Capt. Paul Cuffee

Paul Cuffee (January 17, 1759 – September 9, 1817) was a Quaker businessman, Sea Captain, patriot, and abolitionist. He was of Aquinnah Wampanoag and African Ashanti descent and helped colonize Sierra Leone. Cuffee built a lucrative shipping empire and established the first racially integrated school in Westport, Massachusetts. He died on September 7, 1817. His final words were "Let me pass quietly away." Cuffee left an estate with an estimated value of almost $20,000.

Paul Cuffe, Sr., one of the most important and least known of the anti-slavery leaders in the United States, was the son of a freed African slave and a Wampanoag Indian woman from Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. He rose from poverty to become one of the wealthiest men of color in the United States by the first decade of the nineteenth century, his fortune based on skill as a shipbuilder and merchant-captain.

• from "I Will Take to the Water": Frederick Douglass, the Sea, and the Nantucket Whale Fishery. By Nathaniel Philbrick. Historic Nantucket, Vol 40, no. 3 (Fall 1992), p. 49-51

That Nantucket's combination of Quaker abolitionism and mercantile savvy was an inspiration to blacks throughout the region at this period is indicated by the life of Paul Cuffe (1759-1817). A black sailor from Westport, Massachusetts, Cuffe based his own highly successful business practices on those of the Rotches, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century he had become one of the wealthiest black entrepreneurs in America.

Sources

1. Memoir of Captain Paul Cuffe, A Man of Colour: To Which is Subjoined The Epistle of the Society of Sierra Leone, In Africa & c. York, England: C. Peacock. 1811
2. Wikipedia