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Jim Nugent
https://uudb.org/articles/johnforbes.html
John Murray Forbes
John
Murray Forbes (February 23, 1813-October 12, 1898), a leading Boston
businessman and philanthropist, financed and operated a great nineteenth
century industrial empire. He and his investment group built a transcontinental
railroad system, controlled the output of mines and forests, and sped the flow
of people and goods throughout America. Railroad historian Richard C. Overton
said that Forbes "stood very much in the same relation to the railroad as
George Washington had to his nation."
The
sixth of eight children of Margaret Perkins and Ralph Bennet Forbes, John was
named after his paternal grandparents, Rev. John Forbes and Dorothea Murray. He
was born in Bordeaux, France, where his family had taken up residence while his
father was conducting business in Europe. Three months after John was born,
they returned to America on the schooner Orders in Council. During the eventful
voyage the ship fought off an attack by Guernsey privateers and was later
captured by a British warship. The Forbeses settled in Milton, Massachusetts.
When John was six, his father died. His three Perkins uncles, wealthy East
India merchants, gave the Forbes family $1,200 annually until the sons were old
enough to work.
Uncle Thomas Handasyd Perkins was
a member of William
Ellery Channing's Federal Street congregation for over three decades. It is
likely that John's mother was raised Unitarian. His sister Emma read the Bible
to the younger children every Sunday. Soon John was called "the
Bishop" because of his scripture knowledge.
John attended
school first at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, then at Round Hill
School in Northampton, Massachusetts, 1823-28. George Bancroft was a teacher
there at the time. In an 1828 school oration, he declared that the Reformation
was "the means of throwing off the yoke of a tyrant more despotic than any
military conqueror . . . We may consider it as the means of raising the
standard [of] Liberty in the Midst of Slavery, of arousing Europe from the
Lethargy of ages."
After working in
Boston as a clerk in his uncles' firm for two years, Forbes shipped out for
Canton to learn the other end of the China trade. Boston firms traded pelts
from Oregon, sandalwood from Hawaii, and opium from Turkey for Chinese tea and
silk. Forbes's cousin J. P. Cushing had worked in Canton for 25 years,
controlling the Turkish opium trade for the Boston trading firms. In 1828
Cushing turned the task over to John's older brother, Thomas. When Thomas was
lost at sea, John found himself thrust into responsibility. He was soon
handling business affairs for Howqua, the wealthy head of the Cohong merchants.
In this capacity he learned to buy and sell, load ships, warehouse goods, and
correspond with partners and financiers.
In 1833 John
returned home to recover from an illness. His sister Mary introduced him to one
of her schoolmates at Elizabeth Peabody's
school, Sarah Hathaway, of a New Bedford Quaker family. John and Sarah married
the next spring. A month later John sailed back to China, hoping to close out
his affairs there so that he could speedily return and live with his wife in
Massachusetts.
Back in Canton,
however, Forbes found that he had been secretly made a partner in the Perkins
firm and already had $14,000 in commissions. In addition, Howqua offered him a
10 percent share in all his ventures on condition that he remain in China three
more years. After serving this term he built up a fortune of $100,000.
In 1837, when Forbes returned to the
United States, he found the country gripped by financial panic. He helped to
keep the family firm solvent during the crisis and managed the American end of
their business until 1840. Afterwards he invested in land, iron, steam, and
railroads and pulled his money out of the volatile China trade. He cultivated a
network of correspondents and used it to stay informed of business
opportunities, political opinion, and the conditions of the financial markets.
Friends and relatives turned to him for investment advice and guidance.
From 1838 to 1840
Forbes tried unsuccessfully to revive his brother Bennet's bankrupt
Farrandsville Coal and Iron Company. Later Forbes and Erastus Corning of Albany
bought the Mount Savage (Maryland) Ironworks for $200,000. In 1844 they added a
rolling mill which produced the first iron rail in America.
In 1846 Forbes,
together with John Woods Brooks and James Frederick Joy, purchased a
dilapidated 145-mile-long railroad running from Detroit to Kalamazoo. They paid
two million dollars to the state of Michigan and then invested more to improve
the road and extend it to Chicago. Forbes served as the President of the
Michigan Central Railroad from 1846 to 1855. In 1852 they ran the first trains
into Chicago from the East. Immigrants poured in, grain poured out, and Forbes
made money.
From 1853 to 1855,
Forbes along with Joy, Fairbanks and others financed and built the St. Mary's
Falls Ship Canal around the rapids between Lake Superior and Lake Huron. For
this they received a 750,000 acre land grant in the mineral rich upper
peninsula of Michigan. Forbes was well-informed of the value of this region as,
five years earlier, Louis Agassiz of Harvard College, Forbes's friend from the
Boston Saturday Club, had led an expedition through the area noting the best
timber and mining lands.
Around this same
period, Forbes and his eastern partners invested in a number of small railroads
in Illinois: the Chicago and Aurora, Illinois Central, Central Military Tract,
Joliet & Northern Indiana, Peoria and Oquawka, and Northern Cross. In 1856
they combined these railroads into the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad
(CB&Q). Between 1856 and 1860, Forbes and his associates bought stock in
the Burlington and Missouri and the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroads with an
eye toward control and consolidation in Iowa and Missouri. Forbes served as a
CB&Q director, 1857-98; President, 1878-81; and then Chairman of the Board.
The "Forbes
Group" of investors were the financial power behind Forbes while he, in
turn, controlled and managed them. Under his direction they acted in concert to
pass favorable laws, mould public opinion, finance major endeavors, and build
their enterprises.
Forbes's success
can be laid to his unobtrusive ways, dogged work habits, and pecuniary probity.
"He never seemed to me a man of acquistiveness, but very distinctively one
of constructiveness," a business partner commented. "His wealth was
only an incident. . . . The good, also, which he anticipated for business and
settlers through opening up the country always weighed much with him."
In politics Forbes
was a Whig until 1850. Until Forbes heard Wendell Phillips's celebrated speech
denouncing the murder of the anti-slavery editor Elijah Lovejoy he had been
neutral or indifferent to the subject of slavery. Forbes later said, "That
speech changed my whole feeling with regard to it, though the bigotry and
pigheadedness of the abolitionists prevented me acting with them." He
supplied money and weapons to New Englanders sent to fight slavery in Kansas
and in 1859 entertained John Brown.
As a Republican he
was an elector for Abraham Lincoln in 1860, and three times a convention
delegate. In February 1861, he was a delegate to the "Peace Congress"
in Washington, D.C. At the same time he was helping to prepare for war. He
helped draw up a plan to reinforce Fort Sumter. He assisted John A. Andrews,
Governor of Massachusetts, to raise four regiments before the call for Union
troops went out.
During the war
Forbes counseled Lincoln and his cabinet, advising on naval preparations and
lobbying for a speedy emancipation proclamation. He sent relief to Union
prisoners in the Confederate Libby Prison, promoted the Sanitary Commission,
supported the Freedman's Commission, served as the first President of the New
England Loyal Publication Society, worked for the Committee of Correspondence
for the Vigorous Prosecution of the War, formed the Committee of One Hundred
for Promoting the Use of Negroes as Soldiers, and was President of the
Massachusetts Recruiting Board. The Secretaries of the Treasury and the Navy
sent him on a secret mission to England in 1863 to procure funds and to prevent
the delivery to the Confederacy of two ironclad ships being built in Liverpool.
Through his influence the ships were seized by the British government just
before they were to sail.
Forbes had a
number of ideas of how to put freed slaves to work. His company attempted in
1862 to replace striking firemen on the Michigan Central Railroad with blacks.
After black troops were authorized, he supported equal pay for them. During the
draft riots in New York City, Forbes suggested using black troops to maintain
order. He promoted a free-labor demonstration plantation at Port Royal, South
Carolina.
Forbes advised and underwrote dozens of
philanthropic endeavors. He served on the board of the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology and supported the Milton Academy. He was affiliated with the
Union Club of Boston and the Saturday Club. In 1847 he chartered a ship and
sent relief to Ireland. He revived the New England Emigrant Aid Society to
encourage northerners to settle in Florida. After the Civil war he supported
the Tuskegee and Hampton Schools and started a Reconstruction Society. In his
final years he led the committee that built the Robert Gould Shaw monument in
Boston.
In 1865 Forbes's
son, William Hathaway Forbes, married Ralph Waldo Emerson's
daughter Edith. According to tradition at First Parish in Milton, the Forbes
family were prominent members of the parish. In 1906 William gave land on Adams
Street in Milton for a parsonage. Forbes himself seldom mentioned organized
religion in his letters or reminiscences. He knew the major scientists and
thinkers of his time, including most of the leading Unitarian preachers and
activists in the Boston area. He treated Emerson to a cross-country train trip
and entertained William Henry Channing and James Freeman Clarke.
Daughter Sarah
Forbes Hughes said, "he always went to hear 'Brother Putnam,' as he called
his friend, Dr. George Putnam, the distinguished minister in Roxbury. He also
much admired Theodore
Parker, while for Mr. Emerson his reverence was very deep." As he got
older Forbes expressed more doubt about religion. His daughter relates that,
"Later on he seemed not to care to much about churches, saying, 'We all
know very little.' Once he said to me that 'universal law presupposes a
law-giver,' and that 'somehow we must believe in thought behind matter.'"
Forbes's corporate
financial manipulations and labor practices would not pass muster today, not to
mention the Opium trade. In his own time, however, he was a cut above his contemporaries
in his business practices. It was for the use Forbes made of his wealth that he
was greatly appreciated. Emerson said of him, "Never was such force, good
meaning, good sense, good action, combined with such domestic lovely behavior,
such modesty and persistent preference for others. Wherever he moved he was the
benefactor . . . How little this man suspects, with his sympathy for men and
his respect for lettered and scientific people, that he is not likely, in any
company, to meet a man superior to himself."
The Forbes Family
Papers are in the Baker Library, Graduate School of Business Administration, at
Harvard University. The Chicago, Burlington, & Quincy Railroad Archives and
the Illinois Central Railroad Archives are in the Newberry Library, Chicago,
Illinois. Forbes's student paper, "The Reformation," is in the
Maryland Historical Society, in Baltimore, Maryland. John Lauritz Larson, Bonds
of Enterprise: John Murray Forbes and Western Development in America's Railway
Age (1984, rev. ed. 2001) is the most useful reference on Forbes's
business life. His family and politics are covered in Sarah Forbes Hughes,
ed., Letters and recollections of John Murray Forbes, 2 vols.
(1899); Reminiscences of John Murray Forbes, 3 vols. (1902);
and Letters of John Murray Forbes, 3 vols. (1905).
The biographies
are Roderick Stebbins, John Murray Forbes, A Sermon (1899);
Edward Waldo Emerson, "John Murray Forbes," Atlantic Monthly (December
1899); and Henry Greenleaf Pearson, An American Railroad Builder: John
Murray Forbes (1911). See also Robert Bennet Forbes, Remarks
on China and the China Trade (1844); Edward Waldo Emerson, The
Early Years of the Saturday Club: 1855-1870 (1917); Thomas C.
Cochran, Railroad Leaders 1845-1890: The Business Mind in Action (1953);
R. V. Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence (1959); R. C.
Overton, Burlington Route: A History of the Burlington Lines (1965);
Stanley Paterson, & Carl Seaburg, Merchant Prince of Boston:
Colonel Thomas Handysyd Perkins, 1764-1854 (1971); J. F. Stover, History
of the Illinois Central Railroad (1975); J. N. Dickinson, To
Build A Canal: Sault Ste. Marie 1853-1854 & After (1981); and
Patrick H. Stakem, "The Mount Savage Iron Works: Western Maryland's
Industrial (little) Giant," Western Maryland Chapter, National
Railway Historical Society (July 1997).
Article by Jim Nugent
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