A free Black man from Philadelphia became one of the city's wealthiest citizens — then used his fortune to fund the abolitionist movement that would end slavery.
James Forten (1766–1842) was born free in Philadelphia to free Black parents. At 14, he enlisted as a powder boy on an American privateer ship during the Revolutionary War. When the ship was captured by the British, a British officer offered to take young Forten back to England and give him a comfortable life — if he would renounce the American cause. Forten refused. He spent months as a prisoner of war on a British prison ship in New York Harbor.
After the war, Forten apprenticed with a sailmaker named Robert Bridges. He became so skilled that Bridges eventually left the business to him. By the early 1800s, Forten ran the most successful sail loft in Philadelphia, employing both Black and white workers and holding contracts across the Eastern Seaboard. He became one of Philadelphia's wealthiest men — his fortune valued at roughly $100,000 by the 1830s.
Forten used his wealth and standing to become one of America's most influential abolitionists. In 1817 he organized a mass meeting at Bethel AME Church that drew 3,000 people — one of the largest gatherings of free Black Americans in the country to that point — to formally oppose the American Colonization Society's plan to ship free Black Americans to Africa.
When William Lloyd Garrison launched *The Liberator*, his anti-slavery newspaper, in 1831, Forten was one of its first and most significant financial backers. He provided loans that kept the paper alive in its early years, and recruited hundreds of subscribers from Philadelphia's Black community. Without Forten's money, Garrison's most famous abolitionist platform might never have survived.
Forten died in Philadelphia in 1842, three years before his abolitionist allies achieved victory in Pennsylvania and decades before the Civil War ended slavery nationwide. Thousands attended his funeral. His daughters and granddaughter carried on his work — granddaughter Charlotte Forten Grimké became a prominent poet and educator who taught freed slaves in South Carolina during Reconstruction.