Cyprian Sterry

Cyprian Sterry (September 1, 1825) was an 18th-century American slave trader. Based in Rhode Island, he has been described as "the main slave trader of Providence" and an "affluent and highly successful merchant-shipowner." Following the end of the American Revolutionary War and the resumption of the transatlantic slave trade by three states, Sterry was a leading trafficker of slaves to the port of Savannah, Georgia. Sterry participated in the triangular trade, bringing rum to the Windward Coast and Gold Coast in exchange for captives that were resold in either Cuba or Georgia. After Rhode Island prohibited slaving in 1797, Sterry was in and out of debtors' prison for a decade before finally declaring bankruptcy in 1807.

Career Sterry grew up and worked in Rhode Island, a sea-faring colony, "more dependent upon maritime enterprise than any other." His father was also called Cyprian Sterry and had moved to Providence from Preston, Connecticut, shortly after Cyprian II was born in about 1752.

He served in the American Revolutionary War as a quartermaster and brigade major for the Rhode Island brigade organized in 1776. He was apparently captured while visiting London because he escaped from a British prison in October 1778. After returning to America he was again attached to the Army, and again associated with Nathanael Greene. He also invested in land in the Northwest Territory and Vermont. According to the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, Cyprian Sterry was one of the most active slave traders based in Providence, Rhode Island. He financed at least 18 slave-trading trips and trafficked more than 1500 people from Africa to the United States before 1797.

The slave trade was banned by the Continental Congress during the American Revolutionary War but resumed afterward in North Carolina, Georgia, and South Carolina. Sterry was the leading vendor of African slave cargoes to Georgia in the 1790s, delivering 13 cargoes "between 1793 and 1796: one each in 1793, 1794, and 1797, five in 1795, and five in 1796. He trafficked a total of 1,238 slaves to Georgia. In 1836 Tristam Burges wrote that the family had once lived "in a most opulent condition." In 1795, Sterry and Welcome Arnold had a joint interest in a distillery. Rhode Island prohibited the African slave trade in 1797. Robert Sterry was the American consul at La Rochelle, France prior to his death in a shipwreck off Southampton, Long Island in 1820.