LOPEZ, AARON

LOPEZ, AARON (1731–1782), American merchant-shipper. Born in Portugal, Lopez went in 1752 to Newport, Rhode Island, where, renouncing his Marrano past, he remarried his wife Abigail in a Jewish ceremony, underwent circumcision, and in time became a leader of the Yeshuat Israel Congregation. Lopez' ties to the well established *Gomez and Rivera families and the British America's economic boom during the French and Indian War assured him the credit he needed to expand his business beyond Rhode Island. Jacob Rodriguez *Rivera, whose daughter Sarah he married in 1763 after Abigail's death, often acted as his partner. Though a specialist in the whale oil and spermaceti candle industries, Lopez' business included livestock, groceries, lumber, rum, ships, and clothing. He was also among the few American Jews active in the slave trade. The credit he secured during the 1760s and 1770s from his English suppliers enabled Lopez to build an extensive transatlantic mercantile empire. Lopez had trading connections with the Caribbean, Western Europe, and West Africa and on the eve of the American Revolution, was Newport's leading merchant and her largest taxpayer. Lopez supported the rebel cause and withdrew from British-threatened Newport to Leicester in central Massachusetts. This diminished his business and he did not survive to recoup his losses. The Newporters, to whose prosperity he had contributed so signally before the Revolution, mourned him, wrote Stiles, with a "demonstration of universal sorrow."

bibliography:

Bigelow, in: New England Quarterly, 4 (1931), 757–76; Commerce of Rhode Island, 2 vols. (1914–15); M. Gutstein, Aaron Lopez and Judah Touro (1939); J. Marcus, Colonial American Jews, 3 vols. (1970); S.F. Chyet, Lopez of Newport (1970).

[Stanley F. Chyet]