January 1806

Paul Cuffe, a free Black man of African and Wampanoag descent from Massachusetts, built a mercantile fleet through the early 1800s, owning a ship and a cargo vessel by 1806. He became one of the wealthiest Black Americans of his era and petitioned the Massachusetts legislature against taxation without representation for Black residents denied the right to vote.

Paul Cuffe, a free Black man of African and Wampanoag descent from Massachusetts, built a mercantile fleet through the early 1800s, owning a ship and a cargo vessel by 1806. He became one of the wealthiest Black Americans of his era and petitioned the Massachusetts legislature against taxation without representation for Black residents denied the right to vote.

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.