The Books
As each of us individually conducted research on a specific Atlantic traveler, collectively we read these books and used them as our navigational tools to sail the Atlantic's historiographical waters. The books' histories and stories guided us through our own process. Each of the following books features a unique, comprehensive approach to the early modern Atlantic world and the people who traversed it. Their authors provided us physical, conceptual, and narrative maps that we used to navigate our own understanding of the global Atlantic world. These books also offered us a set of concepts to understand and interpret the world our travelers inhabited and the challenges and opportunities they encountered in their journeys. Scott and Hébrard’s “micro-history set in motion,” Sparks's "Atlantic Creoles," Restall and Fernández-Armesto's "armed entrepreneurs," Sweet’s “Black Atlantic,” Jasanoff's "spirit of 1783," Pérez Morales's "masterless Caribbean," and Colley's "biography that crosses boundaries" offered us fruit for thought and nourished our weekly discussions.
The Books
As each of us individually conducted research on a specific Atlantic traveler, collectively we read these books and used them as our navigational tools to sail the Atlantic's historiographical waters. The books' histories and stories guided us through our own process. Each of the following books features a unique, comprehensive approach to the early modern Atlantic world and the people who traversed it. Their authors provided us physical, conceptual, and narrative maps that we used to navigate our own understanding of the global Atlantic world. These books also offered us a set of concepts to understand and interpret the world our travelers inhabited and the challenges and opportunities they encountered in their journeys. Scott and Hébrard’s “micro-history set in motion,” Sparks's "Atlantic Creoles," Restall and Fernández-Armesto's "armed entrepreneurs," Sweet’s “Black Atlantic,” Jasanoff's "spirit of 1783," Pérez Morales's "masterless Caribbean," and Colley's "biography that crosses boundaries" offered us fruit for thought and nourished our weekly discussions.
The Books
The Books
Ramusio Map (1534). Courtesy of John Carter Brown Library
Paul Cuffe (1759 - 1816)
By April Townson
Born in 1759 to Cuffe Slocum, a former slave, and Ruth Moses, a member of the Wampanoag tribe, Captain Paul Cuffe came of age in the small, white-dominated town of Westport, Massachusetts. At the age of 16, he turned to whaling as a means of finding the freedoms denied to him on land His earliest voyages to the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, during the 1770s, cemented both his love of navigation and his aversion to the slave
trade. At the start of the American Revolution, Cuffe worked with Quaker trading ships, eventually leading to his capture by a British fleet. Cuffe returned to Westport finding himself under a great deal of suspicion due to his African and Native ancestry, which, in 1780, motivated him to petition the Massachusetts government to provide equal voting rights to all free men, regardless of race. Although this foray into politics failed, Cuffe managed to build a successful fishing and trading business with his brother. This new endeavor led him throughout the Atlantic coast of North America from the northern reaches of Nova Scotia to the southern shores of Maryland, expanding his navigational expertise and knowledge of the Atlantic winds, currents, ports, and coasts. After earning enough money to buy a new farm and oversee an incipient shipbuilding business, Cuffe turned to his family’s education, building Westport’s first school – which also happened to be the first integrated American school. He joined the Westport Quaker Meeting in 1808, and through these connections he first learned of the British colony of Sierra Leone. He soon imagined Africa as a land where black descendants of slaves could achieve the equality and independence that was denied to them in America. Considering the development of African markets a key precondition to achieve this vision, Cuffe embarked on a series of Atlantic crossings to explore opportunities in Sierra Leone.
Between 1775 and 1816, Paul Cuffe traversed the Atlantic pursuing economic independence and racial equality.
In early 1811, Cuffe made his first venture to the colony, forming positive relations with local residents and neighboring tribal leaders. Knowing he needed British approval, especially with a new war looming over both country’s heads, he traveled to London, managing to get permission from London authorities for his settlement, trading, and civilization project. Less than a year later, he returned to Sierra Leone to further these connections, but with the war in full force and the white minority in the colony fearing the loss of their influence, he left soon after. Back in the United States, Cuffe managed to secure the approval of President James Madison, Secretary Treasurer Albert Gallatin, and leaders in the black and Quaker communities, but the War of 1812 made Congress unwilling to relax their bans on trading with Great Britain. It was not until late 1815 that Cuffe, along with a small group of black settlers, left the United States. Cuffe hoped that Sierra Leone would soon become a safe haven for an economically independent black community, but he did not live to see his vision come to fruition. He returned to Massachusetts in 1816, passing away at his Westport River home the following year.
A silhouette of Paul Cuffe completed in 1812, engraved by Mason and Maas in Philadelphia, also showing his ship the Traveller between the shores of Sierra Leone and New England. This remains one of the only verifiable images made of Cuffe's likeness completed during his lifetime. Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paul_Cuffee4.jpg.
Paul Cuffe was an early black capitalist, using economic independence as a means to fight for racial equality. In his role as a black sailor and trader, he was one of many African American men who turned to the seas as a means of finding economic wealth and freedom from the oppression they faced on land. Many of Cuffe’s efforts foretold events later in the nineteenth century, well after his death. His view that to undermine the slave trade there must be new economic pursuits in Africa foreshadowed a long history of the decline of slavery in the nineteenth century in favor of a changing global economic landscape. Similarly, his assumptions that life in the United States would not soon improve for its black residents placed him in a larger nineteenth-century Black Atlantic vision leading the fight against slavery and racial subjugation. Cuffe’s focus on Africa as the place of prosperity for the descendants of Atlantic slaves also places him as a forerunner of the Pan-African movement.
"A View of Freetown on the River Sierra Leone" (1803). Less than a decade later, Paul Cuffe would make his first formative visit to the town. Image from Thomas Masterman Winterbottom, An Account of Native Africans in the neighborhood of Sierra Leone, to which is added an account of the present state of medicine among them.
Cuffe’s path, both his successes and his failures, cannot be fully appreciated without also understanding the rapidly changing Atlantic world of the late 1700s and early 1800s in which he lived. The Age of Revolutions, which would drastically change the power dynamics of the Atlantic, directly impacted Cuffe’s life, shaping him into a successful trader and abolitionist in the 1770s while also limiting his options on his travels through the Atlantic. Cuffe’s success not only with Sierra Leone, but also with his entire business, seems exceptional given how often animosity in the geopolitical world interfered with his trade. From the barricades of the American Revolution, to the threats from foreign ships during the French Revolution and Quasi-War, and to the myriad difficulties the War of 1812 placed in the face of his colonization project, the Atlantic waters were rarely easy for Cuffe to navigate. Sailing against oceanic and geopolitical currents, however, Cuffe managed to effectively use his economic and political connections to survive and, to a certain extent, thrive.
References
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Atkin, Mary Gage. Paul Cuffe and the African Promised Land. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Inc., 1977.
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Bennet, Lerone Jr. and Charles White. “Black & Green: The Untold Story of the African-American Entrepreneur.” Ebony 51, no. 4 (1996).
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"Captain Paul Cuffe, Colonizationist and Philanthropist." Negro History Bulletin 1, no. 4 (1938): 1-7.
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Fortin, Jeffrey A. “Cuffe’s Black Atlantic World, 1808-1817.” Atlantic Studies 4, no. 2 (2007): 245-266.
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Harris, Sheldon H. "An American's Impressions of Sierra Leone in 1811." The Journal of Negro History 47, no. 1 (January 1962): 35-41.
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“Memoirs of Capt. Paul Cuffee.” Freedom’s Journal, April 13, 1827. New York, New York.
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“Paul Cuffe and President Madison.” The Liberator XXVII, no. 38, September 18, 1857.
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Sanneh, Lamin. "'A Plantation of Religion' and the Enterprise Culture in Africa: History, Ex-Slaves and Religious Inevitability." Journal of Religion in Africa 27, no. 1 (1997): 15-49.
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Thomas, Lamont D. Rise to Be a People: a Biography of Paul Cuffe. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.
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Walker, Paul. “Captain Paul Cuffe (1759-1817): Nineteenth-century African American Seafarer and Entrepreneur.” Black Theology 13, no. 3 (2015): 219-229.