08/31/2026
A Merchant's World
Silas Deane's political career started somewhere far less glamorous than a committee room: it began in a countinghouse. In the 1760s, Wethersfield was a significant port on the Connecticut River, its wealth built on West Indian trade—New England goods and produce, famously red onions, sailing south in exchange for sugar, molasses, rum, and enlsaved human beings.
His 1763 marriage into the Webb family put him directly inside that network, and he expanded Webb’s successful business into one of the colony's most far-reaching merchant operations. The West Indian economy Wethersfield merchants profited from ran on plantation slavery, and Deane's fortune, like many of his contemporaries', was never separable from that system.
The skills and reputation he built inside that trade, complicated as it was, were the scaffold to his legacy: a stepson he raised and educated who would usher Washington and Rochambeau to Wethersfield, a name that shippers and creditors trusted from New England to the Caribbean, a fluency in business practices, and a room full of competing interests. Those were the skills of a merchant. A decade later, in rooms far from Wethersfield, they would matter just as much.
Photos: 1) Cove Park, Nico Tate Parker 2) Account of monies paid by Silas Deane while political and commercial agent in Europe, 1776 July 20 - 1778 February 8, CT Digital Archives Collections 3) Field of Onions, Wethersfield Historical Society
