Paul Cuffe

Paul Cuffe was born free on Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts, on the seventeenth of January 1759, the seventh of ten children and youngest of four sons. His father, Kofi (Cuff) Slocum, was an Ashanti-born man of Akan heritage who had been captured as a boy, enslaved, and later emancipated; his mother, Ruth Moses, was a Wampanoag woman of Cape Cod. From two peoples who knew displacement, Cuffe inherited both a claim to freedom and a lifelong care for the dignity of those denied it.

He went to sea as a young whaler in his teens, learning navigation on voyages that carried him through the West Indies and the perils of the Revolutionary years. Rising from deckhand to master and shipowner, he built vessels, commanded his own fleet, and traded along the Atlantic seaboard. By the turn of the century he was regarded as the wealthiest person of color in the United States.

Cuffe wielded his standing as a citizen as boldly as he did the helm. With his brother he protested taxation without the vote for Massachusetts men of color, and he founded and funded an integrated school in Westport. A devout Quaker, he pressed for justice through petition, enterprise, and personal example rather than rancor.

In his final years he turned his ships toward Sierra Leone, envisioning free Black settlement and honest commerce with Africa; in 1815-16 he carried nine families across the ocean at his own great cost. He died in Westport on the seventh of September 1817. May the captain who steered by conscience be remembered with honor.