Warren Delano Jr.

Warren Delano Jr. (July 13, 1809 to January 17, 1898) was a merchant of Fairhaven, Massachusetts who worked at Canton for long periods as a partner of Russell and Company. He was the maternal grandfather of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the father of Frederic Adrian Delano.

The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library catalogues him as Warren Delano II, and its finding aid for the Delano family papers gives the same dates.¹

Fairhaven and the China voyage

He was the eldest child of Captain Warren Delano (1779 to 1866), a sea captain and ship owner, and of Deborah Perry Church (1783 to 1827).² At fifteen he graduated from Fairhaven Academy, and he then clerked for Hathaway and Company, a Boston importer, and for Goodhue and Company, an import house of New York.³ In 1833 he sailed for Canton as supercargo in the Commerce and became associated there with Russell, Sturgis and Company.² The appendix of Robert Bennet Forbes's memoir dates his partnership in that house from December 31, 1835.⁴ Forbes's own plans for the Lintin station in 1829 and 1830 ran through arrangements with the Perkins family of Boston, and members of the Forbes family worked for the Canton houses during the 1830s.⁴

The opium business at Canton

Geoffrey C. Ward wrote that every American firm at Canton took part in the opium trade except D. W. C. Olyphant and Company, and that under Forbes and then under Delano Russell and Company became the third most important single firm in the trade, British or American. Ward adds that the American houses depended on Turkish opium and on Indian opium sold on consignment for British or Indian firms.⁵ Delano put his own view in a letter to his brothers: "I do not pretend to justify . . . the opium trade in a moral and philanthropic point of view," he wrote, "but as a merchant I insist that it has been . . . fair, honorable and legitimate . . . liable to no further or weightier objections than is the importation of Wines, Brandies & Spirits into the U. States."⁶

Curtis T. Henson Jr. records that Russell and Company kept Edward Delano at Macao, where he acted as the firm's opium agent.⁷ Ward quotes the diary Edward kept in the autumn of 1844, on the way to India to arrange the season's supply of the drug, with his description of the licensed dens he visited at Singapore.⁸

In 1879 Robert Bennet Forbes wrote to about a hundred former Russell partners asking for their recollections of the China years. Ward writes that Delano answered with a brief outline of his Canton career that left out the opium trade, and that in a footnote he absolved Houqua of ever having owned a chest of the drug. Forbes's projected history of the firm was never published.⁹

The factories and the 1839 surrender

In March 1839, at the start of the Opium War, the foreign residents of Canton were held in their factories while the commissioner Lin Zexu demanded the opium stored there. The General Chamber of Commerce at Canton, whose chairman was William S. Wetmore, was meeting on a bond proposed by the cohong. Its committee minutes, printed in The Chinese Repository, record that Delano moved a resolution, seconded by H. Rustomjee and carried unanimously, that the committee should not enter further correspondence of a political or personal nature with the Chinese authorities. The resolution gave the reason: "inasmuch as we are prisoners in our factories, surrounded by an armed force, our trade stopped, and all communication with Whampoa, Macao, and the fleet outside, denied to us."¹⁰

Forbes's journal for April 1, 1839 lists the household duties of the confinement, and gives "Warren Delano, head cook" among them.¹¹ Forbes writes that he had arranged for the junior partner, Delano, to join Russell and Company, and he names Delano, Abiel Abbot Low, Edward King and W. C. Hunter as "most able and efficient co-operators" during the trade of May to December 1839.¹²

The memorial of the American merchants at Canton, dated May 25, 1839, was printed by the United States House of Representatives as House Document 40 of the 26th Congress. Its signature block reads "A. A. LOW, W. DELANO, Jr., EDWARD KING."¹³ The memorial states that the signers had been "made prisoners in our factories" on "the twenty-second day of March last," and it says: "We have no wish to see a revival of the opium trade." It adds that "most of us" had signed a voluntary pledge to abstain from dealing in the drug.¹³

Letters Delano wrote to his brothers Franklin Hughes Delano and Edward Delano in 1839 are quoted in Henson's 1982 study of the East India Squadron. In them he describes the trade as stopped entirely, and two months later he was projecting alternatives: "The opium trade is done up for the present."¹⁴

The Chesapeake and the cotton orders, 1840

In 1840 the Chinese authorities wanted a large foreign ship to anchor above a raft across the river. Hunter records that "Application being made to Mr. Delano, the then chief of Russell & Co., who had never left Canton," a bargain was concluded for the Chesapeake (ship), the British ship Cambridge that the firm had bought and renamed under the American flag. The ship was made over to the mandarins.¹⁵ Ward's account has the 900-ton Cambridge slip into Whampoa just before the blockades, sold cheap to Delano by her captain, renamed the Chesapeake, and then sold to Lin himself; Ward adds that during the war Delano also acted as agent for the absent British.¹⁶

Hunter also records that Delano passed word to the firm that Houqua was disposed to send orders to India for cotton. Three ships were despatched, and 100,000 pounds were remitted to Calcutta, Bombay and Madras.¹⁷

Forbes's account of the Canton opium trade in 1840 has Russell and Company holding shipments for Houqua in the firm's own name so that they could not be seized in England. Forbes then wrote: "Russell & Co. considered it important to keep the pledge made by Mr. Green, and for a long time had nothing to do with opium; certainly not within my time, between 1840 and 1844, when my interest ceased for a time."¹⁸ Delano was chief of the house from July 1840 until Russell Sturgis relieved him in 1842, and he remained a partner until the end of 1846.¹⁹

An edict of the commissioner, translated in the Chinese Repository for December 1839, concerns the Indian store-ship Mermaid, which had come to Kwangtung for the warehousing of opium. It refers to "the American foreign merchant who has purchased his vessel, Delano," who had also bought cotton and other cargo from the country ship Charles Grant. The translation gives no first name for him.²⁰ The same passage appears in the British parliamentary correspondence of 1840.²¹

Vice-consul at Canton

In January 1840 the Chinese Repository printed a letter from a shipwrecked captain who thanked "the consul, W. Delano, esq." and the houses of Russell and Co. for their kindness at Canton.²² The consul at the time was Peter W. Snow. A petition from the American houses to the governor of Canton, dated April 25, 1840, opens with the words "The American vice-consul, Delano, in behalf of the merchants of his country, whose names are hereto attached, respectfully presents their petition."²³ In the September 1840 journal of occurrences, the Repository records that Snow had embarked for New York on the 21st of the preceding month and that "In the meantime" Delano "acts as vice-consul."²⁴ The index of volume IX lists "Delano, W., U.S.A. vice-consul."²⁵

In December 1841, as American vice-consul, Delano arranged with the hong merchants for the release of about forty survivors of the wrecked East India Company steamer Madagascar, held at Weichau, and he wrote to the missionary Elijah Coleman Bridgman at Macao to receive them. His letter of December 18, 1841, as the Repository printed it, says that he had reason to believe the hong merchants had told the authorities the vessel belonged to another country, and that if the officers learned the men were English the merchants "might find a difficulty." He asked that the captain and his companions refrain from publishing any account, and that James Matheson be asked to keep any notice out of the two Canton newspapers for "a month or two to come." Commander J. M. Dicey, the steamer's captain, wrote that Matheson's influence "with the American consul and merchants" had secured the result, and thanked "Mr. Delano, the American vice-consul and Mr. R., American merchant."²⁶

Henson records that in 1842 Delano, as vice-consul, apprised Commodore Lawrence Kearny of an outrage against American subjects and urged him to pursue the matter.²⁷ The Kearny biography by Carroll Storrs Alden quotes the commodore's report that American interests, so far as he could understand from "Mr. Delano" the vice-consul, had not suffered.²⁸

The official register of the United States for 1841 lists Peter W. Snow alone under China.²⁹ The register for 1845 lists Paul S. Forbes as consul at Canton.³⁰

Russell and Company, 1840 to 1846

Forbes's appendix gives the partnership in Russell and Company as beginning January 1, 1840, and running to December 31, 1846.³¹ Hunter records that the term beginning in 1840 opened with Delano's admission, that he was formerly of Russell, Sturgis and Company at Canton and Manila, and that he succeeded Forbes as chief of the house when Forbes left for New York in the Niantic on July 7, 1840.³²

In 1842 Delano, wanting to go home on a visit, invited Russell Sturgis to relieve him, and Sturgis was admitted on January 1, 1842 and retired in May 1844.³³ The firm's membership in 1844, as Forbes lists it, was W. Delano Jr., Edward Delano, W. H. King, D. N. Spooner, P. S. Forbes and Joseph T. Gilman.³⁴

Forbes records that Delano and his family embarked on December 9, 1844 in the Paul Jones, Captain James T. Watkins, and that the terms of the 1846 reorganization were that "W. Delano was to retire after a time," while Edward Delano remained a partner.³⁵ The genealogy places the birth of his daughter Susan Maria at Macao on October 13, 1844, and she died there in 1846.³⁶ Forbes writes that Edward Delano returned home in 1846.³⁷

Marriage, Algonac and the 1857 losses

Delano married Catherine Robbins Lyman at Northampton, Massachusetts on November 1, 1843. She was a daughter of Joseph Lyman of Massachusetts.³⁸ The finding aid says that the couple went to Macao and remained there until 1846, and that they lived in New York until 1851, when they moved to Algonac near Newburgh, New York.³⁹

Calvert Vaux, the landscape architect, altered the house and grounds that Delano called Algonac, and a sketch of Algonac by Vaux is dated 1851.⁴⁰ Ward lists the investments of his return in 1846 as New York waterfront property, railroads, copper mines in Tennessee and Maryland, and land and anthracite coal in Pennsylvania, where a mining town was named Delano for him; he also built and owned several clippers, and the California gold rush gave him a new market for cargoes.⁴¹ The finding aid says that at Algonac Delano's financial interests were settled in real estate and mining, and that his brother Franklin Hughes Delano looked after his interests in the Mount Savage, Maryland iron works during Warren's third trip to China in the 1860s.⁴²

During the panic of 1857 Delano suffered severe financial losses. In 1859 he returned to China to restore his fortune.³⁹ Ward writes that in January 1860, at fifty, Delano faced bankruptcy and resolved to go to Hong Kong and re-enter "tea and opium."⁴³

Hong Kong and the Civil War years, 1861 to 1866

Forbes's appendix records that Delano was admitted to Russell and Company again on January 1, 1861, and that he retired on December 31, 1866. Forbes's memoir refers to "the stay in China, from 1861 to 1864, of Warren Delano, Jr."⁴⁴

The family joined him at Hong Kong in 1862. Catherine Delano kept a journal of the voyage from New York to Hong Kong on the clipper Surprise, owned by Abiel Abbot Low, and the family papers hold a story written in 1862 for travellers on the Surprise bound for China. Ward dates the departure from New York to June 25 and the first sight of Hong Kong to October 31, 1862, and says that Algonac was leased to Low until 1867. He places the family at Rose Hill and quotes Delano's wish that Robert E. Lee be hanged and his bones hung with those of Jefferson Davis.⁴⁵⁴⁶ Frederic Adrian Delano was born at Hong Kong on September 10, 1863.⁴⁷

The Hong Kong directory for 1865 lists Russell and Company at Queen's Road with Paul S. Forbes (absent), Warren Delano Jr., William H. Forbes, George Tyson, David O. Clark, Frank B. Forbes, Henry S. Grew, Richard S. Dana, W. H. Foster Jr., E. D. Barbour and Emil Vogel. The same directory gives Delano's residence as Caine Road and names him a trustee of the Morrison Education Society and of the Sailors' Home.⁴⁸ It gives the United States consul at Hong Kong as H. N. Congar, as do the Official Register of the United States for 1861, 1863 and 1867.⁴⁹

The finding aid lists, among the papers of Warren II, China accounts for 1862 to 1866, the "Houqua Accounts and Memoranda, 1865-1867," and correspondence with Vogel, Hagedorn and Company of Canton and Hong Kong for 1868 to 1871.⁵⁰

The War Department opium claim

Three accounts say that Delano supplied opium to the Union during the Civil War. Daniel W. Delano Jr., a relative, answered Westbrook Pegler's columns of the 1940s in his 1946 book by writing that Delano's opium dealings were legitimate and that in the Civil War he worked through "legitimate trade channels" to obtain "huge cargoes of the much-needed drug" for the care of the Union wounded. The same book states that Abraham Lincoln knew Delano and appointed him special agent in China.⁵¹ Jean Edward Smith wrote in 2007 that Delano "supplied medicinal opium to the War Department to alleviate the suffering of Union wounded, but that was scarcely his only market."⁵² A Maryland local history by Patrick H. Stakem states that in 1860 Delano "returned to China and made a fortune in the opium trade, supplying opium-based medication to the U. S. War Department during the Civil War."⁵³

Ward's 1985 biography weighs the first of these. Ward writes that Delano "may have helped obtain the drug for the War Department during the Civil War" and did so "presumably at a profit," that the major market remained the Chinese addicts, and that no document shows Lincoln knew Delano or made him a special agent. Ward adds that the Delano papers at the Roosevelt Library hold no trace of a link between the two men, and that Delano served for a time as United States consul at Hong Kong.⁵¹

The Army's own history of its supply bureau gives the purchasing side. By far the greater part of the Medical Department's purchases during the war was made by the purveyors at New York and Philadelphia, and smaller purchases at Washington, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Chicago, Louisville and other places "when suitable articles could be procured upon favorable terms." The Act of April 16, 1862 charged medical purveyors, under the Surgeon General, with the selection and purchase of all medical supplies. A board sitting at New York in June 1862 under Surgeon Richard S. Satterlee, the purveyor there, revised the supply table, and from the spring of 1863 the department prepared its own preparations at laboratories at Astoria, Long Island and at Philadelphia.⁵⁴ The tabular statement closing that report gives the quantities of supplies purchased and manufactured during the war, among them 652,196 ounces of powdered opium, 828,258 ounces of tincture of opium, 993,311 ounces of camphorated tincture, 447,151 ounces of Dover's powder, 27,200 ounces of sulphate of morphia, and 813,156 dozen opium pills.⁵⁵ The United States Pharmacopoeia of 1860 required opium to yield at least seven per cent of morphia.⁵⁶

Coal, iron and the Maryland and Pennsylvania lands

The family papers record that Warren Delano II had a financial interest in the iron works at Mount Savage, Maryland, later called the Union Mining Company. The finding aid also lists a folder headed "Mt. Savage Iron Company (Takeover by Consolidation Coal Company, 1864)."⁵⁷ Stakem lists John A. Graham, with fellow directors John F. Winslow, Warren Delano, John Murray Forbes and Joseph B. Varnum, as the men who ran the Mount Savage Iron Company between 1848 and 1867, and says the Cumberland and Pennsylvania Railroad, formed from the company's railroad operations, shared its directors; a locomotive on the road's roster was named W. Delano.⁵⁸⁵⁹

The Maryland General Assembly incorporated the Consolidation Coal Company of Maryland by an act passed March 9, 1860, naming James D. Armstrong, William Combs and John J. Morrison as incorporators.⁶⁰ Harry Caudill's history of eastern Kentucky coal dates the New York organization of the Consolidation Coal Company to April 19, 1864, with first directors including Corning, Forbes and William H. Aspinwall, and names Warren Delano, grandfather of Franklin Roosevelt, among its directors.⁶¹ Stakem gives Delano as a director from 1864 to 1875 and says a Delano Mining Company operated coal at Mount Savage.⁵³ Ward writes that James Roosevelt, the father of Franklin Roosevelt, was a director of the Maryland company, that Aspinwall was his uncle and had helped found it, and that Delano wrote to his son of a squabble within the company in which he feared Roosevelt would "vibrate" between two factions.⁶²

Poor's Manual of Railroads for 1873-74 lists the Cumberland and Pennsylvania Railroad as owned and operated by the Consolidation Coal Company. Its directors elected October 14, 1872 were Henry A. Mott, Adam Norrie, William Whitewright Jr., Warren Delano and William H. Aspinwall, all of New York City.⁶³ The Manual for 1880 lists a Warren Delano of New York among the directors elected April 15, 1880 of the St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railway, alongside H. G. Marquand; the entry does not say which Warren Delano he was.⁶⁴

The finding aid records Warren II's investments in Pennsylvania coal lands and cites correspondence from C. L. White, superintendent of the New Boston Coal Mining Company.⁵⁷ A report on the New Boston and Morea coal lands in Schuylkill County, written by Benjamin Smith Lyman and published in the Pennsylvania Geological Survey's annual report for 1887, carries the line "Presented to the Geological Survey of Pennsylvania, by Warren Delano, Esq., for publication."⁶⁵ The line gives no first name. The family papers place the New Boston lands among Warren II's own investments, and his son Warren Delano III, born in 1852, later was president of the Delano Coal Company and managed the Union Mining Company at Mount Savage.⁶⁶

The family papers hold a file on the American and Cuba Copper Company, but the file sits among the subject papers of Franklin Hughes Delano and not among Warren's own correspondence.⁶⁷

Newburgh and the Hudson Valley

An 1891 history of Newburgh describes the Church of Our Father, Newburgh (Unitarian), at the corner of Johnston and South Streets. A committee chosen in 1869 to consider a church building of the congregation's own was joined by Warren Delano, who subsequently became its president. The building cost $16,000 and was consecrated on July 17, 1870.⁶⁸ The American Unitarian Association's report for 1937 lists an Annie Delano Hitch Memorial Fund for Newburgh, New York, established in 1899 with $10,000.⁶⁹

Children

Sara Delano Roosevelt, born in 1854, married James Roosevelt on October 7, 1880, and their son Franklin Delano was born in 1882.⁷⁰ Deborah Perry, called Dora, married William Howell Forbes at Paris on April 25, 1867. Annie Lyman married Frederick Delano Hitch at Newburgh on October 16, 1877.⁷⁰ Frederic Adrian was born at Hong Kong in 1863.⁴⁷

The Pegler column

In a King Features column of December 1945, Westbrook Pegler described Frederic Delano as born in China "the son of Warren Delano, the old Canton opium smuggler, who founded the Delano fortune in this trade," and wrote that Frederic and numerous other Delanos "still have financial interests in the properties."⁷¹ Ward records that Pegler wrote at least three columns in the war years calling the President a hypocrite for the source of his grandfather's wealth, and that the White House did not respond. Ward adds that Eleanor Roosevelt, visiting Hong Kong in 1953, talked the charges over with a British merchant and concluded that "the Delanos and Forbeses, like everybody else, had to include a limited amount of opium in their cargoes to do any trading at all."⁵¹

Death and estate

Delano died at Algonac on January 17, 1898, nearly two years after his wife's death on February 10, 1896.⁷² The 1899 genealogy records that he "Left personal estate of 1338000."⁷³ The house burned in 1916, was rebuilt in 1917, and was sold by the family in 1955.⁷²

Family papers

The Roosevelt Library holds his papers within the Delano family collection. They include general correspondence from 1830 to 1891, material on his China financial interests from 1835 to 1871, and typescript copies of letters that he wrote to members of Russell and Company during the Opium War, 1840 to 1841.⁷⁴ The Frederic A. Delano papers hold "Transcripts of Letters from Warren Delano II to members of Russell and Co. during the Opium War, 1840-1841," a set of his notes on United States sea trade made about 1877, and a portrait of Warren Delano by Charles L. Elliott dated 1852.⁷⁵