Businessman, whaler, and abolitionist, Paul Cuffee, was at one time the wealthiest Black man in America. He was born free the seventh of ten children into a multiracial family on January 17th 1759 near New Bedford, Massachusetts. His mother was a Native American woman named Ruth Moses, and his father was Kofi Slocum, a formerly enslaved man from the Ashanti Empire. His owner, John Slocum gave Kofi his freedom in the mid 1740's. Kofi took the name Kofi Slocum when he married his wife. Kofi Slocum worked as a skilled carpenter, farmer and fisherman and taught himself to read and write, and later, with the assistance of a friend, he became skilled in navigation in a matter of weeks. In 1766, when Paul was eight years old, Kofi and Ruth bought a 116-acre farm in nearby Dartmouth, and moved the family there. Paul dropped Slocum as his last name and adapted his father’s first name instead, changing Kofi, to Cuffee.
When Cuffee's father passed, he left more than 100 acres in Westport, Massachusetts to his 10 children. As their two eldest brothers by then had families of their own elsewhere, Paul and his brother John took over their father's farm operations. They also supported their mother and several sisters. In 1770, just miles up the road from Paul’s family farm, the murder of a Black sailor, Crispus Attucks, and subsequent deaths of several other civilians at the hands of British soldiers ignited the sparks that would soon blaze into the Revolutionary War. John Adams considered this event, later called the Boston Massacre, the day the “foundation of American independence was laid.” Deciding that agriculture was not profitable, Cuffee looked toward Martine industry.
In 1773, at the age of fourteen, a year after his father's death, he went whaling in the Gulf of Mexico and made two trading voyages to the West Indies. In 1776, after the start of the Revolutionary War, Cuffee sailed on a whaler but it was, taken captive by the British and held in New York for three months. Following his release, he returned home for two years devoting himself to running British blockades and delivering supplies to the inhabitants of the islands he grew up around. These secret crossings were treacherous, happening under the cover of night and at the mercy of pirates, but they allowed Paul to build lifelong relationships and partnerships with the Quakers of Nantucket. Paul continued to make these several of these trips throughout the war.
Even as a young man, Cuffee never accepted the status quo when it came to his power as Black man. In 1780, at the age of 21, tax collectors came to his family demanding they pay back taxes. Paul and his brother John Cuffee were enraged by this and refused to pay taxes and were thrown in jail because free Blacks did not have the right to vote in Massachusetts. Thus no vote, no taxes. Later that year, Paul, with his brother, petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to grant all free people of color in the state the rights and privileges of citizenship, since such people were subject to taxation. The petition was initially denied, but when the new state constitution was drawn up three years later, it included their proposal. All male landowners had the right to vote, regardless of skin color.
After the war ended in 1793, Cuffee entered into a partnership with his brother-in-law, Michael Wainer, to build ships and establish a shipping business along the Atlantic Coast. He gradually built up capital and expanded to a fleet of ships. Cuffee undertook increasingly successful commercial voyages that allowed him to buy a succession of trading vessels as well as farming property in Westport. During the year, on February 25, 1783, Cuffee married the widow Alice Abel Pequit. Like Cuffee's mother, Alice was a Wampanoag woman. The couple settled in Westport. In 1793 he commanded a whaling voyage to the Strait of Belle Isle, the profit from which he used to build a 69-ton schooner he named Ranger. Whaling was a very profitable business at this time in the United States.
In 1799, Paul Cuffe bought two large properties from a Westport neighbor, Ebenezer Eddy. The first was the Eddy family homestead of 100-acres with a house and outbuildings that was some 300 yards south of his boatyard on the Acoaxet River. The second property that Paul purchased from the Eddy family in 1799 was a 40-acre lot several hundred yards north of his boatyard that had previously belonged to the Allen family and was known as "The Allen Lot." He leased this land out to others to farm and then willed it to his youngest son, William. By 1800 he had enough capital to build and hold a half-interest in the 162-ton barque Hero. Gradually he became owner of majority shares in numerous vessels, some of which he commanded, typically hiring all-Black crews.
Cuffee's views as a devout Black Quaker shaped his community involvement. With the profits from his whaling business, Paul led an effort to establish a school for Blacks in Westport, eventually building one from his own funds and offering it to the community. He was convinced that education offered the route to self-improvement for Blacks, and he dedicated himself to promoting the cause. He often spoke at the Sunday services at the Westport Meeting House and also at other Quaker meetings in Philadelphia, PA. By valuing each person as an individual, he gained the respect of many as a philanthropist and a leader. During the early 19th century, he was uniquely wealthy for a Black man and used his skills, intellect, ingenuity and relationships to advance minority opportunities.
Most Englishmen and Anglo-Americans in his day felt that people of African descent were inferior to Europeans. As slavery continued after the Revolution, primarily in the South, prominent men such as Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, both slave owners, believed the emigration of free Blacks to colonies either within or outside the United States was the easiest and most realistic solution to the race problem in America. It was a means of providing an alternative for free Blacks, rather than absorbing a large population of ex-slaves into the White community through emancipation. Beginning in 1787, the Sierra Leone Company sponsored 400 people, mostly the "Black Poor" of London, to resettle in Freetown, Sierra Leone. John Clarkson, a young naval officer, and the younger brother of Thomas Clarkson, an ardent abolitionist, led the expedition of 15 ships from Nova Scotia to Freetown in the early months of 1792.
Sierra Leone was already populated in part by former American slaves who had received their freedom by running away from their masters and joining the British as Black Loyalists in the Revolutionary War. The colony was plagued with serious problems in trying to establish a working economy, as well as problems developing a government. Following the Sierra Leone collapse, the newly founded African Institution offered migration there to freed slaves whom they had earlier resettled in Nova Scotia and London after the Revolutionary War. When the British lost to the Americans, many of these Black Loyalists were settled in Nova Scotia. And when conditions there proved too harsh, they had petitioned to be relocated in Sierra Leone.
Cuffee became greatly concerned over the status of Blacks in his native state and throughout America. Cuffee’s dream was that free African Americans and freed slaves “could establish a prosperous colony in Africa,” one based on emigration and trade. This movement included sending free Blacks to resettle Africa. Cuffee believed that African Americans would never receive full equality in the United States. Paul Cuffee had for some years taken an interest in the colonial settlements in Africa. Because of Cuffee's background, he supported colonization of Africa. From March 1807 on, Cuffee was encouraged by Quaker and the African Institution abolitionist friends to help the fledgling efforts to improve Sierra Leone, an African colony supported by British Quakers. In 1808 Cuffe had been welcomed into membership in the local Meeting of the Quakers in Westport and they had strongly supported his Sierra Leone mission.
In 1811, he traveled to Sierra Leone, where he and the Black entrepreneurs founded the Friendly Society of Sierra Leone, for the emigration of free Negroes from America, as well as a mutual-aid merchant group dedicated to furthering prosperity and industry among the free peoples in the colony. While he was investigating colonization in Africa, he learned of two African American boys who were orphaned. Immediately, he arranged for education and care for both of them. Cuffee sailed to Great Britain to secure further aid for the colony, arriving in Liverpool in July of 1811. He met with the heads of the African Institution in London who raised some money for the Friendly Society and was granted governmental permission and license to continue his mission in Sierra Leone. Encouraged by this support, Cuffee returned to Sierra Leone, where he and Black settlers solidified the role of the Friendly Society.
The War of 1812 disrupted his overseas commercial activities, but his social and business prominence allowed him to meet directly with President James Madison about a seized cargo. On May 2, 1812, Paul Cuffee went to the White House, (a first for a Black man), where he met with President James Madison, and the Secretaries of State and Treasury who issued orders that his ship and cargo be released. Deciding that Cuffee had not intentionally violated the embargo, Madison ordered his cargo returned to him. Madison queried Cuffee about his recent visits to Sierra Leone, and his ideas about African-American colonization of the new British colony. Eager to learn about Africa, Madison was interested in the possibility of expanding colonization there by free American Blacks. Cuffee intended to return to Great Britain's colony of Sierra Leone regularly but the War of 1812 broke out in June, preventing him from doing so.
The war between the U.S. and Britain continued, so Cuffee decided he would have to convince both countries to ease their restrictions on trading. He was unsuccessful and was forced to wait until the war ended. A a pacifist and devout Quaker he believed God would be better pleased if he kept working to help people who were less fortunate. He chose to devote his remaining energy to taking free Blacks to Africa, often at his own expense. In December of 1815, he spent $4,000 of his own funds to transport 38 Black emigrants and a cargo of goods to Sierra Leone on his brig, the Traveller. The goal was for the families to begin a new life in Sierra Leone, to bring Christianity to Africans, and to create trade between Africa and the U.S. — one that did not involve slave trade. When they arrived on Feb. 3, 1816, Cuffee’s passengers became the first African Americans who willingly returned to Africa through an African-American initiative.
When White men — with mixed motives — began to advocate sending free African Americans to Africa just a few years later, most Black men and women denounced their efforts at "colonization." In 1816, a group of prominent Whites, the majority of whom were slave owners, established the American Colonization Society. The American Colonization Society was an organization founded in the early 19th century with a mission to allow freed slaves an opportunity to return to Africa. The organization was “founded by White slave owners… dedicated to moving free African Americans to African colonies in order to deflect their attention from the abolitionist movement in America”. Their goals of resettling freed Blacks and Cuffee's goal were completely opposite.
Cuffee was persuaded by Reverends Samuel J. Mills and the Society's founder, Robert Finley to help them with the African colonization plans of the American Colonization Society (ACS). Cuffee was alarmed at the overt racism displayed by many members of the ACS, who included slaveholders. Certain co-founders, particularly Henry Clay, advocated relocating freed Blacks as a way of ridding the American South of "potentially troublesome agitators" who might disrupt their slave societies. It soon became clear to Cuffee and other African American leaders that the Society was more interested in removing the free Black presence from American society than they were in supporting African development. Paul Cuffe did not give it his support.
Paul Cuffee’s dream never came to fruition. He lost support from the free African-American community, many of whom had initially expressed support for it. The fact that the American Colonial Society was behind the move, the plan of colonizing was renounce and disclaimed. The interest in the "going back to Africa" movement quickly died among the free and enslaved. He never returned to Africa. Early in the following year, 1817, Paul Cuffe came down with an illness that eventually led to his death on September 7th. Paul Cuffee was a tireless advocate of abolition and racial justice for all Americans. He left a legacy that is local, national, and international; rising to prominence at a time when it was all but impossible for a Black and indigenous man to do so.
His political undertakings, philanthropic endeavors, and business ownership impacted many in Massachusetts and beyond. Paul Cuffee was more than 50 years ahead of his time by recognizing the need for African Americans to be granted personal freedoms and a voice in the United States government. His venture was one of the first Black-initiated "back to Africa" effort in the United States. However, the cause of Black emigration would be taken up by a succession of African American leaders, including Henry Highland Garnet, Martin R. Delany, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and, of course, Marcus Mosiah Garvey. As a successful ship captain, ship owner, and merchant, when Paul Cuffee died, he was among the most respected Black men in the country.