Captain Paul Cuffe

In 1997 Captain Paul Cuffe (1759-1817) was honored. He was a devout Quaker, successful ship owner and one of the wealthiest black Americans of his day.

He was born free into a Native American - African American family on Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts. He became a successful businessman, merchant, sea captain, whaler, and abolitionist. His mother, Ruth Moses, was a Wampanoag from Harwich on Cape Cod and his father an Ashanti, captured as a child in West Africa and sold into slavery in Newport about 1720.

At 14 years old, Cuffe signed on to the first of three whaling voyages to the West Indies. During the Revolutionary War, Cuffe delivered urgently needed goods to the people of Nantucket by slipping through a British Naval blockade on a small sailboat. After the war, he built a lucrative shipping business along the Atlantic Coast and in other parts of the world. He also built his own ships in a boatyard on the Westport River. He established in Westport, Massachusetts the first racially integrated school in North America.

A devout Quaker, Cuffe joined the Westport Friends Meeting in 1808 and often spoke at the Sunday services at the Westport Meeting House and other Quaker meetings in Philadelphia. In 1813, he oversaw construction and donated half the money for a new meeting house in Westport that exists to this day. Very few people of color were admitted to the Friends Meeting in those years.

He became involved in the British effort to develop a colony in Sierra Leone, to which the British had transported many former slaves from America. Some were slaves who had sought refuge and freedom with British military units during the war. After the British were defeated, they took those freed slaves first to Nova Scotia and then in 1792 to Sierra Leone where they were settled in the new colony. At the urging of leading British abolitionists, in 1810 Cuffe sailed to Sierra Leone to learn what the conditions of these settlers were and whether he could help them. He concluded that efforts should be made to increase local production of exportable commodities and develop their own shipping capabilities rather than continuing to export slaves.

Cuffe then sailed to England to meet with members of The African Institution, who were also leading abolitionists, and offer his recommendations for improving the lives of all the people in Sierra Leone. His recommendations were well received in London and he subsequently made two more trips to Sierra Leone to try to implement them.

On his last trip in 1815–16, he transported nine families of free blacks from Massachusetts to Sierra Leone to assist and work with the former slaves and other local residents to be more productive. This voyage has been cited by some as the beginning of a "Back to Africa" movement that was being promoted at that time through the American Colonization Society (ACS) that was mainly led by Southern slave owners who were more interested in removing freed slaves from the US and preserving slavery than in helping the people of Africa. The leaders of the ACS had sought Paul Cuffe's advice and support for their effort. After some hesitation, and strong objections by the free blacks in Philadelphia and New York City, Cuffe chose not to support the ACS and saw his efforts very differently as providing training and machinery and boats to the people of Africa so that they could improve their condition and rise in the world.