Cuffe, Paul

By: Scott A. Miltenberger

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Cuffe, Paul

Sex:  Male

Born:  Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts, United States
17 January 1759

Died:  Westport, Massachusetts, United States, Farm
7 September 1817

Activity/Profession:  Black Nationalist, Entrepreneur

(b. 17 January 1759; d. 7 September 1817),
wealthy black sea captain and Pan-Africanist.

Paul Cuffe was born as Paul Slocum on Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts, the seventh child of the freed African slave Kofi and the Wampanoag Indian woman Ruth Moses. A member of the West African Ashanti tribe, Kofi had been a slave for fifteen years before the wealthy and influential Quaker John Slocum freed him. In the 1740s, spurred by the preaching of the Quaker prophet John Woolman, the Society of Friends began to question the institution of slavery. Many Quakers throughout the Eastern Seaboard started freeing their slaves and organizing in opposition to the institution. Paul Cuffe's African heritage and his experiences with Friends would decisively shape his life.

In 1746 the freed Kofi took the name Cuffe Slocum and married Moses. They moved to Cuttyhunk, where Slocum became quite prosperous. By 1766 he had earned enough money to purchase 116 acres of farmland on the continent at Dartmouth, Massachusetts. Seven years later Slocum died; at that time Paul shipped out on a whaling vessel bound for the Gulf of Mexico.

For the next three years Paul Cuffe traveled throughout the Caribbean on whaling and cargo vessels, learning seamanship and navigation. In 1776, with the outbreak of the American Revolution, the British captured Cuffe then released him after three months. Two years later he joined his older brother David in a more dangerous venture: blockade running. The British navy had blockaded the Eastern Seaboard, cutting off supplies to Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. At great risk to life and liberty Cuffe personally shipped supplies to these two islands throughout the war.

Exposure to Revolutionary ideals may have inspired Cuffe to challenge discrimination against blacks during the war. In 1777 he and his brother John protested taxation on their father's estate, arguing that they were denied the right to vote and therefore ought not pay taxes. Three years later they joined with other free blacks throughout Massachusetts in opposing such “taxation without representation.” Their complaints ultimately resulted in judicial decisions declaring the right of individual towns to grant suffrage to their residents.

Paul Cuffe, in an engraving from a drawing by John Pole of Bristol, England. Cuffe was 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.

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At the war's end in 1783 Cuffe married Alice Pequit, a Wampanoag Indian, and began working closely with his sister Mary's husband, Michael Wainer. The two established themselves at the coastal town of New Bedford, associating with the powerful Quaker merchant family of William Rotch. Building their own boats, Cuffe and Wainer traded along the coast as far south as the Carolinas. In the 1790s their business brought them into contact with the growing southern slave economy. Such ventures southward were particularly dangerous for Cuffe and his free black sailors: the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 made the capture and enslavement of any black suspected of being a runaway legal, with the future of the case entirely dependent upon the claims of the presumed slave owner. In Vienna, Maryland, in 1796 nervous townspeople detained Cuffe's ship for several weeks. By virtue of his connections with William Rotch, he and his sailors escaped without further incident; the experience very likely reinforced Cuffe's opposition to racial discrimination, and despite the risk of false enslavement he continued to trade along the Eastern Seaboard.

Cuffe's efforts soon brought him considerable wealth. By 1810 he was easily among the richest black men in the United States, with a fortune estimated at more than twenty-five thousand dollars. He owned a two-hundred-acre farm near Westport, Massachusetts, and built ships large enough to conduct international trade. In 1800 he constructed the 162-ton Hero; six years later he built a ship nearly twice as large, Alpha. Also in 1806 Cuffe built the 109-ton vessel that became his favorite, Traveller.

Cuffe's personal success did not diminish his commitment to the pursuit of racial equality. His commercial activities brought him into contact with abolitionists and social reformers such as Dr. Benjamin Rush, the black ministers Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, and the black businessman James Forten. Antislavery advocates on both sides of the Atlantic extolled Cuffe's virtues and offered his success as a rebuttal to arguments of black inferiority. His personal experience and the Quakers' strong opposition to slavery drew Cuffe into the Society of Friends; in 1808 he formally joined the Westport Monthly Meeting.

Soon after, perhaps inspired by Quaker ideas about service, Cuffe more fully committed himself to bettering the lives of African Americans in the United States. He came to believe that the development of Africa along Western lines would ultimately end the continent's dependence on the slave trade, thereby benefiting both Africans and African Americans. Fundamental to this development, he opined in his personal journals, would be the settlement of skilled free blacks from the United States as a model for the rest of Africa to follow. Learning of the efforts of British philanthropists to establish the colony for freed slaves known as Sierra Leone, Cuffe saw fit to raise support in the United States for the venture.

In 1811, having gathered the backing of notable Quakers and antislavery advocates for three years, Cuffe launched an expedition to the colony. Pleased by what he saw, he set about making settlement plans of his own. Colonial authorities in Sierra Leone, however, opposed Cuffe and forced him to seek support elsewhere, in London and in the United States. After spending three months at the colony, he traveled back to the United States and sought the assistance of the Madison administration. President James Madison, impressed by Cuffe's presentation, gave the venture his blessing.

The outbreak of the War of 1812 put Cuffe's plans on hold. For the next three years he continued to plan and obtain support for his scheme. Finally, in December 1815, he returned to Sierra Leone to deposit a cargo of goods and thirty-eight free black pioneers. This proved to be Cuffe's last journey to the colony, as ill health prevented him from leading subsequent trips. He died in Westport, Massachusetts, less than two years later.

In many ways Cuffe's colonization effort prefigures the twentieth-century work of the black nationalist Marcus Garvey and the educator Booker T. Washington. Realizing the plight of black slaves in the United States as well as that of West Africans, Cuffe sought to alleviate the degradation of both. His colonial model recognized that pervasive racism in the United States prevented social equality for African Americans; yet that model also stressed the importance of self-help and industry in resuscitating black self-worth in both the United States and Africa. Although colonization was discredited after Cuffe's death—including by many who once supported him in it—his devotion to the idea reflected his commitment to the achievement of not only social equality but also a measure of dignity for African Americans.

See also Allen, Richard; American Colonization Society; Black Seafarers; Civil Rights; Discrimination; Entrepreneurs; Forten, James; Fugitive Slave Law of 1793; Jones, Absalom; Laws and Legislation; Madison, James, and African Americans; Maritime Trades; Marriage, Mixed; Native Americans and African Americans; Society of Friends (Quakers) and African Americans; Voting Rights; and Woolman, John.

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