In The Cradle of Industry and Liberty

and flagship for Commodore Matthew Perry’s
historic 1852 voyage to Japan; and the USS
Princeton, launched in 1843, the world’s first
propeller-driven warship, whose engine was
made at the iron foundry of Merrick & Sons,
also in Southwark.
Another important figure in Philadelphia
maritime manufacturing in this period was
the African American sailmaker James Forten
(1766-1842). Born in Philadelphia to free
black parents, Forten learned some sail
making skills as a young boy tagging along
with his father, who worked for Robert
Bridges, a sailmaker on the Delaware River in
Southwark. In his mid-teens, Forten served in
the Revolutionary War on a privateer under
Stephen Decatur, Senior, in the course of which
service he was captured by the British and
held as a prisoner of war until April 1783.
Two years later Forten entered into an apprenticeship
with Robert Bridges, his father’s former
employer. Smart and very capable, Forten
eventually worked his way up to foreman at
Bridges’ firm. When Bridges retired in 1798
Forten purchased the business from him.
James Forten employed both white and
black workers and his astute management of
his business over forty-four years made him a
wealthy man. A civil rights activist and major
figure in the anti-slavery movement, Forten
was profiled in an 1834 story in the Anti-
Slavery Record, which described his business
as follows:
[H]is workmen, twenty or thirty in
number, were industriously at work. All
was order and harmony. [Forten] took
great delight in pointing out…various
improvements that he had introduced…and
spoke very kindly of his workmen. Here was
one who had been in his employ twenty
years, who owned not a brick when he came,
but now was the possessor of a good brick
house; here was another who had been
rescued from ruin. These were white men,
but not so all. [A]bout one half of them
were colored. [Forten] remarked…that both
colors had thus been employed together for
more…than 20 years, and always with the
same peace and harmony…. “Here,” said he,
“you see what may be done and ought to be
done in our country at large.”
Joshua Humphreys and James Forten
represent the traditional wood- and sail-based
Philadelphia shipbuilders of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. Many of these
traditional builders went out of business as
@
Top: Cramp Shipyard, nineteenthcentury
view. Cramp was one of the few
Philadelphia shipyards to successfully make
the mid-nineteenth century transition from
building traditional sailing vessels of wood
and cloth to construction of newer steampowered
vessels of iron and steel.
PRINT COLLECTION, HISTORICAL SOCIETY
OF PENNSYLVANIA.
Above: James Forten’s sail loft, c. 1815, as
conceived by a contemporary artist in 2013.
Forten, shown in the inset, ran a successful
sail making business with a racially
integrated workforce from 1798 until his
death in 1842.
THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED FOR THE EXHIBIT TIDES OF
FREEDOM: AFRICAN PRESENCE ON THE DELAWARE RIVER AT
THE INDEPENDENCE SEAPORT MUSEUM, PHILADELPHIA.
CHAPTER THREE
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