The maritime industry was far from the only setting that Paul Cuffe helped integrate. As described in a biography of Cuffe written by members of the Delaware Abolitionist Society (with whom he visited in Wilmington in 1807), “Paul had experienced the many disadvantages of his very limited education, and he resolved, as far as it was practicable, to relieve his children from similar embarrassments.” In 1797 he did so quite directly, building and opening a schoolhouse on land adjacent to his own Westport home and making it both free of charge and “open to all who pleased to send their children,” including free Blacks, Native Americans, and whites. Cuff’s School, as it came to be known, was thus by all accounts the first racially integrated school in the United States.
Two early 1810s events in Cuffe’s life reflect the complex question of whether Early Republic America could become as integrated as his groundbreaking school. Beginning in 1810, Cuffe was recruited first by British abolitionists and later by members of the American Colonization Society (ACS) to explore whether the African colony of Sierra Leone offered suitable conditions for the resettlement of free Blacks from these nations. Cuffe voyaged to Sierra Leone frequently over the remaining seven years of his life and worked hard to support newly established Black settlements there, yet at the same time he never fully endorsed the ACS’s vision of colonization. That hesitancy was due to both Cuffe’s own recognition of the colonization movement’s racism and his conversations with fellow free Black Americans, an Early Republic community in which he was highly influential.
The colonization question was also part of what brought Cuffe to an April 1812 meeting at the White House with President James Madison, making Cuffe the first Black American to formally meet with a sitting president. Cuffe and Madison also talked about Cuffe’s status as an American merchant in a fraught historical moment: Cuffe’s ships were continuing to do business around the world despite a newly imposed War of 1812 U.S. embargo on British shipping. Cuffe convinced Madison he had not violated the embargo, and this captain who had once run British blockades to aid the American Revolution was deemed free to continue building his Early Republic shipping empire. Tragically, Cuffe would pass away only a few years later, in 1817, but the legacies of that business, as of his school, his political activism, and his pan-African interests, would carry on.