As I was reading these two chapters,I could not help thinking about the latest opium problem that we see in the 'headlines' and on the 'news'.Time has done nothing to lessen the tragedy of society and opium.From the beginning it's malignant properties have been known,but that has never stopped unscrupulous men from poisoning their fellow man in the name of capitalism. From Turkey to the Golden Triangle,to the current poppy fields in Afghanistan,a trail of dead bodies in its wake ,opium has been the elite's secret weapon for ages now. Way past time someone went down for all the misery the abuse of the plant has done to society,same thing with the plant in S.America. Both plants in their natural state are benign compared to 'man's science' we find in our streets.If You Think the original Drug Dealing people gave up their part of the goose,that just says you have never been in the street. Why would they?I swear Heroin and Cocaine should be made legal in this country to take every rotten blood soaked last dollar out of the American market and out of their pockets.Prohibition on anything last worked like NEVER, how long a society allows a man made plague to continue as such says much about the leadership and condition of that society.....
Chapter 14
THE OPIUM BROTHERHOOD
The use of the drug opium had already been around for thousands
of years when crusading Templars were introduced to it by the
Arabs. Opium had been cultivated from 6000 B.C.E. in Europe and was
found in neolithic burials in southern Spain dating to 4200 B.C.E. The
culture we recognize as the world's first higher civilization, Sumeria,
had a name for opium, hul-gil, or "joy plant," a name that was in use up
to 5,400 years ago. An Egyptian medical text dating to 1550 B.C.E. listed
a long list of ailments opium would relieve. The Greeks, whose mystic
cults used opium in religious rituals, prescribed it for problems such as
headaches, epilepsy, coughs, and kidney stones. At the same time, they
understood it was addictive. Homer refers to opium as the drug of forgetfulness. The Romans used it as a painkiller and as a poison, putting
large amounts of the drug in the wine of the intended victim. From the Mediterranean cultures of Galen and Pliny, the drug spread east to Arabic physicians. Muslim peoples not only inherited the medicinal uses of the drug from these ancient societies but also held the drug in high recreational esteem; in a land that prohibited alcohol, opium was a good substitute. Opium traveled east with the Muslim traders who preceded Marco Polo on land and crossed the Indian Ocean by ship.
During the Crusades, the secretive sect known as the Assassins used the drug hashish to experience the pleasures of heaven. Such enlightenment prepared them for their missions, as they were no longer afraid to die for their faith. The Knights Templar were soon aware of the Assassins and hashish, as well as of opium. The knights returned with tales of the usefulness of these new drugs, to give courage, as opium did, and to motivate men in battle, as did hashish.
Opium use in Europe had declined after the fall of the Roman Empire, only to increase again after Crusaders reintroduced the drug. After the demise of the Templars in 1307, there is little written on the subject, but opium remained in demand and explorers from Vasco da Gama, a member of the Knights of Christ, to Columbus and Cabot were instructed to obtain the magic elixir.1 The medieval alchemist Paracelsus called it "the stone of immortality."
During his travels on the Indian Ocean, Afonso de Albuquerque was acquainted with the usefulness of opium and advised the Portuguese king about the potential profit that existed in buying and reselling the drug. In a letter to his king, who was the grand master of the Knights of Christ, Albuquerque wrote, "I would order poppies . . . to be sown in all the fields of Portugal."2 It was a lesson that the Europeans failed to take to heart. It was easier to buy Turkish or Indian opium.
OPIUM COMES TO THE AMERICAS
The Pilgrims understood the benefit of the drug and took it with them
on their travels to America in 1620. Laudanum was the name given to
the Pilgrims' mixture of opium, wine, saffron, cinnamon, and cloves.
The Pilgrims brought a second opium-based concoction, paregoric, in
which the drug was mixed with licorice, honey, benzoic acid, camphor,
and anise oil. Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a member of the Continental Congress, was the surgeon general of the Continental army. He did much to advance the use of medicines and his "heroic therapy," which incorporated opium. In fact, this therapy later provided a name for opium's favored derivative, heroin. Rush prescribed opium for cholera, for relief of intestinal spasms, and as part of a mixture for enemas.
Like all drugs, opium had its downside. Physicians who prescribed it for a period of four days or less best understood the power of the poppy. An opium dependence goes beyond a habit; the opium becomes as fundamental as food and water, as the user's body is actually altered chemically and cannot function without the drug.3 If one maintains a healthy lifestyle and uses opium properly, the drug can be part of daily existence; many prominent and not-so-prominent people have survived decades-long drug habits. But the nature of opium is not conducive to a healthy lifestyle. Addicts experience physical deterioration, such as gastric and circulatory disorders. The mental effects exhibit themselves in a loss of interest in both personal hygiene and anyone except one's source of the drug. The body appears to feed on itself, becoming emaciated from lack of food. From hepatitis and liver damage to skin disease and respiratory disease, the body begins a descent matched only by the mind's descent. Forgetfulness, lethargy, and irritability are the daily range of emotions suffered by the opium addict.
Today's modern "improvement" of the opium-based group, which includes morphine and heroin, renders the deadly effects of addiction within days. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the opium smoker started on a slower road that led to the final impact: death. Although these effects were fully known, as they are today, knowledge of them did not stop the trade; it continues to this day.
THE OPIUM TRADE
The cornerstone of colonial trade was the super commodity. The commodity for Portugal had been the black slave; the commodity that grew
Spain's empire was silver. The Dutch would lead the way into the spice
trade, creating huge demand for pepper and other herbs back home in
Europe. Britain and France discovered the commodities that were
referred to as food-drugs: sugar, tea, coffee, and alcoholic beverages such
as rum. Colonizing America was not just about finding places to dump
the undesirable populations of Europe; it was also about making a
profit. Getting England addicted to Chinese tea was easy; keeping a trade balance became more difficult. In 1700 the British East India Company imported twenty thousand pounds of tea. Six years later that figure grew 400 percent to a hundred thousand pounds. By 1766 the cost of tea imports was becoming impossible to meet with silver. When the figure hit six million pounds, it became clear that tea would drain England of silver unless something was done.
Up until the eighteenth century, drug use in the world was never described as an epidemic or plague, but the British would change that. The Chinese had discovered the pleasure of smoking opium, first mixed with tobacco, which was brought by the Dutch, then in a pure form. The British East India Company cornered the opium-producing market and sold its drugs to willing Asians. In every southeast Asian country where Britain's empire was active, the government was forced to admit Indian opium. The Chinese had the most money to spend, and their extravagance easily spread opium use. Opium was expensive to bring to market, but China had such a large wealthy ruling class that there were enough customers who could afford to buy and use the drug on a regular basis. The British East India Company had found a way to correct the tea trade imbalance.
Today we often dismiss the crimes of the past as simply being "the way things were." The British and American traders, however, should not be dismissed so lightly. "They were not ignorant of what sort of substance they were selling. They knew it was a poison. They knew it was addictive."4
By 1836 China imported enough opium to make the drug the largest revenue-producing commodity in the world. It enriched a handful while destroying the social and political structure of China. By this time the drug merchants included Americans. The great motivator, greed, was as powerful to Boston's blue bloods as it was to the English. This greed is the reason the drug trade continues today, and why the Western world, specifically America and Europe, is experiencing a drug epidemic. Ironically, it is the former victims of American and European colonialism that are now exporting the drugs to their ex-colonial overlords.
The British and American traders who took part in what was called the China trade often had little the Chinese were willing to buy. The Chinese wanted silver and raw Indian cotton, and America and Europe wanted tea. An exception to the rule was ginseng; America's ginseng, produced in New England and the Appalachian region, was regarded as an aphrodisiac in China. But the market for ginseng was too small to balance America's demand for tea. There were two alternatives. The first was opium. The Chinese were already consumers of opium for almost a thousand years, but they had brewed it into tea. Like many other natural drugs, the opium tea did not cause the debilitating effects that opium smoking and opium derivatives caused. Similarly, the effect of chewing coca leaves on the Andean population of South America had some negative side effects, but nothing like the damage caused by addiction to the refined version of the plant, cocaine. In both cases the refinement of a natural plant created a substance that caused addiction.
The Europeans created the opium addiction. Shortly after discovering the pleasures of tobacco in the American colonies, the Dutch brought the new commodity to China; the Dutch most likely introduced both tobacco and opium smoking. The horrors of addiction quickly became known to the Chinese. In 1729 Chinese Emperor Yung Cheng prohibited the sale and use of opium in his country as anything but medicine. When the British East India Company assumed control over Bengal and Bihar, the opium-producing districts of India, it greatly expanded the trade. By 1767 the company was importing two thousand chests, each filled with 170 pounds of pure opium, each year.
As in America, the British established trade monopolies. The Indian growers, by law, had to sell to the British East India Company. But the British love of profit was no match for the Chinese edict, and the company could no longer sell to China. Instead, the British East India Company became the middleman that bought the opium from the Indian producers and sold to English and American merchants who were willing to run the risk of shipping the product.
In 1799 the Chinese emperor Kia King made all opium trade illegal. This very act most likely served to increase the profits that were made in the trade, as both the price of opium and the amount consumed increased. The British Levant Company, another nationally chartered business syndicate, purchased half the Turkish opium crop and brought it to Europe, where it was sold as medicine.
British and American ships participated in the trade by carrying goods that were attractive to Turkey and India, like tin, lead, and wool. They carried the opium to China, where thousands of pounds of the drug filled chests that were exchanged for tea, spices, and exotic goods.
Another product the Chinese wanted was fur. This provided a lever for the Americans to lift the British monopoly on the China trade. John Jacob Astor's ships were among the first to sail to the Pacific Northwest, where they harvested the coats of seals and otters. Although the Native tribes had hunted the wildlife for centuries, it took only a few years for the hunting to drive the populations to the point of near extinction. This, in turn, made the hunt more expensive.
America as a nation did not sanction the buying and selling of opium, but it did not forbid it either. The American participants in this trade did nothing illegal as far as their own country was concerned. They were, however, breaking Chinese law, as it was illegal to distribute opium there. Like the British, the Americans could rely on their country to invoke protective policy when China attempted to enforce its law. Both Britain and the United States maintained a naval presence to protect their commerce. China, which had no navy, was unable to enforce its laws on its coastline. British and American traders took advantage by occupying Asian islands, where they kept warehouses. Without ships or a coast guard, China could not approach the islands. Just in case of the unlikely inspection by a Chinese mandarin assigned to customs duty, the opium was usually kept aboard floating warehouses—ships that would not make voyages but simply float off the coasts of the occupied islands. From these warehouse ships Chinese merchants bought opium and smuggled it into Canton or the interior of China.
Remarkably, the opium trade was officially prohibited by the British government, but the prohibition was ignored as the government chartered British East India Company profited from the trade. The partners of the company were the elite of a nation that could simply outlaw competition and disregard the country's own laws.
The Dundas family was steeped in Masonry, and the tradition carries into later times. Thomas Dundas, the second Earl of Zetland, became grand master in 1844 and remained in that post until 1870. The Dundas clan brought Masonry to Hong Kong, and the first lodge in that city, chartered in 1846, was named for their lodge in England: the Zetland Lodge No. 525.
LORDS AND DRUG LORDS
At the same time that England defended its right to distribute opium
in China, it took to restricting the drug business at home. The government began monitoring the pharmaceutical houses that were expanding the use of opium in Europe. England went to war twice to protect
the illegal trade conducted by the country's elite; the 1,000 percent
profit was enough to entice the country to protect the illegal trade. In the nineteenth century the drug lords of Britain were the Jardines, the
Mathesons, and the Sutherlands—all Scots ushered into prosperity
thanks to Dundas. These families built dynasties that are still in power
today, while millions of Chinese became addicted to opium.5 
Jardine and Matheson early success was the result of working in close cooperation with the British East India Company. The British East India Company had a monopoly on tea, which was legal until 1833. When Britain officially agreed not to ship opium, Jardine and Matheson—headquartered in Hong Kong—provide the loophole by bringing in the drug. The British East India Company was provided with tea, but its ships did not actually carry the opium. The drug was still packaged with company seals to ensure its quality, however.
Jardine and Matheson was controlled by family and Masonic relationships, and like their American counterparts they wore their family names like a badge. James Matheson, cofounder of Jardine and Matheson, had a nephew, Hugh, who would invest opium profits in mining. Hugh Matheson founded Rio Tinto Zinc Company, which is still in operation today. Alliances with the key banks Schroeder's and Barings provided the ability to move on a global scale.
In Contemporary Times
The Barings, who later were instrumental in founding the
Peninsula and Oriental Steamship lines, were already a force in international trade when they began financing the opium trade. James
Matheson's mother's family, the MacKays, who held the title of Earl of
Inchcape, until recently controlled the board of the steamer lines.
Before steam was the power of choice, opium was carried by clipper
ships, which were built for speed. Two of the first opium clippers were
the Alexander Baring and the Falcon. The Barings financed many
American firms in various businesses, including the Binghams and
Stephen Girard. Girard, like Astor, was an early pioneer of the China
trade, but he was quickly eclipsed by New England merchants. The British had the early lead in the importation of opium and were often the target of Chinese legislation and activity. This is why the British allowed American ships to enter the trade and often financed them. In this way the British were not directly breaking China's prohibition, but the British lenders and shippers would make money from their investments in the American ships.
THE PROFITS OF THE CHINA TRADE
The British families had been benefiting from the trade for a century,
but the Americans caught up quickly. To the chagrin of the British, the
Americans went to Turkey to buy lower-grade opium that competed
with the better British-grown Indian grades. Americans proved themselves adept at smuggling and grew wealthy from the trade. A recent book called The Wealthy 100 created a unique ranking of Americans by wealth and the proportion of that wealth in relation to the gross national product. John Jacob Astor, born in 1763, ranked third; Stephen Girard, born in 1750, was fourth; Elias Hasket Derby, born in 1739, was number 38; smuggler John Hancock, born in 1737, was number 54; and the not as well known Thomas Handasyd Perkins, born in 1764, was ranked number 78.6 While opium traders Astor and Girard ranked much higher, Thomas Perkins was even more influential, as he brought scores of American blue bloods into the trade.
THE HOUSE THAT PERKINS BUILT
Not only did these families create wealth, but also they then created industries that survived and prospered for decades to come. One industry was insurance. The Perkinses understood the value of spreading risk; they would often be financed in part by the first families of New England, who wanted their share of the area's most lucrative trade, and in part by insurance.
Marine insurance is regarded as the grandfather of all modern forms of insurance in America, and it got its start in New England insuring cargo from basic commodities to slaves and opium. Connecticut was home to some of America's first insurance companies. Many have survived intact or as parts of larger companies, though few realize their foundation was insuring the drug and slave traders in the early nineteenth century.
Born in 1764, Thomas Perkins decided early that Harvard was not where he would seek his fortune. Instead he apprenticed with shipping merchants and his older brother, James, who was in the Santo Domingo—New England part of the triangle trade. Thomas married Sarah Elliot, whose father was a British tobacco trader, and through his new family connections made his start in business aboard one of Elias Derby's ships.
Derby was Salem's most important merchant, and the shipping business made him very rich. Today he is regarded as America's first millionaire and a trailblazer of global commerce. Derby's father started their business importing sugar from the West Indies. Because this was made illegal by Britain's restrictive trade acts, it was a fine sort of revenge that led Derby into privateering against British cargo ships during the Revolution. While many succumbed to the risks, Derby prospered. In the postwar period his ships sailed around the world, and his Grand Turk was the first New England ship to reach the Chinese port of Canton, in 1785. Thomas Perkins sailed as the supercargo, the person responsible for transacting the ship's business, with the ship commanded by Captain James Magee, who was related to Derby's wife.
Perkins was responsible for obtaining a good price for the cargo on board the ship. He would then take the proceeds, in whatever form, and invest them in a suitable cargo to bring home. The trade was not always direct, which made the job of the supercargo even more important. Often the supercargo would receive instructions to buy and sell in any way deemed necessary to ensure the owner's profit. On slave ships the captain and supercargo often conspired to abandon some of the crew in order to increase the share of the profits for those who remained.
The Perkins family had little problem with the morality—or lack of morality—of the trade, as its previous business was the slave and sugar trade in Santo Domingo. In 1792 a slave insurrection in that country ruined the Perkinses' business, so James and Thomas formed a new partnership as J. and T. H. Perkins. It did not take more than one successful voyage to become wealthy, and the many successful Perkins voyages made Thomas both wealthy and powerful.
For the crew who traveled on a Perkins ship, life was not as comfortable or as lucrative. In 1814 Charles Tyng was a thirteen-year-old who had run away from school. Colonel Thomas Perkins, who received his title by serving in the Massachusetts militia, took the boy aboard a China-bound ship; Thomas's brother had married the boy's aunt. If the four-foot eight-inch teenager had expected any benefits from being related to the wealthy shipowner, he soon found out the opposite was true. His uncle John Higginson was supercargo aboard the ship, and the first words young Charles heard from him were instructions to the carpenter to beat the boy.
Tyng was beaten daily for minor infractions, for not knowing his way about the ship, and for the amusement of those in charge. He was thrown in the hog pen as punishment. Tyng was even denied adequate clothing for the passage around Cape Horn, and he was handed over to three unusually obese women, wives of a Hawaiian king, for their sexual amusement. Charles Tyng survived his brief stint working for his uncles, and after being twice cheated by them later, he left their employ. Tyng left his memoirs preserving the tales of the opium trade and of the Perkinses' role.7
The other men aboard the Perkinses' ship fared better, but the ship was under provisioned and ran out of food on the way to Canton. This also happened on the return trip. The ship's owners netted four hundred thousand dollars for their efforts, or lack thereof, as they sat home in New England.
While today the memoirs of New England's first families and the museums dedicated to those clans downplay the role of opium and black slaves in building New England's fortunes, their involvement in those trades is undeniable. Shippers could fare well carrying tobacco and cotton to Rotterdam and London, but fortunes were built on trading opium for tea in China. Salem's wives had grown fond of Chinese lacquer furniture and Eastern silk gowns,8 and when the East India Marine Hall opened, Asian dress was the order of the evening. Smuggling opium had its rewards, and both T H. Perkins and opium kingpin Joseph Russell became extremely prominent merchants as a result of their shipping businesses. Their wealth gave them power and access to government. Perkins and Russell traveled to France to carry out their ventures and to act on behalf of their country during the Monroe administration. During the War of 1812, Russell was made charge d'affaires of the United States at the Court of Saint James's.
Perkins was a principal member of the Federalist party and was elected to the Senate eight times. He was also the president of the Boston branch of the United States Bank (in which post he was succeeded by a Cabot). Perkins made his money from the opium trade before the drug business led to open war in China, and invested the profits into sawmills, gristmills, textiles, and the railroad business— including the Boston and Lowell, the Boston and Providence, and other railroads farther west. With his combined interests, Perkins was soon considered the wealthiest man in New England. Many New England family fortunes began with investments in the Perkins China ventures. As a community leader, Perkins did what many slave traders, drug smugglers, and robber barons would do: He became a philanthropist. His charities included the Perkins Institute for the Blind and Massachusetts General Hospital.9
As Thomas Perkins devoted himself to European affairs and his business interests in New England, he turned over the day-to-day responsibilities of opium trafficking to his relatives. His children also made connections through marriage, wedding Cabots, Gardiners, Higginsons, Forbeses, and Cushing's.
THE CUSHING INHERITANCE
While relationships to the Perkins business and family were the start of
many fortunes, they were also the start of several political careers. One
of the most powerful political families that had ties to the Perkinses
were the Cushings. In China the Boston-based Cushing family soon became responsible for operating the Perkins family business. Thomas Cushing was already an active merchant during the eighteenth century. As a businessman, Cushing would sometimes collect intelligence on the Tories, but he was reluctant to share it. He was against the Revolution, as he feared it would interfere with his shipping business. But Cushing overcame his fears when he found that he could make a fortune overcharging both the Americans and the French for supplies. Such excessive profiteering was shared by Otis and Gerry, and even smaller merchants did not consider it wrong to gouge the military.
Chief among a cadre of Thomas Cushings nephews was John Perkins Cushing, who started out as the head of the American hong, or house of foreign trade, in Canton. John Cushing's mother was Ann Perkins, and her connections would allow him access to wealth known to very few. After the early death of his mother, young Cushing was raised by T. H. Perkins.
John Cushing started his career in the counting house of the Perkins home office, but was sent to Canton at age seventeen to further his education. A year later he was in charge of the Canton branch, the epicenter of Perkins's profit machine. Cushing developed an early friendship with one of China's most powerful merchants, Houqua, who was head of the Cohong, the community of Chinese merchants. The friendship of Houqua meant everything for a foreign merchant. Soon Cushing was regarded as the most influential American in Canton.
Cushing stayed in Canton for twenty-five years and increased his personal wealth by buying ships and shares in ships. In 1830 he retired from the China trade and sold his own interests. He returned to New England, where he married Louisa Gardiner and built city mansions and country estates for himself. But he never fully retired, as he made investments in the Chinese voyages of others. Cushing's family wealth was earned entirely in drug trafficking with China, and his descendants ensured that the trade did not end.
Caleb Cushing's political career started in the House of Representatives, and after the suspicious death of William Henry Harrison in 1843, Cushing was sent by the new president Tyler to China as U.S. Commissioner. In China, Cushing did more to represent the Perkins-Cushing interests in the opium-smuggling business than the interests of his country. China, beaten by the British navy in the war, lacked the ability to stand up to the threats of Cushing. The country granted American ships the use of five ports.
Cushing went on to promote war against Mexico, plot with secessionists, and conspire against Zachary Taylor. The death of Taylor elevated Cushing to attorney general of the United States.
THE STURGIS FAMILY
At the same time that John Perkins Cushing was beginning his career
in the opium trade, another Perkins relative was also achieving success.
The Sturgis's were one of the first families of Massachusetts, claiming
descent from Edward Sturgis, who arrived in 1630. The family started
in farming, but the marriage of Russell Sturgis to Elizabeth Perkins,
Thomas's sister, ensured the Sturgis family's fortune in the shipping
business. Thomas Perkins would invest with Russell Sturgis in the Hope,
and Sturgis set sail for China. Meanwhile, one of Russell's sons, James Perkins Sturgis, was sent to the island of Lintin, just outside of Hong Kong, to manage the storage facilities for all the opium traders. Because opium importing was illegal, Lintin served as what might be called a drop house—a large terminal for all the ships carrying opium.
As the Sturgis family wealth grew, Nathaniel Russell Sturgis teamed up with George Robert Russell, who started Russell and Company, the most important opium-trafficking firm of the 1830s. A Russell Sturgis headed Barings Bank, which financed the opium trade. The women in the Sturgis clan did their part as well. Elizabeth Perkins Sturgis married Henry Grew, and their daughter, Jane, married J. P. Morgan's only son, John Pierpont Morgan.
RUSSELL AND COMPANY
Russell's chief of operations in Canton was Warren Delano Jr., the grandfather of future president Franklin Roosevelt. Russell partners who contributed funds to mount his overseas ventures included John Cleve Green, who financed Princeton, and Abiel Abbot Low, who financed construction at Columbia University in New York.10 [The original drug dealers DC]
The Russell family had a tremendous influence at Yale, and their relationship continues to the present day. Yale was originally called the Collegiate School. In early colonial times Elihu Yale served with the British East India Company. He made a fortune with the company and became governor of Madras in India in 1687. Later in life Yale gave away much of his wealth, and Cotton Mather renamed the Collegiate School in Yale's honor in 1718.
Joseph Coolidge was another Russell investor, as were members of the Perkins, Sturgis, and Forbes families. The Perkinses and Russell's were soon united in a merger. Coolidge's son organized United Fruit, which kept the colonial interests of many of New England's influential families tied together. His grandson, Archibald C. Coolidge, was a founder of the Council on Foreign Relations.11
Samuel Russell's cousin William Huntington Russell set up a trust a Yale that created a unique organization of elite families under the name of the Skull and Bones. Russell's cofounder was Alfonso Taft. The Skull and Bones is a very secretive order that admits only fifteen new members each year. Prominent families that have been part of this organization include the Harrimans, Bushes, Kerrys, Tafts, Whitneys, Bundys, Weyerhaeuser's, Pinchot's, Goodyears, Sloanes, Stimson's, Phelpses, Pillsbury's, Kellogg's,Vanderbilts, and Lovetts.
While the Russell shipping empire became one of the greatest and most far-reaching, there is still one more New England family that played a significant role in the trade.
THE FORBES CLAN
When the Cushings left China, the Forbes family took over operations.
The Forbeses were not the first in the opium trade with China, but they
brought drug smuggling to its highest level of profitability and left a
legacy that extends into modern times. The Forbes family roots reach well back into Scotland, where they can be traced to at least the thirteenth century. Sir Alexander Forbes, the first Lord Forbes, was granted lands in 1423 and was made a lord of Parliament in 1445. Incessant warfare in both Scotland and England made loyalty to the king precarious. Well before the massive Scottish immigration after Culloden in 1745, the Forbeses, who were Protestants (and therefore not Jacobites), were already situated in Massachusetts and connected with the families that would become American "aristocracy." As with the Gardiners and others illicit traders, the fortune accumulated by the Forbeses in opium trading was invested in land and industry. John and Robert Forbes would lead the way to the family fortune.
John Murray Forbes (1813-1898), the son of Ralph Bennet Forbes and Margaret Perkins Forbes, started his business career at age fifteen in the Boston countinghouse of bis uncles James and Thomas Perkins. John Forbes was soon allowed to travel to Canton to represent the Perkins syndicate, and he stayed for seven years. In 1837, at the age of twenty-four, Forbes returned from Canton so wealthy that he could finance the construction of several railroads, including the Michigan Central Railroad, which he bought unfinished and extended to Lake Michigan and Chicago.
Forbes became a prime mover, leading a group of capitalists who could raise millions to complete acquisitions of companies. Many had previously invested with Forbes in the China trade, and they remained grateful for and loyal because of the fortunes they had reaped. Forbes continued to extend the Michigan Central's service, to Detroit and into Canada, and he built other railways including the Hannibal and Saint Joseph Railroad in Missouri and the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad, of which he served as president.
NAUSHON ISLAND
Following the lesson of Gardiner, John Forbes bought an island where
he could conduct business isolated from the prying eyes of neighbors.
Like Gardiner's Island, the island of Naushon, just south of the Woods
Hole area of Cape Cod, served as a protectorate for smugglers for as
long as Massachusetts was a colony. The shifting sandbars and the isolation from the active ports of the New England coast protected many
lawbreaking merchants. The island first belonged to one of Massachusetts's most elite families, the Winthrops. There is little evidence that they were involved in the merchant trade. John Winthrop, the leader of seven hundred Puritans, was the first of the family who came to America. John Winthrop's idea of religion was that it was something to be imposed on others. The Taliban form of Islam is an apt comparison to the religious vision of John Winthrop. Puritans made it a crime to miss church, to dance, to sing, and to celebrate Christmas; likewise, the Taliban made it a crime to miss prayers, to dance, to sing, and to celebrate (as opposed to observe) Islamic festival days. Both fundamentalist groups punished their people with torture and humiliation.
As governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Winthrop opposed democracy as well, believing his colony should be governed by a handful of pious leaders. Fleeing religious persecution apparently did not mean that Winthrop would hesitate to persecute others, and in America's first incidence of religious persecution, he banished Anne Hutchinson from the colony. Such elitism pervaded the thinking of the rulers of Massachusetts up to—and even after—the American Revolution.
The second family to own the island was the Bowditch's. They would never enjoy the power of the Winthrops or the wealth of the Forbeses, but the Bowditch's were industrious seafarers and the family was very well connected with Massachusetts blue bloods. William Bowditch sailed to America in the seventeenth century, when the family began making its living from the sea. Habakkuk Bowditch, a son who began a career at sea in the mid-eighteenth century, lost two ships and two sons to the sea and had taken up the cooper trade when his fourth son, Nathaniel, achieved long-lasting fame. Born in 1773 in Salem, Nathaniel enjoyed mathematics more than anything else, and this skill would revive the family's status. Even while in his teens, Nathaniel was renowned for his knowledge of mathematics and languages, to the point that others brought him books to further his education. He spoke French, Spanish, and German and understood Latin, and he even studied two dozen other languages. Remarkably, he found an error in Newton's Principia.
During the Revolution a privateer from Beverly captured a ship carrying the library of a noted Irish scholar. A group of merchants bought the books and housed them in the Philosophical Library, where Nathaniel Bowditch could continue his mostly self-taught education. Despite his widespread reputation, he still had to go to sea to make his fortune. Bowditch worked as a supercargo and made five voyages and a huge fortune, while at the same time making lunar calculations to navigate without the use of a chronometer. Legendary status came when Bowditch navigated into Salem Harbor during a blinding snowstorm.12 He combined his book knowledge and practical experience to enhance the ability of American merchants to navigate their own country. Bowditch rewrote the American Coastal Pilot and then later produced his own book, The New American Practical Navigator, which served as a tool for navigating treacherous American waters until the government took over the responsibility fifty years later.13 Bowditch's premier work is simply referred to as "Bowditch" by sailors; it remains a classic in the field. Since 1802 it has been reprinted in seventy editions.
Bowditch, who married his cousin Mary Ingersoll, refused mathematics chairs at several universities, including Harvard, the University of Virginia, and West Point, instead preferring his position as president of the Essex Fire and Marine Insurance Company.14
At the entrance to Buzzards Bay, Naushon, the Bowditch's' private island, was more of an island kingdom than a summer home. When Kidd rushed around planting his treasure, Naushon Tarpaulin Cove and Gardiner's Island were his last stops. In the years preceding the Revolution, the cove served as a hiding place where smugglers could wait to unload their merchandise.
A lighthouse was built on Naushon just before the Revolutionary War to protect the ships navigating the shoals. During the Revolution it served as a meeting place for privateers. James Bowditch, Nathaniel's brother, fought the government's efforts to improve the lighthouse, as guests were unwanted. When James died in 1817, an improved lighthouse was erected. At this point the Bowditch family, which had owned Naushon for more than a century, sold the island to the Forbeses. Since then the "kingdom" has been in the hands of various Forbes family members and trusts.
THE FORBES FAMILY
AND NAUSHON ISLAND
John Murray Forbes married into another first family of New England
when he wed Sarah Hathaway of New Bedford. Their five children
included William Hathaway Forbes, who married Edith Emerson (a relative of Ralph Waldo Emerson's) and became president of the newly
formed Bell Telephone, John Malcolm Forbes, and Mary Hathaway
Forbes, who married a Russell. The Hathaway, Forbes, and Perkins families were united in a merger with Russell and Company even before John and Sarah Forbes were united in marriage. Money from the opium trade and later investments ensured the prominence of the family for generations to come. The grandson of John Murray Forbes, William Cameron Forbes, was appointed by Teddy Roosevelt as governor general of the Philippines, and was later appointed to a post in Asia by President Harding.
John Forbes's brother was Robert Bennet Forbes (1804-1889), who was known as "Black Ben" Forbes. His historical biography notes his exploits as a sea captain in the China trade but ignores his involvement in the opium business. At age thirteen Robert Forbes sailed for his uncles to China, and at age twenty-four, when Perkins and Russell merged their companies to form the most powerful American house in China, young Robert secured the lucrative post of running the Lintin operation.
Forbes left China in 1834 to marry Rose Green Smith, and he almost lost his fortune in the Panic of 1837. Seeking to rebuild his wealth, Forbes went back to China and played a prominent role in the outbreak of the Opium War, during which Russell and Company prospered. Forbes was made the head of the company, replacing John C. Green. By 1850 Forbes owned interests in more than sixty ships and was the American vice-consul to China and France. In his later life Forbes was noted for his contribution to the U.S. Navy during the Civil War, and he became the first commodore of the Boston Yacht Club.
THE SYNDICATE
The early shipping business was unusually risky and the loss of a single
ship was a disaster to some companies. Often the way to spread the risk
was to "syndicate" the business so that merchants took shares in one
another's companies. In addition to the Perkins and Russell syndicates,
a third syndicate drew in some important personages. Augustine Heard was an Ipswich merchant whose father participated in the often illegal molasses and sugar trade. He too relished the thought of getting revenge on the harsh and restrictive trade laws that favored the home country at the expense of the colonies, so he became a privateer. Heard started his career in the counting house and then became a supercargo. In 1807 he sailed to Smyrna aboard the Betsy.15 The Heard Company started by selling ginseng and otter skins but soon joined the opium trade. Heard's partners included John Forbes, John Green, and Joseph Coolidge.
The American base of the opium trade moved south from the ports of New England to New York. Families who were prominent in Connecticut became equally important in New York. Ultimately, the drug-smuggling families would attain the White House.
Chapter 15
OPIUM: FROM THE
LODGE
TO THE DEN
During the glory years of the China trade, New York succeeded
Boston as the center of American shipping. Ships and warehouses lined South Street's three-mile-long stretch of piers a few short
blocks from Wall Street's Tontine Coffee House, which served as the
center of the growing financial industry. The waterfront was so busy
that spectators came to watch the hustle of dockworkers, shipbuilders,
and auctioneers. Hammers clanged, barrels rolled, auctioneers shouted,
and thousands worked hard building and loading ships. Skilled labor
was so in demand that a sail maker was paid a previously unheard of
four dollars a day. Ships sailed from New York to all ports. Similar to New England's Brahmin families, many New York families achieved great wealth in the drug trade. American shippers had as many excuses for involvement in the trade as their British counterparts. And like the British, the Americans had less to offer as exports, and the new country became the dumping ground for British wares. The American families brought to China ginseng, furs, and opium, their only valued goods.
It should be noted that the trade was not illegal in the United States. What has become labeled the "China trade," which included tea and opium, furs, and furniture, reduces the stigma that might be perceived in modern times. Not all of the China traders carried opium, and their activity was not considered criminal. The laws that were broken were only those of another nation's, a common enough attitude in colonial expansionist times. Although the morality of the opium trade was questioned by a handful, both the British and American governments had no quarrel with any aspects of the China trade.
NEW YORK'S WEALTHIEST CITIZEN
America's richest opium smuggler was possibly John Jacob Astor. In
1800 Astor was worth $250,000 when the average American family had
an income of $750. When he died in 1848 his wealth was equal to
almost 1 percent of the entire country's gross national product.1 Astor's wealth was made in numerous ways, but his opium fortune was a direct result of the British East India Company's granting him a license to sell furs to China and to engage in the opium trade. The fur business was soon abandoned in all but name. In 1816 Astor's American Fur Company actually sailed directly to Turkey to buy ten tons of opium, which was then sold illegally in Canton.
Astor's rapid rise to great wealth is an unlikely story. The son of a German butcher, Astor came to America in 1784 at age twenty-one. He reportedly spoke very little English, although he had lived for a short time in London. He is described as having no grace, charm, or wit; he is even said to have once wiped his hands on the table linens at a dinner party. Yet Astor's gruff manners and poor English did not stop him from rapidly entering society. He quickly married into wealth and breeding in the form of Sarah Todd of New York's Brevoort family.2 This connection most likely prompted his invitation to join New York's most prestigious Masonic lodge, the Holland No. 8. Here he mingled with Archibald Russell, the Livingstons, DeWitt Clinton and George Clinton, and members of New York's other first families.
The Holland No. 8 Lodge was founded in 1787 after negotiating with the Masons to be allowed to hold meetings in the Low Dutch language. At first the new lodge admitted only eight members. The number 8 is significant to elite Masonry: There were eight original Templar knights, there are eight points on the Masonic cross, and there were eight prominent and wealthy New Yorkers in the new lodge.
From his new connections Astor discovered the lucrative fur pelt business. Pelts that could be bought for a dollar from a New York Indian could fetch six times the price in London.3 Astor typically cheated the Indians by getting them drunk and then overcharging for the liquor.4 He cheated his own workers with low-paying contracts, although his own records show he was more generous in bribes: He once made a thirty-five-thousand-dollar payment to Michigan Governor Lewis Cass.5 In short, Astor prospered in the fur business.
Astor's proceeds from the fur trade were invested into New York City real estate during the year Washington was elected president and New York was in recession. And Astor instinctively knew how to take advantage of people. For example, when Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel, Burr had to flee the country and so Astor bought Burr's Greenwich Village home for cash. In 1825 Astor bought land from the U.S. government and immediately evicted seven hundred farmers.
Astor's China connections were made through his fur business, as the Chinese bought beaver pelts that Astor's trappers and traders took from New York and the Oregon territory. He was the first New York merchant to join the China trade, and soon he replaced the furs with opium.
In 1807 New York City entered another recession as the Embargo Act stopped shipping. A letter from Punca Wing Chong, a visiting Chinese merchant and a mandarin connected to the ruling family in China, claimed the embargo had stranded him in New York City and requested permission from President Jefferson to be allowed to sail home. Jefferson made an exception and asked on what ship he intended to sail. Punca Wing chong requested the Beaver, an Astor ship. The ship left New York with Punca Wing chong and a hull full of furs. When it returned Jefferson discovered that Punca Wing chong was not a merchant but a dockhand, and the voyage was a ruse created by Astor. The Beaver made a two-hundred-thousand-dollar profit from the trip.
The profit was put into still another farm, which extended from Broadway to the Hudson in midtown New York.6 But the American government got even when it went to war with Britain. Astor lost his fur capital in Astoria, Oregon, which was worth eight hundred thousand dollars.
Nevertheless, Astor's drug business grew unhindered. In writing he requested that a Constantinople merchant "please send returns in opium" for a consignment of 1,500 red fox furs.7 With three separate fleets sailing the world, Astor made enough drug and pelt money to dip into an immense amount of real estate. By 1826 the German immigrant who made his fortune in America was buying the mortgages of Irish immigrants and foreclosing on them to add to his holdings at lower prices.8
n 1847 Moses Yale Beach compiled a list of the wealthiest New Yorkers. Some had a million or two; Astor towered above them.9 Astor stopped at nothing to increase his fortune. In 1848 he was eighty-four years old and extremely wealthy, yet he still demanded rent even from widows. He died in March of that year, and his second son, William Backhouse Astor, inherited most of his father's twenty-million-dollar fortune.
John Jacob Astor's son learned well. In the 1860s, when working class New Yorkers were going through a severe economic depression, officers of a Russian fleet docked in New York raised $4,760 to buy fuel for the poor. William Astor, however, raised rents 30 percent.10 When he died in 1875, he owned seven hundred buildings and houses—most of them crammed with poor tenants. His legacy is the multitude of slums where the poor starved. Yet the Astor name still graces communities from Queens in New York to Oregon.
NEW YORK'S OTHER CHINA TRADERS
Astor receives the credit for launching New York City into the opium
trade, but others soon followed. Many were New Englanders who
Opium: From the Lodge to the Den 263
moved operations to New York. Prominent families included the
Griswolds from Old Lyme, Connecticut; the Lows from Salem; and the
Grinnells from New Bedford.11 The Griswold Family
Nathaniel Griswold and George Griswold III built the family fortune through their ownership of a large fleet of trading ships that called on ports all over the world. Originally based in East Lyme, a small port on the Long Island Sound coast of Connecticut, the Griswold brothers ran an empire. Their black-and-white-checkered flag was seen in China, the West Indies, and South America. Although the Griswolds have not become a household name in subsequent centuries, many family members achieved prominence as a result of trading in the eighteenth century. The Griswolds' agent in Canton was Russell and Company, in which a Griswold relative was a partner.
Nathaniel Griswold was content to be a merchant, but his brother George had greater ambitions. George was a director of Columbia Insurance, was involved in the Bank of America, and dabbled in other ventures including gold mining. Other family members also made the merchant connection. For example, Nathaniel's daughter Catherine married Peter Lorillard, New York's first tobacco merchant.
The Griswolds played a role in early American politics, as Matthew Griswold was brought to the position of Federalist governor of Connecticut through family money. Future Griswolds served in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate as politicians for Connecticut and Pennsylvania. John D. Lodge, the great-great-grandson of sea trader George Griswold III, was Connecticut's governor from 1951 to 1955. Still other Griswolds became captains of industry, bishops, and college professors.
John Cleve Green
One Griswold employee who later achieved prominence on his own was John Cleve Green, who is usually remembered as one of the major benefactors of Princeton University. Born in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, 264 From the Sacred to the Profane in 1800 to an elder of the Presbyterian Church, Green began his career in the counting room of N. L. Griswold of New York City. He was soon promoted to a supercargo and traveled to South America, Spain, and finally China at the height of the opium trade. Green married the boss's daughter, Sarah Griswold. Green's connections and his knack for being in the right place at the right time landed him a position with Russell and Company. After six years in Canton working for the preeminent opium house, Green returned to New York. He continued in the China trade and also advanced his career as director of the Bank of Commerce and other banks, railroads, and New York Hospital.
The Low Family
The Low family was a group of Massachusetts merchants that moved to New York. Seth Low was born on Cape Ann in 1782. He moved at an early age to Salem, where he earned his living as a trader and a merchant. In Tall Ships to Cathay Helen Augur mentions that Seth Low married Mary Porter, which connected the Lows with the prominent Lord family. Seth had twelve children, and as the Salem area was losing its importance, he moved his family to New York. There Seth and his brother William Henry Low, a senior partner in Russell and Company, helped expand the American role in the trade that Russell inherited from the Perkins syndicate.
Several of Seth Low's children were involved in the China trade, but his son Abiel Abbot Low achieved the greatest fame. Abiel Low joined Russell and Company as a clerk just a short time before the Opium Wars started. He took over the Forbeses' position of personal secretary and agent for Houqua, which helped to expand his wealth and power. After acquiring work experience and connections, Abiel decided to go out on his own. He returned to New York and commissioned the fastest clipper ships money could buy; only the Forbes ships could compete with his. His A. A. Low and Brothers remained in the forefront and continued trading with China and Japan even when most other companies had left the trade.
Profits from his Abiel Low's Asia business were invested in the first Opium: From the Lodge to the Den 265 Atlantic cable and the building of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. His son Seth graduated from Columbia University in 1870 and went on to become mayor of Brooklyn and then the first mayor of New York City after it consolidated in 1898. Seth Low the younger is famous for donating a million dollars, supposedly one third of his fortune, to build the Low Library at Columbia.
Abiel Low, who married Ellen Almira Dow, had a daughter also named Ellen, who in 1869 married into the Pierrepont family—which would later be known as the Pierpont family. The Pierpont and Morgan families were eventually united and played a significant role in the development of American finance.
The House of Morgan was actually started by China trader George Peabody. Described as a solitary miser, Peabody nevertheless joined forces with Barings Bank to get American states to pay on their bond debts, much of which was in British hands. Barings went as far as to bribe famed statesman Daniel Webster to make speeches on the issue. Peabody bought the bonds for pennies on the dollar and reaped a fortune when they were finally repaid. Like other Salem merchants, he amassed great wealth in the China trade and invested in railroads. Because he was heirless, Peabody gave his money to philanthropic causes, including a library in Salem, and he turned over his company to young Junius Spencer Morgan. Junius Morgan's heir was son J. Pierpont Morgan, whose stamp on Barings Bank would last for more than a century.12
The Grinnell Family
The Grinnell's are another China-trading family whose origins are sketchy, but they most likely possess a Huguenot background. Cornelius Grinnell was an American sea captain who became a privateer during the American Revolution. He married Sylvia Howland, which established the Grinnells among New England's first families. Other Grinnell's married into Rhode Island's Brown dynasty and into the Russell family.
Joseph Grinnell, son of Cornelius, cultivated the family wealth in the shipping and whaling businesses. Grinnell collaborated with a man by the name of Preserved Fish and Joseph's brother Henry to establish the firm of Fish, Grinnell, and Company. Over time Fish was dropped from the name and the business became Grinnell, Minturn, and Company. The company would become one of New York City's largest shipping firms.
The Grinnell family roots were in New Bedford, where the first of the Greek Revival mansions was built for Joseph. His profits, like those of many other merchants, were put into the textile trade, and he founded the still-in-operation Wamsutta Mills. Various Grinnell's later financed polar explorations and rescue missions, pioneered real-estate development in Key West, and even found a town—Grinnell, Iowa— and its local college (Grinnell College).
Howland and Aspinwall
Another company that moved from New England to New York during the golden years of the opium trade was Howland and Aspinwall. This merger of two founding families spawned great wealth for generations to come.
John Howland was the first of the clan to travel to America, where he married a fellow Mayflower passenger. John's son, Joseph Howland, started in the whaling business in Connecticut. Joseph's sons also considered the sea to be a road to wealth and went into shipping. Howland shipping would take part in the sugar and slave trade in the Caribbean and in ventures in Cuba, Mexico, and the Mediterranean before discovering the China trade. The Howland children made good matches, with one daughter marrying James Roosevelt and another marrying James Brown of Brown Brothers Harriman.
The most significant Howland marriage was a business merger with the Aspinwall family. Like the Howlands, the Aspinwalls were in the shipping business prior to the American Revolution. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, John Aspinwall married Susan Howland. The new Howland and Aspinwall firm generated great profits in the China trade, and in 1837 William Henry Aspinwalls fortune was estimated to be greater than Cornelius Vanderbilt's. Post-China trade ventures included building America's oldest steamship line and several railroads, and, like most other China traders, participating in philanthropy.
Aspinwall was considered both an honest and a pious man, and has been referred to as a visionary. He was a cofounder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and led America in new adventures around the world while he lived quietly in New York.
Aspinwall claimed that his Panama Railroad, which was erected before the famous canal, could be built in six months. Not having traveled there himself, he didn't realize that the first thirteen miles went through dense jungles and impenetrable swamps filled with poisonous insects and snakes. From mosquitoes and sandflies to alligators and other hazards, the area was known as a pesthole from the days of Spanish exploration. General Grant, who visited the construction site, described the conditions of the rainy season as "beyond belief."13
The conditions took their toll on the workers, who often toiled in mud up to their necks, fighting off the swarming insects from sunrise to sunset. Sickness and disease—including cholera, yellow fever, smallpox, and dysentery—claimed many lives, as did harsh treatment similar to what was enacted on slaves. A commonly told story holds that there was a dead Irishman for every railroad tie. Howland and Aspinwall declared the death toll at one thousand, but estimates actually run up to six thousand. Chinese workers, called coolies, who did hard labor for low wages, were imported. Eight hundred arrived; two hundred survived. Many committed suicide by hanging themselves, paying companions to stab or shoot them, or simply drowning themselves in the ocean. Aspinwall was in New York at the time, where, ironically to modern sensibilities, he helped created the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Like their Boston counterparts, New York's first families used marriage to ensure that their wealth and prominence would remain intact. Harriet Howland married James Roosevelt, President Franklin Roosevelt's great-grandfather, and Mary Aspinwall married Isaac Roosevelt, the same president's grandfather. The son of Mary Aspinwall and Isaac Roosevelt, James Roosevelt, married Rebecca Howland.
THE ROOSEVELTS AND THE DELANOS
The Roosevelts and the Delanos were among America's first Dutch
families. Claes Martenszen van Roosevelt arrived in America before
1649 and died in 1660. Like John Jacob Astor, Roosevelt's only son,
Nicholas, got his start in the fur business. He in turn had two sons who
split the family into two lines: the Oyster Bay, New York line, from
which President Teddy Roosevelt was born, and the Hyde Park New
York line of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Oyster Bay branch got
most of its wealth from the merchant business; the Hyde Park branch
invested primarily in real estate. Membership in the elite societies of their day, including Masonry, and intermarriage increased the Roosevelt family fortune. Isaac Roosevelt married into a sugar-trading family, which often implied the triangular trade of sugar, molasses, and slaves. After the Molasses Act of 1733, anyone who wouldn't smuggle couldn't survive. The Roosevelts survived and prospered,14 and Isaac's brother James joined the business. Isaac became close with William Walton, and both were involved in founding the Bank of New York. James would also make a connection to the Waltons when he married Maria Walton.
Other Roosevelts married Howlands and Aspinwalls, which is how they were introduced to the China trade. The Howland and Aspinwall families were also active in building clipper ships and later in the steamship and railroad businesses.
By the 1820s the Roosevelt clan were more than just wealthy; they were also very well connected. James Roosevelt, son of Rebecca Aspinwall Roosevelt, sat on boards with the Vanderbilts and J. Pierpont Morgan. James Roosevelt's son James "Rosy" Roosevelt became engaged to Helen Schermerhorn Astor. At their engagement party, one of the guests in attendance was Sara Delano.
The Delanos were another of America's first families. Descendants of a Huguenot family by the name of de la Noye, who fled Holland for America, they arrived on the Fortune in 1621. Philip de la Noye came to America at age nineteen and became a Massachusetts landowner. He Opium: From the Lodge to the Den 269 modified the spelling of his surname to Delano and married into the family of John and Priscilla Alden. Philip's son, Thomas Delano, married the Alden's daughter, also named Priscilla, although the couple was fined ten pounds for engaging in intercourse before the wedding.
Farther down the family tree, Warren Delano, Franklin's grandfather, made his fortune in the opium business, starting through the Grinnell firm. Warren's daughter Sara Delano became the mother of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Sara's sister Dora married a Forbes, and their sister Annie married Fred Hitch, a Russell and Company associate in Shanghai.
The Delano family seemed to gravitate toward the sea and the trading business. Warren Delano was an associate of James Roosevelt's father and was a partner in Russell, Sturgis, and Company (also known as Russell and Company at various stages). Warren was the China representative and owned a mansion in Macao. For a while he retired from opium trading and sank his fortune into New York real estate and coal and copper mines in Pennsylvania and Tennessee.
In August 1857 the failure of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust started a domino effect that wiped out many banks. All but one bank in New York suspended specie payment. By the end of the year, five thousand businesses had failed, tens of thousands of workers had lost their homes and jobs, and people starved and froze to death both in the cities and in the coal towns. While his workers died, Warren lived in Algonac, his estate, complete with high-ceilinged rooms with rosewood furniture, teakwood screens, potted plants, and Buddhist bells.
Although Warren Delano suffered no loss of creature comforts, his net worth suffered dearly. He was desperate to keep his status and decided to go back to China and the drug-smuggling business; it was the simplest way to rebuild his fortune. "It would be denied in these later years that the opium he bought and shipped was intended for the tremendously profitable market provided by addicts," writes Kenneth Davis, who mentions specifically that it was opium, and not tea, that brought wealth along with a touch of notoriety.15 By this time the New England drug smugglers were bringing the drug to American addicts. The family later claimed that the opium Warren brought to America was for the relief of the Civil War wounded, but he returned to China in 1859, which predated the Civil War by two years.
The future President Franklin Roosevelt announced his engagement to Eleanor in grandfather Warren's room, surrounded by China trade regalia. More prominent than his cousin Teddy was, Franklin took his role in Masonry seriously, becoming active in the Holland No. 8 Lodge in New York City and a Scottish Rite Temple in Albany.
Theodore Roosevelt is famous, of course, as a U.S. president and for leading the charge on San Juan Hill. Roosevelt's public persona depicts him as a "trustbuster," fighting the giant Standard Oil and mediating mining strikes. Despite his Masonic membership, however, he was far from egalitarian. He was also closely tied to big business, and was able to raise the necessary corporate donations for his candidacy; his trust busting activities, though, would leave him at odds with the Rockefeller and Carnegie interests.
The twenty-sixth president of the United States is on record as being a racial elitist with an attitude that bordered on favoring ethnic cleansing. He has been quoted as saying, "Some day we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type." He also said, "I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding... Criminals should be sterilized and feebleminded persons forbidden to leave offspring."16
While Teddy was crying out against the unwashed masses, the country was gripped by a fear of anyone who was foreign—Chinese, African, Italian, or Eastern European. The Eugenics Records Office (ERO) was created and funded by the wealthiest people of the day to reduce the population of the poor. The ERO, which was funded by John D. Rockefeller, the Carnegie Institution, George Eastman, and the widow of E. H. Harriman, singled out specific undesirable traits, from alcoholism to an inordinate love of the sea, and then sought to sterilize those who exhibited such traits. The movement grew in America and was adopted by Nazi Germany, which then showed the world the ultimate expression of these beliefs.
President Grant and Julia Dent
The Delano family's influence continued, as Susannah Delano married Captain Noah Grant in June 1746. They had a son Noah, also a sea captain, who married Rachel Kelly. They also had a son Jesse, who married Hannah Simpson. Jesse and Hannah Grant's son was Ulysses Simpson Grant, the renowned Civil War general and U.S. president, who married Julia Dent.
The Dent family of England ranked alongside the Jardines and Mathesons in the opium trade,17 but the prosperity of the trade may not have extended to the American Dents. The Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant mentions her father as a prosperous landowner descended from a Maryland plantation owner and her mother's father as a China trader in the firm of Wrenshall, Peacock, and Pillon. The American Dents were a New England family who took part in the early China trade first by exporting ginseng to that country. Julia Dent's mother and father came to the Midwest to trade along the Mississippi River with Edward Tracy.
Ulysses Grant was a late bloomer who had drifted down to failure and disgrace during his early army career. He drank to the point that he was broke and finally resigned from the army. He failed at farming, failed at selling real estate, and made only a modest income as a clerk until someone convinced him to return to the military. The Civil War saved his reputation and gained him the presidency of the United States.
AMERICA'S MERCHANT
FAMILIES GO TO WAR
The elite merchant families of Boston and New York grew wealthy in
the opium trade, which was inherited from England; China, however,
suffered. The Chinese rapidly became addicted in increasing numbers. The importation of opium chests numbered five thousand in 1821 and grew to thirty-nine thousand by 1837. This figure represents 6,630,000 pounds of opium. Soon the addiction reached the royal palace. Emperor Tao Kwong lost three sons to drug addiction, and it was estimated that China had four to twelve million addicts.18 The emperor conducted a study of the effects of opium on his country. He was told that for the first time his treasury was being drained of silver rather than being resupplied by the tea trade. Brigandage plagued the highways. Soldiers refused to fight, and when coerced to fight against other warlords the soldiers were defeated. It was obvious that corruption was spreading in the army and the civil service. Mandarins were regularly bribed to allow the importation of illegal products. And at Canton the marketplace was stocked with the apparatus of the opium trade.
The emperor ordered a crackdown and numerous drug users were arrested. To drive home the emperor's point, an opium merchant was publicly crucified in Canton. A Chinese boat was caught unloading opium believed to have been bought from Thomas Perkins. At first nothing was done, but then all trade came to a halt. On the day Bennett Forbes became a partner at Russell and Company, he complained that they could not unload a chest of opium.19 Russell and Company made an announcement that it would cease trading opium. Its agent, John Green, sent instructions to India to stop all opium trading. But it was too late for them and for others. The agent of the emperor, Lin Tse-hsu, surrounded all the British and American ships and subjected them to house arrest. He then confiscated twenty thousand chests of opium and staged the Chinese version of the Boston Tea Party, mixing the opium with lime and throwing it into the water. Russell and Company lost 1,400 chests, Jardine and Matheson lost 7,000 chests, and the British Dent and Company lost 1,700 chests.
Even after the destruction of millions of dollars' worth of drugs, the house arrest continued. Wealthy Americans in China, including Warren Delano, A. A. Low, and John Green, were forced to do without servants and had to cook for themselves for the first time. The punishment was considerably less harsh than that inflicted on their Chinese Opium: From the Lodge to the Den 273 partners in the trade, who were jailed and quickly executed.
Finally the opium debate reached Parliament. Statesmen like William Gladstone decried the trade in opium and its effect on the Chinese, but in the end the money was the key. The only way to compensate the British businessmen for their loss was to declare war on China. The brief war compelled China to sign a treaty giving the British Hong Kong and access to its markets.
THE LEGACY OF THE CHINA TRADE
The area that would become Hong Kong replaced the tiny islands and
floating warehouses that served as the storage facilities for opium. From
Hong Kong, ships could sail up along the coast and spread opium to
even greater numbers of the Chinese population. But along with legality came a decrease in profits. The shipping firm called the Peninsula
and Oriental Steamship line allowed Chinese buyers to place orders for
opium directly with India, eliminating the British middleman. But some companies thrived in the new situation. For the firm of Jardine and Matheson, the Opium War represented a new beginning. Made famous by the James Clavell novel Noble House, Jardine and Matheson, the house that opium built, grew and prospered as a result of having the power of England behind it. Today Simon and Henry Keswick, direct descendants of William Jardine, run the company, which is not known to have broken English or Chinese rules since the Opium War days. It has its many tentacles in shipping, the Cunard Line, trading, auto sales, brokerage, engineering, restaurants and hotels, property investment and management, insurance, and banking.
The power Jardine and Matheson once wielded in London is no longer as strong, as the company was unable to persuade Margaret Thatcher to hang on to Hong Kong. In 1984 Hong Kong was thirteen years away from reverting back to Chinese rule. Jardine and Matheson moved its exchange listing to Singapore, which infuriated China. The hard feelings between the company and modern China still persist. Jardine and Matheson is thought by many, including China, to have played a role in getting Chris Patten appointed Hong Kong's last governor under British rule. Patten's democratic reforms, and Henry Keswick's criticism of China after Tiananmen Square in 1989, have kept the relationship tenuous.20 In 1995 more than half of Jardine's profits were still earned in China and Hong Kong.
A competing company from the Persian-English family of Sassoon also had a major part in the China trade. Like their Scottish counterparts the Sassoons brought opium to China, but theirs was homegrown. Saleh Sassoon was the treasurer to the Ahmet Pasha, or governor of Baghdad. When the pasha was overthrown, the family moved to Bombay. Sassoon's son David became a merchant and was granted a license to trade in Indian opium and cotton. The Opium Wars were a brief setback, but David's son Edward Albert brought opium profits home to England, where he increased the family fortune in the textile trade. Being knighted by the queen was Edward's reward for his contribution to the economy. And marrying a Rothschild was a means of ensuring his power.
THE OPIUM LEGACY IN AMERICA
For their part in the drug business the Americans took home a lot of
money. In 1844 Caleb Cushing created the American treaty with
China, which officially allowed American ships in the China trade. After the wars in China the drug-smuggling business became more dangerous, as there was Asian competition and there were much faster steamships. British and American firms started bringing drugs to safer shores—their own. In Britain, the cities of Liverpool, Dover, Bristol, and even London were the import drug centers. This was around the time that the attempts to regulate opium use became serious.21 Between pre- and post-Opium Wars the opium imports in England tripled to 280,000 pounds.22 The drug was even prescribed to children in such concoctions as Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup, and unwed mothers discovered it was an easy way to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Opium would be regulated as a poison in 1868, but without substantial penalty. Opium's derivative morphine was soon the cause of massive addiction of returning Crimean War veterans, who learned to inject the drug.
The drug trade in Europe became widespread, and it was the product of an alliance between criminal families from various nations and Swiss and German pharmaceutical companies. A large number of these firms were happy to deal with the smugglers, simply shipping drugs under deliberately misleading labels.23 For instance, German firms shipped heroin, the latest derivative of opium, as aspirin. Turkey was the one nation that resisted the demands of the League of Nations and profited from its own production of opium. Turkey held out until 1931, when it officially closed its factories. Bulgaria took up the slack.
The drug trade, of course, never stopped. More and more customers bought the products, and as regulation grew, so did the profits from the trade. The only part that has changed is the level of violence. When corporations controlled the industry, they had no need to compete differently from how they had in selling other products. When the corporations were replaced by criminals, those who felt the need to get rid of the competition often killed it. [You mean when it appeared that corporations were replaced by criminals,now we can see the corporations for the criminal's they are DC]
In 1840 New Englanders imported twenty-four thousand pounds of opium into the United States. This garnered much attention, but the U.S. reaction was to slap a duty on the product. Drug importers, once dependent on a small group of addicts in their homeland, soon had thousands as the Civil War saw an increase in prescribed opium and opium abuse. Horace Day wrote The Opium Habit, blaming the Civil War for the massive spread of addiction.
next
WEALTH: THE LEGACY OF THE OPIUM TRADE
Footnotes
Chapter 14
1. Martin Booth, Opium: A History (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), pp. 16-24.
2. Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global DrugTrade (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 79.
3. Booth, pp. 82-3.
4. Carl A. Trocki, Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 32.
5. Edward A. Gargan, "The Humbling of a Heavyweight," New York Times, 30 November 1995.
6. Klepper and Gunther, p. 11.
7. Charles Tyng, Before the Wind: The Memoir of an American Sea Captain (New York:Viking, 1999), pp. xiii-xviii.
8. Charles Corn, The Scents of Eden: A History of the Spice Trade (New York: Kodansha, 1999), p. 303.
9. Thomas G Cary, Memoir of Thomas Handasyd Perkins (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1856; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1971), p. 209.
10. Fay, Peter Ward, The Opium War 1840-1842, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 140.
11.Chaitkin.p. 135.
12. Morison, The Maritime History of Massachusetts, p. 115.
13. Albion, Baker, and Labaree, p. 92.
14. Nathaniel Bowditch, Bowditch's Coastal Navigation (New York: Arco Publishing, 1979), Notes.
15. Thomas N. Layton, The Voyage of the Frolic: New England Merchants and the Opium Trade (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 25.
Chapter 15
1. Klepper and Gunther, p. 28.
2. Ibid., page 29.
3. Ellis, p. 177.
4. Lucy Kavaler, The Astors: An American Legend (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1968), p. 30. 5. Ibid., p. 30.
6. Ellis, p. 210.
7. Ibid., p. 211.
8. Ibid., p. 244.
9. Klepper and Gunther, p. 19.
10. Ellis, p. 318.
11. Albion, Baker, and Labaree, pp. 97-100.
12. Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (New York: Touchstone Books, 1991), pp. 8-16.
13. From the Web site www.trainweb.org/panama/historyl.html.
14. Kenneth Sydney Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny 1882-1928 (New York: Random House, 1996) pp. 15-20.
15. Ibid., p. 42.
16. Jeremy Rifkin and Jeremy P.Tarcher, The Biotech Century (New York: Putnam, 1999), p. 117.
17. Jeffrey Steinberg, (editor) et al. Dope, Inc. (Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 1992) p. 127.
18. Booth, p. 128.
19. Fay, p. 132 20. Gargan, "The Humbling of a Heavyweight."
21. Booth, pp. 51-66.
22. Ibid., pp. 51-74.
23. Kathryn Meyer and Terry Parssinen, Web of Smoke: Smugglers, Warlords, Spies and the History of the International Drug Trade (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), p. 125.
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