James Forten
James Forten was a prominent free black man born in Philadelphia on September 2, 1766. He grew up in a family with a sailmaking background and received education at the Friends' African School after losing his father at a young age. Forten served in the American Revolutionary War as a privateer and was later imprisoned by the British. Upon his release, he became a successful sailmaker and eventually owned his own business, Forten and Company, which provided employment for both African Americans and whites.
Beyond his business success, Forten was deeply involved in abolitionism and philanthropy, aligning himself with various humanitarian organizations and prominent figures of his time. He actively campaigned for civil rights and opposed the American Colonization Society's efforts to relocate African Americans to Africa. His life reflected the complex racial dynamics of the antebellum North, where he navigated the tensions between free African Americans and white citizens. Forten's legacy is marked by his dignified leadership and the significant respect he garnered from both communities, evidenced by the large turnout at his funeral in 1842.
Subject Terms
James Forten
- Born: September 2, 1766
- Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Died: March 4, 1842
- Place of death: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Entrepreneur and activist
Born free in Philadelphia, Forten became a successful sailmaker, businessman, and community leader, providing a shining example of how free African Americans overcame white prejudice.
Areas of achievement: Abolitionism; Business; Philanthropy; Social issues
Early Life
James Forten (FOHR-tehn) was born a free black man and a colonial British subject in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 2, 1766, the second child and only son of Thomas Fortune, a sailmaker, and his wife, Margaret Waymouth. Forten would later alter his name because so many slaves were surnamed “Fortune.” After Forten’s father died in 1774, he received elementary education at the Friends’ African School, began to learn sailmaking from his father’s colleagues, and started a long association with Anthony Benezet and other white Quaker abolitionists.
In 1781, Forten volunteered for privateering service aboard the Royal Louis under Captain Stephen Decatur in the American Revolutionary War. A few months later, his ship was forced to surrender to the British frigate Amphion under Captain John Bazely. Forten was consigned to the prison ship Jersey until the end of the war. After he was released, he sailed for England as a merchant seaman aboard the Commerce. Upon returning to Philadelphia in 1785 from an extended stay in London, he was apprenticed as a sailmaker to Robert Bridges. In 1798, having risen through the ranks to become foreman of Bridges and Company, Forten took over from his retiring employer and renamed the business Forten and Company.
Life’s Work
The high quality of Forten’s sails was recognized throughout the shipping industry. As his business grew and he employed hundreds of African Americans and whites, who worked side by side, he prospered personally and became a leading citizen, not only in the African American community but also in Philadelphia as a whole. He was active in several abolitionist and philanthropic organizations, such as the Free African Society, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, and the American Moral Reform Society. He worked closely in humanitarian efforts with Methodists, Quakers, and Episcopalians, involving such church leaders as Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, and served on the vestry of St. Thomas’s African Episcopal Church. He also collaborated on public service projects with such prominent citizens as Benjamin Rush and Bishop William White. During the War of 1812, he served on the committee to plan the defense of Philadelphia against a British invasion which, happily, never came.
Forten’s anonymous publication in 1813 of Letters from a Man of Colour on a Late Bill Before the Senate of Pennsylvania marked an intensification of his support of civil rights and abolitionism. Thereafter he worked closely with Philadelphia printer Russell Parrott and peripherally with Frederick Douglass. He gave financial support to the Liberator, the newspaper edited by William Lloyd Garrison, with whom he developed a close friendship.
Forten flirted briefly in 1816 with the idea of the American Colonization Society (ACS) to send African Americans to settle in Africa and found countries such as Liberia, but by 1817 he had rejected this strategy because he came to believe that America would use it to get rid of African Americans rather than liberate them. In 1819, he was active with Parrott against the ACS and accordingly Forten also opposed the National Conventions of the Free People of Color throughout the 1830’s. To maintain their positions and credibility as African American community leaders, Forten and his peers walked a tightrope between whites and lower-class African Americans, being careful not to offend or alienate either party. This became especially difficult in the wake of reaction to Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion against slaveowners in Virginia, which resulted in the deaths of dozens of people.
Forten’s first wife, Martha Beatte, died in 1804 after just six months of marriage. On December 10, 1805, he married Charlotte Vandine, from a sailmaking family of mixed African, Dutch, and Native American ancestry. Together they had nine children. He died peacefully at home on March 4, 1842, after a yearlong but unknown illness.
Significance
Forten’s life shows that racial tension existed between whites and free African Americans in the antebellum North, just as it did between slaveholders and slaves in the South, albeit of a different sort. Northern whites resented free African Americans as economic competition and cultural encroachment. The growth of the free black population in Philadelphia from about sixty-five hundred in 1790 to more than thirty-two thousand in 1820 prompted many white Philadelphians to revise their view of free African Americans as an inconvenience or a public nuisance and to fear that something essentially different would take over their city and forever change its character for the worse. This fear and tension often were made manifest in arson, restrictive laws, denial of voting rights, random violence, and organized demonstrations. Through all this, Forten comported himself with dignity, restraint, and calm rationality, and so he was able to win respect from African Americans and whites alike. Evidence of his wide, powerful, and beneficent influence is that a mixed-race crowd of thousands turned out for his funeral, which was among the largest in Philadelphia since that of Benjamin Franklin.
Bibliography
McClish, Glen Arthur. “A Man of Feeling, a Man of Colour: James Forten and the Rise of African American Deliberative Rhetoric.” Rhetorica 25, no. 3 (Summer, 2007): 297-328. Analyzes the role of Forten’s pseudonymous writings in his social activism, especially with regard to white readership.
Winch, Julie. A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Thorough, engaging, meticulously documented, and definitive, the standard biography of Forten, an important book by the leading scholar of free African Americans in antebellum America.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “James Forten and ’the Gentlemen of the Pave’: Race, Wealth, and Power in Antebellum Philadelphia.” In Multiculturalism: Roots and Realities, edited by C. James Trotman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Examines how Forten was able to win the widespread respect of both African Americans and whites in a city sharply divided along racial lines.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Philadelphia’s Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Struggle for Autonomy, 1787-1848. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. Provides a clear context for understanding the lives, conditions, and contributions of prominent African Americans in the largest city in the antebellum north.