The revolutionary imprisonments of Paul Cuffe

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A small park overlooks what used to be the crossroads of the world. Gently singing birds and tourists, both en route to somewhere else, pass by what once were the stinking, crowded roads of America’s fourth largest shipping port. 

Visitors to this corner of New Bedford might see the sign, “CAPTAIN PAUL CUFFE PARK,” on the small terrace that now presides at the intersection of a brewpub and a YMCA parking lot. Today, the woman most responsible for stamping that famous name on New Bedford’s front door, Lee Blake, sits on a bench reminiscing about the decades of work that raised this memorial and seeded this grass.

“It is often the job of Black historians to raise the visibility of important Black figures,” she says. “I’m inspired by his continual push forward. I’m inspired to do that in my own life.” Blake points to the new biographies, children’s books, movies, and schools that have been written, produced, and named for Cuffe in recent years: “All those things stem from the research we did,” she said. “We saw a real need for people to have positive role models. And they can come from the past. Why shouldn’t kids get inspired by these people?”

Famous in his time — and maybe still along this stretch of swampy coastline — Paul Cuffe has largely been snubbed from the country’s list of great patriots, adventurers, businessmen, philanthropists, educators, and civil rights icons. Yet his remarkable life could be on the shortlist of greatest Americans in any of these categories. 

From the son of a slave, a mischievous smuggler, to a wealthy entrepreneur, Paul Cuffe is sometimes remembered as the founder of America’s very first integrated public school. It opened in Westport in 1797, generations before the Civil War and 163 years before Ruby Bridges marched into a New Orleans first grade. Sometimes Cuffe is remembered as an adventurer and ship captain, whose enterprise made him the wealthiest person of color in the United States before the Civil War, and whose influence made him perhaps the first African American to gain an audience with a U.S. president (James Madison, in 1812). Still others remember him as one of the forefathers of Black Nationalism, since he attempted to found a country in Africa and sought to redefine the economic balance of the Atlantic with recently-freed American families a century before Marcus Garvey. 

What’s remembered less frequently are the toiling years that made this man, before he wrote his way into history, but just as he nudged America so slightly forward. Cuffe turned 17 years old in 1776. He spent his formative years out on the waters of Buzzards Bay, and eventually he sailed headlong into revolution.

Long before it led him to fortune and fame, however, the young man’s combination of restlessness, impudence, and imagination led him to jail. Twice. He was imprisoned by combatants on both sides of the American Revolution for believing too deeply in its cause.

First, Cuffe was jailed for defying the British by smuggling goods to Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and the Elizabeth Islands. In slapdash boats, perhaps built by hand, he evaded the blockades of mighty warships, rumrunning and smuggling to the islands where he was born and still had family ties. 

Shortly after, his Dartmouth neighbors imprisoned him for refusing to pay taxes. Cuffe and his brother John could not stand that they suffered taxation without representation while a war raged for the same cause. So they did not pay those taxes. They made their position known in copious letters to high offices. And they went to jail for it. 

So Paul Cuffe won the unusual distinction of seeing a cell on both sides of the war before it was over. “It fits his personality, or maybe it shapes his personality,” says Jeffrey A. Fortin, author of the latest biography, “Captain Paul Cuffe, Yeoman,” published in 2024. 

Yet for all the accomplishment and drama that Cuffe packed into one lifetime, Fortin says, “My historian’s take is that he was a human being, and I hope he’s seen that way… When you mythologize these historical figures, you lose track of their humanity.” 

“I want him to be inspirational, but I want him to be inspirational because he was a person like the rest of us,” Fortin said.

Catching Paul Cuffe: The first imprisonment

The island of Cuttyhunk, where Paul Cuffe was born, is little more than a rock that rises from the sea. Roughly 15 miles south of New Bedford, it is today the most remote spit of Massachusetts’ smallest town, Gosnold, and home to 10 full-time residents. In 1759, Kofi Slocum and Ruth Moses occupied the island’s lone farmhouse with their growing family. 

Their sixth child entered the world as Paul Slocum, taking the surname his father had received when a prominent Dartmouth Quaker had bought him as a slave. Later in life, Paul and many of his siblings would take their father’s Ashanti name as a new surname. (The spellings Cuffe, Cuffee, and Coffee all appear in various records.) 

Growing up on the raw, windswept island would not have been so different from living on a ship out in Buzzards Bay, and Paul and his family scratched their living from the sea more than the rocks underfoot. Kofi Slocum sold fresh water to passing ships and hired himself out as a carpenter and shipbuilder. Not so many years removed from slavery, he taught himself to read, write, and add by recording business transactions in a small book. 

From the island’s peak, Paul could see to Bedford Village and Martha’s Vineyard — over the same waters that one day would become his smuggling route. And likely he knew the shifting winds, hidden rocks, and currents as second nature from his earliest days.

When Paul was about 5, the family moved to Aquinnah to live among his mother’s family, who were part of the Wampanoag tribe on Martha’s Vineyard. There they lived in one of the dwindling corners of Massachusetts where the local Indigenous people persisted in their way of life. As a young man, Paul thought of himself as a unique identity of mixed Indian and Black ancestry, referring to himself as “musta,” a derivation of “mustee,” meaning mixed.  

Before Kofi Slocum died, when Paul was 13, he purchased 116 acres of farmland in Dartmouth and brought his family back to live on the mainland. Kofi’s life contained no shortage of astounding achievements: he died a landowning free man in Massachusetts after suffering the middle passage and slavery, then buying his own freedom. His death could not have been easy for Paul, and almost immediately upon his father’s passing, the teenager launched to sea on a whaling voyage, in 1772. 

Sailing the world and earning his own money would have solidified Paul’s expert seamanship and whetted his taste for hard-won profit. But, as quickly as he had flown into the world, Paul was grounded again by the American Revolution, which screeched the whaling industry to a halt.

The young Cuffe faced a shortage of work, but his relatives and friends on Martha’s Vineyard found abject hunger and merciless cold on the other side of a British blockade of food and fuel. 

Smuggling could solve both problems. 

Under the cover of darkness, Paul set out to the islands in a sailing dory. For the hours-long journey, sometimes accompanied by his brothers, Paul would have slipped through the narrow channels between the Elizabeth Islands that, even today, are known as treacherous passages. He recorded several trips out to Nantucket, where the Quaker community welcomed him and showered him with thanks. On several occasions, Paul and his brothers may have been caught, and their cargo seized.

But he always returned to smuggling, staking his lifelong knowledge of the waters against that of the plundering British. Finally, Paul was captured and jailed. There is some disagreement about exactly when this took place, but Fortin, Cuffe’s biographer, sets his first imprisonment in 1779. Cuffe was transported to New York harbor and, according to Fortin’s research, may have served time aboard the notorious brig Jersey. 

Known as a “hell ship” among the men, the Jersey at its worst recorded between eight and 12 deaths every day. Cuffe would’ve smelled the foulness as British guards struggled to keep up with the rotting bodies, sometimes leaving them for days before tossing them anonymously overboard into New York Harbor. 

At the same time, the many Black loyalists of the American Revolution were congregating in New York, then a loyalist stronghold. Cuffe may not have encountered these British-aligned Black soldiers, but among the enslaved and free people of color, there was always swirling talk about which side of the war to join. 

“For many Afro-Indians, it was, ‘Who’s gonna free me first?’” said Lee Blake, the New Bedford historian.

After a few months, Cuffe was eventually released from British captivity, and he returned to Massachusetts.

To whom is freedom owed? The second imprisonment

It did not take long for Paul Cuffe to work himself back to prison, this time closer to home. 

Cuffe became frustrated with the war that was upending his world, endangering his life, hobbling his business ambition, but that was failing to acknowledge him. 

“You’re hearing all this talk about freedom and natural rights and natural law, but no one’s talking about you getting a piece of that,” said Fortin. So Cuffe went himself “to go get it,” Fortin said.

In February 1780, perhaps less than a year after his first imprisonment, Cuffe and his brother John led a group of local men, writing a “petition of several poor negroes and mulattoes” to the state legislature. It read:

“That we being chiefly of the African extract… have been deprived of enjoying the profits of our labors or the advantage of inheriting estates from our parents, as our neighbors the white people do…. We apprehend ourselves to be aggrieved… [because] we are not allowed the privilege of freemen of the State, having no vote or influence on the election of those who tax us.”

Their complaint should have rung true in the halls of Boston: No taxation without representation was supposedly a grave offense. And the Cuffes added, with no shortness of patriotic fervor:

“Many of our colour (as is well known)… have cheerfully entered the field of battle in defense of the common cause.”

Yet the constitution of Massachusetts was passed without abolition or universal suffrage, in March 1780. Undeterred, Paul and John took up their pens again, writing to both the General Court of Bristol County and the selectmen of Dartmouth. In these letters, they identified as “Indian men” and “free Negroes,” taking advantage of their mixed ancestry to make a two-pronged argument. 

Native Americans were exempt from paying taxes, so the brothers used that argument in the letter to Bristol County. Yet as free Black men, they argued they should have the same right as free white men in a letter to Dartmouth. Thus, Cuffe appealed primarily for relief from taxation in some letters and for suffrage in others.

“Cuffe’s ideological calls for liberty intertwined with his pragmatic, profit-driven business acumen,” writes Fortin. “Given the mixed populations along the south coast of Massachusetts, he would not have been seen as contradictory in making these two arguments simultaneously.”

Yet neither strategy prevailed, and for withholding their taxes, the Cuffes were thrown in jail.

The letters are extraordinary documents in American history, demonstrating how Black, native, and disenfranchised men sought the ideals of the Revolution — all on one parchment. “Cuffe’s courageous petition may have been the most important paper penned by a Black man during the revolutionary era,” Fortin claims in his biography.

After being hauled to a jail in Taunton, Cuffe was eventually released after the intervention of the prominent Quaker, William Rotch. Just a few years later, in 1783, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts abolished slavery.

Remembering Paul Cuffe today

Along the ragged coastline of southern Massachusetts, Cuffe was in danger of being forgotten to history. 

When Lee Blake founded the New Bedford Historical Society 30 years ago, in 1996, the port city had gone centuries without a memorial to one of the most famous men to ever traffic its docks. Blake founded the historical society to preserve and celebrate the contributions of African Americans, Cape Verdeans, Native Americans, and other people of color to life in New Bedford. 

In addition to Paul Cuffe Park, Blake was the organizing force behind the preservation of the Nathan and Polly Johnson House, where Frederick Douglass and other runaways on the Underground Railroad first began a new life. In 2023, a statue of Douglass was unveiled to christen the new Abolition Row Park in New Bedford.

“People were charged up that there weren’t any memorials,” Blake said. 

Just a few generations prior, local residents during the Second World War had personally hauled Cuffe artifacts to the New Bedford Whaling Museum for preservation, Blake said. But by the time she started advocating for more remembrances, the Whaling Museum had forgotten it even had those items, and certainly wasn’t displaying them, according to Blake. 

“People didn’t see the importance of Black history,” she said. 

These slights to his memory are matched by what Cuffe himself experienced in his lifetime.

Paul’s father, Kofi Slocum, had been owned by Quakers and was raised in that faith. Paul, too, thought himself a Quaker, prayed like a Quaker, and believed what Quakers believed. His exploits as a seaman and his devotion to industry were fueled in large part by his faith. But for decades, including through his two imprisonments, he was not recognized in any Quaker meetinghouse. 

He had sailed to Nantucket to smuggle goods to fellow Quakers in the war, and that may be where he caught the attention of the powerful Rotch family, the Quaker whaling barons who were influential among Nantucket’s social and political leaders. As the Rotches shifted their whaling operations to Bedford Village, they would have interacted more with the unusually charismatic young sailor. 

That was likely why William Rotch used his personal influence to free Cuffe from his second imprisonment, in Taunton. But when he exited from that jail, Paul Cuffe could neither vote in Massachusetts nor sit next to white Friends, such as Rotch, at the meetinghouse.

A long few centuries later, Lee Blake looks around at the neatly manicured edges of Paul Cuffe Park. The oasis is tucked into a corner of the Whaling Museum, where an exhibit now bears permanent witness to the life of Paul Cuffe. The pipe he smoked is on display, as is the original copy of the petition he wrote to the selectmen of Dartmouth. One of the museum’s plaques thanks those who helped curate the exhibit, and Lee Blake’s name is among them.

As life quietly hums forward around her and the park she helped make, Blake says, “We are making visible that we all belong here.”

Blake is working on a new memorial about the women in New Bedford who were often working unseen to support the Revolution. “It’s now time to raise other people up,” she says. 

Email Colin Hogan at chogan@newbedfordlight.org 

Lee Blake is a member of The New Bedford Light’s board of directors. 

Editor’s note: The New Bedford Light’s newsroom is scrupulously independent. Only the editors decide what to cover and what to publish. Founders, funders and board members have no influence over editorial content.

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