His mother, Ruth Moses, was a Wampanoag from Harwich, Cape Cod and his father an Ashanti captured as a child in West Africa and sold into slavery in Newport about 1720.

[2] After Cuffe's father died when the youth was thirteen, he and his older brother, John, inherited the family farm (their mother had life rights).

[citation needed] On his last trip in 1815–16, he transported nine families of free blacks from Massachusetts to Sierra Leone to assist and work with the former slaves and other local residents to develop their economy.

Some historians relate Cuffe's work to the "Back to Africa" movement being promoted by the newly organized American Colonization Society (ACS).

A group made up of both Northerners and Southerners, it was focused on resettling free blacks from the United States to Africa – eventually resulting in development of Liberia.

He believed his efforts in providing training, machinery and ships to the people of Africa would enable them to improve their lives and rise in the world.

[11] Although his brother was afraid to sail in dangerous seas, Cuffe set forth, probably with a friend as crew in 1779 to deliver cargo to Nantucket.

In 1780, at the age of 21, Paul and his brother John Cuffe refused to pay taxes because free blacks did not have the right to vote in Massachusetts.

In 1780, they petitioned the council of Bristol County, Massachusetts, to end such taxation without representation, which had been an issue of colonists that led many to the Revolution.

[18] In 1811, when Cuffe took the Traveller into Liverpool, The Times of London reported that it was probably the first vessel to reach Europe that was "entirely owned and navigated by Negroes.

Some years later, in 1813, Paul purchased from David Soule a roughly 4-acre property abutting his boatyard and home on the north and west.

The Second Great Awakening, carried primarily by Quakers, Methodists, and Baptists from New England to the American South, had motivated some owners to manumit (free) their slaves after the Revolutionary War.

As slavery continued after the Revolution, primarily in the South, prominent men such as Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, both slave owners, believed the emigration of free Blacks to colonies either within or outside the United States was the easiest and most realistic solution to the race problem in America.

[21] The second wave of settlers in Sierra Leone consisted of some 1,200 free Blacks who, after England's defeat, had been transported by the Royal Navy from American port cities to Nova Scotia for resettlement.

These people of color, mostly from the southern U.S. states, found Nova Scotia a very uncomfortable place, where they faced regular discrimination at the hands of the local white residents.

[23][full citation needed] This group of settlers had formed communities and congregations in Nova Scotia and many of them were educated and skilled in farming and various crafts.

One of his close Quaker friend and business partner, William Rotch Sr., had traveled to London shortly after the Revolutionary War ended at a time when there was much discussion in government and the press about the first settlement of blacks from Britain in Sierra Leone.

Subsequently Cuffe wrote as follows: I have for these many years past felt a lively interest in their behalf, wishing that the inhabitants of the colony might become established in truth, and thereby be instrumental in its promotion amongst our African brethren.

[25]From March 1807 on, Cuffe was encouraged by Quaker and abolitionist friends in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York City to help the fledgling efforts to improve Sierra Leone.

He met with some of the colony's officials, who were opposed to American commercial vessels coming to Sierra Leone and competing with local merchants.

[27][28] His own attempts to sell goods yielded poor results, particularly because of high tariff charges on trade to and from the colony.

[29] Cuffe and the black entrepreneurs together founded the Friendly Society of Sierra Leone as a mutual-aid merchant group dedicated to furthering prosperity and industry among the free peoples in the colony.

[30] At the invitation of the African Institution, Cuffe sailed to Britain to secure further aid for the colony, arriving in Liverpool in July, 1811.

[37] In At home in 1813, Cuffe worked mainly on the rebuilding of the Westport Friends Meeting House and contributed roughly half the cost of that project.

Cuffe sailed out of Westport on December 10, 1815, with thirty-eight free black colonists: eighteen adults and twenty children,[39] ranging in age from eight months to sixty years old.

MacCarthy a certificate of the steady and sober conduct of the settlers since their arrival, and an acknowledgment of $439.62 advanced to them since they landed, to promote their comfort and advantage.

Mills and Robert Finley to provide information and advice to the American Colonization Society (ACS), formed for this purpose.

Certain co-founders, particularly Henry Clay, advocated relocating freed Blacks as a way of ridding the American South of "potentially troublesome agitators" who might disrupt their slave societies.

The following month, Reverend Peter Williams Jr. offered an extended eulogy at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in New York.

Henry Noble Sherwood, who wrote one of the first biographies about Paul Cuffe that is included in the references and further reading, summed up his life in the final paragraph of that work as follows: "Overwhelming his industry, his religion and education stands his optimism.