September 14, 2020 • 43 mins
As a child and young man, James was part of the British colonies that rebelled against rule from the throne. As an adult, he made his fortune in sail making, and turned his influence to the causes of abolition and civil rights.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And when
I started researching today's topic, I was several days in
and I kept second guessing myself because it seemed absolutely
(00:22):
impossible that we had not already covered this person. I've
had the same phenomenon happened to me. Yeah, we're talking
about James Forton today. And he's one of those figures
that has really emerged as an icon in the abolitionist movement.
He's someone people love to write about. Um. As a
child and a young man, he was part of the
British colonies as they were rebelling against rule from the throne,
(00:45):
and he both saw and participated in the Revolutionary War
that led to the US gaining independence. And as an
adult he turned his influence to the causes of abolition
and civil rights. And it was one of those things
where I kept going and I was working, and I
was several thousand pages into writing, and I pink, Tracy went,
we didn't do this already, did we? Because how could
(01:07):
we not have? Yeah? Well, and uh, and his name
may sound familiar because of previous name drop, which will
get to you in the episode, But yeah, I did
the same thing where I was like, did did did we? No?
I fully expect to find some weird hidden thing that
for some reason we couldn't find in any of our
indexes or archive lists. So I'll be like, oh, yeah,
(01:32):
totally previous host did this, and I'll be like, how
did I never find it? When you've been writing podcasts
for seven years, it's easy to not remember anymore what
you've done. Yeah, I don't. I always feel bad when
we do a live show, which I missed desperately. That
is truly one of the things I am missing the
most during this pandemic. That people will ask a question
(01:54):
about something that one of us has researched like two
years prior, or sometimes even less than, and I'll be like,
I don't remember any of this. I'm so sorry. Sometimes
I don't even remember that we did that episode. Oh yeah.
There are times we've both experienced where we go through
the archives or we're talking about something and we don't
remember ever doing it, and like one of us will
be like, I don't remember ever doing this, and it'll
(02:15):
be like you wrote it, but it happens. It's a lot. Again,
if you're doing a research paper essentially every single week
for seven years, yeah, you can't retain all of it. No,
your brand gets a little crowded. So today's subject, who
we're pretty sure we haven't done an episode on previously
is James Morton. Uh. He was born on September two,
seventeen sixty six and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And sometimes you'll find
(02:39):
his family's name listed as Fortune f O R t
U N E rather than Forton. And James was part
of the fourth generation of his family to live in
North America. The Fortin's had been in Pennsylvania for three
of those generations. His grandfather had been from West Africa
and was taken to Philadelphia as an enslaved man in
(02:59):
the six teen eighties. Although we do not know a
whole lot more than that about him. We do not
even know his name. That great grandfather had a child
with an enslaved woman that was James Morton's grandfather. And
although there's no clear information on exactly how it happened,
Forton's grandfather was able to secure his own freedom. Uh.
(03:20):
That is, according to James's accounts, Yeah, there's no record
of that. We don't know what kind of manumission or
freedom happened, just that it was something James told everybody. Yes,
my grandfather gained his own freedom. Uh. Forton's parents are
a little bit mysterious as well in terms of the
details of their life. His father, who is sometimes referred
(03:41):
to as Thomas Fortune, was, according to James, born a freeman.
Thomas was educated enough to read and write. He was
a sailmaker by trade that will come up again, and
he worked for a man named Robert Bridges. Bridges was
born to Irish parents in the Colonies, and over time
he became quite wealthy in his business, and so he
(04:01):
both employed free black craftsman at least we know of
Thomas and then later on we'll talk about his relationship
with James, but he also had enslaved black people working
in his sale offt as well. We also don't have
a lot of information on James's mother, Margaret. It's believed
that she was in her mid forties when James was born,
and we don't know anything else about her. We don't
(04:23):
know whether she was ever enslaved. No biography there. Yeah,
the background is not there. It's interesting because she lived
for quite a while and lived with James, but it
was all of her story is pretty much focused on
on James's story, and so we don't know what her
personal life was like before she became a wife and mother.
But as a child, James sometimes accompanied his father when
(04:44):
he went to Bridges's shop to work in the sale loft,
and James would have been given assorted tasks. They're like
sweeping and sometimes sorting scraps for potential recycling, like to
see if they were big enough to use for a patch.
He also may have prepared be wax for the sailmakers
to run their sewing thread through. But eventually young James
did learn to sew sales, and the idea in all
(05:07):
of this was that James was going to be completely
prepared to support himself through a stable and lucrative trade.
This was all very deliberately done by his father, Thomas,
thinking about his family's financial stability. Also went way beyond
teaching James a trade. Thomas also took small commissions for himself,
and when we say small, we mean jobs that involved sales,
(05:30):
literally small enough that he could work on them at
home without the benefit of a large loft space to
lay out all of the cuts of canvas he would need,
and then Thomas used the money that he earned through
his side work to set up a lending business so
that he could be paid back with interest uh when
he loaned money to clients, and then he could further
(05:50):
grow his holdings that way. In late seventeen seventy three
or early seventeen seventy four, when James was still just seven,
his father died. The details of the ill us that
led to this death are unknown, but Margaret then left
to figure out how to provide for her children. James
and his younger sister, Abigail, reached out to her husband's
acquaintances and business associates to try to pull together a
(06:13):
plan to get James educated and to keep food on
the table. From seventeen seventy three to seventeen seventy five,
James attended a Quaker school, the Friends African School, But
then when James was just nine, the school ran into
an array of problems. There was financial issues and the
failing health of the school's teacher, so it had to
(06:34):
close often. It kept up kind of a sputtering schedule. Meanwhile,
the family needed James to work to help support them,
and his time in school ended because of that. James
continued to be a voracious reader long after his formal
schooling with the friends ended though. Yeah, that was a
kid that loved books. And Margaret was working. She was
(06:54):
doing like taking and mending and stuff, but like to
support the three of them and pay their rent, it
was just not enough. So James started working for a shopkeeper.
And because he was still just a boy at this point,
remember he's like nine, this work was kind of like
cleaning the store, stalking the shelves. It's been theorized that
he probably served as an occasional clerk. And of course,
(07:16):
all of this upheaval in James's personal life was happening
as the colonies were going through their own upheaval. Yeah,
James was a boy in Philadelphia as the Revolutionary War
was brewing. He was still just nine when he heard
the Declaration of Independence being read publicly for the first
time on July eight, seventeen seventy six. When the British
(07:37):
marched into Philadelphia and took possession of the city on
September seventeen seventy seven, James witnessed that as well, yeah,
there has been. I saw an interesting discussion of this
in in one of the pieces I was reading about
why his why some families, particularly black families did not
leave and and there's a story and that's like they
didn't have anywhere to go. Um, a lot of people
(07:59):
just did not have the means, both black and white,
to leave the city when they knew that this occupation
was going to happen, so they kind of just hunkered
down and waited it out. But after the British moved
out of the city, Philadelphia became a rallying spot for privateers,
and this meant that the shipyards once again became very
busy as investors set about outfitting existing ships for privateering
(08:20):
or commissioning new ships to be built specifically for that purpose.
And because of the ongoing war, which had deeply impacted
the import of goods from Europe, this was also a
time that inflation was a very intense problem, so James
and his family would have needed all of the money
they could get just to make ends meet. As he
reached his team years and was able to take on
(08:41):
more demanding work, James joined the crew of a privateering vessel.
This was the Royal Louis. He was fourteen at the time.
Because he knew about sale, construction and repair, he was
really an asset for the Louise captain, which was Stephen Decatur.
James's mother, Margaret, wasn't exactly enthusiastic about the smooth but
she did consent to it. The plan was that the
(09:03):
Royal Louis, which left Philadelphia with a crew of two
hundred men, would take other ships and then deploy members
of the crew to sail those ships. James was one
of twenty black crew members, and at this point the
British held both New York and Charleston, and Decatur had
been commissioned to cruise along the coast between the two
(09:24):
cities in search of British vessels. The Royal Louis took
four other ships with very little resistance, although the times
that there were firefights definitely left an impression on Forton.
Uh There is some discrepancy in Forton's memories, as relayed
to a family friend later in life, versus historical record
regarding which ship put up a fight, but the primary
(09:45):
takeaway was that James saw both shipmates and the crew
of the other ship killed. Although he himself was uninjured.
This first voyage was both lucrative for Forton and gave
him a sense of pride at having helped the colonies
in their fight against British rule. The Louis had intercepted
British vessels that were carrying military dispatches, and so that
(10:06):
disrupted the flow of information that was vital to British planning.
James once again set out as a member of the
Royal Louis crew in October seventy one, as the Siege
of Yorktown was underway, but this time the Royal Louis
was captured by the British ship Amphion. That happened almost
immediately after they left port, and James became a prisoner.
He was naturally worried, recounting later that his mind was
(10:30):
quote harassed with the most painful forebodings from a knowledge
that rarely were prisoners of his complexion exchanged. They were
sent to the West Indies, and they're doomed to a
life of slavery. But that did not happen. Instead, James
Forton was assigned by the captain of the Amphion, which
was John. Basically, he was assigned to be a companion
(10:52):
to the captain's twelve year old son, Henry. This may
have started out essentially as a babysitting assignment for a
kid who was at See for the first time, but
according to Forton's account, he and Henry became real friends
and Captain Baisley started to treat him more and more
as his child's friend and less like a prisoner. Yeah,
there was one particular incident that's recounted where the two
(11:15):
boys were playing marbles and James made this particularly amazing
move and so Henry was like, everybody, come look at this,
it's amazing, And later he would kind of jest that
being good at marble's had saved his life. But James
Forton did end up on a prison ship for a
while though, and we're gonna pause here for a sponsor
break before we get into that part of his story.
(11:42):
So when the Ampion regrouped with a British prison ship,
Captain Baisley actually gave James Swarton the opportunity to instead
travel to England with his son Henry. James turned down
the offer by saying that he had quote been taken
prisoner for the liberties of my country and never will
prove a traitor to her interest. He was then listed
(12:02):
on the prison ship Jersey as prisoner number forty one
O two, carrying with him a letter from Captain Baisley
to the Captain of the Jersey asking that James quote
not be forgotten on the list of exchanges. While aboard
the Jersey, James made a deal with a Continental Navy officer.
At one point that officer was to be exchanged for
(12:24):
a bit of British officer, and the steal was so
James could hide in the man's sea chest and be
exchanged along with them. But when the moment actually came,
James gave his spot away to a boy who was
two years younger than he was. That was Daniel Bruton.
And Daniel made it to safety and would become James
Morton's friend for life. This was a huge sacrifice, aside
(12:46):
from the fact that there were horrible sanitary conditions in
the prison ship. One thing I read said something like
eight men died every single day just from the overcrowding
and the bad hygiene. The British didn't even consider privateer
as continental prisoners. They didn't recognize the letters of mark
that had established those privateering ships as working for the
(13:07):
Continental Congress, and so that made James and his fellow
crew members pirates in the eyes of their captors, and
so James was in a really precarious situation. Simultaneously, even
on the continental military side, privateers were not valued the
same way. They were not considered equal exchanges for red coats.
Despite all of the odds against him, James survived long
(13:30):
enough for his name to make its way up the
exchange list, and after seven months as a captive, he
was released. He was dropped in New York and walked
to Trent And barefoot before getting food and assistance. When
he made it back to Philadelphia, he was not in
good health. He was thin and malnourished, to the point
that a lot of his hair had fallen out. But
to his mother and sister, who really thought he had
(13:52):
died at sea, his reappearance probably seemed like a miracle.
And also at this point he was still just a teenager. Yeah,
I don't even know if he had turned fifteen yet
at this time. This all happened in a very short
period of time. But a year later, the war was
over and James was physically recovered and he was working,
probably in the sail loft of Robert Bridges again to
(14:13):
keep the family housed and fed. During this time, James's
sister Abigail, married a sailor named William Dunbar, who left
almost immediately after the wedding to sail to London aboard
a ship called the Commerce, which was run by a
merchant named Thomas Truxton, and James went with him. When
Jamesporton arrived in London, he was seventeen. William Dunbar went
(14:34):
back to Philadelphia aboard the Commerce as soon as the
cargo was unloaded and the new cargo brought on. But James,
knowing that he now had a brother in law who
could help look after the family, decided to stay in
England for a while. As a young man who was
able to make and repair sales, he could easily pick
up work along the docks and in the shipyards of London.
For James, this was definitely not an instance of a
(14:56):
young man who was looking to sew his wild oats
or enjoy some unrestrained party time. He is often described
as pious. He never drank and was really quite disdainful
of alcohol. He would say later in his life that
he had never had a drop, and he seems to
have spent his free time kind of walking around the city,
observing the social and political norms of life in London
(15:17):
at the time, particularly in regard to race. While he
was less likely to stand out in the city because
of the color of his skin, James certainly witnessed the
racism involved in a city where black loyalist refugees from
the war were being referred to as an infestation. This
was also when the idea had started to take hold
of a colony in Sierra Leone where the British government
(15:41):
could ship unwanted black refugees. We will come back to
this later, but the truth is we actually don't really
know what James Forton thought or saw when he was
in London. Specifically, it is unclear whether he had always
intended that this would be a temporary visit, or if
he had actually at some point thought he might relocate
(16:02):
there and then later changed his mind for some reason.
There is no real record even of what ship he
sailed back to Philadelphia on. There has been speculation that
he once again met up with the Commerce and took
it back because it was making regular runs back and forth,
but we do not know for certain. All we know
is that he did return home to Philadelphia in Once
(16:23):
he was in Pennsylvania again, his next line of work
wasn't on the water. He officially became a sailmaker's apprentice
under Robert Bridges. Bridges was a lot more than a
boss to James. He was a mentor perhaps even a
father figure. Although a lot of the specifics of their
relationship are pretty speculative, it appears, based on records that
(16:44):
Forton lived with Bridges for a while, which was not
unusual for an apprentice, and that means that he would
have been a free black man in a home where
enslaved people made up the household staff. Yeah. This also
gets into the discussion that I didn't really delve into
here of the indenture of an apprentice, and there is
some discussion there to be made about whether or not
(17:05):
you're still a free person at that point. Certainly, indentures
were not in trade learning crafts exclusive to black people
at this point. Um. But it's just another kind of
nuance to consider in all of this. Um. And we
have also talked on the show before about the inherent
conflict of stories like this. A person, specifically a black
person that participates or lives in a system that enslaves
(17:29):
other black people. Uh Forton's family had its own complicated
history with slavery, although the Fortins or Fortunes, depending on
which historical record you're reading and which one any given
individual in that family favored. Although they were black, James
had an aunt who purchased enslaved people. This was not
exactly uncommon in Philadelphia and other cities. Enslaved labor was
(17:52):
so much a part of the cultural and economic norms
at the time that almost anyone with any kind of
financial stability or wealth was probably involved in enslavement. Back
to the relationship between Robert Bridges and James Parton. Bridges
even purchased a house in James Parton's name, and he
trained Forton to become an expert in designer and sailmaker.
(18:13):
This was all pretty unusual for a number of reasons
other than the ones that we've just mentioned. First, Forton
was the only free black person working in the sail loft.
Other black men worked there, but they were all enslaved. Additionally,
Robert Bridges and his wife Jemima, had children of their own,
and if things had progressed in the usual way, one
(18:33):
of the Bridge's sons would have been the one taking
over the family business, but that did not happen. In
six Bridges promoted James Forton to foreman and then he
was made junior partner. And in part this was because
Robert Bridges, who had done very well for himself over
the years, he had made additional money in privateering by
(18:55):
uh purchasing privateering ships, even though he himself did not
ever sail on them. He was kind of angling for
his sons to become merchants and not tradesmen. He wanted
to push them up the socioeconomic ladder, and so, in
wishing to advance the position of his children, Robert had
created a space where James was the one that was
on a path to take over the business one day.
(19:16):
But to be clear, James was a hard worker. He
was very good at what he did. The time he
spent on the sea informed his work with practical knowledge
and experience that even Robert Bridges didn't have. And as
he took on greater and greater responsibility, the loft clients
recognized that James Sporton knew what he was talking about.
Although some accounts of his life include mentioned that he
(19:38):
patented a sale management system. There are no records to
indicate that that was actually the case now, but he
was undisputably like the sale expert um because he understood
like what it even meant to like lift a sale,
which a lot of salemakers didn't really know from personal experience.
Like they would hire in sailors sometimes to do extra
(20:00):
sewing who were like on land for a little while,
but there weren't people designing these sales who had really
been at sea very often at all, And so James
was like miles ahead of everyone in terms of experiential knowledge.
As the eighteenth century was coming to a close, James
reached a new transition point in his life in Robert
(20:20):
Bridges retired and Forton took over the salemaking company. With
the help of Robert Bridges, he had become both a
homeowner and a business owner, both of which were very
unusual for black residents of Philadelphia in the late seventeen hundreds.
This transition was pretty simple in terms of property, but
the workforce was a little different. While the apprentices stayed
(20:41):
trusting that James Forton could train them, the men who
had finished their apprenticeships weren't really as willing to stay
under this new ownership. While they had been answering to
James for quite some time as their supervisor, they had
some concerns that as a business owner, a black man
would automatically lose clients because of prejudice. There was a
concern about financial stability as well. James was the only
(21:05):
black person in Philadelphia at the time who owned a
business the size of this sail loft, and none of
the employees knew what was going to happen. Allegedly, Robert
Bridges moves things out, although whether that was through a
financial guarantee or just by reiterating the good reputation that
James Sporton had with all the other captains and the
shipowners in town, like, that's really unclear. Yeah, we don't know.
(21:28):
If he kind of made like a cash reserve and
said like, look, guys, you're gonna get paid. This reserve
is here in case anything goes wrong, or if he
just was like, are you fools. Every captain knows that
this is a person you go to. They're not going
to go somewhere else because you're not going to get
the same level of service, And Bridges was by the way,
(21:49):
absolutely right. Uh. Thomas Willing, a banker in one of
the city's wealthiest men, really kind of became one of
Forton's first really like consistant champions and patrons in this regard.
He regularly patronized the loft, and Forton eventually named one
of his sons after the businessman. His third son was
named Thomas Willing. Francis Forton Bridges died two years after
(22:14):
the business changed hands, so he did not get to
enjoy his retirement very long. But if anyone had been
worried about James Forton continuing the firm's prosperity without his
mentors kind of standing by in the wings, they really
did not need to have been concerned. James Forton and sons,
as it eventually came to be known, continued to have
success and to be a well respected business with a
(22:35):
dedicated clientele. And this was all the case, we should
point out. While the country's economic situation was not all
that stable. Up to this point in his life, James
had been taking care of his mother and sister, but
he also wanted a family of his own, and we'll
talk about that after we have a little sponsor break.
(22:59):
If I of years after acquiring the salemaking business, James
met a young woman named Martha Batty who went by Patty,
and not a whole lot is known about her life before.
She and James married on November tenth of eighteen oh three,
but unfortunately, their newly wed bliss lasted less than a
year before Martha died. Seven months later. She became ill
(23:20):
and passed, and the cause of her death is unknown.
James did not really ever want to talk about her
very much at all for the rest of his life,
so we don't really know much about their relationship or,
like I said, her, what caused her passing. Not long
after Patty died, his sister Abigail also lost her husband,
so from that point on, James took care of Abigail
(23:40):
and her children for the rest of their lives. Forton
got married again, this time on December tenth, eighteen o five.
His bride was Charlotte Van Deen, who was twenty at
that time. There was another death in the family and
May of the following year, James's mother, Margaret, died at
the age of eighty four. When James and Charlot it
welcome to their first child in September of eighteen six.
(24:03):
They named her Margaretta in honor of the deceased matriarch
of the family. James and Charlotte had nine children's total,
there was Charlotte who died in childhood, Harriet James Jr.
Robert Bridges, Sarah Louisa, Mary, Isabella, Thomas Willing, and William. Yeah,
many of those names you will recognize because he often
would name people after Patron's mentors, people who were important
(24:25):
to him and his family. Forton's business model as he
ran the sail loft in support of his growing family,
was really progressive. He hired both black and white employees
to work in his loft, and there was no separation
along race lines, and his business flourished for the first
nine years, so much so that he was sometimes referenced
(24:46):
in the press and in travelogs as this example of
black prosperity in Philadelphia, which of course ignores the fact
that like he was a complete outlier. Um they kind
of used him like, no, you could have the their
dreams full filled, and it's like, well, yes, but one
dream Like there were a lot of people not given
the sort of lucky breaks that he had had. Then
(25:08):
the Embargo Act of eighteen o seven really meant that
trade came to a standstill, so ships sales were not
in demand anymore. Things picked back up in eighteen ten
when the foreign trade restrictions were lifted, and then the
War of eighteen twelve once again put everything into a
really perilous state, particularly during a blockade of the Delaware River.
(25:29):
The trade continued through Philadelphia as supplies were moving inland,
a lot of business owners just didn't make it through
with their livelihoods. Intact, James was, as one biographer put it,
luckier or perhaps more prudent than many. He did experience
some losses during all of this economic upheaval, but he
was really careful with his business, and he stayed financially stable,
(25:51):
and he was able to expand his fortunes once all
of that instability had kind of settled down a little bit.
He also whether to real estate bubble in a city
and a panic in eighteen nineteen, and like his father,
he put his money to work by lending, and he
also made real estate investments. Over the years of working
on the waterfront, Forton rescued a dozen people from drowning.
(26:14):
In eighteen twenty one. He was recognized for having saved
so many with a certificate of heroism from the Humane
Society of Philadelphia. The certificate remained one of his most
prized possessions for the rest of his life. He framed
it and displayed it in the sitting room of his home. Yeah,
there are varying accounts of whether the number was actually
twelve or not. Some go as low as four, and
(26:35):
some are like it could have been even more. This
is a port city where people were always falling in
the water. Um usually twelve is where the consensus lands.
As Philadelphia was struggling to find its footing as it
was surpassed as a port city by New York. James
and his sons had to work really, really hard to
keep the business going, and it was not easy, but
(26:57):
they managed to continue to be respected and seen as
a great success. Visitors would come to the Sale loft
to marvel at Forton's success and his integrated workforce, which
was often touted as being about fifty fifty black and white,
was written about in the Anti Slavery Record in eighteen
thirty four. Of course, in spite of all the press
(27:19):
and interest from the general public, many of whom openly
praised Forton's business, the Journeyman's Sailmaker's Benevolent Society of Philadelphia,
only had white members. In thirty eight, Philadelphia's trade register
showed nineteen black sailmakers in the city. All but one
was working at James Forton and Sons, and three were
(27:39):
James and his sons, James Jr. And Robert. Though he
was running a very successful business, you would think very
busy with all those children, James Forton still made time
to participate in church and community efforts as well. As
a member of the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas,
James put his business acumen to work and he spearheaded
(27:59):
fund raising efforts to help black men and women in
Philadelphia get educations. He also advised both the church itself
and other members of the church in business affairs, and
he would help them when they needed assistance with legal
matters as well. But even more than that, he emerged
as a leader in the abolition movement and a champion
of civil rights for black citizens. He had been connected
(28:22):
from a very early age to people in Philadelphia who
were abolitionists. Anthony Beneze, who was a well known abolitionist
and educator, had known James's father, and it helped James's mother, Margaret,
arranged for James to attend the Friends African School as
a boy. Beneze was one of the founders of the
Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage,
(28:44):
which evolved into the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Pennsylvania had passed
the Gradual Abolition Act in March of seventeen eighty, when
James was still thirteen, and though this is widely touted
as a big step in abolition history, and it was
the first of many said steps that were pushed for
by abolitionists, it also meant that James, at a very
impressionable age, saw firsthand how legislators were trying to appease
(29:09):
in slavers with this law by grandfathering in their right
to continue to keep people as property so long as
they registered them each year. And even as freedom was
afforded to more and more black residents, it didn't really
provide for a transition out of poverty once they were free,
and James saw that as the number of free black
inhabitants of the city grew, so did the hostility from
(29:31):
Philadelphia's white population. Forarton worked in the abolitionist cause from
an early age. He was one of the abolitionists who
petitioned Congress to change the seventeen ninety three Fugitive Slave
Law in the early eighteen hundreds, and once he had
a family, James was more passionate than ever about abolition
and equality. He wrote the pamphlet Letters from a Man
(29:52):
of Color in eighteen thirteen, and its desire for his
children to have all the same rights as any other
citizen is clear in the text He wrote to implore legislators, quote,
are you a parent? Have you children around whom your
affections are bound by those delightful bonds that none but
a parent can know? Are they the delight of your
prosperity and the solace of your afflictions? If all this
(30:15):
be true to you, we submit our cause the parents
feelings cannot air. In that same pamphlet, Forton wrote about
the obvious inequality between the white and black residents of Philadelphia,
particularly on holidays. He spoke specifically about the Fourth of
July and the contradictory nature of celebrating liberty when you
compared the experiences of Philadelphia's black and white residents. He wrote, quote,
(30:38):
it is a well known fact that black people, on
certain days of public jubilee dare not be seen after
twelve o'clock in the day upon the field to enjoy
the times. For no sooner do the fumes of that
potent devil liquor mount into the brain than the poor
black is assailed. Is it not wonderful that the day
set apart for the festival of liberty should be abu
(31:00):
used by the advocates of freedom in endeavoring to sully
what they professed to adore. So if the name James
Barton has been sounding familiar to you on this podcast,
it might be because we did mention him in our
episode on Paul Cuffey. The two men had a number
of things in common. They both became wealthy through maritime interests.
Cuffey had started to turn a profit in a shipping business,
(31:21):
and like Forton, invested in real estate. You may recall
that Cuffey was a supporter of relocation of Africans and
people of African descent in the United States to Sierra Leone,
and we referenced this idea earlier in this episode. Although
it going on in Great Britain, but of course that
also was an idea that spread across the Atlantic, and
(31:42):
in the Paul Cuffee episode, we talked about the failed
efforts that preceded Cuffe's involvement in the movement, which started
in eighteen ten. Forton initially supported Cuffey's work in this area,
but he, like so many others, eventually backed away from
this idea and renounced it. He had that change of
heart largely after arranging a number of meetings where people
discussed the realities of this plan, and he came to
(32:05):
realize that for most people that he talked to you,
this is just not something they wanted to do. Many
of them, of course, had no immediate ties to Africa
and had never even been there. They considered themselves Americans,
and they didn't want to abandon that. Being a sailmaker
and an abolitionist also came with some tricky choices to navigate.
Fabric made in the United States became a bigger issue
(32:28):
as the country gained the ability to manufacture textiles, specifically duck,
which is a heavy duty canvas that's used in sailmaking.
This was part of an effort to get away from
the reliance on European goods, but it also meant that
the cotton industry, which was intertwined so deeply with slavery,
was also flourishing. We do not know James Forton's thoughts
(32:50):
on this, If he ever recorded any, they are lost,
but we do know that he did continue to use
cotton duck and cotton duck that was manufactured in the
United States. But we also know that his daughter, Harriet,
for example, who was married to Robert Purvis, was an
active participant in the Colored Free Produce Association, which chewed
the use of anything that had been produced by enslaved people.
(33:12):
So there was almost certainly an awareness of how success
in his field was tied, at least in some way
to enslavement, although he also leveraged his own success to
combat the institution of slavery. And it's also said that
he refused to make or repair sales for any ship
that he believed to have been involved in slave trade,
So the ethics of his business do appear to have
(33:34):
mostly been aligned with his anti slavery views. Forton routinely
used his wealth to promote the idea of freedom of
enslaved people and the rights of free black people, and
his money was likely used to purchase the freedom of
several people. Because of his many connections with mariners, business leaders,
and lawyers who camped his business affairs, James also had
(33:56):
a network of people who he could turn to in
order to stay informed and occasionally to leverage his influence.
Forton's own influence actually had a very lengthy reach. There
is a specific story about a relative of his, so,
through a series of bad events, one of his nephews
sons had ended up enslaved in New Orleans when the
(34:17):
man that the ten year old was apprenticed to sold him,
and that boy, Amos did not immediately mention that he
had a wealthy uncle in Philadelphia. He was kind of
too terrified to say much of anything, by the way
the account reads. But once he did actually say this,
the story goes that Robert Layton, who was the man
that had enslaved him through purchase, recognized the name James
(34:40):
Forton and looked into the matter, and ultimately this led
to Amos Dunbar being returned to his family. In eighteen thirty,
Forton was part of the first National Negro Convention. He
spoke out against the American Colonization Society At that event
and the years that followed, he once again urged government
reform and asking Pennsylvania State legislature to forego restricting free
(35:03):
black people to immigrate into the state. The Forton children
also got very much involved in the cause, and as
they aged into adulthood, they wrote, and they spoke, and
they helped form abolitionist groups. His daughters, in particular, were
really really good writers. James and Charlotte Forton's home became
a hub of abolitionist activity, both for work and for planning,
(35:24):
as well as just for socializing. Parton was one of
the driving forces that got The Liberator, which was the
abolitionist paper run by William Lloyd Garrison, off the ground.
Not only did Forton use his own money to finance
its publishing, but he also raised funds from other donors
to ensure its ongoing printing. Forton also frequently wrote letters
(35:45):
to the press speaking out against slavery and for civil rights,
although he usually used a pen name for this. He
favored signing off as a colored Philadelphian or a man
of color as the two most common ones, but in
a lot of cases include In his eighteen thirteen pamphlet
most of Philadelphia knew that these writings were the work
of James Forton. In eighteen forty, the Philadelphia Board of
(36:08):
Education planned to close the only public high school for
black students in Philadelphia, and Forton intervened and rallying his
friends to promise to aid in the school's enrollment numbers
and support, Forton managed to save the Lombard Street School.
There is sort of a sad irony there where the
school board ended up closing another school because they were
(36:30):
afraid that the numbers were so low, because these two
schools were splitting enrollment, and the school they closed had
been the one that he had sent his kids to,
and so so he kind of doomed one school to
save another. But um then, beginning in eighteen forty one,
James started to feel unwell, and over that summer he
really started to have difficulty breathing. There has been speculation
(36:53):
over the years that he may have had tuberculosis, but
there are no medical records to consult, and it's just
as possible that the various filaments and chemicals that he
was exposed to throughout his career of sailmaking had damaged
his lungs. James Forton died in March of eighteen forty
two at his Philadelphia home at Third and Lombard. On
the day of his funeral, a huge crowd of people,
(37:15):
hundreds of them, followed the hearse through the city streets
to show their respect for him. It was really unprecedented
for a black man to receive that kind of a
funeral procession, not just a number, but because the crowd
was made up of both black and white citizens walking together.
Particularly surprising because Philadelphia really remained mired and a lot
(37:35):
of conflicts stemming from racist attitudes of its white inhabitants.
J Miller McKim, who was an associate and a friend
through the Pennsylvania Anti Slavery Society, wrote this about the
funeral procession. Quote, the vast concourse of people of all
classes and complexions, numbering from three to five thousand, that
followed his remains to the grave bore testimony to the
(37:57):
estimation in which he was universally old. James Sporton's widows, Charlotte,
lived for more than forty more years after James died,
and was just a few days shy of her hundredth
birthday when she died in the eighteen eighties, His surviving
children continued both his business and his activism. He had
stipulated in his will that the money he left his
daughters was theirs and would not become part of any
(38:20):
husband's fortunes. Yeah. I kind of love that detail. That
he was also a little bit of a feminist. Um. Yeah,
he's such a cool figure, and I it's one of
those things. This is a long ish episode, but I
had to cut so many cool things about him to
work because there are a cajillion stories that people would
(38:43):
tell about him and their encounters with him. So, as
our our usual apology, if I left your favorite out,
I'm sorry. Um but yeah, like I said, I can't
believe we never talked about it before. Yeah. Yeah, I'm
glad you chose this one because from the brief references
(39:05):
to him in the Paul Cuffey episode, it was like
I knew the parts about being involved in the abolition movement. Um,
I knew about his shifting support for the colonization plans
of sending people to Sierra Leone. I did not know
any of the stuff about privateers or sailmaker. Yeah. Uh yeah.
(39:25):
There's one particular, really really good biography of him and
it goes into so much detail about sailmaking that I
was like down a rabbit hole of kind of delights
like sewing. Talk Um, but I will shift gears to
do a little bit of listener me if that's cool
with you. That seems good to me. This is from
our listener. I don't know she pronounces her name Lara
(39:45):
or Laura, but writes Hi, Tracy and Holly. I often
think I'm gonna write you after listening to an episode,
such as after your episode back in about John Harvey Kellogg.
My great grandparents trained as nurses at Battle Creek under Kellogg,
with my great grand father being part of an effort
to open a similar sanitarium in Wisconsin before he married
my great grandmother, and then both of them after marriage
(40:07):
working as nurses in Mexico, opening a health food store
and hydrotherapy clinic in Washington, d C. And then moving
to homestead in Alberta, Canada, where they were the main
medical personnel in a prairie community. Lara, please write that story,
so um, I want all of that information. But she
goes on. But it was the Isabella Bird episode that
finally prompted me to write I so appreciated the episode.
(40:30):
I first learned about her on my honeymoon to Kauai
in two thousand three, when I bought her book about
the Hawaiian Islands in a gift shop, and then I
became really fascinated with her and read many of her
other books. I checked my bookshelf and found ones about
the Rockies, Japan, Malaysia, and Tibet. Embellished or not, some
of the things she did were unusual for a woman
of her time, and I found that aspect of her
(40:51):
writing interesting, including the details of how she traveled, what
she packed, et cetera. But over time I found her
writing more problematic for many the reasons you mentioned in
the podcast. I love the podcast, and I really appreciate
the diversity of subjects you cover. There have been several
times over the past couple of years that a friend
has posted a link to something on Facebook about a
historical event, usually a news article looking back at an event,
(41:15):
with a comment along the lines of I had no
idea about this until recently, and I've been able to say, Hey,
if you want to know more about this, you should
check out this episode of stuff he was newstry Glass.
Thanks Laura you're like our little, um personal pr person,
which I appreciate. Um, thank you again for one. I'm
really really fascinated about your great grandparents and I really
(41:38):
do hope you write that book. And also, yeah, Isabella
Lucy Bird is an interesting creature. I think a lot
of people who maybe were exposed to her writing, you know,
at one point in their lives, as they go through it, uh,
realize over time that it remains fascinating, but it is
also problematic in its way. Yeah. When we um, when
we first put that episode on our social media, there
(42:02):
was a surprising to me, like a surprisingly large number
of people who were like, oh, no, I just started
reading this book and now I'm afraid I'm going to
learn all the like, all the problematic things about her.
And I was like, I'm surprised that there are this
many people who listen to our show who are reading
her books right now, who don't know right right like
(42:23):
I could see picking up one of her books, but um, yeah,
and um, it's hard to avoid all of the problematic parts. Yeah. Well,
and like I said in that episode, I kind of
take for granted that that's going to be the case
of any nineteenth century traveler we talk about right absolutely.
I mean we've seen it happen over and over and over.
(42:45):
But if you would like to write to us, you
can do so. You can do that at History podcast
at iHeart radio dot com. You can also find us
on social media at missed in History. If you would
like to subscribe to the show, it is easiest pie
to do so. You can do that in the iHeart
Radio app, at Apple podcast or wherever it is you listen.
(43:06):
Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. H
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And when
I started researching today's topic, I was several days in
and I kept second guessing myself because it seemed absolutely
(00:22):
impossible that we had not already covered this person. I've
had the same phenomenon happened to me. Yeah, we're talking
about James Forton today. And he's one of those figures
that has really emerged as an icon in the abolitionist movement.
He's someone people love to write about. Um. As a
child and a young man, he was part of the
British colonies as they were rebelling against rule from the throne,
(00:45):
and he both saw and participated in the Revolutionary War
that led to the US gaining independence. And as an
adult he turned his influence to the causes of abolition
and civil rights. And it was one of those things
where I kept going and I was working, and I
was several thousand pages into writing, and I pink, Tracy went,
we didn't do this already, did we? Because how could
(01:07):
we not have? Yeah? Well, and uh, and his name
may sound familiar because of previous name drop, which will
get to you in the episode, But yeah, I did
the same thing where I was like, did did did we? No?
I fully expect to find some weird hidden thing that
for some reason we couldn't find in any of our
indexes or archive lists. So I'll be like, oh, yeah,
(01:32):
totally previous host did this, and I'll be like, how
did I never find it? When you've been writing podcasts
for seven years, it's easy to not remember anymore what
you've done. Yeah, I don't. I always feel bad when
we do a live show, which I missed desperately. That
is truly one of the things I am missing the
most during this pandemic. That people will ask a question
(01:54):
about something that one of us has researched like two
years prior, or sometimes even less than, and I'll be like,
I don't remember any of this. I'm so sorry. Sometimes
I don't even remember that we did that episode. Oh yeah.
There are times we've both experienced where we go through
the archives or we're talking about something and we don't
remember ever doing it, and like one of us will
be like, I don't remember ever doing this, and it'll
(02:15):
be like you wrote it, but it happens. It's a lot. Again,
if you're doing a research paper essentially every single week
for seven years, yeah, you can't retain all of it. No,
your brand gets a little crowded. So today's subject, who
we're pretty sure we haven't done an episode on previously
is James Morton. Uh. He was born on September two,
seventeen sixty six and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And sometimes you'll find
(02:39):
his family's name listed as Fortune f O R t
U N E rather than Forton. And James was part
of the fourth generation of his family to live in
North America. The Fortin's had been in Pennsylvania for three
of those generations. His grandfather had been from West Africa
and was taken to Philadelphia as an enslaved man in
(02:59):
the six teen eighties. Although we do not know a
whole lot more than that about him. We do not
even know his name. That great grandfather had a child
with an enslaved woman that was James Morton's grandfather. And
although there's no clear information on exactly how it happened,
Forton's grandfather was able to secure his own freedom. Uh.
(03:20):
That is, according to James's accounts, Yeah, there's no record
of that. We don't know what kind of manumission or
freedom happened, just that it was something James told everybody. Yes,
my grandfather gained his own freedom. Uh. Forton's parents are
a little bit mysterious as well in terms of the
details of their life. His father, who is sometimes referred
(03:41):
to as Thomas Fortune, was, according to James, born a freeman.
Thomas was educated enough to read and write. He was
a sailmaker by trade that will come up again, and
he worked for a man named Robert Bridges. Bridges was
born to Irish parents in the Colonies, and over time
he became quite wealthy in his business, and so he
(04:01):
both employed free black craftsman at least we know of
Thomas and then later on we'll talk about his relationship
with James, but he also had enslaved black people working
in his sale offt as well. We also don't have
a lot of information on James's mother, Margaret. It's believed
that she was in her mid forties when James was born,
and we don't know anything else about her. We don't
(04:23):
know whether she was ever enslaved. No biography there. Yeah,
the background is not there. It's interesting because she lived
for quite a while and lived with James, but it
was all of her story is pretty much focused on
on James's story, and so we don't know what her
personal life was like before she became a wife and mother.
But as a child, James sometimes accompanied his father when
(04:44):
he went to Bridges's shop to work in the sale loft,
and James would have been given assorted tasks. They're like
sweeping and sometimes sorting scraps for potential recycling, like to
see if they were big enough to use for a patch.
He also may have prepared be wax for the sailmakers
to run their sewing thread through. But eventually young James
did learn to sew sales, and the idea in all
(05:07):
of this was that James was going to be completely
prepared to support himself through a stable and lucrative trade.
This was all very deliberately done by his father, Thomas,
thinking about his family's financial stability. Also went way beyond
teaching James a trade. Thomas also took small commissions for himself,
and when we say small, we mean jobs that involved sales,
(05:30):
literally small enough that he could work on them at
home without the benefit of a large loft space to
lay out all of the cuts of canvas he would need,
and then Thomas used the money that he earned through
his side work to set up a lending business so
that he could be paid back with interest uh when
he loaned money to clients, and then he could further
(05:50):
grow his holdings that way. In late seventeen seventy three
or early seventeen seventy four, when James was still just seven,
his father died. The details of the ill us that
led to this death are unknown, but Margaret then left
to figure out how to provide for her children. James
and his younger sister, Abigail, reached out to her husband's
acquaintances and business associates to try to pull together a
(06:13):
plan to get James educated and to keep food on
the table. From seventeen seventy three to seventeen seventy five,
James attended a Quaker school, the Friends African School, But
then when James was just nine, the school ran into
an array of problems. There was financial issues and the
failing health of the school's teacher, so it had to
(06:34):
close often. It kept up kind of a sputtering schedule. Meanwhile,
the family needed James to work to help support them,
and his time in school ended because of that. James
continued to be a voracious reader long after his formal
schooling with the friends ended though. Yeah, that was a
kid that loved books. And Margaret was working. She was
(06:54):
doing like taking and mending and stuff, but like to
support the three of them and pay their rent, it
was just not enough. So James started working for a shopkeeper.
And because he was still just a boy at this point,
remember he's like nine, this work was kind of like
cleaning the store, stalking the shelves. It's been theorized that
he probably served as an occasional clerk. And of course,
(07:16):
all of this upheaval in James's personal life was happening
as the colonies were going through their own upheaval. Yeah,
James was a boy in Philadelphia as the Revolutionary War
was brewing. He was still just nine when he heard
the Declaration of Independence being read publicly for the first
time on July eight, seventeen seventy six. When the British
(07:37):
marched into Philadelphia and took possession of the city on
September seventeen seventy seven, James witnessed that as well, yeah,
there has been. I saw an interesting discussion of this
in in one of the pieces I was reading about
why his why some families, particularly black families did not
leave and and there's a story and that's like they
didn't have anywhere to go. Um, a lot of people
(07:59):
just did not have the means, both black and white,
to leave the city when they knew that this occupation
was going to happen, so they kind of just hunkered
down and waited it out. But after the British moved
out of the city, Philadelphia became a rallying spot for privateers,
and this meant that the shipyards once again became very
busy as investors set about outfitting existing ships for privateering
(08:20):
or commissioning new ships to be built specifically for that purpose.
And because of the ongoing war, which had deeply impacted
the import of goods from Europe, this was also a
time that inflation was a very intense problem, so James
and his family would have needed all of the money
they could get just to make ends meet. As he
reached his team years and was able to take on
(08:41):
more demanding work, James joined the crew of a privateering vessel.
This was the Royal Louis. He was fourteen at the time.
Because he knew about sale, construction and repair, he was
really an asset for the Louise captain, which was Stephen Decatur.
James's mother, Margaret, wasn't exactly enthusiastic about the smooth but
she did consent to it. The plan was that the
(09:03):
Royal Louis, which left Philadelphia with a crew of two
hundred men, would take other ships and then deploy members
of the crew to sail those ships. James was one
of twenty black crew members, and at this point the
British held both New York and Charleston, and Decatur had
been commissioned to cruise along the coast between the two
(09:24):
cities in search of British vessels. The Royal Louis took
four other ships with very little resistance, although the times
that there were firefights definitely left an impression on Forton.
Uh There is some discrepancy in Forton's memories, as relayed
to a family friend later in life, versus historical record
regarding which ship put up a fight, but the primary
(09:45):
takeaway was that James saw both shipmates and the crew
of the other ship killed. Although he himself was uninjured.
This first voyage was both lucrative for Forton and gave
him a sense of pride at having helped the colonies
in their fight against British rule. The Louis had intercepted
British vessels that were carrying military dispatches, and so that
(10:06):
disrupted the flow of information that was vital to British planning.
James once again set out as a member of the
Royal Louis crew in October seventy one, as the Siege
of Yorktown was underway, but this time the Royal Louis
was captured by the British ship Amphion. That happened almost
immediately after they left port, and James became a prisoner.
He was naturally worried, recounting later that his mind was
(10:30):
quote harassed with the most painful forebodings from a knowledge
that rarely were prisoners of his complexion exchanged. They were
sent to the West Indies, and they're doomed to a
life of slavery. But that did not happen. Instead, James
Forton was assigned by the captain of the Amphion, which
was John. Basically, he was assigned to be a companion
(10:52):
to the captain's twelve year old son, Henry. This may
have started out essentially as a babysitting assignment for a
kid who was at See for the first time, but
according to Forton's account, he and Henry became real friends
and Captain Baisley started to treat him more and more
as his child's friend and less like a prisoner. Yeah,
there was one particular incident that's recounted where the two
(11:15):
boys were playing marbles and James made this particularly amazing
move and so Henry was like, everybody, come look at this,
it's amazing, And later he would kind of jest that
being good at marble's had saved his life. But James
Forton did end up on a prison ship for a
while though, and we're gonna pause here for a sponsor
break before we get into that part of his story.
(11:42):
So when the Ampion regrouped with a British prison ship,
Captain Baisley actually gave James Swarton the opportunity to instead
travel to England with his son Henry. James turned down
the offer by saying that he had quote been taken
prisoner for the liberties of my country and never will
prove a traitor to her interest. He was then listed
(12:02):
on the prison ship Jersey as prisoner number forty one
O two, carrying with him a letter from Captain Baisley
to the Captain of the Jersey asking that James quote
not be forgotten on the list of exchanges. While aboard
the Jersey, James made a deal with a Continental Navy officer.
At one point that officer was to be exchanged for
(12:24):
a bit of British officer, and the steal was so
James could hide in the man's sea chest and be
exchanged along with them. But when the moment actually came,
James gave his spot away to a boy who was
two years younger than he was. That was Daniel Bruton.
And Daniel made it to safety and would become James
Morton's friend for life. This was a huge sacrifice, aside
(12:46):
from the fact that there were horrible sanitary conditions in
the prison ship. One thing I read said something like
eight men died every single day just from the overcrowding
and the bad hygiene. The British didn't even consider privateer
as continental prisoners. They didn't recognize the letters of mark
that had established those privateering ships as working for the
(13:07):
Continental Congress, and so that made James and his fellow
crew members pirates in the eyes of their captors, and
so James was in a really precarious situation. Simultaneously, even
on the continental military side, privateers were not valued the
same way. They were not considered equal exchanges for red coats.
Despite all of the odds against him, James survived long
(13:30):
enough for his name to make its way up the
exchange list, and after seven months as a captive, he
was released. He was dropped in New York and walked
to Trent And barefoot before getting food and assistance. When
he made it back to Philadelphia, he was not in
good health. He was thin and malnourished, to the point
that a lot of his hair had fallen out. But
to his mother and sister, who really thought he had
(13:52):
died at sea, his reappearance probably seemed like a miracle.
And also at this point he was still just a teenager. Yeah,
I don't even know if he had turned fifteen yet
at this time. This all happened in a very short
period of time. But a year later, the war was
over and James was physically recovered and he was working,
probably in the sail loft of Robert Bridges again to
(14:13):
keep the family housed and fed. During this time, James's
sister Abigail, married a sailor named William Dunbar, who left
almost immediately after the wedding to sail to London aboard
a ship called the Commerce, which was run by a
merchant named Thomas Truxton, and James went with him. When
Jamesporton arrived in London, he was seventeen. William Dunbar went
(14:34):
back to Philadelphia aboard the Commerce as soon as the
cargo was unloaded and the new cargo brought on. But James,
knowing that he now had a brother in law who
could help look after the family, decided to stay in
England for a while. As a young man who was
able to make and repair sales, he could easily pick
up work along the docks and in the shipyards of London.
For James, this was definitely not an instance of a
(14:56):
young man who was looking to sew his wild oats
or enjoy some unrestrained party time. He is often described
as pious. He never drank and was really quite disdainful
of alcohol. He would say later in his life that
he had never had a drop, and he seems to
have spent his free time kind of walking around the city,
observing the social and political norms of life in London
(15:17):
at the time, particularly in regard to race. While he
was less likely to stand out in the city because
of the color of his skin, James certainly witnessed the
racism involved in a city where black loyalist refugees from
the war were being referred to as an infestation. This
was also when the idea had started to take hold
of a colony in Sierra Leone where the British government
(15:41):
could ship unwanted black refugees. We will come back to
this later, but the truth is we actually don't really
know what James Forton thought or saw when he was
in London. Specifically, it is unclear whether he had always
intended that this would be a temporary visit, or if
he had actually at some point thought he might relocate
(16:02):
there and then later changed his mind for some reason.
There is no real record even of what ship he
sailed back to Philadelphia on. There has been speculation that
he once again met up with the Commerce and took
it back because it was making regular runs back and forth,
but we do not know for certain. All we know
is that he did return home to Philadelphia in Once
(16:23):
he was in Pennsylvania again, his next line of work
wasn't on the water. He officially became a sailmaker's apprentice
under Robert Bridges. Bridges was a lot more than a
boss to James. He was a mentor perhaps even a
father figure. Although a lot of the specifics of their
relationship are pretty speculative, it appears, based on records that
(16:44):
Forton lived with Bridges for a while, which was not
unusual for an apprentice, and that means that he would
have been a free black man in a home where
enslaved people made up the household staff. Yeah. This also
gets into the discussion that I didn't really delve into
here of the indenture of an apprentice, and there is
some discussion there to be made about whether or not
(17:05):
you're still a free person at that point. Certainly, indentures
were not in trade learning crafts exclusive to black people
at this point. Um. But it's just another kind of
nuance to consider in all of this. Um. And we
have also talked on the show before about the inherent
conflict of stories like this. A person, specifically a black
person that participates or lives in a system that enslaves
(17:29):
other black people. Uh Forton's family had its own complicated
history with slavery, although the Fortins or Fortunes, depending on
which historical record you're reading and which one any given
individual in that family favored. Although they were black, James
had an aunt who purchased enslaved people. This was not
exactly uncommon in Philadelphia and other cities. Enslaved labor was
(17:52):
so much a part of the cultural and economic norms
at the time that almost anyone with any kind of
financial stability or wealth was probably involved in enslavement. Back
to the relationship between Robert Bridges and James Parton. Bridges
even purchased a house in James Parton's name, and he
trained Forton to become an expert in designer and sailmaker.
(18:13):
This was all pretty unusual for a number of reasons
other than the ones that we've just mentioned. First, Forton
was the only free black person working in the sail loft.
Other black men worked there, but they were all enslaved. Additionally,
Robert Bridges and his wife Jemima, had children of their own,
and if things had progressed in the usual way, one
(18:33):
of the Bridge's sons would have been the one taking
over the family business, but that did not happen. In
six Bridges promoted James Forton to foreman and then he
was made junior partner. And in part this was because
Robert Bridges, who had done very well for himself over
the years, he had made additional money in privateering by
(18:55):
uh purchasing privateering ships, even though he himself did not
ever sail on them. He was kind of angling for
his sons to become merchants and not tradesmen. He wanted
to push them up the socioeconomic ladder, and so, in
wishing to advance the position of his children, Robert had
created a space where James was the one that was
on a path to take over the business one day.
(19:16):
But to be clear, James was a hard worker. He
was very good at what he did. The time he
spent on the sea informed his work with practical knowledge
and experience that even Robert Bridges didn't have. And as
he took on greater and greater responsibility, the loft clients
recognized that James Sporton knew what he was talking about.
Although some accounts of his life include mentioned that he
(19:38):
patented a sale management system. There are no records to
indicate that that was actually the case now, but he
was undisputably like the sale expert um because he understood
like what it even meant to like lift a sale,
which a lot of salemakers didn't really know from personal experience.
Like they would hire in sailors sometimes to do extra
(20:00):
sewing who were like on land for a little while,
but there weren't people designing these sales who had really
been at sea very often at all, And so James
was like miles ahead of everyone in terms of experiential knowledge.
As the eighteenth century was coming to a close, James
reached a new transition point in his life in Robert
(20:20):
Bridges retired and Forton took over the salemaking company. With
the help of Robert Bridges, he had become both a
homeowner and a business owner, both of which were very
unusual for black residents of Philadelphia in the late seventeen hundreds.
This transition was pretty simple in terms of property, but
the workforce was a little different. While the apprentices stayed
(20:41):
trusting that James Forton could train them, the men who
had finished their apprenticeships weren't really as willing to stay
under this new ownership. While they had been answering to
James for quite some time as their supervisor, they had
some concerns that as a business owner, a black man
would automatically lose clients because of prejudice. There was a
concern about financial stability as well. James was the only
(21:05):
black person in Philadelphia at the time who owned a
business the size of this sail loft, and none of
the employees knew what was going to happen. Allegedly, Robert
Bridges moves things out, although whether that was through a
financial guarantee or just by reiterating the good reputation that
James Sporton had with all the other captains and the
shipowners in town, like, that's really unclear. Yeah, we don't know.
(21:28):
If he kind of made like a cash reserve and
said like, look, guys, you're gonna get paid. This reserve
is here in case anything goes wrong, or if he
just was like, are you fools. Every captain knows that
this is a person you go to. They're not going
to go somewhere else because you're not going to get
the same level of service, And Bridges was by the way,
(21:49):
absolutely right. Uh. Thomas Willing, a banker in one of
the city's wealthiest men, really kind of became one of
Forton's first really like consistant champions and patrons in this regard.
He regularly patronized the loft, and Forton eventually named one
of his sons after the businessman. His third son was
named Thomas Willing. Francis Forton Bridges died two years after
(22:14):
the business changed hands, so he did not get to
enjoy his retirement very long. But if anyone had been
worried about James Forton continuing the firm's prosperity without his
mentors kind of standing by in the wings, they really
did not need to have been concerned. James Forton and sons,
as it eventually came to be known, continued to have
success and to be a well respected business with a
(22:35):
dedicated clientele. And this was all the case, we should
point out. While the country's economic situation was not all
that stable. Up to this point in his life, James
had been taking care of his mother and sister, but
he also wanted a family of his own, and we'll
talk about that after we have a little sponsor break.
(22:59):
If I of years after acquiring the salemaking business, James
met a young woman named Martha Batty who went by Patty,
and not a whole lot is known about her life before.
She and James married on November tenth of eighteen oh three,
but unfortunately, their newly wed bliss lasted less than a
year before Martha died. Seven months later. She became ill
(23:20):
and passed, and the cause of her death is unknown.
James did not really ever want to talk about her
very much at all for the rest of his life,
so we don't really know much about their relationship or,
like I said, her, what caused her passing. Not long
after Patty died, his sister Abigail also lost her husband,
so from that point on, James took care of Abigail
(23:40):
and her children for the rest of their lives. Forton
got married again, this time on December tenth, eighteen o five.
His bride was Charlotte Van Deen, who was twenty at
that time. There was another death in the family and
May of the following year, James's mother, Margaret, died at
the age of eighty four. When James and Charlot it
welcome to their first child in September of eighteen six.
(24:03):
They named her Margaretta in honor of the deceased matriarch
of the family. James and Charlotte had nine children's total,
there was Charlotte who died in childhood, Harriet James Jr.
Robert Bridges, Sarah Louisa, Mary, Isabella, Thomas Willing, and William. Yeah,
many of those names you will recognize because he often
would name people after Patron's mentors, people who were important
(24:25):
to him and his family. Forton's business model as he
ran the sail loft in support of his growing family,
was really progressive. He hired both black and white employees
to work in his loft, and there was no separation
along race lines, and his business flourished for the first
nine years, so much so that he was sometimes referenced
(24:46):
in the press and in travelogs as this example of
black prosperity in Philadelphia, which of course ignores the fact
that like he was a complete outlier. Um they kind
of used him like, no, you could have the their
dreams full filled, and it's like, well, yes, but one
dream Like there were a lot of people not given
the sort of lucky breaks that he had had. Then
(25:08):
the Embargo Act of eighteen o seven really meant that
trade came to a standstill, so ships sales were not
in demand anymore. Things picked back up in eighteen ten
when the foreign trade restrictions were lifted, and then the
War of eighteen twelve once again put everything into a
really perilous state, particularly during a blockade of the Delaware River.
(25:29):
The trade continued through Philadelphia as supplies were moving inland,
a lot of business owners just didn't make it through
with their livelihoods. Intact, James was, as one biographer put it,
luckier or perhaps more prudent than many. He did experience
some losses during all of this economic upheaval, but he
was really careful with his business, and he stayed financially stable,
(25:51):
and he was able to expand his fortunes once all
of that instability had kind of settled down a little bit.
He also whether to real estate bubble in a city
and a panic in eighteen nineteen, and like his father,
he put his money to work by lending, and he
also made real estate investments. Over the years of working
on the waterfront, Forton rescued a dozen people from drowning.
(26:14):
In eighteen twenty one. He was recognized for having saved
so many with a certificate of heroism from the Humane
Society of Philadelphia. The certificate remained one of his most
prized possessions for the rest of his life. He framed
it and displayed it in the sitting room of his home. Yeah,
there are varying accounts of whether the number was actually
twelve or not. Some go as low as four, and
(26:35):
some are like it could have been even more. This
is a port city where people were always falling in
the water. Um usually twelve is where the consensus lands.
As Philadelphia was struggling to find its footing as it
was surpassed as a port city by New York. James
and his sons had to work really, really hard to
keep the business going, and it was not easy, but
(26:57):
they managed to continue to be respected and seen as
a great success. Visitors would come to the Sale loft
to marvel at Forton's success and his integrated workforce, which
was often touted as being about fifty fifty black and white,
was written about in the Anti Slavery Record in eighteen
thirty four. Of course, in spite of all the press
(27:19):
and interest from the general public, many of whom openly
praised Forton's business, the Journeyman's Sailmaker's Benevolent Society of Philadelphia,
only had white members. In thirty eight, Philadelphia's trade register
showed nineteen black sailmakers in the city. All but one
was working at James Forton and Sons, and three were
(27:39):
James and his sons, James Jr. And Robert. Though he
was running a very successful business, you would think very
busy with all those children, James Forton still made time
to participate in church and community efforts as well. As
a member of the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas,
James put his business acumen to work and he spearheaded
(27:59):
fund raising efforts to help black men and women in
Philadelphia get educations. He also advised both the church itself
and other members of the church in business affairs, and
he would help them when they needed assistance with legal
matters as well. But even more than that, he emerged
as a leader in the abolition movement and a champion
of civil rights for black citizens. He had been connected
(28:22):
from a very early age to people in Philadelphia who
were abolitionists. Anthony Beneze, who was a well known abolitionist
and educator, had known James's father, and it helped James's mother, Margaret,
arranged for James to attend the Friends African School as
a boy. Beneze was one of the founders of the
Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage,
(28:44):
which evolved into the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Pennsylvania had passed
the Gradual Abolition Act in March of seventeen eighty, when
James was still thirteen, and though this is widely touted
as a big step in abolition history, and it was
the first of many said steps that were pushed for
by abolitionists, it also meant that James, at a very
impressionable age, saw firsthand how legislators were trying to appease
(29:09):
in slavers with this law by grandfathering in their right
to continue to keep people as property so long as
they registered them each year. And even as freedom was
afforded to more and more black residents, it didn't really
provide for a transition out of poverty once they were free,
and James saw that as the number of free black
inhabitants of the city grew, so did the hostility from
(29:31):
Philadelphia's white population. Forarton worked in the abolitionist cause from
an early age. He was one of the abolitionists who
petitioned Congress to change the seventeen ninety three Fugitive Slave
Law in the early eighteen hundreds, and once he had
a family, James was more passionate than ever about abolition
and equality. He wrote the pamphlet Letters from a Man
(29:52):
of Color in eighteen thirteen, and its desire for his
children to have all the same rights as any other
citizen is clear in the text He wrote to implore legislators, quote,
are you a parent? Have you children around whom your
affections are bound by those delightful bonds that none but
a parent can know? Are they the delight of your
prosperity and the solace of your afflictions? If all this
(30:15):
be true to you, we submit our cause the parents
feelings cannot air. In that same pamphlet, Forton wrote about
the obvious inequality between the white and black residents of Philadelphia,
particularly on holidays. He spoke specifically about the Fourth of
July and the contradictory nature of celebrating liberty when you
compared the experiences of Philadelphia's black and white residents. He wrote, quote,
(30:38):
it is a well known fact that black people, on
certain days of public jubilee dare not be seen after
twelve o'clock in the day upon the field to enjoy
the times. For no sooner do the fumes of that
potent devil liquor mount into the brain than the poor
black is assailed. Is it not wonderful that the day
set apart for the festival of liberty should be abu
(31:00):
used by the advocates of freedom in endeavoring to sully
what they professed to adore. So if the name James
Barton has been sounding familiar to you on this podcast,
it might be because we did mention him in our
episode on Paul Cuffey. The two men had a number
of things in common. They both became wealthy through maritime interests.
Cuffey had started to turn a profit in a shipping business,
(31:21):
and like Forton, invested in real estate. You may recall
that Cuffey was a supporter of relocation of Africans and
people of African descent in the United States to Sierra Leone,
and we referenced this idea earlier in this episode. Although
it going on in Great Britain, but of course that
also was an idea that spread across the Atlantic, and
(31:42):
in the Paul Cuffee episode, we talked about the failed
efforts that preceded Cuffe's involvement in the movement, which started
in eighteen ten. Forton initially supported Cuffey's work in this area,
but he, like so many others, eventually backed away from
this idea and renounced it. He had that change of
heart largely after arranging a number of meetings where people
discussed the realities of this plan, and he came to
(32:05):
realize that for most people that he talked to you,
this is just not something they wanted to do. Many
of them, of course, had no immediate ties to Africa
and had never even been there. They considered themselves Americans,
and they didn't want to abandon that. Being a sailmaker
and an abolitionist also came with some tricky choices to navigate.
Fabric made in the United States became a bigger issue
(32:28):
as the country gained the ability to manufacture textiles, specifically duck,
which is a heavy duty canvas that's used in sailmaking.
This was part of an effort to get away from
the reliance on European goods, but it also meant that
the cotton industry, which was intertwined so deeply with slavery,
was also flourishing. We do not know James Forton's thoughts
(32:50):
on this, If he ever recorded any, they are lost,
but we do know that he did continue to use
cotton duck and cotton duck that was manufactured in the
United States. But we also know that his daughter, Harriet,
for example, who was married to Robert Purvis, was an
active participant in the Colored Free Produce Association, which chewed
the use of anything that had been produced by enslaved people.
(33:12):
So there was almost certainly an awareness of how success
in his field was tied, at least in some way
to enslavement, although he also leveraged his own success to
combat the institution of slavery. And it's also said that
he refused to make or repair sales for any ship
that he believed to have been involved in slave trade,
So the ethics of his business do appear to have
(33:34):
mostly been aligned with his anti slavery views. Forton routinely
used his wealth to promote the idea of freedom of
enslaved people and the rights of free black people, and
his money was likely used to purchase the freedom of
several people. Because of his many connections with mariners, business leaders,
and lawyers who camped his business affairs, James also had
(33:56):
a network of people who he could turn to in
order to stay informed and occasionally to leverage his influence.
Forton's own influence actually had a very lengthy reach. There
is a specific story about a relative of his, so,
through a series of bad events, one of his nephews
sons had ended up enslaved in New Orleans when the
(34:17):
man that the ten year old was apprenticed to sold him,
and that boy, Amos did not immediately mention that he
had a wealthy uncle in Philadelphia. He was kind of
too terrified to say much of anything, by the way
the account reads. But once he did actually say this,
the story goes that Robert Layton, who was the man
that had enslaved him through purchase, recognized the name James
(34:40):
Forton and looked into the matter, and ultimately this led
to Amos Dunbar being returned to his family. In eighteen thirty,
Forton was part of the first National Negro Convention. He
spoke out against the American Colonization Society At that event
and the years that followed, he once again urged government
reform and asking Pennsylvania State legislature to forego restricting free
(35:03):
black people to immigrate into the state. The Forton children
also got very much involved in the cause, and as
they aged into adulthood, they wrote, and they spoke, and
they helped form abolitionist groups. His daughters, in particular, were
really really good writers. James and Charlotte Forton's home became
a hub of abolitionist activity, both for work and for planning,
(35:24):
as well as just for socializing. Parton was one of
the driving forces that got The Liberator, which was the
abolitionist paper run by William Lloyd Garrison, off the ground.
Not only did Forton use his own money to finance
its publishing, but he also raised funds from other donors
to ensure its ongoing printing. Forton also frequently wrote letters
(35:45):
to the press speaking out against slavery and for civil rights,
although he usually used a pen name for this. He
favored signing off as a colored Philadelphian or a man
of color as the two most common ones, but in
a lot of cases include In his eighteen thirteen pamphlet
most of Philadelphia knew that these writings were the work
of James Forton. In eighteen forty, the Philadelphia Board of
(36:08):
Education planned to close the only public high school for
black students in Philadelphia, and Forton intervened and rallying his
friends to promise to aid in the school's enrollment numbers
and support, Forton managed to save the Lombard Street School.
There is sort of a sad irony there where the
school board ended up closing another school because they were
(36:30):
afraid that the numbers were so low, because these two
schools were splitting enrollment, and the school they closed had
been the one that he had sent his kids to,
and so so he kind of doomed one school to
save another. But um then, beginning in eighteen forty one,
James started to feel unwell, and over that summer he
really started to have difficulty breathing. There has been speculation
(36:53):
over the years that he may have had tuberculosis, but
there are no medical records to consult, and it's just
as possible that the various filaments and chemicals that he
was exposed to throughout his career of sailmaking had damaged
his lungs. James Forton died in March of eighteen forty
two at his Philadelphia home at Third and Lombard. On
the day of his funeral, a huge crowd of people,
(37:15):
hundreds of them, followed the hearse through the city streets
to show their respect for him. It was really unprecedented
for a black man to receive that kind of a
funeral procession, not just a number, but because the crowd
was made up of both black and white citizens walking together.
Particularly surprising because Philadelphia really remained mired and a lot
(37:35):
of conflicts stemming from racist attitudes of its white inhabitants.
J Miller McKim, who was an associate and a friend
through the Pennsylvania Anti Slavery Society, wrote this about the
funeral procession. Quote, the vast concourse of people of all
classes and complexions, numbering from three to five thousand, that
followed his remains to the grave bore testimony to the
(37:57):
estimation in which he was universally old. James Sporton's widows, Charlotte,
lived for more than forty more years after James died,
and was just a few days shy of her hundredth
birthday when she died in the eighteen eighties, His surviving
children continued both his business and his activism. He had
stipulated in his will that the money he left his
daughters was theirs and would not become part of any
(38:20):
husband's fortunes. Yeah. I kind of love that detail. That
he was also a little bit of a feminist. Um. Yeah,
he's such a cool figure, and I it's one of
those things. This is a long ish episode, but I
had to cut so many cool things about him to
work because there are a cajillion stories that people would
(38:43):
tell about him and their encounters with him. So, as
our our usual apology, if I left your favorite out,
I'm sorry. Um but yeah, like I said, I can't
believe we never talked about it before. Yeah. Yeah, I'm
glad you chose this one because from the brief references
(39:05):
to him in the Paul Cuffey episode, it was like
I knew the parts about being involved in the abolition movement. Um,
I knew about his shifting support for the colonization plans
of sending people to Sierra Leone. I did not know
any of the stuff about privateers or sailmaker. Yeah. Uh yeah.
(39:25):
There's one particular, really really good biography of him and
it goes into so much detail about sailmaking that I
was like down a rabbit hole of kind of delights
like sewing. Talk Um, but I will shift gears to
do a little bit of listener me if that's cool
with you. That seems good to me. This is from
our listener. I don't know she pronounces her name Lara
(39:45):
or Laura, but writes Hi, Tracy and Holly. I often
think I'm gonna write you after listening to an episode,
such as after your episode back in about John Harvey Kellogg.
My great grandparents trained as nurses at Battle Creek under Kellogg,
with my great grand father being part of an effort
to open a similar sanitarium in Wisconsin before he married
my great grandmother, and then both of them after marriage
(40:07):
working as nurses in Mexico, opening a health food store
and hydrotherapy clinic in Washington, d C. And then moving
to homestead in Alberta, Canada, where they were the main
medical personnel in a prairie community. Lara, please write that story,
so um, I want all of that information. But she
goes on. But it was the Isabella Bird episode that
finally prompted me to write I so appreciated the episode.
(40:30):
I first learned about her on my honeymoon to Kauai
in two thousand three, when I bought her book about
the Hawaiian Islands in a gift shop, and then I
became really fascinated with her and read many of her
other books. I checked my bookshelf and found ones about
the Rockies, Japan, Malaysia, and Tibet. Embellished or not, some
of the things she did were unusual for a woman
of her time, and I found that aspect of her
(40:51):
writing interesting, including the details of how she traveled, what
she packed, et cetera. But over time I found her
writing more problematic for many the reasons you mentioned in
the podcast. I love the podcast, and I really appreciate
the diversity of subjects you cover. There have been several
times over the past couple of years that a friend
has posted a link to something on Facebook about a
historical event, usually a news article looking back at an event,
(41:15):
with a comment along the lines of I had no
idea about this until recently, and I've been able to say, Hey,
if you want to know more about this, you should
check out this episode of stuff he was newstry Glass.
Thanks Laura you're like our little, um personal pr person,
which I appreciate. Um, thank you again for one. I'm
really really fascinated about your great grandparents and I really
(41:38):
do hope you write that book. And also, yeah, Isabella
Lucy Bird is an interesting creature. I think a lot
of people who maybe were exposed to her writing, you know,
at one point in their lives, as they go through it, uh,
realize over time that it remains fascinating, but it is
also problematic in its way. Yeah. When we um, when
we first put that episode on our social media, there
(42:02):
was a surprising to me, like a surprisingly large number
of people who were like, oh, no, I just started
reading this book and now I'm afraid I'm going to
learn all the like, all the problematic things about her.
And I was like, I'm surprised that there are this
many people who listen to our show who are reading
her books right now, who don't know right right like
(42:23):
I could see picking up one of her books, but um, yeah,
and um, it's hard to avoid all of the problematic parts. Yeah. Well,
and like I said in that episode, I kind of
take for granted that that's going to be the case
of any nineteenth century traveler we talk about right absolutely.
I mean we've seen it happen over and over and over.
(42:45):
But if you would like to write to us, you
can do so. You can do that at History podcast
at iHeart radio dot com. You can also find us
on social media at missed in History. If you would
like to subscribe to the show, it is easiest pie
to do so. You can do that in the iHeart
Radio app, at Apple podcast or wherever it is you listen.
(43:06):
Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. H
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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