Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,861

This is the grave of James Forten.

Born free in Philadelphia in 1766, Forten came from a family of freed people. In fact, it was his grandfather who had become free, so some time earlier than this. The family was pretty sufficient, but Forten’s father died when his son was only 7, probably from a fall. So the family was OK so long as there was a breadwinner but that was lost and young James went to work. He got work as a chimney sweep and then a grocery store clerk. He tried to keep at school, or his mother did. He attended Anthony Benezet’s noted school for Black children, but by the time he was 9, he dropped out entirely.

In 1780, Forten was 14 years old and had joined the Navy. Working boats, whether military or private, was a common job for young Black men. He was on the privateer Royal Louis, which was captained by Stephen Decatur, Sr., father of the more famous naval officer from a generation later. There really wasn’t much difference between a naval ship and a privateer in the American Revolution on the colonials side though. The ship was there to attack British ships. Well, the ship was captured. For some reason, maybe he was dragooned into service, I don’t know, the captain of that ship came to find Forten impressive and intelligence and he offered to send the boy back to England for further education. But Forten was all in on this whole American Revolution thing and replied, at least supposedly, “I have been taken prisoner for the liberties of my country, and never will prove a traitor to her interest.” This language sounds super apocryphal but maybe it was something like that. In any case, the officer seems to have been at least somewhat amused because rather than really punishing him, he just had him treated as a prisoner of war in the same conditions as everyone else. If he wanted to be a patriot, well, he could be a patriot.

After seven months as a prisoner, Forten was released as part of an exchange. He went to New York briefly and then sailed to London, working over there as a shipyard laborer for about a year. He ended up back in Philadelphia in 1790, where he apprenticed himself as a sail maker, the same man who had been his father’s apprentice in that trade. Forten was very good at this job. He mastered the trade and quickly became foreman. Then he bought the business in 1798. He soon became a pretty wealthy man, not just for a Black man of the era, but any man.

So given that he had a really stable business making ship sails, Forten could spend quite a bit of his fortune funding the struggle for Black rights. Slavery may not have been legal in Pennsylvania, but discrimination, including legal discrimination, was rife. Racism is as bad in the North as in the South, then and now, but it works in different ways, including the incredibly racist ways that parents today escape integrated schools based on whatever is “best” for Maddie and Connor, which always happens to be not being in school with any or very many Black or poor kids. School segregation was a huge issue in early 19th century Philadelphia too.

So Forten took on many of these battles. He tried to get the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act overturned by Congress, but that was unsuccessful. He fought a bill in the Pennsylvania legislature in 1813 to force all Black people to register with the state. He wrote an influential pamphlet against it called Letters From A Man of Colour that probably did make the difference in the bill dying.

Forten also became a leader in the colonization movement. Here he remained in a minority position but one that quite a few people did believe in. Would white America ever accept Black people as equal. In the year 2025, the answer to this is obviously no, even if it sure seemed like it 17 years ago when we elected Barack Obama president. So for men like Forten, what about just leaving the United States? The problem with this was obvious–African Americans were by this point Americans and most did not want to leave. Still, one can see why you would. Forten himself did not leave. But he funded expeditions for those who did want to do so, including one led by Paul Cuffee in 1815 that sent 38 Black Americans to Sierra Leone. Even when they got established, these movements were almost always a disaster in reality–the Black Americans, who usually came from the middle class, legitimately believed they were more civilized than Africans and ruled them not that differently than other imperialists would, leading to severe oppression and destabilization that nations such as Sierra Leone and Liberia still deal with today. After all, Liberian dictator and general scumbag Charles Taylor traced his family back to the Americans who came over in the 19th century, just to give one example.

But then Forten held a big meeting among the Black community in Philadelphia about this and the overwhelming majority of people there denounced the colonization schemes and Forten declared himself done with that and instead began to oppose the American Colonization Society, the white led organization really pushing these ideas. He would hold to these positions for the rest of his life, including opposing emigration to Haiti, which became a bigger thing in the 1830s.

Forten helped William Lloyd Garrison start The Liberator in 1831, providing much of the financial support for the radical newspaper. He himself became a frequent contributor to the paper.

Forten managed to stay pretty healthy until almost the end of his life. He remained actively involved in his still lucrative sail cutting business and he continued to write for The Liberator and other abolitionist papers until just before his death in 1842. He was 75 years old.

James Forten is buried in Eden Cemetery, Collingdale, Pennsylvania. Obviously this is a much newer gravestone, probably put up in the last decade. His descendants included many leading figures of Black life over the next century, including his son-in-law, the abolitionist Robert Purvis and then Purvis’ children who included the physician Charles Purvis, the suffragist Harriet Purvis, and the inventor William Purvis, as well as another granddaughter, Charlotte Forten Grimké, who was a prominent abolitionist, poet, and educator.

If you would like this series to visit other abolitionists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. John Ton is in Chicago and James Shepherd Pike is in Philadelphia. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.