 His mother, Ruth Moses, was a Wampanoag from Harwich on Cape Cod and his father an Ashanti, captured as a child in West Africa and sold into slavery in Newport about 1720.In the mid-1740s the father was manumited by his Quaker master, John Slocum, in Massachusetts and his parents married in 1747 in Dartmouth, Massachusetts.After Cuffe's father died when was thirteen, he and his older brother, John, inherited the family farm (with life rights to their mother) and resided there with their mother and three younger sisters.