Finally looked on the internet for the source?
So, according to your observations, Rhode Island slave-traffickers were model citizens who performed a great service for the New England business community. Interesting, but the slaves groaning in agony below deck would have had, I think, a very different opinion.
I confess that I don't get your point. What ever the number was, what difference did it make that Rhode Islanders owned slave ships? The African slave trade was legal until the Constitutional ban took effect. During the time it was legal, 12.5 million Africans were taken & 10.7 million of them arrived in the New World. Of that number, about 338,000 were delivered to North America. The best estimate is that 60-70,000 slaves were imported to North America from the Caribbean. The accepted number of slaves imported is approximately 450,000. By the time of the Civil War all but a tiny fraction of the 4,000,000 slaves in the U.S. were entirely home grown.
For that reason, there was no reason for the Confederacy to reopen the African slave trade. The border states, as was stated explicitly over & over again, provided a pool of excess human beings for the constant need to replace the labor pool in the Lower South. Plantations in Virginia, in particular, had stopped being profitable due to soil depletion & other factors. They became, in effect, farms that raised human beings for sale. That is the reality that was exploited by the firm of Franklin & Armfield. The cash crop of the Old Virginia plantation culture that R.E. Lee & company were so loyal to was funded by human trafficking.
Based in Alexandria VA & New Orleans, Isaac Franklin became one of the richest men in America. He was the Bill Gates of the slave trade. Unlike the vagaries of the Rhode Island thread, F&A's HQ is a National Park site & their business records are in the National Archive. You can google away to your heart's content.
The flow of excess labor from Virginia & Maryland was driven down the Natchez Trace to the Forks in the Road Slave Market. The systematic sexual assault by the drovers during the passage is documented in the private correspondence between Franklin & Armfield. They had a rating system that indicated the playability of individuals not only for the purpose of personal pleasure, but to provide stock for the extremely lucrative Fancy Girl sex slave market in New Orleans. There is nothing about the slave trade that wouldn't gag a buzzard. However, the homegrown version involved a level of callous brutality & sexual abuse that is hard for the modern person to comprehend.
If we are going to discuss slavery, why not concentrate on aspects that actually had something to do with the lead up to & how the Civil War was fought? It was, after all, "the God given right to own other human beings as property" that the seceding states went to war to guarantee forever.