records indicate he had been purchased at Cape Mount, in what is now Liberia, during a Rhode Island slave voyage of the vessel Venus, financed by Stiles’s neighbor William Vernon.
Ezra Stiles (1727–1795), longtime Newport minister and later president of Yale.
Stiles received the eleven-year-old as part of the return on his own investment of a single barrel of rum for the voyage.[4]
A few months later Stiles purchased another African boy, “aged 14 or 15,” named Prince. This second purchase was for Stiles’s father, Isaac, and Prince was quickly sold on to New Haven for ninety-five dollars, likely for domestic service. Stiles had purchased Prince from Eleazar Arnold for ninety dollars, adding five dollars when selling him to his father and profiting again from slave trading.[5] While Prince left the city soon after, Newport Stiles remained in Newport well after Rev. Stiles departed in 1778 to become president of Yale College.[6]
Simplified diagram of the “triangular trade” linking Europe, West Africa, and the Americas—an economic context for Newport’s 18th-century maritime world.
Newport Freeman
From 1757 to 1778 when he was 32, the young man known as Newport Stiles grew of age in the seaside city that was his namesake, working as Reverend Stiles’ enslaved servant. According to a 1755 count, the city of Newport was 18% Black, and when the colonial census happened in 1774, Newport was 14% Black.[7] Beginning in 1775, Stiles began the process of incorporating Newport into his church, the Second Congregational Church. In February of that year, he received his first communion and in the following March he was baptized. Rev. Stiles wrote in his diary: “baptized my Negro Man Newport (aet. 27, nearly) and admitted him into full Communion with the Church.”[8]
Records show that the verses Stiles preached around the time of Newport’s baptism emphasized obedience, perseverance, and conduct as signs of salvation. On March 12 he preached on Revelation 3:10 and Psalm 119:4–5.[9] Read alongside the rite that followed, the moment suggests Stiles understood his religious mission as compatible with his control over Newport’s life. Like many white ministers of the period, he cast himself as a paternal figure in the lives of enslaved people, positioning captivity as a supposed path to Christian instruction. Baptism did not bring freedom, however. It was only later that Newport, now calling himself by the surname Freeman, secured manumission.
Clarke Street Meeting House (Second Congregational Church), Newport—where Ezra Stiles preached during his Newport ministry.
In June 1778, as Stiles left Aquidneck Island to become president of Yale College, he freed Newport from bondage, then about 30 years old. Stiles entered the note in his diary: “I free or liberate my Negro Man Newport.”[10] A longstanding tradition relates that Newport helped awaken the abolitionism associated with Stiles’s later life. By 1790, Stiles was a founding member and first president of “The Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom and the Relief of Persons Unlawfully Held in Bondage,” the first such society in the state.
The Constitution of the Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom, and for the Relief of Persons Unlawfully Holden in Bondage, as Revised and Enlarged on the 13th Day of September 1792.
The History of the City of New Haven tells the story this way:
“Mr. Stiles’ first thought that any wrong had been done, came into his mind one day when going into his kitchen and hearing Newport, for so he called this new member of his household, sobbing, he inquired what the cause of his grief, and learned that the boy was thinking of his mother. From that hour Stiles was a converted man, repenting of his own participation in the wrong, and laboring for the abolition of the slave trade.” [11]
Amos Doolittle’s pictorial Plan of New Haven (1817), including Yale.
Though free and living in freedom on Aquidneck Island, the man now known as Newport Freeman was having difficulty securing steady work. After all, Stiles had never trained Freeman in the marketable skills of the seaside town such as sailing, or some sort of trade or professions that were typical of enslaved laborers in Newport’s economy. Thus, when Rev. Stiles returned to the city of Newport for a visit in 1782, Freeman approached him for work. Stiles wrote in his diary: “Came my former Manservant, Newport, who with his Wife & Child left Rh. Isld 15th Inst. have hired them for seven Years at £20 per Annum.”[12]
In the time since Rev. Stiles’ departure in 1778, Newport Freeman married his wife, Violet, and had his first son, Jacob. Because Freeman had struggled to find work he turned to the man who had previously enslaved him to hire him and was able to secure an annual salary to support his family. Stiles also agreed to indenture Jacob, who was two, until he turned twenty four.[13]
Aquidneck Island (Newport/Portsmouth/Middletown)—the geographic setting for the article’s Newport-centered story.
On January 12th, 1783 in New Haven, Violent and Newport welcomed a second child, Abraham.[14] A year later, Reverend Chauncey Whittelsey baptized Abraham in the First Church of Christ in the same city. Records show that Violet left her indenture the following year, though both Newport and his son Jacob remained in his service until his death in 1795.[15] Freeman became known for his quick wit and a dry sense of humor that was ultimately a representation of a level of privilege due to his proximity to Stiles that was not normal for a Black man in New Haven.
A story from the History of the City of New Haven preserves one such moment. On a Sunday, Freeman saw Constable Skinner, Yale’s police chief, walking with President Day near the almshouse and famously called out in stage whisper, ‘Whom are you taking to the lockup now?’[16] The line playfully cast Day as the detainee and, with a whisper, turned a familiar scene into a gentle reversal of roles. It hints at Newport’s dry humor, his comfort moving among Yale’s elite, and a subtle assertion of dignity.
Sketches of the 1769 Transit of Venus—an emblem of the Enlightenment-era scientific world referenced in the article’s “chapter” heading.
In 1798, over forty years after his purchase by Ezra Stiles, Newport Freeman filed for divorce from his wife, Violet, in the Superior Court of Connecticut. The petition, which survives today in state archives, is a rare example of a legal separation initiated by a formerly enslaved man in the region. Violet, it notes, had left him and was now living in Boston. Newport claimed that she “willfully deserted him,” presumably to Massachusetts, perhaps in her own claim for independence.[17]
Though we do not know if Violet ever appeared in court, we do know the divorce was granted. The petition itself tells us something even more profound. Freeman had built a life marked by self-determination and legal consciousness. He had navigated a world that once considered him property and, by century’s end, had become a citizen capable of asserting rights, however imperfectly recognized, under the laws of the nascent United States. Newport Freeman died on August 16th, 1827, at the old age of 86.[18] His story, from capture in Liberia, to bondage in the Clarke Street house, to plaintiff in a court of law, is part of the longer arc of Black legal activism and resilience in early America
Abolitionist medallion design (“Am I not a Man and a Brother”), widely used by late-18th-century anti-slavery movements in the Atlantic world.
A Medallion, a Memory, and a Reckoning
The Ezra Stiles House still stands, which means we can no longer tell its story only through Stiles’s sermons, his astronomy, or his later antislavery work. The house was built with enslaved labor and was home to an African boy Stiles helped traffic across the Atlantic. It was also a place where that same boy, later calling himself Newport Freeman, claimed membership in a church, negotiated wages, raised children, and later stood before a Connecticut court as a free Black man.
Seen this way, 14 Clarke Street is not just a minister’s parsonage. It is evidence of how slavery and religion were intertwined in colonial Newport, how African and Indigenous children could be brought into white households under the name of Christian instruction, and how some of those same people later used the law, the church, and community ties to assert their own lives. To interpret the house fully, we have to tell Stiles’s story alongside Newport Freeman’s.
Ezra Stiles House, 14 Clarke Street, Newport
If the site is to serve as public memory today, it should not only celebrate learning, theology, or the early history of Yale. It should name the people whose labor made that learning possible. Prince, Newport, Violet, and Jacob all belong in the same narrative as Ezra Stiles. Their presence turns the house from a quiet colonial relic into a record of Black survivance in a city built on Atlantic slavery.
