From: jeffreydanielrubard@gmail.com   
      
   People of color in Pennsylvania also succeeded as leaders in other ways. Most   
   prominent among them was James Forten (1766-1842). He had been born free in   
   Philadelphia, and wrote with pride that his father, Thomas Forten, also   
   “never wore the yoke.”    
   He was the nephew of Ann Elizabeth Fortune, who with her brother Thomas had   
   been free born in Maryland.   
      
   They moved to Philadelphia, and Thomas Forten became an apprentice sailmaker   
   working beside a white apprentice named Robert Bridges who became a close   
   friend. Bridges inherited money enough to start his own sailmaking business.   
   He hired Forten, and they    
   continued to work together.   
      
   Thomas Forten married a free Black woman named Margaret Waymouth, who was born   
   about 1722 and died 1806 at the age of eighty-four. According to family   
   tradition her father or grandfather had been born a slave and gained his   
   freedom.   
      
   Thomas and Margaret Forten lived in Philadelphia at Third and Walnut Streets,   
   and belonged to an Anglican church, probably St. Paul’s, which was near   
   their home. At the age of forty-one Margaret gave birth to her daughter   
   Abigail in 1763, and at forty-   
   four to her son James on September 2, 1766.   
      
   When very young James Forten learned to read, write, and cipher. He was also   
   taught Quaker ethics of humanity, right conduct, hard work, and serious   
   striving. One of his teachers was Anthony Benezet, a family friend. In 1773,   
   Forten’s father died    
   suddenly, and James went to work at the age of six. Benezet found him a job in   
   a grocery store.   
      
   In the city of Philadelphia, on August 10, 1768, Ann Elizabeth Fortune sat   
   down to write her last will and testament. She began by describing herself as   
   a “free Negroewoman born in His Majesty’s Dominions,” single and never   
   married. With no husband    
   or children of her own, she left a large estate to her niece Abigail Forten,   
   aged five, daughter of her brother Thomas Forten, who also lived in   
   Philadelphia.   
      
   There was much for Abigail to inherit. Her aunt owned a handsomely furnished   
   house on Chestnut Street near the center of Philadelphia. The will mentioned a   
   feather bed, walnut furniture, looking glasses, paintings, fine china,   
   silverware, jewelry, a    
   wardrobe of “silk and dimity gowns,” a bolt of “green satin” cloth,   
   and more.   
      
   All those cherished possessions were to be preserved for Abigail and given to   
   her when she came of age. The house itself was ordered to be sold, and the   
   proceeds invested with great care, for Abigail’s use when she turned   
   twenty-one. Detailed    
   instructions made clear that this “free Negroewoman” knew much about   
   managing money in early Philadelphia.   
      
   Historians have been curious to know more about Ann Elizabeth Fortune and the   
   source of her wealth. One clue appears in her will. This “free   
   Negroewoman” owned an African slave named Jane, whom she ordered to be   
   emancipated. Another clue was a notice    
   that had appeared twenty-seven years earlier, in the Pennsylvania Gazette on   
   October 3, 1751: To be sold, a Parcel of likely Negroes, very reasonable....   
   N. B. Said Negroes may be seen at a Free Negroe Woman’s in Chestnut Street,   
   opposite to Mr.    
   Anthony Benezet’s.”   
      
   Ann Elizabeth Fortune was a neighbor and friend of Anthony Benezet, and he   
   agreed to serve as executor of her estate. That connection confirms that she   
   was the “Free Negroewoman in Chestnut Street” who worked in    
   hiladelphia’s African slave trade.   
      
   Another question is about the origins of Ann Elizabeth Fortune herself. Her   
   will tells us that she was born “in His Majesty’s Dominions,” and the   
   language suggests that she may have been born free. This was where our   
   knowledge ended until 2005,    
   when the gifted genealogist Paul Heinegg published his major databases on   
   freeborn African Americans in Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, and North Carolina   
   during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He found them in surprising   
   numbers, and changed our    
   fundamental understanding of race, slavery, and servitude in early America.   
      
   Heinegg identified thousands of free “people of color” in early America   
   who descended from African slave fathers, and mothers who were freeborn white   
   women, mostly servants who came to the Chesapeake colonies in the seventeenth   
   and early eighteenth    
   centuries. By law in many English colonies, children of mixed ancestry   
   followed the status of their mothers. Infants with slave fathers and mothers   
   who were indentured servants became free at birth. Other children of mixed   
   ancestry who had slave mothers    
   and free white fathers were not so fortunate. They became slaves at birth,   
   again following the condition of the mother according to law and custom in   
   many English colonies in North America.   
      
   On the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia, Paul Heinegg discovered   
   several “free mulatto women” in an extended family that took the name of   
   Fortune or Forten. Both spellings were used in the same household, sometimes   
   by the same person.   
      
   In 1743, a Maryland constable’s report described several of these women as   
   “full as dark as most Mallatos.” Among them was Sarah Fortune, a   
   “Mulatto” from Somerset County, Maryland, who had been baptized in 1715.   
   Paul Heinegg was able to    
   identify her as the mother of a song variously called Thomas Fortune or Forten   
   (1740-73) who moved to Philadelphia and founded an eminent free African   
   American family. This same Thomas Forten was the brother of Ann Elizabeth   
   Fortune, and father of her    
   heiress Abigail Forten. All were descended from Sarah Fortune, a free mulatto   
   woman of Somerset County, Maryland, which solves the puzzle of ancestry.   
      
   Yet another puzzle is about Ann Elizabeth Fortune’s complex web of   
   connections in Philadelphia. She formed close personal ties with women in   
   Philadelphia’s most prominent Quaker families. A witness to her will was   
   Hannah Cadwalader, mother of Lambert    
   Cadwalader and matriarch in one of Philadelphia’s most eminent Quaker clans.   
   Another witness was Margaret Stevenson, a niece of Hannah Cadwalader.   
      
   Ann Elizabeth Fortune was actively involved in the African slave trade and a   
   slave owner herself. At the same time, her close friend and neighbor Anthony   
   Benezet was an early leader of Philadelphia’s antislavery movement, a   
   founder of African schools    
   in the region, and Philadelphia’s most prominent advocate of human rights   
   for African Americans in the mid-eighteenth century.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)