Perkins family

The Perkins family of Boston was a merchant line whose firm J. and T. H. Perkins traded in the West Indies, on the Northwest Coast, in West African slaves, at Canton and at Smyrna, and whose Canton business was merged into Russell and Company in 1830 and 1831.¹ Antony C. Sutton placed a Perkins family settled at Boston in 1631 among the old-line families of Skull and Bones in his chart.² The best documented member is Thomas Handasyd Perkins (1764 to 1854), the firm's senior partner, who gave a house and his name to the school for the blind that became the Perkins Institution for the Blind, took part in founding the Massachusetts General Hospital, and chartered the Granite Railway Company and presided over the Bunker Hill Monument Association. His brother James Perkins (1761 to 1822) was his partner and his brother Samuel G. Perkins kept a separate house. Their sister Margaret married Ralph Bennet Forbes, and their sons Robert Bennet Forbes and John Murray Forbes went through the firm into the China trade.³ The later line produced Charles Elliott Perkins, president of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, and Thomas Nelson Perkins, a Boston lawyer, fellow of Harvard University and alternate American expert at the 1929 reparations conference in Paris.

Origins in the Boston merchant trade

Thomas Handasyd Perkins was born in Boston on December 15, 1764, and was named for his maternal grandfather, a Boston dealer in furs and imported hats whom Cary calls Thomas Handasyd Peck.⁴ The 1907 family memoir of his grandniece gives the grandfather's name as James Handasyd Peck and gives the death of the father, the merchant James Perkins, as 1773; Cary places it in 1771. Both leave the widow with eight children.⁴⁵ Cary wrote that the father had been connected with George Erving, one of the principal merchants of the town.⁴ The widow carried on the business, and she was part owner of the ship Beaver, which the French government chartered to carry part of its cavalry to Cap-Français.⁶ She died in 1807, and the Boston Female Asylum voted its officers a badge of mourning in her honor.⁶

As a boy Thomas saw the Boston Massacre, passed part of his youth at Barnstable, where he knew Harrison Gray Otis, was prepared for college by the Reverend Mr. Shute at Hingham, and was then placed in the counting-house of Messrs. Shattuck, with whom he remained until he was twenty-one.⁷

Saint-Domingue

Thomas left the Shattuck counting-room in 1785 and, not well, wintered at the French colony of Saint-Domingue with his elder brother James Perkins.⁸ From there he went to Charleston, South Carolina, where he spent much of his time at the rice plantations of Thomas Ferguson, who "numbered upwards of eight hundred slaves" at Pon Pon.⁸ He then accepted an invitation to rejoin his brother in Saint-Domingue, and the two "formed a house there which was very successful," until the climate did not suit Thomas and he returned to Boston. He married Sarah Elliot in 1788.⁹

The insurrection in Saint-Domingue came in 1792. Cary records that the insurgents burned the town and the brothers' store, that the planters owed the house large sums that could no longer be paid, and that James and Samuel G. Perkins returned to Boston with most of their property lost.¹⁰ The Boston firm of J. and T. H. Perkins was organized in 1792, and it ran until James died in 1822.¹¹ In 1819 it became J. and T. H. Perkins & Sons, and it kept two or three vessels in the West Indies trade, shipping coffee and sugar to Europe.¹¹ The Owls Nest memoir names a Mr. Burling as James Perkins's business partner at Saint-Domingue.¹²

The African coast and the slave trade

Perkins's Batavia journal of July 1789 describes the household servants of the city as "the slaves being generally Malays," and records Malay bands of musicians, taken from arriving vessels, sold for "about one hundred paper-dollars a head." He adds: "I was astonished at the low price they bore in comparison to the Guinea slaves in America and the colonies."¹³

Elmer Donnan's collection of documents on the American slave trade prints a letter of October 6, 1792 from J. and T. H. Perkins to their Saint-Domingue house, Perkins, Burling & Co. The Boston firm agrees to buy slaves as agents of Daniel McNiel and to fit out his vessel, the Katy, for the Coast, at 5 percent on the outfit and 5 percent on the sales. The vessel "must be entered as from St. Eustatia and St. Thomas, and the papers calculated acordingly," a direction the letter explains with the words "we mean his log."¹⁴ Donnan's notes to the letter quote Briggs's history of the Cabot family. They give a letter of June 24, 1790 to Theodore Lyman, the voyage of the Betsey with thirty-two slaves to Simon Elliot (Thomas Perkins's father-in-law), a letter of December 16, 1791 from Thomas H. Perkins to Jean Laroque offering rum, tobacco and cloths "such as suit the Guinea Market," and a 1793 letter on slaves "worth 250 to 270 Ds." Donnan adds that the Perkins papers are said to contain over a hundred letters to traders in Africa.¹⁵

The Sierra Leone governor's account of the Willing Quaker, Robert Adamson master, records her arrival in April 1793 and her departure in July with "upwards of One hundred Slaves" for Surinam. Donnan's note says she had sailed from the West Indies on December 15, 1792 under Perkins and Burling, agents of Captain Daniel McNeil, an owner, and that J. and T. H. Perkins of Boston "may also have been owners." The note adds that the firm was dispatching the Clarissa to Havana with slaves under Captain William McNeil, a nephew of Daniel, and that Havana admitted American vessels only if they carried new negroes.¹⁶ The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database enters the Willing Quaker's 1792 voyage under Adamson, from Boston on December 15, 1792, with the owners listed as Daniel McNeil, J. Perkins and T. H. Perkins: 110 slaves embarked at the Sierra Leone estuary and 88 disembarked at Suriname in September 1793.¹⁷ A second entry for a Willing Quaker voyage of 1792, under Daniel McNeil with J. T. H. Perkins as owner, records 63 slaves embarked and 53 landed at Havana in April 1792.¹⁸

Donnan also prints a 1803 insurance record for the Danish ship Hope, "Coast of Africa to Havana," $33,300, for J. and T. H. Perkins, written in the office of N. P. Russell, together with a Charleston court's decision that notes were void because the Massachusetts act of 1788 forbade participation in the trade. A letter of January 25, 1810 from N. P. Russell to J. and T. H. Perkins on "the two African risks" (the San Francisco de Asis and the Carlota) records that the underwriters declined them; Donnan infers that the firm was "still concerned" in the trade although it had "apparently hesitated" after the act of Congress of May 10, 1800. A letter from the firm at Havana to James Graham on July 16, 1804 says: "we prefer losing a little upon a few horses than gaining upon human flesh."¹⁹

Kris Millegan wrote that the Perkins syndicate had been "Forced out of the lucrative African slave trade by U.S. law and Caribbean slave revolts," and that leaders of the Cabot, Lowell, Higginson, Forbes, Cushing and Sturgis families had married Perkins siblings and children.²⁰

The Northwest Coast and the Canton beginnings

Thomas sailed for Canton in February 1789 as supercargo of the Astraea, owned by Elias Hasket Derby of Salem, under Captain James Magee.²¹ At Canton he saw the Columbia, the ship that Captain Gray later took across the bar of the Columbia River. Cary writes that Perkins gathered information on the Chinese market and on the value of sea-otter skins from the Northwest Coast, and that the Hong merchant Houqua had observed him and a relationship developed. He sent the brig Hope, under Captain Ingraham, to the Northwest Coast, intending the voyage to end at Canton; its main object failed, but it found the northern Marquesas. He then joined Magee in building the Margaret, with Magee as master, and a schooner of about thirty tons set up on the coast took "some twelve or fifteen hundred sea-otters" in one season.²¹

Paris, Lafayette and Mount Vernon

Perkins sailed in December 1794 in the Charlotte, a ship of his firm and of S. Higginson & Co., to Bordeaux, and was in Paris in March 1795, where he saw the execution of Fouquier-Tinville and others.²² James Monroe, then American minister, asked him to help send George Washington La Fayette to America under the name G. W. Motier. Madame de La Fayette was in Paris, and Boissy d'Anglas was the contact. Perkins's friend Joseph Russell of Boston took the youth to Le Havre, and the ship was commanded by Captain Thomas Sturgis, a brother of the Robert Sturgis who had married Perkins's eldest sister. Russell and Perkins paid the expenses, and Marquis de Lafayette later wrote from Olmutz that Perkins had saved his life.²² A letter of October 18, 1796 to Joseph Russell, then in Europe, reports that Motier was with Washington.²³ Perkins visited Mount Vernon in July 1796, introduced by Colonel Lear.²⁴ Cary says that Perkins might have been made Secretary of the Navy and that his election to Congress would have been certain had he sought it.²⁵

Sealing voyages, the Mediterranean and Smyrna

A letter from Boston dated December 27, 1796, to Mr. George Perkins at Smyrna, asks about the Smyrna market for coffee and sugar and refers to "your brother, Mr. Thomas Perkins."²⁶ On November 1, 1799 the brig Sally, Captain Stephen Hall, sailed on a sealing voyage to Kerguelen, St Paul and Amsterdam islands, with Peron as chief mate and a plan to sell skins at Canton to the American consul, Mr. Snow. A letter of October 16, 1800 to Robert Bennet Forbes at New York says that Peter Peron was landed at St Paul with eight men and eight more were on Amsterdam.²⁷ Orders of May 24, 1800 to Jackson and Tilden for the ship Thomas Russell directed her to Malaga, then up the Mediterranean, Smyrna included, and then to Calcutta.²⁸

The National Park Service nomination for the Russell house at Middletown states that "The Perkins brothers of Boston, who had been associated with the Turkish opium trade since the 1780's, formally organized their Smyrna merchant house in 1816." It adds that "Both of these families would be associated with Russell during his tenure in Canton," and that it is uncertain whether John P. Cushing and others also explored the India opium market.²⁹

Robert Bennet Forbes described an 1828 voyage to Smyrna in the Danube, fitted out at New York by Sturgis and Perkins with a credit on Baring Brothers of about 60,000 pounds, "the principal object being to procure Turkey opium for China."³⁰ He sailed from Vourla under convoy and went on to Gibraltar to await operations on a larger scale.³⁰ At Canton the drug was landed at the store-ships anchored at Lintin and run up the river in small boats.³¹

Perkins and Company at Canton

In 1798 the firm bought the ship Thomas Russell and sent Ephraim Bumstead as supercargo; in 1803 it engaged him to set up a China house, and John Perkins Cushing, then sixteen and a nephew of the brothers, went as his clerk.³² Hunter wrote that Perkins & Co. was "established soon after a visit made by Mr. Thomas H. Perkins with two vessels to Canton in 1798," that until the summer of 1829 it was "the most important of the American houses," and that Bumstead represented it until 1807, when Cushing succeeded him.³³ Cary has Bumstead dying on the way home soon after 1803 and Cushing in copartnership until "the dissolution of the house in 1827"; Hunter has Cushing continuously at Canton until 1828, when he returned in the Milo.³²³³ Cary adds that the Canton house grew until consignments interfered with its own business, and "a distinct commission-house was, therefore, established at Canton" under the favor of Perkins and Co.³²

Forbes says that Cushing "was principally instrumental in promoting the establishment of Russell & Co.," and that he transferred an important part of his business to the new house. An advertisement of the Canton house dated November 23, 1823, signed by Philip Ammidon and Samuel Russell, gives as its references Perkins & Co. at Canton and the Boston houses J. and T. H. Perkins & Sons and S. G. Perkins & Co.³⁴

On August 9, 1829, Thomas T. Forbes, who had succeeded Cushing in charge of Perkins & Co., drowned in a typhoon with S. H. Monson, the bookkeeper of Russell & Co. Among his papers was a sealed letter asking Russell & Co., in case of accident, to take charge of his local business and that of J. and T. H. Perkins. Hunter wrote that Houqua's business came to the Russell house with it. Cushing returned to Canton in August 1830, and Hunter quotes the result: "Russell & Co. were officially appointed sole agents for the Boston house, that of Perkins & Co. being wound up, while the important foreign business of Houqua was then also definitely secured to them."³⁵ The Library of Congress finding aid for the Russell records dates the event to 1831, when "the China trading operations of John P. Cushing, William Perkins & Company of Boston, and Houqua" merged with Russell & Company.³⁶ The Baker Library guide describes Cushing as the man who arranged to dissolve the Boston house by merging its Canton business into Russell & Co. in 1831, and holds Perkins & Co. letter books from Canton that precede the merger.³⁷ J. and T. H. Perkins & Sons was wound up in 1838, and Cary says Thomas withdrew from business "with a large fortune."³⁸

A George C. Perkins of Boston, bookkeeper of Russell & Co., is among the men Hunter names as drowned in the Lantao Channel; Forbes's memoir devotes a passage to "the tragical death of Mr. George Perkins," who sailed from the Sandwich Islands in March 1854 in the Hamburg barque Concordia for Hong Kong and disappeared after bargaining with a Chinese boat to carry him from Green Island passage to Macao. Forbes also records that Perkins and Edward King retired from the Russell house in 1849.³⁹⁴⁰

The Hartford Convention and the 1815 mission

Cary's appendix says that Perkins "was not a member of the Hartford Convention" but supported its principal measure and accepted a place in the mission that followed.⁴¹ The twelve Massachusetts delegates to the convention were George Cabot, William Prescott, Harrison Gray Otis, Timothy Bigelow, Stephen Longfellow, Daniel Waldo, George Bliss, Nathan Dane, Hodijah Baylies, Joshua Thomas, Joseph Lyman and Samuel S. Wilde. The 1823 pamphlet A Short Account of the Hartford Convention records that the House resolve was adopted 159 to 48 and prints Governor Caleb Strong's commission of January 31, 1815 naming Otis, Perkins and William Sullivan; the three arrived in Washington one day after news of peace.⁴² Perkins wrote from Washington on February 16, 1815 to Cushing at Canton: "I am here on public business in behalf of the State of Massachusetts. The joyful event of peace has suspended the mission on which I came."⁴³

Bank, Cadets and Senate

Cary says that Perkins was elected to the Massachusetts Senate in 1805, that for eighteen or twenty years he sat in one branch or the other of the legislature, generally the Senate, and that he was president of the Boston branch of the Bank of the United States, succeeded by George Cabot.⁴⁴ Forbes records that he was lieutenant colonel of the Boston Cadets and resigned on November 5, 1800.⁴⁵

The Bunker Hill Monument Association

John C. Warren's 1877 history names Perkins as one of five principal originators of the monument, with William Tudor, Daniel Webster, Edward Everett and Dr. John C. Warren, and says he hosted the founding dinner.⁴⁶ The charter was approved on June 7, 1823; Perkins was vice-president from 1823 to 1827, president from 1827 to 1829 in succession to Webster, and chairman of the Building Committee.⁴⁷ The Granite Railway, built to bring the stone, was organized with Perkins as president; Nathaniel P. Russell, in whose office the 1803 Perkins insurance was written, was treasurer of the Association in 1823.¹⁹⁴⁸ Perkins gave $1,000 toward the Warren statue.⁴⁹

The Granite Railway

The act incorporating the Granite Railway Company was passed on March 4, 1826. The incorporators were Thomas H. Perkins, William Sullivan, Amos Lawrence, David Moody, Solomon Willard and Gridley Bryant; section 8 authorized Perkins to call the first meeting. The charter was made perpetual in 1831, and the company's first contract, in 1827, was to carry stone for the monument at fifty cents per ton plus forty cents per ton. The company's 1870 history calls it the second railroad in the United States, where Cary calls it the first; Perkins owned nearly all of it when he died in 1854.⁵⁰ Cary records that he had watched the start of railroads in England and caused a two-mile line to be built from the Quincy quarries to the water.⁵¹

Boston institutions

The trustees of the Massachusetts General Hospital met on January 2, 1814, with Perkins listed first among those present, and the board's address to the public dated January 8, 1814 carries his name first among the signatures.⁵² Cary says that he and his elder brother gave $5,000 each, and that he was active in the hospital's asylum for the insane.⁵³ James Perkins's bequests included about $20,000 in real estate to the Boston Athenaeum and $20,000 to Harvard University.⁵⁴

In 1826 the Athenaeum needed something over $30,000 for additions. Thomas and his nephew James Perkins each gave $8,000 on condition that the public subscribe the same amount.⁵⁴ In 1833 Thomas proposed to give his mansion house in Pearl Street as a permanent residence for the blind, on condition that a fund be raised; the New-England Institution for the Education of the Blind reported in 1834 that "a twelvemonth ago" he had made the proposition, and that over $50,000 had been subscribed within a month.⁵⁵ Cary says Dr. John D. Fisher had obtained an earlier act of incorporation and that Perkins's proposal "suddenly roused the community to aid in the project."⁵¹ Cary records the late fundraising for the Washington Monument and the toast to Perkins by Robert C. Winthrop at Faneuil Hall in October 1854.⁵⁶

The Samuel G. Perkins line and Cincinnati

Samuel G. Perkins traded in Boston as S. G. Perkins & Co. and married Barbara Higginson, daughter of Stephen Higginson, in 1795.⁵⁷ Their youngest child, James Handasyd Perkins, was born in Boston on July 31, 1810, entered the counting room of his uncle Thomas at eighteen, studied law, and went to Cincinnati.⁵⁸ He died in 1849.⁵⁷ The Owls Nest property near Cincinnati was bought in 1845, and the sons of James Handasyd and Sarah Elliott Perkins gave it to the city as a park in 1905.⁵⁷

Charles Elliott Perkins and the Burlington

Charles Elliott Perkins was born in Cincinnati on November 24, 1840 and went to Burlington, Iowa in 1859 to work on the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad, whose president was John Murray Forbes, a first cousin of his father.⁵⁹ His children included Alice Forbes (born 1867), Edith Forbes (1873), Margaret Forbes (1876), Charles Elliott (1881), Mary Russell (1883) and Samuel George.⁵⁹ The 1906 Who's Who entry records him as a clerk of the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad in 1859, director of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad in 1875, vice-president from 1876 to 1881 and president from 1881 to 1901, resigning on February 21, 1901.⁶⁰

John Murray Forbes wrote that he held the presidency of the Burlington for two or three years, and that his "cousin, Mr. Perkins, was not yet sufficiently known to warrant putting him at the head of the road"; when Charles E. Perkins "had won the confidence of the board and of the stockholders" and "was entirely competent to run the road," Forbes "gladly turned over the presidency to him."⁶¹ A board resolution of October 18, 1898, after Forbes's death, is signed "C. E. Perkins, President."⁶²

The Harvard Commission on Western History, in 1912, reprinted a letter of January 27, 1912 establishing the Charles Elliott Perkins Foundation, funded by Mrs. William Hooper in memory of her father. The commission's members were A. McF. Davis, Horace Davis, Grenville M. Dodge, Charles G. Dawes, Charles Moore, Howard Elliott, Frederic A. Delano, Frederick J. Turner, A. C. Coolidge and E. H. Wells; the commission's report says that Elliott and Delano "were trained under Mr. Perkins."⁶³

Thomas Nelson Perkins

Edward Cranch Perkins, the second son of James Handasyd Perkins, married Jane Watson, described in the memoir as a niece of John Murray Forbes, and their children were Thomas Nelson (born 1870), Elliott (1873 to 1885), James Handasyd (1876) and John Forbes (1878; a daughter of his is listed as born in 1907).⁶⁴ Who's Who records Thomas Nelson Perkins as born at Milton, Massachusetts, in 1870, the son of Edward C. and Jane S. (Watson) Perkins, Harvard A.B. 1891 and LL.B. 1894, a member of the Boston firm Ropes, Gray & Gorham (by 1920 Ropes, Gray, Boyden & Perkins), and a fellow of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.⁶⁵ He married Louisa Catherine Adams, daughter of Charles Francis Adams Jr., at Lincoln on June 6, 1900.⁶⁶ The Harvard quinquennial catalogue of 1915 lists him as Fellow from 1905; he resigned in 1924 to serve in Europe and was re-elected in October 1926.⁶⁷⁶⁸ In 1917 he sat on the priorities committee of the War Industries Board and studied the British and French control systems.⁶⁹ From 1926 he was president of the Dawes Plan Arbitral Tribunal of Interpretation, signing Award No. II (January 29, 1927) and Award No. III (May 29, 1928).⁷⁰ The Foreign Relations of the United States for 1929 lists, among the American experts at the Paris committee on reparations that produced the Young Plan, Owen D. Young and J. P. Morgan Jr., with Perkins and Thomas W. Lamont as alternates, and Perkins as chairman of its third subcommittee on deliveries in kind; he signed the report at Paris on June 7, 1929.⁷¹⁷² He was a director of the Boston and Maine from 1924 (chairman of the executive committee from 1928, acting president from 1929 to 1930) and of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in the annual reports for 1929 through 1936.⁷³

Skull and Bones and the Perkins names

Sutton's index of members by class year lists four Perkinses: John and William Perkins in the class of 1840, Nathaniel Shaw Perkins in 1842 and Thomas Albert Perkins in 1858.⁷⁴ The Yale records give the following about them.

John Perkins, class of 1840, was born at Natchez on July 1, 1819, the son of Judge John Perkins, took a Harvard LL.B. in 1842, practiced in New Orleans, sat in Congress from 1853, chaired the Louisiana secession convention in January 1861 and sat in the Confederate Congress; his house Somerset was burned, he left the country, returned in 1878 and died at Baltimore on November 28, 1885.⁷⁵ Millegan wrote that John Perkins, Jr. (S&B 1840) was "chairman of the 1861 Louisiana Secession Convention, who fled abroad for 13 years after the Civil War."²⁰ William Perkins of the same class was born on April 26, 1821 at Grand Gulf, Mississippi, practiced law, and perished on the steamer Arctic in 1854.⁷⁶ Nathaniel Shaw Perkins (1842) was born at New London on April 19, 1822, the son of Nathaniel Shaw Perkins of the Yale class of 1812, was a partner in the whaling firm Perkins & Smith, and died on February 8, 1905.⁷⁷ Thomas Albert Perkins (1858) was born at Brooklyn on January 17, 1839, the son of Dennis and Maria (Clarke) Perkins, was a cotton merchant at Dennis Perkins & Co., and died on January 1, 1909; the class of 1858's biographical record prints a Skull and Bones roster that includes him.⁷⁸

Bagg's 1871 account of the Yale societies lists Samuel C. Perkins of the class of 1848 among the incorporators, by the Connecticut act of May 1860, of the Kingsley Trust Association, the legal body of Scroll and Key.⁷⁹

The Morgan partner George W. Perkins

George W. Perkins, a partner of J. P. Morgan & Co. from 1901 and later chairman of the executive committee and a director of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy, was born at Chicago on January 31, 1862 and began at the Chicago office of the New York Life Insurance Company.⁸⁰ George B. Cortelyou, Secretary of the Treasury from 1907 to 1909, testified before the Pujo subcommittee that at the Hotel Manhattan conference of October 22, 1907 with J. P. Morgan, James Stillman, George F. Baker and others, Perkins "was then a member of the firm of J. P. Morgan & Co."⁸¹ Walter E. Frew, a director of the Bankers Trust Company, testified on December 10, 1912 that its voting trustees about 1905 were "Henry P. Davison, George W. Perkins, and Daniel G. Reid," and that Perkins "was then a member of J. P. Morgan & Co."⁸² The 1889 genealogy of the Perkins family of Ipswich enters his father, George Walbridge Perkins, as born at Erie, Pennsylvania, on December 25, 1831 and dead at Cleveland on March 29, 1886, who married Sarah Louisa Mills in November 1856 and moved to Chicago in 1859; the children listed are Charles Clarkson (1858), George Walbridge (January 31, 1862), William (1863), Emily Swan and Edward Richard. The genealogy's line runs from John Perkins of Ipswich through Jacob, Joseph, Joseph, Joseph and Elijah to William W. Perkins of Erie.⁸³ The same genealogy records that John Perkins sailed in the Lyon from Bristol on December 1, 1630, took the freeman's oath at Boston on May 18, 1631 and removed to Ipswich in 1633, the Boston date Sutton gives for his Perkins family.²⁸³ Sutton wrote: "The name Morgan has never appeared on the membership lists, although some Morgan partners are with the inner core, for example, Davison and Perkins."⁸⁴