James Forten

James Forten was born free in Philadelphia on the second of September 1766. He attended a Quaker school operated by Anthony Benezet through his early childhood and apprenticed as a powder boy on the privateer Royal Louis at fourteen — under the command of Stephen Decatur Sr. — during the American Revolution. He was captured by the British in 1781, held on the prison ship Jersey for seven months, and refused an offer of safe passage to England in exchange for his loyalty to the Crown.

He returned to Philadelphia after the war and apprenticed in the sailmaking trade. He became foreman of the Robert Bridges sail loft in 1786 and took ownership of the loft on Bridges's retirement in 1798. He developed a patented device for handling and managing sails that became the standard of the American merchant marine. He employed approximately forty workers, integrated his workforce racially, and operated for the next forty years as the principal sailmaker of the Port of Philadelphia.

He was the principal financial supporter of the American abolitionist movement of the 1820s and 1830s. He financed the publication of William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator from its founding issue on the first of January 1831 (Garrison acknowledged Forten as among the paper's most reliable subscribers); funded the freedom suits of escaped enslaved people through Pennsylvania courts; and operated the principal Underground Railroad station of central Philadelphia from his Lombard Street sail loft.

He died in Philadelphia on the fourth of March 1842, age seventy-five. His granddaughter Charlotte Forten Grimké (also placed in this archive) carried his abolitionist commitments into the next generation.

He is honored here as the sailmaker whose Philadelphia loft financed American abolitionism.