Black Business Pioneers in America: Faith, Enterprise, and Stewardship

Meet nine Black business pioneers who overcame slavery, exclusion, and hostility to build lasting enterprises—and used what they had to serve God and others.

 

American history holds remarkable stories that deserve to be far better known. In the face of slavery, legal exclusion, and open hostility, Black men and women built businesses, accumulated wealth, created opportunities, and strengthened whole communities. Many of them also understood something deeper: that what they possessed carried a responsibility reaching well beyond themselves.

For those whose lives were shaped by faith in God, success was never only about accumulation; it was an occasion to serve. When Jesus taught that “everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required” (Luke 12:48), He framed every gift—time, ability, opportunity, and wealth—as something entrusted rather than simply owned. That is the heart of biblical stewardship: the recognition that we are managers of what belongs to God, not owners answerable to no one.

These nine pioneers lived in very different times and circumstances and expressed their convictions in their own ways. Yet their lives press the same enduring question upon us all: What will we do with what God has placed in our hands?

Builders of the Early Republic

Paul Cuffe, 1759–1817

Born free on Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts, Paul Cuffe was one of ten children of Kofi Slocum, a formerly enslaved man from West Africa, and Ruth Moses, a member of the Wampanoag people. He had little formal schooling, yet taught himself to read, write, and navigate, going to sea while still young and eventually building a thriving shipping and whaling enterprise out of Westport. His vessels, crewed by Black and Native American sailors, traded as far as Europe and Africa.

Cuffe did not keep his success to himself. A devout Quaker, he gave generously to his Meeting, funding roughly half the cost of a new meeting house in 1813, and he established a racially integrated school in Westport at his own expense. In May 1812, he traveled to Washington to petition for the release of an impounded ship and was received by President James Madison—widely regarded as the first person of color to meet with a sitting U.S. president. When he died in 1817, his estate was valued at more than $20,000, a significant fortune for the era, and one he had spent his life reinvesting in his community and in efforts to help free Black families establish new lives.

His story reflects a biblical principle: God entrusts people with abilities, opportunities, and resources not simply for themselves, but to steward faithfully for His purposes and the good of others.

James Forten, 1766–1842

James Forten was born free in Philadelphia and educated at the African School run by the Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet. At about fourteen, he went to sea aboard the privateer Royal Louis; when the ship was captured, he spent roughly seven months aboard the notorious British prison ship Jersey in New York Harbor before being freed in a prisoner exchange. After the war, he apprenticed under the Philadelphia sailmaker Robert Bridges, rose to foreman, and eventually bought the business, building it into one of the city’s most respected sail lofts and employing both Black and white workers.

His convictions shaped how he did business. Forten refused to make sails for any vessel involved in the slave trade, and as his wealth and influence grew he became a leading abolitionist, helping to fund William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator and serving in the leadership of the American Anti-Slavery Society. He proved that integrity and enterprise need not be at odds—that there are profits a person of conscience will simply decline.

“What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” Jesus asked (Mark 8:36).

Forten’s life is a reminder that how we earn can matter as much as what we earn.

Free Frank McWorter, 1777–1854

Free Frank McWorter was born enslaved in South Carolina. While living in Kentucky during the War of 1812, he built a saltpeter operation and began earning money of his own—money he put toward the most valuable thing he could buy: freedom. He purchased his wife’s liberty first, then his own, and over the course of his life bought freedom for some sixteen family members, structuring even his estate to free still more after his death.

In 1836 he founded New Philadelphia, Illinois, becoming the first African American known to have legally platted a town in the United States. It grew into a rare integrated community on the frontier, and its site is now a National Historic Landmark.

McWorter built more than property—he used enterprise to break chains, treating what he earned not as a possession to be hoarded but as a means of freedom for the people he loved and the generations who would follow.

Fortunes Won on the Frontier

Stephen Smith, 1795–1873

Stephen Smith began his working life as an indentured servant in a Pennsylvania lumberyard. At twenty-one, he borrowed money to purchase his freedom, and by 1822 had opened his own lumber business in Columbia, Pennsylvania. Prosperity did not make his path easy: his property was vandalized and burned by those hostile to a successful Black businessman. He rebuilt, expanding into coal and real estate until he became one of Pennsylvania’s wealthiest merchants and a member of a bank board.

Business, though, was only part of his calling. Smith was an ordained minister and an active abolitionist who used his resources to support the Underground Railroad and, later in life, to endow a home for the aged that still bears his name.

His perseverance echoes Paul’s charge to be “steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord” (1 Corinthians 15:58)—for faithfulness often means continuing to build even after what you have built has been torn down.

Clara Brown, c. 1800–1885

Freed from slavery in her fifties, Clara Brown made her way to Colorado during the Gold Rush and settled in Central City as one of the territory’s earliest Black residents. She built a successful laundry business while also serving as a midwife, nurse, and cook—but those around her knew her for far more than commerce. Affectionately called “Aunt Clara,” she became a pillar of the region’s spiritual life, hosting early Methodist services in her home and helping to finance the building of churches.

She invested shrewdly in property and mining interests, yet much of what she earned served a deeply personal mission: she spent years and considerable sums searching for family members sold away from her under slavery, and she helped other freed people build new lives in the West.

In 1885 she was admitted to the Society of Colorado Pioneers for her part in the state’s early history. Clara Brown knew intimately what it was to have nearly everything taken from her—and when God placed resources in her hands, she became known, above all, for giving them away.

William Alexander Leidesdorff, 1810–1848

William Alexander Leidesdorff was born on St. Croix in the Danish West Indies, the son of a Danish father of Jewish descent and a mother of African-Caribbean heritage. He came to California in 1841 and settled in the small community that would become San Francisco, where he established a ship chandlery, a lumberyard, and shipping interests, and launched the first steamboat on San Francisco Bay.

His influence reached well beyond commerce. Leidesdorff helped build the town’s first hotel, served as its treasurer, sat on the school board, and donated land for California’s first public school.

He died suddenly in 1848 at only thirty-eight. Gold was later discovered on his Sacramento-area property, and his estate was eventually appraised at roughly $1.5 million—the posthumous valuation that led many to call him the first millionaire of African descent in the United States, a distinction he never lived to see.

His life is a reminder that a person’s influence is not measured only by its length; what we build and establish can go on speaking long after we are gone.

Bridget “Biddy” Mason, 1818–1891

Few lives capture the bond between enterprise and generosity as fully as Biddy Mason’s. Born enslaved in Georgia, she was forced to walk much of the way west behind her enslaver’s wagons, tending livestock and children while raising three daughters of her own.

The turning point came in 1856: when her enslaver tried to take her out of free California, she petitioned the court and won freedom for herself and thirteen others in a landmark case.

Freedom was the beginning, not the end, of her labor. Working as a nurse and midwife, she saved with great discipline and in 1866 bought her first parcel of land in what is now downtown Los Angeles, becoming in time one of the city’s first Black landowners and one of its wealthiest residents.

What she did with that wealth became the greater part of her legacy. She fed the hungry regardless of race, supported schools, visited prisoners, and in 1872 helped found and finance the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles, the city’s oldest Black congregation.

“The open hand is blessed,” she told her family, “for it gives in abundance, even as it receives.”

Her conviction reflects the truth of Proverbs 19:17: “Whoever is generous to the poor lends to the LORD, and he will repay him for his deed.”

In Biddy Mason, an open hand became a channel of blessing for an entire city.

Enterprise and Public Life After the War

Robert Gordon, 1812–1884

While still enslaved in Richmond, Virginia, Robert Gordon managed a coal yard so ably that his owner let him keep the “slack”—the coal dust others discarded as waste—which he sold to local industry, saving until he could purchase his freedom in 1846.

Moving north to Cincinnati, he opened a coal business of his own. When competitors launched a price war to force him out, he answered not by slashing his prices but by quietly buying up their cheap coal through intermediaries and stockpiling it. When a hard winter froze the waterways and cut off his rivals’ supply, he sold from his reserves.

He later invested in bonds and real estate, and during the Civil War he donated coal to a military hospital. He left a substantial estate, and his will endowed a home for aged and impoverished women along with a gift to a Cincinnati orphanage.

Gordon had a gift for seeing worth where others saw only waste. Throughout Scripture, God repeatedly uses what the world overlooks to accomplish His purposes.

Robert James Harlan, 1816–1897

Robert Harlan was born enslaved in Kentucky and permitted to train and trade horses, a skill that made him a fortune when he ran a store during the early California Gold Rush. He later raced horses in England before returning to the United States during Reconstruction, when his energies turned toward public life.

He became associated with Ulysses S. Grant, rose to prominence in Republican politics as an advocate for African American civil rights, served as a colonel in a Black militia battalion in Cincinnati, and in 1886 was elected to the Ohio House of Representatives.

Harlan’s story widens the meaning of stewardship beyond money. Influence, too, is entrusted to us—a position, a voice, an opportunity, or a seat at the table—and like any other gift, it can be spent in the service of others.

What These Pioneers Teach Us About Biblical Stewardship

These nine lives are not identical. Their backgrounds, businesses, and convictions differed, yet a single pattern runs through all of them.

Cuffe funded a meeting house and a school. Forten refused the profits of slavery and financed its abolition. McWorter bought human beings out of bondage and set them free. Smith sustained the Underground Railroad. Brown strengthened churches and helped the formerly enslaved begin again. Mason cared for the poor and helped plant a church. Gordon provided for vulnerable people he would never meet.

They built—but they also released.

That distinction matters because Scripture never presents wealth as an end in itself. A steward is not the ultimate owner; a steward manages what belongs to another and must answer for how it is managed.

As Paul wrote, “it is required of stewards that they be found faithful” (1 Corinthians 4:2).

Everything we hold—our abilities, relationships, money, influence, and time—falls under God’s authority. We may labor, plant, build, and water, but the increase ultimately belongs to Him: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth” (1 Corinthians 3:6).

Biblical stewardship guards us against two opposite errors. We must not worship wealth, but neither should we despise the God-given ability to create, build, work, and prosper.

The deeper question is what rules our hearts and whom our resources serve.

Jesus said, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21).

These pioneers challenge us to examine both.

Faithful with What God Has Placed in Your Hands

Biblical stewardship begins with recognizing that your life belongs to God.

It is more than giving money. It means bringing every part of life under the Lordship of Jesus Christ—your work, your business, your resources, your abilities, and your influence offered back to Him and used for His purposes.

The servants in Jesus’ parable of the talents were entrusted with their master’s property and expected to faithfully use what had been placed in their care (Matthew 25:14–30).

The amount entrusted differed, but every servant was accountable for what he did with it.

God calls His people to that same faithfulness with whatever He has placed in their hands.

Perhaps He has entrusted you with financial resources, a business idea, a skill, a relationship, an opportunity, or a place of influence.

Whatever it is, do not bury it.

Sow it faithfully. Work diligently. Give generously. Serve others. And trust God with the increase.

For more biblical teaching on this theme, explore what Scripture teaches about finances.

The stories of these Black business pioneers leave us with more than admiration. They leave us with a question—not only, “What can I build?” but “Who will be blessed because God placed it in my hands?”

Inspiration Ministries exists to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ, disciple believers in God’s Word, and encourage people to live out a faith that blesses others. Explore more about giving and stewardship, discover the traits of godly leadership, or partner with Inspiration Ministries as we share the Gospel around the world.

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Sources & Further Reading

• Paul Cuffe and President James Madison – White House Historical Association.
• James Forten, Sailmaker – Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
• The incredible story of William Leidesdorff, San Francisco’s Black founding father – San Francisco Examiner.
• Bridget “Biddy” Mason – National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

Who were some of the earliest Black business pioneers in America?

Paul Cuffe, James Forten, Free Frank McWorter, Stephen Smith, Clara Brown, William Alexander Leidesdorff, Biddy Mason, Robert Gordon, and Robert James Harlan were among the Black men and women who built significant enterprises despite slavery, racial discrimination, and legal barriers.

What does the Bible teach about business and biblical stewardship?

The Bible teaches that everything a person possesses is ultimately entrusted by God. First Corinthians 4:2 says, “Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found faithful.” Biblical stewardship includes faithfully using money, abilities, opportunities, time, and influence for purposes that honor God and serve others.

How can faith influence the way someone approaches business?

Faith can shape how a person earns, manages, gives, and uses resources. Scripture calls believers to integrity, generosity, diligent work, care for others, and recognition that God is the ultimate source of every opportunity and resource.