Portuguese Explorers' Monument at Brenton Point.
Quahog.org > Facts and folklore > Newport's Portuguese Heritage Newport's Portuguese Heritageby Patricia O'Sullivan More than just chouriço and linguiça. Portuguese Explorers' Monument at Brenton Point. Thro' seas where sail never spread before, Beyond where Ceylon lifts her spicy breast, And waves her woods o'er the wat'ry waste. —Os Lusíadas, Luís de Camões For six hundred years, Portuguese have been leaving their native land in search of fortune, adventure, and freedom. They established settlements on six continents, making Portuguese one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. Every June, Portuguese communities around the world celebrate Dia de Portugal, de Camões e das Comunidades Portuguesas (Day of Portugal, Camões, and the Portuguese Communities). Originally a national festival honoring the poet, Luís de Camões, the day has come to celebrate the Portuguese people and their culture wherever they reside.1 Despite its small population, Rhode Island has the largest percent of people in the United States who claim Portuguese as their primary ancestry. Many of their forebears arrived in Rhode Island during the previous century. However, people of Portuguese ancestry have lived in Rhode Island for the better part of its history.2 According to court records, there have been Portuguese settlers in Newport since 1684.3 Some histories qualify these settlers by their Jewish religion while others define them solely by their Jewishness, as if their Portuguese identity is incidental. One such history can be found on the Library of Congress website, which states: "The Portuguese did not establish major settlements in North America during the colonial period, but they did become an important immigrant group during the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. A few isolated settlements, such as the Portuguese-Jewish congregations in Newport, Rhode Island, and Charleston, South Carolina, have been documented in the original thirteen colonies."4 While one would hope that devaluations of the earliest Portuguese settlements in North America were uncommon, even the editor of the Portuguese American Journal wrote a few years ago: "The Portuguese presence in the United States goes back to colonial times. Still the first significant Portuguese settlements were established around 1850."5
By 1759, the Portuguese community in Newport was large enough to commission a house of worship, Touro Synagogue, which still stands today. We don't have exact numbers for the size of this community, but half of the family names in Touro Cemetery are Portuguese, representing nine families.6 Two more Portuguese family names are mentioned in documents from an earlier period. 7 It could be argued whether or not eleven families constitute enough persons to qualify a settlement as significant, but what cannot be denied is the influence these families had on New England's history.
The Touro family was equally influential. Isaac Touro, the leader of the Jewish congregation at Newport from 1759-1779, is credited with saving the synagogue from destruction by giving it over for use as a hospital during the British occupation of Newport. The philanthropy of his children, Judah, Abraham, and Rebecca, ensured the restoration of the synagogue, the Jewish cemetery, and the Stone Mill in Newport. In addition, Judah Touro's generosity funded dozens of institutions in New Orleans, including that city's own Touro Synagogue. Upon his death, he bequeathed $10,000 toward the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Beyond their individual deeds, these Portuguese settlers in Newport provided a corporate testament to the mission of Roger Williams to establish Rhode Island as a haven for liberty of conscience and the colony's 1663 charter granted by King Charles II, which states: "...noe person within the sayd colonye, at any tyme hereafter, shall bee any wise molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question, for any differences in opinione in matters of religion, and doe not actually disturb the civill peace of our sayd colony..."9 The British blockade of Narragansett Bay in 1775 dried up Newport's thriving trade. When the British landed six thousand troops on Aquidneck Island in 1776, three quarters of the population fled to the mainland. At the end of the Revolutionary War, only a handful of the Portuguese residents returned to Newport. Three quarters of a century later, in 1858, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem about the Jewish cemetery at Newport, writing: Of foreign accent, and of different climes; Alvares and Rivera interchange With Abraham and Jacob of old times.10 Longfellow visited Newport long after the Jewish community had moved away or died out and years before Rhode Island replaced Massachusetts as the primary destination of Portuguese immigrants. The 1790 census notes only three Portuguese family names among the residents of Newport11 and the Tax Book of 1855 for Newport and the Newport Directory of 1856 both list just one Portuguese surname, Seixas.12 13 Because so few people of Portuguese ancestry lived in Newport during the time of Longfellow's visit, perhaps he can be forgiven for finding their names strange. However, by 1880, about 250 residents of Newport listed their birthplace as Portugal, and by 1900 their number exceeded 1,000.14 The nineteenth-century wave of Portuguese immigrants, drawn by the whaling and textile industries, came mainly from the Azores and Cape Verde. They were Catholics most of them. Irish Catholics had been living in Newport since the early 1800s, but in typical Newport fashion, the city was no stranger to the religious diversity Catholic immigrants brought to the city. The first Catholic mass in the state of Rhode Island was held at Newport in July 1780.15 Many more masses took place in the year following to accommodate French forces, who made Newport their base after the British abandoned Aquidneck Island, ravaged by a hurricane in 1778. The anti-Catholic riots that plagued Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington in the nineteenth century did not erupt in Rhode Island. Indeed, the Rhode Island General Assembly had voted in 1783 to grant Catholics "all of the rights and privileges of the Protestant citizens of this state."16 This is not to say that immigrants and their decedents did not experience anti-Portuguese prejudice, however, the locus of this sentiment tended away from Newport.
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