James Forten was born free in Philadelphia, served as a teenage powder boy on a Revolutionary privateer, and survived months on a British prison ship. He rose from apprentice to owner of one of the city’s leading sail lofts, and used the fortune it produced to finance and lead the fight against slavery and against schemes to remove free Black Americans from the country. For half a century he was the most prominent figure in Black Philadelphia and a model of the independent Black citizen the early republic was reluctant to recognize.
At a Glance
- Born
- 2 September 1766, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Died
- 4 March 1842, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Known for
- Philadelphia sail loft (owner from 1798); Letters from a Man of Colour (1813); financial backing of The Liberator
- Fields
- Enterprise · Abolition · Military
- Era
- Revolution & Early Republic
Early Life
Forten was born on 2 September 1766 in Philadelphia to Thomas and Margaret Forten, free Black residents of the city. His father worked as a sailmaker in the loft of Robert Bridges, a white sailmaker, and the boy began helping there as a child. He attended the school for Black children run by the Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet, but after his father’s death around 1773 he left school to help support the family, working for a grocer among other jobs. According to his own later recollection, he was in the crowd at the State House yard on 8 July 1776 when the Declaration of Independence was first read in public, an event he returned to throughout his political life.
In July 1781, not yet fifteen, he signed on as a powder boy aboard the Royal Louis, a Pennsylvania privateer commanded by Stephen Decatur Sr. The ship returned to port in August 1781 with captured prizes, but on its second cruise it was taken on 8 October 1781 by the British frigate Amphion. By Forten’s later account, the British captain, John Bazely, took a liking to him and offered to send him to England with his own son; Forten refused, and he was sent to the prison ship Jersey in New York harbor, where thousands of American captives died of disease. Black prisoners risked being sold into slavery in the West Indies, but Forten was held as a prisoner of war and released in an exchange in 1782.
Life and Work
After the war Forten returned to Bridges’s sail loft as an apprentice. He rose to foreman, and when Bridges retired in 1798 Forten took charge of the business and later bought it outright. Sailmaking was skilled, essential work in one of the busiest ports in North America, and Forten’s loft outfitted merchant vessels for decades. He employed both Black and white workers and trained apprentices. By the 1810s he had become one of the wealthiest men in Philadelphia, and his home became a center of Black social and political life.
Forten put his standing to work in public argument. In 1813, when the Pennsylvania legislature considered a bill to require Black migrants entering the state to register and to restrict their movement, he published Letters from a Man of Colour, on a Late Bill Before the Senate of Pennsylvania. Issued anonymously, though his authorship was widely known, the pamphlet invoked the state’s 1780 gradual abolition law and the Declaration of Independence to argue that Black Pennsylvanians were citizens entitled to equal protection. The bill did not become law. The pamphlet is an early and sustained argument for Black citizenship written by a Black American, and its appeal to the founding documents anticipated the arguments of later abolitionists.
The founding of the American Colonization Society in 1816, which proposed to resettle free Black Americans in Africa, drew his most sustained opposition. In January 1817 he chaired a mass meeting at Richard Allen’s Bethel Church, where, as Forten reported to the Black shipowner Paul Cuffe, at least three thousand people attended and none favored going to Africa. The meeting’s resolutions declared that free Black Americans would not abandon enslaved people in the South and would not leave the country of their birth. Forten remained a leader of anticolonization protest for the rest of his life, even as some Black Americans, including Cuffe, saw emigration as a path to independence.
In 1831 he became one of the most important early backers of William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, sending money to keep the Boston paper afloat, recruiting subscribers in Philadelphia, and contributing letters signed “A Colored Philadelphian.” Garrison credited Black readers and patrons like Forten with sustaining the paper in its first years. Forten also supported temperance, education, and moral reform societies in Black Philadelphia. His wife, Charlotte, and their daughters Margaretta, Sarah, and Harriet were founding members of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1833.
Legacy
Forten’s last years brought reverses. In 1838 a new Pennsylvania constitution restricted the vote to white men, disfranchising him and every other Black man in the state despite his war service and his property. He died in Philadelphia on 4 March 1842, and thousands of Black and white Philadelphians attended his funeral. His son-in-law Robert Purvis delivered a eulogy at Bethel Church later that month.
The family he raised carried his work into the next generation. Purvis, who married Harriet Forten, became a leading abolitionist and Underground Railroad organizer, and Forten’s granddaughter Charlotte Forten Grimké taught freed people in the South Carolina Sea Islands during the Civil War and kept a diary that is now a major source on Black abolitionist life. Historian Julie Winch’s biography, A Gentleman of Color, restored Forten to the history of the early republic, where he stands as proof that Black Americans fought for independence, built businesses, and argued for citizenship from the nation’s beginning.
James Forten, a Revolutionary veteran and prosperous sailmaker, argued from the nation’s founding documents that free Black Americans were citizens entitled to equal rights. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 2 September 1766 Born free in Philadelphia.
- July 1781 Joins the privateer Royal Louis as a powder boy.
- October 1781 Captured by HMS Amphion; held on the prison ship Jersey.
- 1782 Released in a prisoner exchange; returns to Philadelphia.
- 1798 Takes over Robert Bridges’s sail loft.
- 1813 Publishes Letters from a Man of Colour against a proposed registration law.
- January 1817 Chairs the Bethel Church meeting that rejects African colonization.
- 1831 Helps finance William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator.
- 1838 Pennsylvania’s new constitution disfranchises Black men.
- 4 March 1842 Dies in Philadelphia.
Sources and Further Reading
- Julie Winch, A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
- James Forten, Letters from a Man of Colour, on a Late Bill Before the Senate of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1813), in Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, and Phillip Lapsansky, eds., Pamphlets of Protest (New York: Routledge, 2001).
- Pennsylvania Center for the Book, “James Forten.” Link
- Journal of the American Revolution, “James Forten, Revolutionary: Forgotten No More,” June 2023. Link
- Museum of the American Revolution, “Black Founders: The Forten Family.” Link
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