Paul Cuffe Becomes One of Wealthiest Black Americans as Merchant Captain

Massachusetts-born Paul Cuffe, son of a freed African and a Wampanoag woman, had by the mid-1800s built a small fleet of ships and become one of the wealthiest Black men in America. As a Quaker, he successfully petitioned Massachusetts to allow tax-paying Black men to vote, an early civil rights legal victory, around 1780.