Did Boston's Rich White Folks Profit From Slave Trade?

In the 21st-century some of the rich white families that still pretty much control what happens economically and politically in the City of Boston may claim that their families' wealth was not obtained, historically, by profiting from the African slave trade and the enslavement of people of African descent in the USA and elsewhere. But as Russell B. Adams Jr. recalled in his 1977 book, The Boston Money Tree:

"...Peter Faneuil, like most early Bostonians saw nothing amiss in what was later to be termed the `peculiar institution' of the South...Among the effects in Peter's estate at his death were 5 slaves...Peter Faneuil...tried his hand at the slave trade more than once...Not long before his death Faneuil sent a slaving ship, owned half by himself and one quarter each by a neighbor and the captain on an expedition to the coast of Guinea...Ship and slaves were sold at auction, a portion of the proceeds going to the estate of Peter Faneuil."

The Boston Money Tree book also observed that although "it was primarily as slave traders, not slave owners, that Bostonians were to make their mark in the history of human bondage in America," a French visitor to Boston in 1687 "had reported that scarcely any Boston household of consequences didn't have at least one slave..."

According to the same book:

"...Boston's enterprising merchants, always on the lookout for commodities to serve their markets, turned...to trading slaves...It took little imagination for these...traders to sail off to Guinea with cargoes of rum to be exchanged for Negroes who were then exchanged for more sugar cane to be turned into more rum...Thomas Amory, one Boston merchant...was big in the slave trade and...succeeded in helping to found one of the city's latter-day first families."