(lively string music) - I was at the State House when they read our Declaration of Independence.

(bell clanging) The bells called me.

(lively string music continues) I weaved in and out of the crowd trying to get as close as I possibly could.

(lively string music continues) "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

(lively string music continues) - On July 8th, 1776, in the yard of the Pennsylvania State House, what we call Independence Hall today, James Forten was there as a nine-year-old child hearing the words of the Declaration for the very first time.

And these are words that he would continually reference throughout his life.

- For me as a kid growing up in Philadelphia, if I would've known that, that might have changed my whole trajectory of having a feel for the American Revolution.

- [Matthew] The mission of the Museum of the American Revolution is to share compelling stories about the diverse people and complex events that shaped America's ongoing experiment in liberty, equality, and self-government.

We're hoping that the Black Founders: The Forten Family of Philadelphia exhibit will encourage visitors to think about the American Revolution not just as a single moment in time, but a complex series of events that launched this ongoing effort to make the world a better place for all people.

This is a family of revolutionaries.

They are committed to the ideals of the American Revolution.

- I think anybody living, surviving, and thriving in the late 18th and early 19th century as Black people were revolutionaries; you had to be in order to live.

- Here at the Museum of the American Revolution, we've been sharing James Forten's story since we've opened.

So we thought it'd be really wonderful to do a full-scale exhibition on the family.

We were really kind of captivated by historian Julie Winch's book, "A Gentleman of Color," the first scholarly biography of James Forten.

No museum had ever done an exhibit on him or featured him in a major way.

- There was James Forten, the patriarch of the family, the Revolutionary War veteran, the self-made businessman, the man who is committed to the anti-slavery cause but also to reforming America.

But you look at his family, he brings up his children with a similar commitment to reform.

- [Matthew] Based on some intense genealogy work that we did alongside historian Julie Winch, we were able to find the branches of the family that still have living descendants.

- What I knew about the family history was limited.

It wasn't until that book that I realized just how deep James was.

It's just amazing.

- I've always known about James Forten, but to tie my family line with his family line and to know who is who, it's just been so motivating and rewarding.

- We've begun to rethink the American narrative and who gets to be centered and who's marginalized, who gets to tell the story of America.

(lively sting music continues) Many years ago, someone looking like me would not be telling this story.

The Founding Fathers were not all white men.

We should consider James Forten as one of those founders.

(lively string music ends) - Once I started digging away, I found more and more material.

What a complex human being this man was from really his childhood right through to the end of what was, at that time, a very long life.

I mean, he is almost 76 when he dies.

(pensive string music) - [Matthew] James Forten was born in September of 1766 to parents who were free African Americans in the city at the time.

- And it's important to make that note that Forten is born free.

So he grows up seeing the rollout of this early American experiment, and he is right in its backyard of inception.

- The late 18th and early 19th century Philadelphia witnessed an explosion of Black freedom.

And when we think about the decades leading up to the beginning of the 19th century, we really see the numbers grow and expand.

By the time they take the 1790 census, there were technically a little over 6,000 Black people living in and around Philadelphia.

And by the 1830s, 1840s, that number would more than double.

And what's most important is that, in this moment when we're thinking about freedom and the birth of a new nation, the majority of those Black men and women were free.

(pensive string music ends) (gentle music) - James Forten's father, Thomas, worked for a man named Robert Bridges, who was one of the leading sailmakers in Philadelphia during the Revolutionary era.

(gentle music continues) As part of the educational programming here at the museum, we've also developed a first person theatrical performance called "Meet James Forten."

- We needed an actor who could really jump into that character with passion and zeal, and Nathan Alford-Tate has been that person.

- What is it like being on a ship, being in kit?

You know, this is what James Forten would have worn, and so it really helped to inform how he might walk, how he might speak.

- My father gave me this sailmaking fid.

It was his.

I, I learned how to use it.

I even learned how to sew a few canvas pieces myself; and by the end of the day, my hands were stiff and feet ached from all the work.

My devout Anglican father reminded me that God would indeed bless us if we followed the work of the Lord and not of men.

- When his father dies in 1773, that's a shock to the family.

The primary breadwinner for the family is now gone.

- My mother, Margaret, felt that receiving an education was the next important step.

She sought the help of Anthony Benezet.

I still admire her for that, asking a white Quaker teacher to take me as a student.

It probably helped that Benezet was always ready to point out the contradiction between slavery and the Christian doctrine.

- So he did receive a bit of formal education when he was a child, but that had to come to a stop because of the death of his father.

- James only got two years of education, but guess what?

That was a heads up of a lot of people, including other white citizens during that period as well.

How about this?

He served as a privateer.

(gentle music) - [Matthew] The term for a private vessel that was given a letter of marque to serve on behalf of Congress is a privateer, a private sailing vessel given the authorization to attack enemy vessels in a time of war.

(gentle music continues) - Join a private ship and set sail to fight for the cause, and at no small incentive, a chance at prize money.

We were commissioned to capture enemy ships and keep the profits as our own.

So I could risk my life for the Revolution and also provide for my family.

I chose the Royal Louis, Captain Stephen Decatur, and joined as a powder boy at the young age of 14.

(gentle music continues) - [Matthew] We commissioned a scale model of the Royal Louis that is being created and built by a ship model builder based in Albany, New York, named Rex Stewart.

And Rex is one of the top ship model builders in the United States today.

- This is the plan of the Cromwell, but it's similar to what the Royal Louis would have looked like.

I think it'll be a unique build because it will shed a new light on those ships, how they were designed, how they were rigged, and at the same time, who served on them.

And there's probably other unsung heroes; and this just may open up that door, if you will.

(gentle music) - [Matthew] We also have, in the museum, a full-scale re-creation of the bow, or the front, of a privateer ship.

- [Guide] And the British had 137 ships.

Who do you think is gonna win?

(gentle music ends) (marching drum music) - In 2020, we commissioned a painting that shows a little known moment in James Forten's life, but a moment that was pretty significant to him 'cause it's something he continued to reference in his writings and in his conversations with others.

And this is a moment when he returned to Philadelphia from his first voyage aboard of Royal Louis.

(footsteps plodding) - I turned 15 the day I watched the Continental Army march through the streets of Philadelphia on their way to Yorktown.

(footsteps plodding) The Rhode Island Regiment, now with two all-African companies, marched proudly by as brave men has ever fought.

They were determined, unstoppable, and I was too.

We were doing our part to carve out our place in the new country.

(footsteps plodding) - When I see that painting, I'm seeing, A, a person who has served, 'cause that is in between his first and his second tour as a privateer, and just an acknowledgement of those who look like him who are serving during the Revolutionary War.

(dramatic cello music) - I was only home a few days before we were put back to sea.

I was ready to capture more British ships.

But we were not as untouchable as I thought.

We sailed over the horizon (dramatic cello music continues) and right into British hands.

I knew that death in battle could be a possibility, but as a prisoner?

- October 1781, the Royal Louis, after its first successful voyage, is captured off the coast of Virginia and the crew is put aboard a British prison ship called the Jersey.

(dramatic cello music continues) Another really wonderful loan that we've been able to secure for this exhibit, the muster book of the British prison ship Jersey.

And James Forten's name is listed in this muster book as a prisoner along with the letter of marque, or the license that was granted to the Royal Louis by the Continental Congress in 1781 that was captured when the Royal Louis was captured.

We've also reached out to various organizations and institutions, including the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, which is the current holder of a lot of the personal papers and belongings of Charlotte L. Forten; a pamphlet, "Letters from a Man of Colour," from the Schomburg Center in Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library; local institutions here in Philadelphia like the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Great, great research institutions and collecting organizations.

(gentle music) - We have so many wonderful artifacts in connection with the Forten family.

Now we get to step outside and see some of the spaces and places that James Forten connected with during his time here in Philadelphia.

So the James Forten Walking Tour is something that we developed here at the museum using what we have, and that's his neighborhood, to bring to life what Forten's experiences would have been like in this neighborhood we consider today Old City; in his world, it's Dock Ward.

When Philadelphia was established by William Penn in roughly 1681, 1682, two years later, we know of the slave ship Isabella that brings a large amount of people of African descent enslaved here to Philadelphia.

There's a marker out by the Delaware River that notes bringing those individuals here in 1684.

James Forten would have wrestled with this because his family were free people of African descent.

(gentle music continues) I'm standing here in front of the marker by the London Coffee House that was established in 1754 by William Bradford, who was a publisher here in Philadelphia.

So people would've gone there to get tea, to maybe get some chocolate, to get other imported goods.

There would've been captains of industry that would have been in that market.

But not only would they have seen all these incredible exported/imported goods into Philadelphia, they also would've seen publicly people of African descent who were sold at auction just off the site of this building right here.

- While we think about families like the Forten family who had a history, generational history of freedom, they lived and worked and interacted with people who had experienced enslavement themselves, were attempting to extricate themselves from the spiderweb of slavery.

But I think we have to ask the question: What does freedom mean when it sits alongside of slavery - After the war, when James Forten returns to Philadelphia, he rekindles that relationship with Robert Bridges and gets a job in Bridges' Workshop.

James Forten rises pretty quickly, eventually becomes foreman of the workshop, so basically Bridges' right-hand man.

And so what Bridges decides to do is to basically give his business to James Forten.

- How was he able to be given this business, to take over this business?

Why not his sons?

It's a great question.

And the answer, when I look at that, is because Bridges wanted more for his sons; he wants them to be doctors, lawyers.

It's, you know, something we think about today, where we want better for our children.

(pensive string music) - James Forten, as an African American man, is telling both Black and white workers what to do, what tasks to work on.

It's pretty significant for the 1780s and '90s.

James Forten's sailmaking business, it becomes one of the leading sailmaking businesses in Philadelphia, and he becomes one of the wealthiest Philadelphians at the time and one of the, if not the wealthiest African American man in early 19th century America.

(gentle music) We've tried to be very conscious of ways to bring this story to life in new and exciting ways, and this includes hands-on spaces in the exhibit gallery, including a partial recreation of the Forten sail loft.

- I had to learn the basics of sailmaking to write about James Forten's story.

So as soon as I came in this morning, I got into this area.

And the smell of pitch and tar and all those things that they used, it took me back to having been in sail lofts.

And it's a craft, making canvas sails, that hasn't changed in a great many ways actually since James Forten would have practiced it.

(gentle string music) - Just a couple of years after he takes over the sailmaking business, he gets married to a woman named Martha Beatte, and that's in 1803.

Martha and James' marriage doesn't last very long because Martha passes away very soon after they were married.

He marries a woman named Charlotte Vandine, another free woman of color.

James Forten purchases a home in 1806.

There's a historic marker there today that marks the home that...

The home no longer stands, but it was a three-story brick townhouse, a pretty substantial structure owned by an African American man at the time.

This exhibit is the first time that objects like a table owned by James Forten that was in the Lombard Street house that the Forten family lived in.

The table was likely made here in Philadelphia and used by the family as they had entertained guests in their house to talk about abolition, but also just to talk about daily life.

James and Charlotte had a total of nine children, eight of whom survived to adulthood.

- James Forten, he understood the importance of education and pushed for that had almost every turn.

- [Matthew] Harriet Davy Forten and Sarah L. Forten receive a pretty robust education paid for by their parents - For those of significant wealth, many of them chose to use private tutors.

Private tutors, especially for young Black women, became a sort of marker of distinction, a marker of wealth.

To be tutored in your home meant that you would be spared the indignities of racism, of segregation, of encounters on the street on the way to school.

And that education was of course steeped in reading, writing, but also things like sewing and watercolors and thinking and reading poetry.

- Harriet and Sarah get married, and they marry brothers, Robert Purvis and Joseph Purvis, sons of a white man and a woman of color.

Their father was a merchant, hence how he was able to acquire great wealth.

The Purvis brothers chose to identify themselves as African American.

Many people who who met them thought they could pass as white.

- There was a close bond between the Purvis family and the Fortens.

This was not unusual for the time.

These men and women often found themselves in the same locations, praying in the same churches, attending the same literary societies and events.

- [Matthew] Robert Purvis became a leading abolitionist and an abolitionist writer.

So Robert Purvis and Harriet Davy Forten Purvis are this power couple, in a way, of the abolitionist movement, this includes Robert Purvis involvement in founding the American Anti-Slavery Society.

Charlotte Vandine Forten and her daughters help establish the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society.

Sarah L. Forten, she's quite an accomplished poet as well, routinely publishing her poetry in "The Liberator."

- Founded by William Lloyd Garrison, which really was a political machine in itself and pushed the nation to confront the injustice of slavery and the need to eradicate it in the most revolutionary of ways.

- [Matthew] "The Grave of the Slave" was sort of an abolitionist-centered poem.

Francis Johnson, a noted African American composer and band leader in Philadelphia, actually puts Sarah Forten's poem to music, and that song becomes an abolitionist rallying cry and used around the country.

Harriet Davy Forten Purvis, during the Civil War years and just after, works with Octavius Catto trying to desegregate Philadelphia's trolley cars and street cars.

In the Civil War section of the exhibit, we're featuring the story of Robert Bridges Forten, James Forten's son, who enlisted in the 43rd Regiment of United States Colored Troops during the Civil War in 1864.

- He is well past the age to enlist and could simply have sat on the sidelines or raised money for the United States Colored Troops, but who insisted on making that personal commitment and serving, and sadly would lose his life doing so.

- [Matthew] We'll also be featuring the only surviving United States Colored Troop Regiment flag painted by African American artists David Bustill Bowser.

(pensive music) - When we think about Black leadership in Philadelphia in the late 18th and early 19th century, we almost always gravitate to the Black church.

And we think about, in particular, the founding of Mother Bethel, we think about St. Thomas Episcopal Church.

Everything happened in these churches.

- The Forten family became members of St. Thomas at its inception, 1792.

They had previously been members of St. Paul's Episcopal Church, which was one of the three Episcopal churches in the city at the time; Christ Church was the oldest.

(pensive music continues) And James Forten, at the young age of 26, was actually elected to the first vestry.

Obviously he must have impressed his fellow members who had to vote for this lay body of leaders.

And as a young man, I think it speaks well to the kind of character that they saw in him and the leadership abilities that he had already demonstrated.

- One of the things that the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas has allowed the Museum of the American Revolution to borrow for this exhibition is one of their historical baptismal registers that documents the baptisms of not only James Forten and his wife when they were baptized as adults, but also the baptisms of their children soon after their birth.

(pensive music continues) Another really wonderful loan that we've been able to secure for this exhibit, a pew from Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, now we know it as Mother Bethel AME Church.

There was a rising movement in the early 1800s that was based on the idea that if you separate the African American population from the United States and actually encourage them to resettle in Africa, the United States would be in a better position regarding its difficult racial relations.

There's a meeting that's called by the Black leaders to discuss whether colonization was a good idea or a bad idea.

And James Forten is coming into this meeting with the idea that this plan of colonization has merit.

Forten is standing presiding over the meeting and calls for a vote.

What the 3,000 people say is no because what is coming out more about the American Colonization Society is this is about removing Black Americans from the United States.

And James Forten is very much against that because he had fought to create this nation, this is his country.

From that point forward, James Forten's tune about colonization takes a radical shift in the other direction and he becomes one of the leading opponents of colonization.

Of those roughly 3,000 people that were there for that meeting, a few of them were sitting in this pew listening to Forten.

James Forten dies in March of 1842, and his funeral takes place at the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, which was at that time located on 5th Street.

And his funeral is attended by thousands of Philadelphians, it's the largest funeral ever for a person of color up to that point in the city.

James Forten is buried in the churchyard at St. Thomas.

Many of the remains of the people that were interred at St. Thomas were removed multiple occasions, but now are at Eden Cemetery in Collingdale, Pennsylvania.

- That is where Absolom Jones, James Forten, and members of the Forten family were re-interred.

Absolom Jones' body, in 1992, was exhumed and brought here and is now in a Bible-shaped urn in our altar.

And about 10 years ago, the Sons of the American Revolution, working with Julie Winch, actually established a headstone on a plot that we believe houses James Forten's body.

(pensive music) - [Matthew] There are descendants of James Forten that are spread throughout the United States today.

They actually have family material that they passed down through six, seven generations of the family.

It's a Bible that first belonged to Jane Vogelsang Forten who married James Forten Jr., the eldest son of James Forten Sr. - The family Bible was left to me by my mom and dad.

It wasn't until after the birth of my daughter when she was in school that I realized what was going on here and who he was.

It was during Black History Month.

She had to do a report on someone who was 50 years or older, Black, and had been deceased.

Only person I could think of was James.

I pulled that out and we looked through there and realized that there wasn't a lot of detailed information.

So we went to the local library.

I thought maybe I'd find some book that maybe referenced him, but not an entire 400-plus page publication about him.

- [Julie] In this case, it mattered to the members of this family to record the events happy and the events sad.

It is births and it's marriages, it's also passings of people.

- Kip was added in- - Oh wow.

Look at that.

- bu his mom.

- [Dolly] And then his daughter, right?

- [Guide] Yeah, and that's his daughter.

Exactly, yep.

- Wow.

(pensive music ends) (lively string music) - [Matthew] As the United States is approaching its 250th anniversary of 1776, we can learn a lot from the Fortens and the way they dealt with challenges.

- Yes, the exhibition has at its core James Forten, but there are all these other people, all these descendants of his, or in-laws of his, who are worth looking at.

- I believe that James Forten and many of the heroes of the revolutionary period simply have not been the focus of a lot of more popular historical enterprises, which is one of the reasons why we're so happy to see this exhibit.

- [Matthew] We wanna emphasize, and especially with this exhibit, that telling diverse stories of the American Revolution tells a larger, more accurate story.

- I can think of no sort of better place or ground zero to engage in the conversation about freedom and justice.

So to me, this is a perfect exhibit and a perfect way to help us reorganize the narrative of history, of engagement, and to have all Americans find themselves in this story.

(lively string music continues) - This, this is my home.

(lively string music continues) (lively string music continues)