From the earliest days of the colony Newport had taken a prominent place in its history.  Its natural advantages had early singled it out for both commercial and social distinction.  One of the first governors, Coddington, was its original settler.  An openly-avowed freedom from prejudice was among the first declared principles of Rhode Island.  Quakers and Jews were gladly received, and while the former brought with them the temperance and moderation peculiar to their tenets, the latter grafted on Newport commerce the spirit of enterprise which made the town celebrated in colonial annals for its prosperity and importance.  The Jewish merchants were men of good origin, fine presence and character.  They were many of them of high birth in Spain and Portugal, and they have bequeathed to posterity a record of stately hospitality and unblemished integrity.  The names of Lopez, Riviera, Seixas and Touro are honored and respected still in their former home, and the fine arch that towers over the gay promenade of to-day gives entrance to their last resting-place, so solemn and so majestic a home of the dead that it drew from the Nestor of American poets a stirring apostrophe to the manes of the dead sons of Israel.  The fine harbor and bay of Newport soon attracted commerce from all nations, which heaped its wharves with riches and made princes and magnates of its merchants—­a position they seemed born to sustain.  The Overings, Bannisters, Malbones and Redwoods kept open house and exercised lavish hospitality—­witness, as told by the Newport Herald of June 7, 1766, the story of Colonel Godfrey Malbone’s feast on the lawn of his burning mansion, so fine an edifice that its cost had been a hundred thousand dollars in 1744; but the house taking fire at the time he had invited guests to dinner, he thus feasted rather than disappoint them, and all through the long summer night they held high revel and pledged each other in jovial toasts while the flames of the burning building illumined these Sardanapalian orgies.  Year after year added to the importance of this city by the sea:  year after year the Indies poured into its warehouses the riches with which Newport, out of its abundance, dowered New York, Boston and Hartford and ornamented and enriched the stately homes of its merchants.  There is, however, one blot on its scutcheon—­one which darkens the picture of this prosperity and the means that helped make it—­and that is the slave-trade.  Yes, the town which was to give birth to William Ellery Channing was one of the first to become interested in this baleful traffic.  It is true it was denounced by the Legislature, which as early as 1652 made it penal to hold slaves, yet statistics show that between 1730 and 1752 the return cargoes of all ships from the West Indies consisted of them.  The slave-trade of Newport bore fruit in other evils.  At this time there were no less than forty distilleries at work, and this rum, exported to Africa, bought and brought home the human freight.  However, in 1774 the importation was prohibited, and all male children born after 1784 were declared to be free.