Cuffe, Paul

Source:

 African American National Biography

Cuffe, Paul

(17 Jan. 1759–7 Sept. 1817),

Atlantic trader and early African colonizationist, was born on Cuttyhunk Island off southern Massachusetts, one of ten children of Kofi (later Cuffe) Slocum, a freed slave originally from West Africa's Gold Coast, and Ruth Moses Slocum, a Wampanoag Native American, both farmers. Kofi Slocum's Quaker master freed him in the mid-1740s and, although he was excluded by race from membership in the Society of Friends, Kofi and Ruth Slocum lived by Quaker principles—hard work, frugality, and honesty. This diligence paid off in the 1766 purchase of a 116-acre farm in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, on Buzzard's Bay. At his death in 1772 Kofi bequeathed the farm to his sons Paul and John.

Taking his father's African name, Cuffe, and respecting his dual (Native American and African American) identity, the self-educated Cuffe sought his fortune at sea. Whaling was open to men of any race, so Paul worked on Atlantic whalers during his adolescent years. From this, he turned to maritime trading and, during the American Revolution, he was briefly jailed for running the British blockade of the colonies. When Massachusetts passed new tax levies in 1780, Cuffe joined his brother and five other Dartmouth free blacks in a petition protesting their “having No vote or Influence in the Election with those that tax us” because of being “Chiefly of the African Extraction” (Thomas, 9–10). He was jailed again, but his persistence brought reduction of the Cuffe brothers’ tax debt in 1781. Two years later Cuffe married Alice Pequit, a Pequot Indian from Martha's Vineyard; by the end of the century the couple had seven children. He built a school to ensure that racial discrimination would not deny his children and others a formal education.

Paul Cuffe in an engraving from a drawing by John Pole of Bristol, England. Cuffe, one of the richest African Americans of his day, owned a large farm and built ships large enough to conduct international trade. (© New Bedford Whaling Museum.)

view larger image

Through the 1790s and into the 1800s Cuffe invested in a gristmill and store but he amassed his considerable wealth through maritime ventures. He worked closely with the Rotch family of New Bedford, Massachusetts, owners of a bank and financiers of whaling operations; he bought and built ships, developing his own maritime enterprise that involved trading the length of the U.S. Atlantic coast, with trips to the Caribbean and Europe; and he developed contacts around the Atlantic rim. For business partners as well as crew, he preferred his extended family of blacks and Native Americans.

Cuffe became aware of African colonization through the intellectual circles he encountered during his travels along the Atlantic coast. Since 1787 British philanthropists had been working to build a settlement of former slaves in Sierra Leone, on Africa's west coast, and British and American acts to end Atlantic slave trading in 1808 focused greater attention on the effort. Cuffe grew to share a belief with philanthropists on both sides of the Atlantic that slave trading had damaged Africa's moral foundation, but that African American colonists could bring Christianity to “uplift” African populations and in time replace the trade in humans with a commerce lucrative to the colonists and their supporters in the United States and Great Britain. He thus developed a plan to transport moral, religious, and industrious blacks across the Atlantic to begin the process of development while he worked to persuade people in the United States to support the effort.

To test the feasibility of such an effort, early in 1811 Cuffe loaded his brig, Traveller, with merchandise from Philadelphia and sailed to Freetown, Sierra Leone, his first voyage to Africa. Although English merchants profiting from the trade with Sierra Leone disapproved of Cuffe's intervention and worked against his designs, he ended his visit confident that African Americans could establish a prosperous colony in Africa. After venturing to Liverpool to gain British support for his “civilizing mission,” Cuffe returned to Freetown. Late in 1811 he founded the Friendly Society of Sierra Leone, a cooperative black organization intended to encourage “the Black Settlers of Sierra Leone, and the Natives of Africa generally, in the Cultivation of their Soil, by the Sale of their Produce” (Harris, 55). Black colonists, English philanthropists, and the British government voiced approval.

Cuffe hoped to send at least one vessel each year to Sierra Leone, transporting African American settlers and goods to the colony and returning with marketable African products. As he talked about the venture in the United States, he stimulated black feelings of Pan-Africanism and brought new energy to African American thinking on emigration. The timing was not good, however. Because war with Great Britain was imminent, the U.S. House of Representatives refused Cuffe permission to trade with the British colony. He was forced to wait out the War of 1812, tending to family, business, and religious matters while urging the government to end the war and open trade. Once the war ended, Cuffe put his plans into action. On 10 December 1815 he sailed for Africa's west coast on the Traveller with a commercial cargo and thirty-eight African Americans, twenty of them children, intent on making a new life in Sierra Leone. This constituted the first, black-initiated “back to Africa” effort in U.S. history.

Cuffe failed to profit from the venture, but he obtained land for the settlers, and his enthusiasm for colonization grew. With racial tensions rising in the United States, as poor whites reacted to competition from growing numbers of free blacks, Cuffe believed still more strongly that only in Africa, away from white animosity, could African Americans “rise to be a people” (Thomas, 119). He soon was pressing for the United States to free its slaves and then colonize them on land they could own in Africa. It was an expensive proposition that, in the end, neither free blacks nor Cuffe and his supporters could finance. Ironically, as Cuffe's enthusiasm for colonization was growing, so was that of some white Americans, many with less philanthropic motives. Their new American Colonization Society, with government backing, would establish in 1821 the West African settlement for American free blacks that eventually would become the nation of Liberia. Cuffe did not live to witness that effort. In 1817, after a period of deteriorating health, he died at his Massachusetts farm.

W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey are considered among the major advocates of Pan-Africanist thinking in the United States for their early-twentieth-century recognition of the transatlantic plight of persons of African descent. A full century earlier, Paul Cuffe had courageously advocated this position and had taken the first concrete steps toward its realization. For this reason, Cuffe should be recognized as one of the fathers of American Pan-Africanism and one of the most successful black entrepreneurs of his generation.

processed xml | source xml