The Sailmaker Who Funded Freedom

High above the Delaware wharves, a long loft smells of tar and new canvas. Bolts of sailcloth run the length of the floor, and men, some Black and some white, kneel over the cloth with needles and palm thimbles. At the head of the room a Black man in his fifties holds a seam up to the light, while out the window the masts of ships waiting on slave-grown cotton crowd the river.

It is 1818.

He does not just come of age in a free Black family in Philadelphia. He goes to sea at fourteen as a powder boy aboard the American privateer Royal Louis, is taken by the British, and spends about seven months on a prison ship, close enough to slavery to feel its breath, before he is exchanged and walks home.

He does not just learn a trade. He takes over the Delaware sail loft where he had apprenticed, builds it into one of the busiest in the city, employs some forty men of both races, and grows wealthy in a port where most Black residents are poor and unprotected.

He does not just keep his head down. He refuses to rig ships bound for the slave trade, and in 1800 he helps gather a petition from free Black Philadelphians asking Congress to end slavery across the whole nation, a request that reportedly angered Thomas Jefferson himself.

He does not just argue for his own rights. He writes against a Pennsylvania bill to bar free Black people from the state, helps organize the first national Black conventions, and in 1831 puts his fortune behind William Lloyd Garrison so that The Liberator can keep printing.

His Spark of Liberty was a free man’s money turned into other people’s freedom.

He had served a country that counted him an alien the moment he came home, and he spent the next sixty years holding it to its word. The wealth he built in a harbor full of slave-grown cargo, he aimed straight back at the institution that filled those holds.

Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”

Born free in Philadelphia on September 2, 1766, the grandson of enslaved people, he learned his letters at the Quaker school of Anthony Benezet and went to work in a sail loft as a boy after his father died. He served aboard the privateer Royal Louis during the Revolution, survived capture and a British prison ship, and by 1798 owned the loft outright, building it into a fortune some accounts put above one hundred thousand dollars. He helped lead the Free African Society, organized the 1800 emancipation petition, published A Series of Letters by a Man of Colour against a law to restrict Black settlement in Pennsylvania, and became a vice president of the American Anti-Slavery Society. When he died in Philadelphia in the spring of 1842, several thousand mourners, Black and white, followed him to the grave.

His name was James Forten.

Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon

A new Sparks of Liberty short read is here. What the Candle Witnessed tells the story of the enslaved boy who taught himself to read and, by candlelight in the summer of 1776, read the anti-slavery passage that Congress struck from the Declaration of Independence. Read it now on Amazon.
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