James Forten

(1766-1842)

Black Nationalist, Entrepreneur

James Forten was born of free African-American parents in Philadelphia on September 2, 1766. He studied at a Quaker school but at the age of fifteen he quit to serve as a powder boy aboard the privateer Royal Louis during the American Revolution. He was captured by the British and held prisoner for seven months. He eventually spent a year in England where he was introduced to abolitionist philosophy.

Upon returning to America he was apprenticed to a sailmaker, but by 1786 he was foreman and in 1798 he became owner of the company. The business prospered and in 1832 employed forty white and African American workers.

By the 1830s Forten had become active in the abolitionist movement and was a strong opponent of African colonization. He became a noted pamphleteer, a 19th-century form of social activism and was an early fund-raiser for William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator.

Forten was president and founder of the American Moral Reform Society and was active in the American Anti-Slavery Society. He was a vigorous opponent of northern implementation of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. Forten died in Philadelphia on March 4, 1842.

Source: The African American Almanac, 7th ed., Gale, 1997.