Captain Paul Cuffe, Yeoman
eBook - ePub

Captain Paul Cuffe, Yeoman

A Biography

  1. 240 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Captain Paul Cuffe, Yeoman

A Biography

About this book

Paul Cuffe is best understood as a member of the Black founding fathers—a group of pre-eminent African Americans who built institutions and movements during the first decades of the United States. While he is known amongst scholars, his astounding life story deserves a much wider audience. Jeffrey A. Fortin has crafted a beautiful, moving portrait of this important maritime figure that will appeal to anyone interested in early American history and who loves great story telling.

Born on Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts in 1759 to a formerly enslaved African father and a Wampanoag Indian mother, Cuffe emerged from anonymity to become the most celebrated African-American sea captain during the Age of Sail. An abolitionist, veteran, and community activist, celebrity followed Cuffe as he built a shipping empire that traded both in American coastal waters and across the wider Atlantic Ocean. Cuffe and his Black crews shook the foundations of systemic racism, challenging norms by sailing into Charleston and other ports where slavery was legal, and thus demonstrating that business and profits were more powerful than social limitations. He founded America's first racially integrated school in Westport, Massachusetts, and is considered the leader of the nation's first back-to-Africa movement. Newspapers in England, the United States, and the Caribbean reported his whereabouts and adventures, and abolitionists hailed him for his Quaker beliefs, sobriety, and commitment to advancing opportunities for persons of African descent.

Drawing on pamphlets, letters, and other documents, and painstakingly reconstructing his genealogy, Fortin vividly describes Cuffe's experiences and places them within the broader history of the Early Republic to help reveal the central role of African Americans in the founding of the United States. Unlike previous biographies, Fortin situates Cuffe within an Atlantic world where race and identity were fluid, and Africans and African Americans sought to build and govern a free Black nation in West Africa. 

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Yes, you can access Captain Paul Cuffe, Yeoman by Jeffrey A. Fortin in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & African American History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. CoverĀ 
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. ContentsĀ 
  6. Preface
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. Terminology
  9. Introduction
  10. Chapter One: Born of the Atlantic
  11. Chapter Two: A Farmer Takes to the Sea
  12. Chapter Three: Pulled from the Darkness
  13. Chapter Four: ā€œAll kinds of abominable thingsā€
  14. Chapter Five: ā€œTo my scattered brethrenā€
  15. Chapter Six: English Celebrity
  16. Chapter Seven: A Sickly Colony
  17. Chapter Eight: Struggling for Support
  18. Chapter Nine: Final Voyage to Sierra Leone
  19. Chapter Ten: The Year without Summer
  20. Chapter Eleven: ā€œPassing toward the graveā€
  21. Epilogue
  22. Notes
  23. Index
  24. Back Cover