Paul Cuffe

Paul Cuffe was born free on Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts, on the seventeenth of January 1759, the youngest of ten children of an Ashanti-born formerly enslaved man and a Wampanoag mother. He went to sea as a deckhand at sixteen. By thirty he owned a small fleet of fishing schooners and was the wealthiest African American man in the Republic.

In 1780 — at twenty-one — Cuffe and his brother John refused to pay Massachusetts taxes while neither could vote nor hold office. They sued the state on the principle of no taxation without representation. The 1783 Massachusetts judicial reform extended the franchise to all free male taxpayers regardless of race; the Cuffe brothers' suit was a contributing cause.

He commissioned and constructed the brig Traveller in 1807 in Westport, Massachusetts — among the first major commercial vessels built and crewed entirely by African Americans. He sailed the Traveller to Sierra Leone in 1810-11, conducting trade between the new British colony and Liverpool and Philadelphia. He developed in those years the conviction that voluntary repatriation of free African Americans to Sierra Leone could establish a self-governing African community immune to American racial oppression.

In December 1815 Cuffe sailed the Traveller from Westport to Sierra Leone carrying thirty-eight African American emigrants — the first organized voluntary African American emigration to Africa, financed entirely from his personal funds at a cost approximating four thousand dollars. The emigrants successfully settled in Freetown.

He lobbied Congress for federal support of further emigration before his death. He died of natural causes in Westport on the seventh of September 1817, age fifty-eight.

He is honored here as the sea captain whose Sierra Leone voyage opened African American voluntary emigration.