According to the Paul Cuffee School website, when their namesake returned to the U.S. in 1812 from voyages to Sierra Leone and then England, he found his ship had been “impounded by the U.S. Revenue Service in Newport. Within six days, at record-breaking speed, Cuffee was in Washington knocking at the door of President Madison, who immediately arranged for the ship to be returned. Cuffee is said to have been the first person of color to enter the White House through the front door.”
Cuffe (unlike the school, he usually spelled his surname with one ‘e’), wrote in his journal on Saturday, May 2, 1812: “…at 11 o’clock Waited on the President.” He also met Secretary of State Albert Gallatin and discussed his desire to return to Sierra Leone, aiming to find alternatives to the slave trade. Gallatin told him that Madison’s government would “consisting with the Constitution”…be ready to help in any way they could. “All People appeared Very friendly,” Cuffe recorded, and two days later “all my property Was Remited or to be Restored to me With out Reserve.”
So who was this influential pioneer and problem solver that Paul Cuffee School is named for?
He was a businessman, whaler, ship’s captain, ship builder, philanthropist and abolitionist, and when he died in September 1817, he was believed to be the wealthiest man of African descent in America.
Paul Cuffee Charter School was the brainchild of local doctor Cyril O. Burke. It began in 2001 with two classes in rented facilities a mile apart, and gradually expanded into its three current buildings on Promenade and Barton Streets, and Elmwood Avenue and currently enrolls around 750 students in grades K-12. Cuffee students are diverse: 63% Hispanic, 10.8% Black, 7.1% white, 4.5% mixed race, 3.1% Asian, and less than 1% Native American. The School’s namesake, Paul Cuffe, was also diverse — in his heritage, his skills and his achievements.
He saw education as a means of liberation; he was self-taught. In 1799, wanting his children to have schooling, and facing difficulties with the Westport authorities, he established a school open to all children regardless of race. It was possibly the first integrated school in America. He later told Delaware abolitionists of the difficulties he faced: “The collision of opinion respecting mode and place occasioned the meeting to separate without arriving at any conclusion.” So he built the schoolhouse on his own land, hired a schoolmaster and opened the school to all, never demanding any rent, nor trying to dominate the school.
Paul Cuffe was born free as Paul Slocum on Cuttyhunk, a tiny island in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts in 1759. His father was African-born and his mother was Wampanoag. Cuttyhunk was purchased in 1677 by the Slocum family, who were enslavers, whose main home was in Rhode Island.
Wikipedia’s entry for Paul Cuffee minces no words when describing the original Peleg Slocum (1654–1732), who hailed from Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and used Cuttyhunk for grazing sheep:
Despite being known as an “honest publick [sic] Friend,” (i.e. traveling Quaker preacher) Slocum was also known to be a smuggler and a profitable contraband trader. Posing as being on religious missions, Slocum would use his boat to transport felonious goods. Slocum’s criminal activity was so great that he was able to, at the age of 23, put up 2000 pounds to purchase a farm.
The complicated history of slavery in New England is borne out by the story of Paul Cuffe’s family. His father Cuffe Slocum, originally called Kofi, was brought from West Africa to New England as an enslaved child in the 1720s. (Kofi is an Akan name, from what is now Ghana, meaning he was born on a Friday). He was purchased by Peleg’s descendant Ebenezer Slocum and in the 1740s bought his freedom from Ebenezer’s nephew John Slocum. He soon after married Ruth Moses, a Wampanoag woman from Martha’s Vineyard and they began raising a family of 10 children on Cuttyhunk. In 1766, when his son Paul was seven, Cuffe purchased and moved to a 120-acre farm in Westport, which passed to his widow and two younger sons, John and Paul, when he died in 1772. Paul Cuffe later dropped the surname of the enslaver Slocum, and adopted Cuffe as his surname in honor of his father.
Paul Cuffe was taxed as a landowner, but as a Black and Wampanoag man, he had no vote. In 1780 he, his brother, and other Black and Native landowners petitioned the Bristol County authorities for the right to vote. No taxation without representation was in the air! Their petition was denied, but the case helped pave the way for the 1783 Massachusetts Constitution, which gave equal rights and privileges to all (male) citizens of the state.
Cuffe first went to sea at sixteen, serving on a whaler and learning mathematics and navigation. The outbreak of the Revolutionary War meant, however, both opportunity and danger. In 1776 his ship was captured by the British and Cuffe was imprisoned for three months in New York. He returned to Massachusetts and in 1779 started running the British blockade taking trade goods to Nantucket and other Massachusetts ports. He built ten boats at his Westport shipyard, which grew increasingly large; among them, schooners, barks, the 109-ton brig Traveller, and finally, a 268-ton ship Alpha.
Cuffe’s crew were all men of color, African or Native American (except, once, a Swedish youth). This became particularly dangerous after 1793, when Congress passed a Fugitive Slave Act that codified a provision in the Constitution giving enslavers the right to retrieve fugitives from slavery from another state. This put Cuffe and his crew in continual peril of being kidnapped and sold.
Cuffe, who joined the Westport Monthly Meeting, was a Quaker for most of his life, though he was not a formal member until 1808. Non-white membership of the Society of Friends was unusual, though people of color attended services, often in a separate area. Cuffe, forced to sit in the gallery at a Quaker Meeting House in Philadelphia later that year, stood up and testified his intention of leading the struggle against slavery.
He sailed to Sierra Leone, where former American slaves had been settled since the late 1780s. He arrived in Freetown in 1811. After some months in the colony he concluded that if the settlers produced more exportable goods, this might convince the local African chiefs, many of whom were still supplying captives to slave traders, that there were more profitable sources of income—exactly the view the abolitionists held when they originally created the Sierra Leone Company.
He subsequently made two more trips to Sierra Leone, on the last one taking nine Black families who were free and who he thought had the skills needed to develop the economy. He declined helping the American Colonization Society, who aimed to settle free Blacks in Liberia. However, while the ACS intended to relieve the “problem” of free Blacks in America, Cuffe wanted to help Africa by providing training for free Black settlers, as well as machinery and ships.
This last journey wore him out, and Cuffe set all his affairs in order and died in September 1817, surrounded by his family. Historian Rosalind “Posy” Cobb Wiggins concluded her edition of his papers in this way: “In Quaker terms, Friend Paul Cuffe ‘Spoke Truth to power.’”
*In 1812 Paul Cuffe literally spoke truth to power when he put his case to President James Madison in the Executive Mansion, which, by the way, was not called the White House until 1901. Nevertheless, he did indeed enter by the front door. And he was most likely the first person of color to do so. And he did get what he asked for.
Sources
Jeffrey A. Fortin, Captain Paul Cuffe, Yeoman: A Biography. Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 2024.
Rosalind Cobb Wiggins ed., Captain Paul Cuffe’s Logs and Letters, 1808-1817, Washington D.C. Howard University Press, 1996.
Paul Cuffe (1759-1817) – Friends General Conference
Captain Paul Cuffe’s School: First school in America open to people of all colors
Paul Cuffee, African-American Captain, Merchant & Shipowner
Jane Lancaster, PhD is a historian and former public school teacher (in the UK). She has lived in Providence for a very long time, taught at Brown and RISD and knows quite a lot about the state’s history, but still doesn’t sound much like a Rhode Islander. (Though her friends in England think she has an American accent).
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