Forbes family

The Forbes family was a Boston family whose members traded at Canton from the 1820s, held a share of Russell and Company, built and financed railroads in the Midwest, headed a telephone company, and kept Naushon Island as a family estate. Its best-known members in the record are Robert Bennet Forbes and John Murray Forbes, the sons of Ralph Bennet Forbes and Margaret Perkins, and later W. Cameron Forbes, who served as Governor-General of the Philippines, as chairman of the 1930 presidential commission on Haiti and as ambassador to Japan.¹

The Forbes line

The Massachusetts Historical Society's guide to the Forbes family papers begins with the Reverend John Forbes (1740 to 1783), a Scottish clergyman appointed minister at St. Augustine, East Florida, in 1763, who held seats on the Governor's Council and various judgeships there and who married Dorothy Murray, the daughter of a loyalist, in Boston in 1769. The family remained loyal to the crown until East Florida was ceded to Spain in 1783. They had three sons: James Grant Forbes (1769 to 1825), John Murray Forbes (1771 to 1831) and Ralph Bennet Forbes (1773 to 1824).¹ The second son, brought up at Milton and a classmate of John Quincy Adams at Harvard University, was the American consul at Copenhagen and then Hamburg from 1801 to 1819, and then Adams's representative in Argentina, where he died in 1831.¹ The third son, Ralph Bennet Forbes, married Margaret Perkins in 1799. Her brothers James Perkins and Thomas Handasyd Perkins headed the Boston house of J. and T. H. Perkins, one of the largest East India merchants in the United States, which kept a branch at Canton (see Perkins family).¹²

Ralph Bennet Forbes and Margaret Perkins had three sons, Thomas Tunno Forbes (1802 to 1829), Robert Bennet Forbes (1804 to 1889) and John Murray Forbes (1813 to 1898).³ John Murray Forbes wrote that the family's living in the years after his father's collapse came from "three Perkins uncles," who contributed $1,200 a year. His father was prostrated by overwork in his mid-forties and died in October 1824, about fifty-one years old, leaving five children at home.⁴ John Murray Forbes was born at Bordeaux on February 23, 1813, while his parents were travelling in France after a voyage out from Boston that had ended in a British capture.⁴

The eldest brother, James Grant Forbes, was the father of the Reverend John Murray Forbes (1807 to 1885) and of Paul Siemen Forbes (1808 to 1886), who lived in China. The Reverend John Murray Forbes was therefore a first cousin of Robert Bennet and John Murray Forbes of Milton. His sons were Francis Blackwell Forbes (1839 to 1908) and John Murray Forbes Jr. (1844 to 1921). Paul Siemen Forbes had three sons, William Howell Forbes (1837 to 1896), Henry De Courcy Forbes (1849 to 1920) and Paul Revere Forbes (1860 to 1936).³ Robert Bennet Forbes had three children, Robert Bennet Forbes Jr. (1837 to 1891), Edith Forbes, who married Charles Elliott Perkins of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad in 1864, and James Murray Forbes (1845 to 1937). John Murray Forbes had a daughter, Mary Hathaway Forbes, and a son, William Hathaway Forbes (1840 to 1897).³

Thomas Tunno Forbes

Thomas Tunno Forbes, the brother who went out to China after Robert Bennet Forbes, was head clerk, and possibly junior partner, of the Canton house of Perkins and Company under John Perkins Cushing, a cousin of the family.⁵ In 1828 he succeeded Cushing as the agent of the house at Canton. On August 9, 1829 he drowned in a typhoon together with S. H. Monson, the bookkeeper of Russell and Company. Among his papers was a sealed letter asking Russell and Company, in case of accident, to take charge of the local business of Perkins and Company and of J. and T. H. Perkins. The Canton house did so, and the Houqua business came with it.⁶ The Massachusetts Historical Society guide dates the junction of the Perkins interests with Russell and Company, which "went on to dominate American commerce in the Far East throughout the 19th century," to the aftermath of his death.¹

Robert Bennet Forbes

Robert Bennet Forbes was the elder of the two brothers and the more active seaman. He left school for work, sailed to China at thirteen, received his first command at twenty and returned to Boston at twenty-eight.¹ His memoir, Personal Reminiscences (1882), describes an 1828 voyage in the Danube, fitted out at New York by Sturgis and Perkins, to buy Turkish opium at Smyrna for the Chinese market, with a credit on Baring Brothers of about £60,000.⁷ He describes the store-ships at the Lintin anchorage, where opium was held outside the Canton river mouth and run up river in small boats, and gives the annual value of the trade as ten or twelve million dollars.⁸ He sought the command of the Lintin station ship in 1829 and 1830, with plans arranged through the Perkins family and Bryant and Sturgis.⁹ In 1830 Augustine Heard arrived at Canton in the bark Lintin under Captain Forbes.¹⁰

Hunter lists Robert Bennet Forbes as admitted to the Russell and Company partnership in 1839 and as leaving for New York in July 1840. Forbes gives his own partnership as running from January 1, 1840 to January 1, 1844, and again from January 1, 1849 to January 1, 1857.¹⁰¹¹ When he left in 1840 the chief's place passed to Warren Delano Jr. of the Delano family.¹⁰ The Massachusetts Historical Society guide states that during his years in the Far East he became head of Russell and Company, "played a prominent role in the outbreak of the Opium War," and served as United States vice-consul.¹

Forbes was one of the signers of the May 25, 1839 memorial of the American merchants at Canton, printed as House Document 40 of the 26th Congress. The memorial asked for a commercial agent and a naval force to protect American trade after the surrender of opium at Canton. Its signers include Russell Sturgis, Warren Delano Jr., Gideon Nye Jr. and Abiel Abbot Low.¹²

The Reminiscences give the fullest account of the 1847 famine voyage. During the Irish famine of 1846 and 1847 New England sent aid. At the suggestion of his brother John Murray Forbes, Robert Bennet Forbes headed a petition to Congress for the loan of a naval vessel. A joint resolution approved by President James K. Polk granted him the USS Jamestown and granted the USS Macedonian to a New Jersey captain.¹³ The Jamestown sailed from the Charlestown Navy Yard on March 28, 1847 with about eight hundred tons of supplies, anchored off Cork on April 12, and was back in Boston on May 16, forty-nine days after sailing. The Boston relief committee included Josiah Quincy Jr., then mayor, and the cargo was delivered at Cork to a committee of citizens.¹³

In 1861 Robert Bennet Forbes organized a Boston Coast Guard, an armed volunteer corps with boats and howitzers. On March 26, 1861 he went to Washington and urged Gideon Welles, the Secretary of the Navy, to build a number of gunboats at once; Welles said he had no power to do so without Congressional action.¹⁴ The Coast Guard was later disbanded, its boats and guns were transferred to the navy, and many of its officers and men were taken into the navy.¹⁴ The Historical Society guide adds that he later consulted on the construction of gunboats and built warships for the Union Navy, and that his son James Murray Forbes went to China in 1863 at the age of eighteen, started as a clerk with Russell and Company, advanced rapidly in the firm and returned to the United States a wealthy man in 1871.¹

John Murray Forbes at Canton and Houqua

John Murray Forbes went out to Canton in 1830 and was among the young men admitted to the Russell and Company partnership in the 1834 to 1836 intake that Hunter records.¹⁰ In his own notes, printed by his daughter Sarah Forbes Hughes, he says that he was put into the Russell and Company office as their youngest clerk by an arrangement of Cushing's, with a private understanding that if he proved competent he would be admitted to the firm on January 1, 1834. Before Cushing left, he introduced Forbes to "his old friend Houqua," the chief of the Hong, "and recommended me to his confidence."¹⁵ Forbes wrote that Houqua took him as Cushing's successor and that of his brother Tom, "who had been his intimate friend," handed him the foreign letters to read and answer, and before Forbes was eighteen years old ordered him to charter whole ships and load them, with the invoices made out in Forbes's name "just as if the shipments were my own property." At one time, Forbes wrote, "I had as much as half a million dollars thus afloat."¹⁵

Houqua wrote to him from Canton on May 4, 1837: "I have given you authority to manage my business," and on August 10, 1838 told him to consult Cushing about the sale of a consignment of tea and silk piece goods.¹⁶ Hughes, who edited his letters and recollections in 1899, says that he served as the Boston agent of Houqua after his return, and that the agency "did not stop at Chinese and other merchandise, but embraced general investments in this country." Forbes recalled that he had the management of about half a million of Houqua's money, held at Houqua's request in his own name, with the ownership indicated in his books by the initials A. S. I., "American Stock Investment."¹⁷ In 1839 he gave the captain of his ship Acbar written instructions for the China coast, naming "Mr. R. B. F." as the person to be told what cargo and funds were aboard, and directing the captain to take "very quietly a pilot at once, or waiting among the islands, if anything secret is to be done, until you can see him and concert measures."¹⁸

In 1841 the notes drawn by Russell and Company for Houqua's share of the Canton ransom were deposited for collection with Jardine, Matheson and Company and Dent and Company.¹⁹

Railroads, Naushon and the Burlington

Hughes writes that her father's business in ships and merchandise was "gradually decreasing" by 1856 and that his work was "mainly devoted to the Michigan Central," with the small roads that became the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad (CB&Q).²⁰ In October 1857, when the Michigan Central Railroad was in trouble, Forbes was asked to go to London to raise a loan of two million dollars.²¹ The editor records that he had to mortgage both his Milton and his Naushon Island places to advance money to the railroads in which he was interested.²²

Forbes and William Swain of New Bedford, a relative of his mother, bought Naushon Island, an island between Buzzards Bay and Vineyard Sound. From 1857 his long vacations were spent there.²² The directors of the CB&Q recorded in a resolution of October 18, 1898 that he was elected a director in 1857, served continuously until his death on October 12, 1898, was president of the company from 1878 to 1881, and was chairman of the board from then on.²³ The Historical Society guide, by contrast, says that he served as president of the Burlington in the 1880s.¹

The Brown meeting and the Kansas network

Hughes describes her father's railroad interests of 1859 as a complication. They "had led him into building" the Hannibal and St. Joseph line, the stock of which stood in the name of three trustees, he being chairman and manager. The road "ran through the heart of Missouri, a bitterly pro-slavery country," and he could not proclaim his distaste for pro-slavery methods while he represented other people's property. "On the other hand," she writes, "the railroad was the direct connecting link of Kansas with the East, and over it, supplied with money and Sharps' rifles, which he had helped to provide, came the free men from Massachusetts." With the Free-Soil party, she writes, he "worked quietly all through that time."²⁴

In February 1859 Samuel Gridley Howe wrote to Forbes from New York introducing "Captain John Brown of Kansas," of whom he wrote: "He is of the stuff of which martyrs are made." In a second letter from Boston dated May 9, 1859 Howe wrote that Brown was in the city and would call on Forbes "at your house, or your office, as you may appoint."²⁵ Forbes invited Brown and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn to Milton for tea. In the notes printed by Hughes, he wrote that "the storm continuing, we kept them over and sat up talking until after midnight." He described Brown as "a grim, farmer-like looking man, with a long gray beard and glittering, gray-blue eyes which seemed to me to have a little touch of insanity about them." Brown, he wrote, "repelled, almost with scorn, my suggestion that firmness at the ballot-box by the North and West might avert the storm," and said that it had passed the stage of ballots and "nothing but bayonets and bullets could settle it now." Forbes recorded Brown speaking of the battles of Ossawatomie and Black Jack in Kansas, and of having seen the European armies on a visit to Europe.²⁶

Forbes then wrote: "I saw no more of him after that night; indeed did not hear much of him until his outbreak at Harper's Ferry, to which I had contributed $100 or so, supposing it to be merely for use in Kansas."²⁶ The next day the Governor of Missouri, who had set a price of $3,250 on Brown's head, "appeared on railroad business" and also passed the night at Milton. Hughes adds that her father made the acquaintance at this time of John Albion Andrew, then a lawyer employed to defend one of Brown's adherents.²⁶²⁷

Sanborn gives a different account of the introduction. He wrote that Howe gave him, at New York on February 5, 1859, a letter addressed to "John M. Forbes, Esq." that he never used, and that he personally introduced Brown to Forbes in May 1859 at Forbes's house in Milton.²⁸ In a letter of March 4, 1859 to a correspondent, Sanborn wrote that "Dr. Howe thinks John Forbes and some others not of our party would help the project if they knew of it," and he then recorded that he sounded several anti-slavery men of wealth and influence in the spring of 1859 and obtained subscriptions from persons "willing to give to a brave man forcibly interfering with slavery, without inquiring very closely what he would do next."²⁸ Sanborn also records Brown remarking, as they drove away from Forbes's house at Milton in 1859, that he had seen few houses of rich men in England so full of beauty and comfort as this one, in which he had passed the night.²⁹

The Kansas committees of 1856 and 1857 form a separate and documented network. Sanborn describes two bodies under which Brown chiefly acted: the National Kansas Committee, formed at Buffalo in the summer of 1856 with headquarters at Chicago, and the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee, formed about the same time and lasting longer. He served as secretary of the Massachusetts committee from December 1856, and George L. Stearns was its chairman. The State committee, he wrote, bought the rifles that Brown carried to Harper's Ferry, voted them to Brown as its agent in 1857, and raised nearly $100,000 in money and supplies in Massachusetts during 1856.³⁰ The membership list of the National Kansas Committee that Sanborn printed includes "W. H. Russell, New Haven, Conn."³¹ Brown's will, signed at Boston on April 13, 1857, left "all trust funds and personal property for the aid of the Free-State cause in Kansas" to Stearns, Samuel Cabot Jr. and "William H. Russell, of New Haven, Conn.," as trustees.³² The third trustee, from New Haven, is William Huntington Russell, the Yale graduate of 1833 who co-founded Skull and Bones. Forbes is not named in the will. In the same passage as the March 1859 letter, Sanborn counts the gifts of Theodore Parker, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Stearns, and places Forbes among those "not of our party."²⁸³²

Sanborn's 1885 biography also contains extended passages on a different man named Hugh Forbes, an English-born military adventurer whom Brown engaged as a drill-master in 1858 at a hundred dollars a month, whose manual was printed in New York, and whom Sanborn called "the false member of the little band," who "betrayed the confidence of his employer through vanity and emptiness of head, rather than through malice of heart."³³ Hugh Forbes wrote letters of complaint and threats to Howe, Charles Sumner and others in 1858 and 1859.³³ He is a different man from the Milton host.

After the raid, Hughes records, Forbes wrote in his notes that the execution of Brown on December 2, 1859, "was really almost the turning-point of our own rebellion." In 1860 he was one of the electors at large chosen on the Republican ticket in Massachusetts, a position he attributed to the wish of the Free-Soil party "to ally themselves here with the business men."²⁷

The Massachusetts colored regiments

In the summer of 1862 Forbes organized a Committee of a Hundred to promote the use of black men as soldiers and acted as its chairman. His notes state: "We raised, I think, about $100,000 by subscription among the most conservative Republicans." In that capacity he helped choose officers for the first two Massachusetts colored regiments, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment and the 55th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, "Colonel Shaw having the 54th and N. P. Hallowell the 55th." The appeal for funds to raise the regiments was not made until February 1863.³⁴ He wrote to William Pitt Fessenden urging an amendment to carry out the government's promise of equal pay to those two regiments.³⁵

Robert Gould Shaw, colonel of the 54th, was a cousin of Forbes. Shaw was killed while leading the regiment against Fort Wagner in July 1863, and the death grieved Forbes. After the war Forbes was president of the committee that raised the fund for the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, which stands on the edge of the Boston Common facing the State House, at the spot where Governor John Albion Andrew had bidden the regiment farewell.³⁶

The 1863 mission and the Republican party

In 1863 Forbes and William Henry Aspinwall were entrusted with ten million dollars in 5-20 government bonds and went to England on a mission for the Treasury and Navy. They arranged a loan of five hundred thousand pounds from Baring Brothers for the account of the United States government.³⁷ The letters from the mission include correspondence with John Bright and Joshua Bates and a discussion of the Laird rams.³⁷ The Historical Society guide describes the journey as one made "to prevent the Laird 'rams' from falling into Confederate hands."¹

Forbes was an active Republican through the war. The editor records that he retired from the Republican party on the nomination of James G. Blaine in 1884, and wrote to the chairman of the Independents.³⁸

William Hathaway Forbes

William Hathaway Forbes, the elder son of John Murray Forbes and Sarah Hathaway, served in the First Massachusetts Cavalry and was taken prisoner in 1864, then held on parole and exchanged.³⁹ He married Edith Emerson in 1865.⁴⁰ The editor describes the success of "my elder brother, as president of the American Bell Telephone Company," and writes that the father's pride in it came because "it showed that he had real ability, and was not spoiled by his too easy surroundings."⁴¹

In the 1887 argument over the Government's suit to annul the Bell patent, counsel for the company reproduced the stipulation under which the United States took testimony in Europe on the telephone of Philipp Reis. It is signed "American Bell Telephone Company, by W. H. Forbes, Prest.," and by G. A. Jenks, Solicitor General, acting Attorney General in the matter.⁴² The Historical Society guide calls him "the first president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company."¹

W. Cameron Forbes

William Cameron Forbes, the son of William Hathaway Forbes and Edith Emerson, is named in the family letters as a grandchild of John Murray Forbes.⁴¹

In the Philippines, where he was secretary of commerce and police, he was appointed Vice-Governor on July 1, 1908. When James F. Smith left the islands on May 7, 1909, Forbes became acting president of the Commission and Governor-General.⁴³ Smith's resignation took effect on November 11, 1909, and Forbes "became Governor-General by appointment of President Taft"; the formal inauguration was held on November 24.⁴⁴ He left for the United States on six months' leave on March 15, 1912, returned on January 18, 1913, and submitted his resignation, effective September 1, 1913; his successor, Francis Burton Harrison, assumed office at Washington on September 2.⁴⁵⁴⁶

On February 4, 1930 President Herbert Hoover described the purpose of a special commission to Haiti: "The primary question which is to be investigated is when and how we are to withdraw from Haiti." On February 7 he named W. Cameron Forbes of Massachusetts chairman, with Henry P. Fletcher, Elie Vezina, James Kerney and William Allen White.⁴⁷ The commission sailed from Key West on the U.S.S. Rochester on February 25, reached Port-au-Prince on February 28 and sat in public sessions at the Excelsior Hotel. On March 7 the chairman telegraphed Hoover: "The Commission finds the situation in Haiti critical and the people greatly inflamed." The telegram reported that the leagues of the opposition would not accept an election of a President by the Council of State, an appointive body that had elected and reelected President Louis Borno. It described a plan under which delegates of the leagues would endorse a compromise candidate, neutral and out of politics, whom the Council of State would elect, and who would call elections for the legislature and then resign.⁴⁸ The commission's report to Hoover is dated March 26, 1930.⁴⁷ Telegrams of December 1930 from the American High Commissioner refer to the "Forbes plan" and to Haiti's plan for the "immediate Haitianization of the Public Services."⁴⁹

As ambassador in Japan during the Manchurian crisis, Forbes sent telegrams from Tokyo to the Secretary of State. On September 19, 1931, the day after the Mukden incident, he reported that the Japanese Foreign Office described a minor clash between Japanese railway guards and Chinese soldiers just north of Mukden, which the Japanese Army had since occupied, and that, judging it unwise to cancel his voyage home as such action might be misconstrued, he would sail that afternoon on the Empress of Japan.⁵⁰ On October 1, 1931 he was in Washington, and Secretary Henry L. Stimson arranged for him to call on William Rhinelander Castle, the under secretary of state.⁵¹ On November 12 he reported that Kijuro Shidehara had said Japan would withdraw troops in Manchuria to the railway zone on the satisfaction of either of two conditions, satisfactory police conditions or acceptance of five points, and recommended that the League of Nations and the United States express approval of the police plan; the Department sent the text to the charge in France with instructions that a noncommittal attitude be taken.⁵¹ On November 18 he reported the General Staff's statement that an additional division was being considered for Manchuria and three more air squadrons had gone there.⁵¹ He resigned as ambassador on March 22, 1932.⁵²

The Forbes line and John Kerry

Francis Blackwell Forbes (1839 to 1908), a son of the Reverend John Murray Forbes (1807 to 1885), went to China in 1857 after schooling at Columbia College Grammar School in New York and became a partner in Russell and Company. He was active in the Shanghai Steam Navigation Company, served as consul at Shanghai for Norway and Sweden, became a specialist in Chinese botany and wrote papers on the Burlingame Mission. He married Isabel Clarke in 1867, left China for Europe in the early 1880s, became managing director of the Serrell Automatic Silk Reeling Company, and was hit hard by its failure in 1894 and by the earlier failure of Russell and Company in 1891.³ His children included James Grant Forbes (1879 to 1955), born at Shanghai on October 22, 1879, who died at Paris.⁵³

James Grant Forbes married Margaret Tyndal Winthrop, a daughter of Robert Charles Winthrop Jr., at Boston on November 28, 1906. Their daughter Rosemary Isabel Forbes was born at Paris on October 27, 1913, married Richard John Kerry at Montgomery, Alabama on February 8, 1941, and died at Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts on November 14, 2002. Their son John Kerry, born December 11, 1943, was a grandson of James Grant Forbes.⁵³ John Kerry is listed under the class of 1966 in the index of Skull and Bones members that Antony C. Sutton reproduces.⁵⁴

The descent runs through the Reverend John Murray Forbes, the son of James Grant Forbes (1769 to 1825), the eldest brother of Ralph Bennet Forbes. It does not run through Ralph Bennet Forbes, Robert Bennet Forbes or John Murray Forbes of Milton, who were first cousins of the Reverend John Murray Forbes.³

The 1891 failure of Russell and Company

The 1889 Chronicle and Directory for China lists the firm at Hong Kong, "Russell & Co., merchants, Praya," with the partners "William H. Forbes; John M. Forbes (New York); S. W. Pomeroy (London); Charles Vincent Smith (Shanghai); F. D. Bush (New York); G. H. Wheeler (Shanghai); E. H. M. Huntington; C. A. Tomes." The Shanghai entry gives the same list, with "Wm. H. Forbes (Hongkong)" and "John M. Forbes (New York)." Its residents' list has "Forbes, W. H., (Russell & Co.) merchant, Praya" and "Forbes, John M. (Russell & Co.) merchant, Praya (absent)." A separate "W. H. Forbes" of Hatch, Forbes and Company, merchants at Tientsin, appears elsewhere in the same volume. The directory lists the Russell and Company William H. Forbes among the directors of the China Fire Insurance Company and on committees at Hong Kong.⁵⁵ The 1892 volume's chronology of Hong Kong carries the entry "Russell & Co., suspend payment, 1891."⁵⁶

On July 22, 1891 the Hong Kong Daily Press reported a petition in bankruptcy before the Acting Chief Justice, E. J. Ackroyd, by Mook Hang Shan, a Canton merchant, against "W. H. Forbes, J. M. Forbes, A. W. Pomeroy, Chas. V. Smith, and C. A. Tomes, trading under the style of Russell & Co. at Hongkong and elsewhere."⁵⁷ On September 2, 1891 the same paper reported a suit over Hong Kong land that had been registered in the Land Office as the property of "John Murray Forbes, junior," and in which counsel read an affidavit stating that Russell and Company had become insolvent in June. The same report records that John Murray Forbes, trustee for How Qua, held an equitable charge for 253,000 taels with interest at seven per cent.⁵⁸

On December 10, 1891 the paper printed the report of the official assignee in the bankruptcy of Charles Alexander Tomes, a junior partner. The report states that Tomes "was adjudicated bankrupt, with William Howell Forbes, the senior partner at the firm," on July 22, 1891. It names "John Murray Forbes" as "another partner of the firm who conducted the business in New York" and whose sanction the junior partner's admission had never received. It states that the partners entered into a trust deed on June 9, 1891, under the laws of New York, with Henry Hannah of New York as trustee for the benefit of their creditors.⁵⁹ The Hong Kong Telegraph of August 31, 1891 printed a letter from the National Bank of China, Limited, which referred to "the failure of Russell & Co. in June" as cancelling the firm's agreement to act as secretaries of the bank.⁶⁰

Sarah Forbes Hughes wrote that her father, who had left the house years before, was grieved by "the failure of his old house in China, Russell & Co., occasioned by some speculations in steamers and the close competition by German commission merchants," and that the suspension of Baring Brothers gave him "an actual physical shock."⁶¹

The Historical Society's genealogy for the family papers has one William Howell Forbes, born in 1837 and died in 1896, a son of Paul Siemen Forbes, who lived in China, and it lists William Hathaway Forbes (1840 to 1897) separately. It has one John Murray Forbes Jr. (1844 to 1921), a brother of Francis Blackwell Forbes, whose business letters from Boston, New York and China run from 1879 to 1906. The collection also holds letters from Francis Blackwell Forbes in China, London and Paris to William Howell Forbes, John Murray Forbes Jr., the Russell and Company partners S. W. Pomeroy and G. H. Wheeler, and the firm itself.⁶² On these records the Hong Kong senior partner of 1889 to 1891 is William Howell Forbes, a first cousin of Francis Blackwell Forbes, and the New York partner "John M. Forbes" and the "John Murray Forbes, junior" of the land record are John Murray Forbes Jr. The Boston railroad builder John Murray Forbes (1813 to 1898) had left the firm decades earlier, and William Hathaway Forbes of the Bell company is a separate man from William Howell Forbes.⁶¹⁶²