Are you ready? Mysteries, the hit fiction podcast team and. Yes, reaches this thrilling final season. Just coming after my dear child team, and by season four, no one is allowed up here. I have all the listen and follow team and be on the radio, our Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts, take me to to Monday. But now we wait till Monday.

Hi, this is Hillary Clinton, host of the new podcast, You and me both. There's a lot to be anxious and worried about right now, and it's made so much worse by the fact that we can't be together. So I find myself on the phone a lot, talking with friends, experts, really anyone who can help make some sense of these challenging times. These conversations have been a lifeline for me.

And now I hope they will be for you to please listen to you and me both on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 B. Wilson. And when I started researching today's topic, I was several days in and I kept second guessing myself because it seemed absolutely impossible that we had not already covered this person.

I've had the same phenomenon happen to me.

Yeah, we're talking about James Forten 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 as a child and a young man. He was part of the British colonies as they were rebelling against a rule from the throne. And he both saw and participated in the Revolutionary War that led to the U.S. 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 ping Tracy, which we didn't do this already did because how could we not have.

Yeah, well, and and his name may sound familiar because of previous namedrop which will get to you and. Yeah, but yeah, I did the same thing where I was like did, did, did we that know 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. I want to be like, oh yeah, totally previous hosted did this. 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 miss desperately. That is truly one of the things I am missing the most during this pandemic, that people will ask a question about something that one of us has researched like two years prior, or sometimes even less than that.

And I'll be like, I don't remember any of this. I'm so sorry. Yeah, 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 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. Know your brain gets a little crowded. So today's subject here, we're pretty sure we haven't done an episode on previously is James Wharton. He was born on September 2nd, 1766, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And sometimes you'll find his family's name listed as Fortune if you and E rather than Forten.

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 the 80s.

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 Wharton's grandfather. And although there's no clear information on exactly how it happened, Fortin's grandfather was able to secure his own freedom. 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.

Fortin's parents are a little bit mysterious as well in terms of the details of their life. His father, who is sometimes referred to as Thomas Fortuyn, was, according to James, born a free man. Thomas was educated enough to read and write. He was a sail maker 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 both employed free black craftsmen. 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 sail loft 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 40s when James was born. And we don't know anything else about her. We don't 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 he went to Bridges's shop to work in the sale loft. And James would have been given assorted tasks. They 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 beeswax for the steelmakers makers to run their sewing thread through. But eventually young James did learn to sew sales. And the idea in all 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 women jobs that involved sales 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 sidewalk to set up a lending business so that he could be paid back with interest when he loaned money to clients.

Then he could further grow his holdings that way. In late 1773 or early 1774, when James was still just seven, his father died. The details of the illness 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 plan to get James educated and to keep food on the table from 1773 to 1775.

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 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 doing like taking in mending and 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, stocking the shelves. It's been theorized that he probably served as an occasional clerk.

And of course, all of this upheaval in James's personal life was happening as the colonies were going through their own upheaval, that 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, 1776, when the British marched into Philadelphia and took possession of the city on September 26, 1777. 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 wife, some families, particularly black families, did not leave. And and there's this story and it's like they didn't have anywhere to go.

A lot of people 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 said, about outfitting existing ships for privateering 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 teen years and was able to take on more demanding work.

James joined the crew of a privateering vessel. This was the Royal Louis. He was 14 at the time because he knew about sail construction and repair. He was really an asset for the Lui's captain, which was Stephen Decatur James's mother. Margaret wasn't exactly enthusiastic about this move, but she did consent to it. The plan was that the Royal Louis, which left Philadelphia with a crew of 200 men, would take other ships and then deploy members of the crew to sail those ships.

James was one of 20 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 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 forten. There is some discrepancy in Fortin's memories, as relayed to a family friend later in life versus historical record regarding which ship put up a fight. But the primary 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 forten and gave him a sense of pride at having helped the colonies in their fight against British rule. Louis had intercepted British vessels that were carrying military dispatches, and so that 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 of 1781, is 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, 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 Forten was assigned by the captain of the AMPHION, which was John basely. He was assigned to be a companion to the captain's 12 year old son, Henry. This may have started out essentially as a babysitting assignment for a kid who is at sea for the first time. But according to Fortin'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 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 just that being good at marbles had saved his life. But James Forten did end up on a prison ship for a while, though. And we're going to pause here for a sponsor break before we get into that part of his story.

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They on Saturday night make it up as we go only on the Iraq Podcast Network in association with audio of media created by Scarlett Burke and Jared Goosestep. So when the Amphion regrouped with a British prison ship captain, Baisley actually gave James Horton 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 on the prison ship Jersey as prisoner number 41 02, 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 a British officer and the deal was so James could hide in the man's 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 Bruthen. And Daniel made it to safety and would become James Burton's friend for life.

This was a huge sacrifice. Aside from the fact that there were horrible sanitary conditions on 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 privateers as continental prisoners. They didn't recognize the letters of Mark that had established those privateering ships as working for the 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 redcoats. Despite all of the odds against him, James survived long 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 Trenton 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 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 15 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 same loft of Robert Bridges again to 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 James Forten arrived in London, he was seventeen. William Dunbar went 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 sails, 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 young man who was looking to sow 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 at the time, particularly in regard to race.

Well, 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 a 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 could ship unwanted black refugees. We will come back to this later.

But the truth is, we actually don't really know what James Forten 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 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 1785. Once he was in Pennsylvania again, his next line of work wasn't on the water. He officially became a sail maker'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. Live, it appears, based on records that Forten 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, I didn't really delve into here of like the indenture of an apprentice. And there is some discussion there to be made about whether or not you're still a free person. At that point. Certainly indentures were not in trade, learning crafts exclusive to black people at this point. But it's just another kind of nuance to consider in all of this. 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 other black people.

Fortin's family had its own complicated history with slavery, although the Fortin's 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 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 Forten. Bridges even purchased a house in James Horton's name, and he trained Forten to become an expert designer and sailmaker. This was all pretty unusual for a number of reasons other than the ones that we've just mentioned. First, forten was the only free black person working in the sale 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 of the Bridges sons would have been the one taking over the family business. But that did not happen. In 1786, Bridges promoted James Forten 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 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.

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 law's clients recognised that James Wharton knew what he was talking about. Although some accounts of his life include mentioned that he patented Assael management system, there are no records to indicate that that was actually the case.

But he was undisputably like the sail expert because he understood, like what it even meant to, like, lift a sail, which a lot of sail makers didn't really know from personal experience, like they would hire in sailors sometimes to do extra sewing who were like on land for a little while.

But there were 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 experience.

Knowledge is the 18th century was coming to a close. James reached a new transition point in his life. In seventeen ninety eight, Robert Bridges retired and Forten took over the sail making 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 1980s.

This transition was pretty simple in terms of property, but the workforce was a little different while the apprentices stayed. Trusting that James Wharton 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 black person in Philadelphia at the time who owned a business the size of the sail loft, and none of the employees knew what was going to happen. Allegedly, Robert Bridges smooths things out, although whether that was through a financial guarantee or just by reiterating that good reputation that James Wharton had with all the other captains, the ship owners in town, like, that's really unclear. Yeah. We don't know if he kind of made like a cash reserve and said, like, look, guys, you're going to get paid.

This reserve is here in case anything goes wrong.

Or if he just was like, are are you fools? Every captain knows that this is a. Person, you go to you, 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. Absolutely right. Thomas Willing, a banker and one of the city's wealthiest men, really kind of became one of Fortin's first, really like consistent champions and patrons in this regard. He regularly patronized the loft and Fortney eventually named one of his sons after the businessman.

His third son was named Thomas Willing. Francis Forten Bridges died two years after the business changed hands, so he did not get to enjoy his retirement very long. But if anyone had been worried about James Forten continuing the firm's prosperity without his mentor kind of standing by in the wings, they really did not need to have been concerned. James Forten and Sons, as it eventually came to be known, continued to have success and to be a well respected business with a 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. Five years after acquiring the sale making business, James met a young woman named Martha Baity who went by Patti and not a whole lot is known about her life before she and James married on November 10th of 1883. But unfortunately, their newlywed bliss lasted less than a year before Martha died. Seven months later, she became ill 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 Patti died, his sister Abigail also lost her husband. So from that point on, James took care of Abigail and her children for the rest of their lives, fought and got married again, this time on December 10th, 1895.

His bride was Charlotte Bandini, who was 20 at that time. There was another death in the family in May of the following year. James's mother, Margaret, died at the age of 84 when James and Charlotte welcomed their first child in September of 1886. They named her Marguerita in honor of the deceased matriarch of the family. James and Charlotte had nine children 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 patrons, mentors, people who were important to him and his family.

Fortin's business model, as he ran the sell off 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 in the press and in travelogues. Is this example of black prosperity in Philadelphia, which of course ignores the fact that, like, he was a complete outlier, they kind of used him like, no, you could have their dreams fulfilled.

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 the Embargo Act of 1887 really meant that trade came to a standstill. So ship sales were not in demand anymore. Things picked back up in 1810 when the foreign trade restrictions were lifted. And then the War of 1812 once again put everything into a really perilous state, particularly during a blockade of the Delaware River.

Though trade continued through Philadelphia as supplies are 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 and he was able to expand his fortunes once all of that instability had kind of settled down a little bit. He also weathered a real estate bubble in the city and a panic in 1819.

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, Forten rescued a dozen people from drowning in 1821. 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 some are like it could have been even more. This is a port city where people were always falling in the water.

Usually twelve is where the 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 they managed to continue to be respected and seen as a great success. Visitors would come to the same loft to marvel at forten success and his integrated workforce, which was often touted as being about 50 50 black and white, was written about in the antislavery record in 1834.

Of course, in spite of all the press and interest from the general public, many of whom openly praised Fortin's business, the Journeyman Sailmaker Benevolent Society of Philadelphia only had white members. In 1838, Philadelphia's Trade Register showed nineteen black steelmakers in the city. All but one was working at James Forten and Sons, and three were 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 Forten 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 fundraising 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 from a very early age to people in Philadelphia who were abolitionist. Anthony Benzi, who was a well-known abolitionist and educator, had known James's father and had helped James's mother. Margaret arranged for James to attend the Friends African School as a boy. Benazir was one of the founders of the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes, unlawfully held in bondage, which evolved into the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.

Pennsylvania had passed the Gradual Abolition Act in March of 1780, when James was still 13. And though this is widely touted as a big step in abolition history and it was the first of many such 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 enslavers 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 Philadelphia's white population.

Fardon worked in the abolitionist cause from an early age. He was one of the abolitionists who petitioned Congress to change the 1793 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 of color in 1813, and his 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 be true to you? We submit our cause. The parent's feelings cannot air. In that same pamphlet, Forten 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, It is a well-known fact that black people on certain days of public jubilee dare not be seen after 12 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 abused by the advocates of freedom in endeavoring to sully what they profess to adore?

So if the name James Burton has been sounding familiar to you on this podcast, it might be because we did mention him in our episode on Paul Cuffy. The two men had a number of things in common. They both became wealthy through maritime interests. Cuffy had started to turn a profit in a shipping business and like forten, invested in real estate. You may recall that Cuffy 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 in the Paul Cuffy episode, we talked about the failed efforts that preceded coveys involvement in the movement, which started in 1810. Forten initially supported coveys 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 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. Fabrique, made in the United States, became a bigger issue as the country gained the ability to manufacture textiles, specifically Duqu, which is the heavy duty canvas that's used in Sayle making.

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 Fortin's thoughts 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 issued the use of anything that had been produced by enslaved people.

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 mostly been aligned with his antislavery views.

Forten 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 handle his business affairs. James also had a network of people who he could turn to in order to stay informed and occasionally to leverage his influence. Fortin'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 man that the 10 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 Leighton, who was the man that had enslaved him through purchase, recognized the name James Forten and looked into the matter.

And ultimately, this led to Amos Dunbar being returned to his family in 1834 and 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's state legislature to forego restricting free black people to emigrate into the state.

The 14 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 Fortin's home became a hub of abolitionist activity, both for work and for planning, as well as just for socializing.

Forten 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 Forten use his own money to finance its publishing, but he also raised funds from other donors to ensure its ongoing printing. Forten also frequently wrote letters 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, including his 1813 pamphlet, most of Philadelphia knew that these writings were the work of James Forten.

In 1840, the Philadelphia Board of Education plans to close the only public high school for black students in Philadelphia, and Forten intervened in rallying his friends to promise to aid in the school's enrollment numbers and support, Forten 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 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 he kind of doomed one school to save another. But then beginning in 1840, when James started to feel unwell and over that summer, he really started to have difficulty breathing. There has been speculation 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 steelmaking had damaged his lungs.

James fought and died in March of 1842 at his Philadelphia home at 3rd and Lombard on the day of his funeral. A huge crowd of people, 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 remains mired in a lot of conflict stemming from racist attitudes of its white inhabitants.

Jay Miller McKim, who was an associate and a friend through the Pennsylvania Antislavery Society, wrote this about the funeral procession, quote, The vast concourse of people of all classes and complexions numbering from three to 5000 that followed his remains to the grave bore testament. To the estimation in which he was universally held, James Fortin's widow, Charlotte, lived for more than 40 more years after James died and was just a few days shy of her 100th birthday when she died in the late 1980s.

His surviving children continued both his business and his activism. He had stipulated in his will that the money he left to his daughters was theirs and would not become part of any husband's fortunes.

Yeah, I kind of love that detail that he was also a little bit of a feminist. 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 jillion stories that people would tell about him and their encounters with him.

So as are our usual apology, if I left your favorite out, I'm sorry, but yeah, I 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 the brief references to him in the Paul Cuffy episode, it was like I knew the parts about being involved in the abolition movement. 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, yeah. There's one particular really, really good biography of him, and it goes into so much detail about Sayle making that I was like down a rabbit hole of kind of delite is like sowing talk.

But I will shift gears and do a little bit of listening reel, if that's cool with you.

That seems good to me. This is from our listener. I don't know. She pronounces her name Laura or Laura. But writes, Hi, Tracey and Holly, I often think I'm going to write you after listening to an episode such as after your episode back in 2013 about John Harvey Kellogg, my great grandparents trained as nurses at Battle Creek under Kellogg with my great grandfather 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, 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.

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. I first learned about her on my honeymoon to Kauai in 2003 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 writing interesting, including the details of how she traveled, what she packed, etc.. But over time, I found her writing more problematic for many of 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 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 Stuffy Ministry Glass.

Thanks, Laura.

You're like our little personal PR person, which I appreciate.

Thank you again. For one, I'm really, really fascinated about your great grandparents, and I really 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 and realize over time that it's remains fascinating. But it is also problematic in its way.

Yeah. When we when we first put that episode on our social media, there 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. Well, like, I could see you picking up one of her books, but. Yeah, and it's hard to avoid all of the problematic parts of.

Yeah, well, and I like I said in that episode, I kind of take for granted that that's going to be the case of any 19th century traveler. We talk about rights. Absolutely. I mean, we've seen it happen over and over and over. But if you would like to write to us, you could do so. You can do that. A history podcast at my heart, rediff.com. You can also find us on social media at MTT in history.

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