James Forten

James Forten was born free in Philadelphia on the second of September 1766, one of two children of Thomas and Margaret Forten. His father, a sailmaker whose own grandfather had freed himself from bondage, died when James was young. As a boy Forten attended the Quaker school for Black children operated by the abolitionist Anthony Benezet, though by the age of nine he had left his lessons to help support his mother through work.

At fourteen, Forten went to sea, serving as a powder boy aboard the privateer Royal Louis under Captain Stephen Decatur during the Revolutionary War. When the ship was captured by the British, he was offered comfort and freedom in England but refused to betray his country, answering that he had been taken prisoner for the liberty of his nation and would never prove a traitor to her. He endured seven months aboard the prison hulk Jersey in New York harbor, where disease claimed many, and survived to walk home to Philadelphia.

Apprenticed to the sailmaker Robert Bridges, Forten rose to foreman and, in 1798, purchased the sail loft himself. Through skill and innovation he built one of the most successful sail-making enterprises in the city, employing both Black and white workers and amassing a considerable fortune that made him one of the wealthiest African Americans of his era.

Forten turned his wealth toward freedom. He wrote Letters From a Man of Colour in 1813 against a discriminatory Pennsylvania bill, opposed the colonization movement, helped fund William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator, and served as a leader of the American Anti-Slavery Society. When he died in 1842, thousands, Black and white alike, followed him to his rest. May his steadfast courage and his labor for liberty be honored for all generations.