Barclays Bank History Series I

A Genealogical Study of the Families Who Created the Bank

PART ONE - The Lairds of Urie

Before the Barclay family founded their eponymous bank, a youthful David Barclay became a mercenary soldier of fortune in Germany, eventually rising to the rank of major under Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, during the Thirty Years War. He returned to Scotland in 1636 to serve in the Covenanting army and was given a horse regiment to command as colonel under General John Middleton. In the summer of 1648 Middleton got entangled with the Duke of Hamilton, whom his men captured and then executed.

Col. David Barclay

 Oliver Cromwell came to Scotland shortly thereafter and made sure that those who had fought against Hamilton, in any manner—including David Barclay, who claimed to be just looking the other way while the Duke was done in—lost their posts. 

Colonel David Barclay licked his wounds, deciding if he couldn't fight Cromwell's new republic one way, he'd defeat it from inside the tent, as the saying goes. He went home to Gordonstoun, where his wife of less than a year, Katherine, awaited him. [Source: Genealogical Account of the Lives of the Barclays of Urie for upwards of 700 Years with Memoirs of Colonel David Barclay and his son Robert Barclay...(London: John Herbert, 1812).

Kate, as I choose to think of her, was not just any wife. Her family tree was impeccable—a father serving on King James VI’s Privy Chamber, a grandfather having been the Earl of Sutherland—both positions coming in quite handy for Col. David Barclay in the days ahead. 

Perhaps the first step in Barclay's new attitude had been after his horse regiment was taken from him, leaving him unable to join up with other Scots like William Keith, the 7th Earl of Mareschal, who objected so violently to the execution of Charles I after his trial for treason early in 1649, that he set out to avenge the murder. The death of  King Charles had thus precipitated a third war between Scotland and England--a war eventually concluded by Oliver Cromwell’s return to Scotland, where he put an end to the uprising. 

 

 

Because Barclay had no regiment with which to fight, he was able to profit personally when William Keith, having taken arms against the English Crown, forfeited the title of Mareschal, more commonly known as the Keeper of the Privy Seal. That seal had for generations been in the hands of members of the Sutherland Clan, which Barclay had recently married into.

[Source:  Sir Robert Gordon, Bart., Genealogical history of the Earldom of Sutherland from its origin to the year 1630. With a continuation to the year 1651 (Edinburgh: University of Guelph Library, 1813). 

 

 Favored by the Stuart Kings 

 

 

 

The Colonel married Katherine Gordon in late 1647. Their marriage effectively united the Barclays into the clans of Gordon, Sutherland and Huntly. Colonel Barclay used these new family connections to get the himself elected as a Member of Parliament, and a few years later re-elected. It was a new era under the Republic ushered in by Oliver Cromwell. 

 

If you recall American History 101, or even earlier stories about Cromwell and the Puritans, the year 1620 sticks out as the year Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock in an attempt to escape from religious persecution back home.

“Back home” was where Colonel David Barclay had been watching the Covenanting wars play out in real time.  

Those wars were reaching their end on a late December day in 1647 when Colonel David Barclay married the White Rose of Scotland. 

The chaos of the previous century or more, however, would not be forgotten. The stories were made into legends and symbols, told to represent a family's loyalty, or disloyalty, to the Crown. 

 

 

The White Rose of Scotland 

One writer in New York in 1904, looking back two and a half centuries, wrote of those days:

John Barclay, who settled in East New Jersey in 1684, was the second son of Col. David Barclay of Ury. The father had served with distinction in the Thirty Years War as a follower of Gustavus Adolphus, and had borne arms in the civil wars at home. On December 24th, 1647, he married Lady Katharine Gordon, known as the ''White Rose of Scotland," and about a year later (in 1648) purchased from William, Earl of Mareschal, the estate of Ury in the County of Kincardine, Scotland. In 1679, under charter from the crown, this estate and some neighboring estates which were also owned by Col. David, were united into the "Barony of Ury."  [Source: R. Burnham Moffat, The Barclays of New York: Who They Are, and Who They Are Not, and Some Other Barclays (New York: Robert Grier Cooke, 1904), p. 1.

 

Excerpted from The White Cockade

Barclay Link to Mary, Queen of Scots 

Scottish romanticism was watered with the blood of both martyrs and saints. Less romantic but more realistic was the fact that the same blood was tainted by being mingled with blood from villains and traitors. Traitors, spies and assassins of every ilk inhabited every square foot of Scottish lands No one knew whom to trust. Perhaps it was for that reason secret societies were born there many generations earlier--Knights Templar, Scottish Rite Masonry, and other similar brotherhoods whose secrets have never been revealed.

Credit to Tudors Dynasty

We looked back at chronicles of the previous century and discovered numerous plots and conspiracies involving the clans in Scotland, just over the reign of Queen Mary. Many histories were recorded, left only to be deciphered.

Take, as an example, what occurred a century before Col. Barclay's marriage. It was in July 1555 that King Charles' predecessor, Mary Queen of Scots, arrived at Inverness. She had "requested" George, Earl of Caithness to meet her there and bring his countrymen to assist her in quelling uprisings. He did not show up. Only Sir John Gordon--great-grandfather of Katherine Gordon--attended the Queen. Mary was enraged, and she had Caithess committed to prison at Inverness, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh successively, until he paid a huge fine for his disloyalty.

Click to enlarge.

Over the next five years or so, Caithness became ever more bold in his disregard of Queen Mary's wishes. Both he and Sir John (Earl of Sutherland) committed almost irrational outrages against each other, not unlike gang warfare in the Hood today. As a result: 

"Earl George [Caithness] was greatly exasperated at the interference of the Earl of Sutherland, and to this incident we trace the foundation of that hatred which the two rival Houses of Caithness and Sutherland bore each other for so long a period." [Source: The Saint-Clairs of the Isles, Being a History of the Sea-Kings of Orkney and Their Scottish Successors of the Surname of Sinclair, Arranged and Annotated by Roland William Saint-Clair.]

 

Such incidents became steeped in pure, unadulterated greed and narcissism, and they escalated into three horrific murders on June 23, 1567 that would come to haunt Col. David Barclay's wife, Katherine Gordon, as her grandfather passed the story down to family members, many years after the fact. Katherine's grandfather was, in fact, Alexander Gordon, the 12th Earl of Sutherland, who lived to tell the tale that became a legend in the Barclay household, perhaps even to this day.

Grandfather Alex was only 15 years old when the incident took place. He had been out hunting at the family's retreat called Helmsdale Castle, while his father, John Gordon, the 11th Earl of Sutherland, and  Alexander's stepmother, Sir John's third wife, Marian Seton, were being entertained and fed at the castle. One historical website tells us:

Helmsdale, since demolished

The castle had its beginnings in the 1460s. It was repaired and enlarged around 1600, but it was in 1567 that the famous tragedy was enacted that is said to have inspired the plot of Shakespeare's "Hamlet". Isobel Sinclair, in a diabolical attempt to divert the line of succession to her own son, arranged to poison her visitors, the 11th Earl of Sutherland and his Countess and their son, while they were taking dinner at the castle. But the plan miscarried and the Earl's son did not drink the poisoned wine, while her own son did, as well as the Earl and Countess. The original castle ... had been the hunting seat of the Sutherland family.

The Good Earl John

I'll leave it to you to decide whether this scenario fits the fictional plot of Hamlet or not. The characters in the real plot were Sutherland, also called Sir John Gordon, "the Good Earl John." Sir John was there with his third wife, whom he had only recently married.

1. Wife No. 1 was Elizabeth Campbell (daughter of Colin Campbell, the 3rd Earl of Argyll and Jean Gordon), about whom one website leads us to the conclusion that the Campbells and Argylls were as equally to be avoided as the Caithness clan, members of which perpetrated the murders at Helmsdale.
2. Wife No. 2 In 1549 Sir John was wed to Lady Helen Stewart, eldest daughter of John Stewart, 3rd Earl of Lennox (1490-1526). Helen was the sister of Matthew Stewart, the father of Henry Darnley. Helen as a young girl had married William (Will) Hay, 6th Earl of Erroll, whose cousin, George Hay, coveted Will's title as Earl of Erroll, taking it for himself soon after Will's death. After five years or so as a widow, Helen married Sir John and in 1552 gave birth to Alexander Gordon.
3. Wife No. 3 was Marion Seton, lady in waiting to Mary of Guise (otherwise known in this essay as the Queen Mum). Marion's father was George Seton, the son of Janet Hepburn, daughter of Patrick Hepburn, 1st Earl of Bothwell. 

One year after Will Hay's death, King James V of Scotland, died also, leaving as his only heir the Catholic, Mary Queen of Scots, for whom George Hay (now Earl of Erroll) became, among others, a protector. In fact, George had been among those who signed an agreement to allow Mary's mother (Mary of Guise), widow of King James V, to serve as her Regent until her death in 1560. Also among those protectors was Sir John Gordon, who was actually the man most involved in arranging the marriage between Queen Mary and Henry Darnley, who at that time was the nephew of John's wife (Wife No. 2 above).

King James V

Government and foreign policy were viewed back then like a human chess game, using the royal family as chess pieces, without lives of their own. The Queen Mum (Mary Guise) had been so used herself in 1540 when forced to choose as a husband either James V, King of Scotland, or Francis I, King of France. Whichever man she chose, she would become a queen, although in my view she was merely a pawn.

George, the Earl of Erroll was an avid chess player in this game, watching as Mary's first marriage was arranged by the Queen Mum, resulting in the wedding between her daughter and Francis II--son of Henry II of France and Catherine de' Medici. Francis was 14 when the wedding took place, and he became King of France a year later upon the death of his father. 

Henry Guise with red feather

Francis, too, was placed in a regency--his royal power delegated to Mary's uncles from the noble House of Guise: Francis, Duke of Guise, and Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine. His mother, Catherine de' Medici, agreed to this delegation of power to the Guise family, which took place in the same year that Elizabeth I (House of Tudor) became the Queen of England, crowned on January 15, 1559.

With the marriage of Francis II and Mary Stuart occurring only the previous year, the future of Scotland thus became linked to France. A secret clause provided that Scotland would become part of France if the royal couple did not have children. When young Francis II died childless on 5 December 1560, the Guises left the French court of the new King Charles, and they brought Mary Stuart, Francis II's widow, back to Scotland, an act approved by the Tudor Queen Elizabeth I because Scotland by then had an established Protestant church run by a council of Protestant nobles that Elizabeth supported.

Nevertheless, Scotland continued to be beset by a variety of religious factions still warring with each other and committing treasonous acts, such as abducting Mary and holding her in one castle or another. George Hay, the Earl of Erroll sometimes had a hand in such intrigues, including her imprisonment in April 1567, two months after her second husband, Henry Darnley, was murdered.

Titles, Titles Everywhere...

Henry Darnley

Henry Darnley was the eldest surviving son of Matthew Stewart, 4th Earl of Lennox, by his wife Lady Margaret Douglas. The union of these two children was a chess move designed to give any child Mary might have as a result, a claim to the English throne, based on Darnley's family tree. 

Henry had been born in Leeds, in north Yorkshire shortly after Matthew Stewart, his father--who happened to be Sir John Gordon's brother-in-law at that time--was found guilty of treason. Both of Henry's parents then went into exile from Scotland--with his father being third in line to the Scottish throne. Darnley's mother, the Countess of Lennox, was a niece of the late Henry VIII, and was, therefore, a potential successor to Elizabeth I. [Thank God for Wikipedia.] 

Eventually, King James VI & I of Scotland and England (the same man wearing two crowns) united the senior royal line of Stewart (represented by his mother Mary, Queen of Scots) with the junior branch of Stewart of Darnley, as his father (Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley) was that family's senior representative, being the son and heir apparent of Matthew Stewart, 4th Earl of Lennox (1516–1571). This king was the baby Mary gave birth to as a result of her short second marriage to Henry Darnley.

Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell

Although the marriage did take place, it was quite brief, ending in February 1567, when Darnley was murdered. There was, nevertheless, good new for his Stewart family, since Mary had managed to get pregnant before Darnley's enemies murdered him. 

The chief suspect in the murder was James Hepburn, a man soon to become Mary's third husband. It appears James Hepburn had previously been married to none other than Jean (a/k/a Jane or Janet) Gordon, who had divorced Hepburn on May 3, 1567, according to Antonia Fraser's magnificent work. He married Mary, Queen of Scots, eight days later. 

Jean's father, George Gordon, was the 4th Earl of Huntly, and her mother was Margaret Stewart, daughter of King James IV. George, in 1550 had accompanied Mary's mother, the Queen Mum, to France, later joining the Protestant Lords of the Congregation, working toward "a form of co-existence between Catholic and reformed worship," by accepting the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots. But her father then died in 1562. 

Jean Gordon

It was Jean's half-brother, also named George Gordon, the 5th Earl of Huntly who "rescued" their cousin Alexander from the strange union forced on him after his parents were poisoned in 1567 by Isobel Sinclair. She and her fellow conspirators had kidnapped Alexander, forcing him to marry a woman twice his age--Barbara Sinclair, daughter of the 4th Earl of Caithness. 

We know most of the details from a fascinating sttudy written by Margaret H. B. Sanderson, called Mary Stewart's People: Life in Mary Stewart's Scotland. Published by James Thin, an imprint of the Mercat Press in Edinburgh in 1987, Sanderson's book reveals that the poisonings were "part of a conspiracy by the Earl of Caithness' family ... to eliminate the heirs to the earldom of Sutherland." 

Dunrobin Castle

By 1569 Alexander Gordon was at least 18, successor to this title of Earl of Sutherland. Although he sought a divorce from Barbara (some say Beatrix) Sinclair on the grounds he had been a minor of 15 when the forced wedding took place, the divorce was unnecessary when Barbara died before any decree was granted. That left him free to marry Jean Gordon by December 1573.

Alexander and Jean were married and moved to Dunrobin Castle, home of the Sutherland Clan since the 1400s. Upon Alexander's death in 1594, the title passed to Jean's half-brother, George Gordon, by then the First Marquess of Huntly, the same man who had rescued Alexander from the clutches of the Sinclairs at Caithness. 

Sir Robert Gordon

Alexander and Jean became parents of five children, one of whom was known as Sir Robert Gordon, 1st Baronet, born 14 May 1580, died Mar 1654. The feuds of the previous century were still playing out when Sir Robert returned from England and France in 1621 to find lands inherited from his older brother John Gordon in deep debt. Two years later he was given a way out of that debt. His father's old enemy, George Sinclair, 5th Earl of Caithness, was proclaimed a rebel. "Gordon received a commission from the privy council to proceed with fire and sword against him, and took possession of Castle Sinclair, the earl's residence. Having subdued the county of Caithness, he returned with his troops into Sutherland, and soon after went back to the court in England." [Sources set out in Wikipedia].

Robert would continue to advance in this new found wealth resulting from his loyalty to King James I (also known as James VI), the son of the marriage of Mary to Darnley. On 28 May 1625, as a gentleman of the privy chamber to Charles I, he was created premier baronet of Nova Scotia, with remainder to his heir male whatsoever; and he obtained a charter under the great seal granting to him sixteen thousand acres on the coast of Nova Scotia, which were erected into a barony. [Also see Complete Baronetage by George E. Cokayne]

What It All Means 

We have reached the place where we began this tale. Robert's second daughter Katherine, who married David Barclay in 1647. Soon after that fateful event, Barclay became a Member of Parliament. He and his wife left five children, about whom we will learn in Part Two of this series.

As Barclay had already learned over the course of his life by that time, his future in Parliament would be a large factor in keeping his property intact. Politics can be useful, as the Barclays and their extended families would learn often over the coming centuries in banking. 

Barclays Bank on Lombard St., London

It was only after Lady Katherine died in 1663 that David Barclay himself turned to religion, becoming a Quaker in 1666, as did his eldest son Robert Barclay, who had been educated in Paris by a Papist uncle, we've been told. This Robert Barclay returned from France, rejecting Catholicism, and married Christian Mollison, the daughter of an Aberdeen merchant. Like his father, Robert, too, soon became an ardent Quaker. 

Quakerism provided the Barclays with a useful role to play in the new world of business, similar to the role Switzerland would later play. As neutral protestants who refused to take up arms for either of the warring parties, neutrality gave them a foot in each side, even while it made them appear to be discreet and trustworthy--the perfect image for a banker.

 

Bush Family Connections to Naval History

A Prelude to the story of Samuel Prescott Bush appears at this blog in "Bush and Fay Family--Roots and Skeletons," first published November 25, 2016, but recently revised with new material added. That new material shows a link between the Bush-Fay family (Rev. J. S. Bush and wife Harriet Fay) and the Meiggs-Keith family who created the United Fruit Company. 

What follows here is much of the original story that appeared before the revision.

Samuel  Prescott Bush was born in Orange, New Jersey, at the peak of the War Between the States.  Despite the fact that his mother, formerly Harriet Eleanor Fay, had been born in Savannah, Georgia, Samuel's father was such a rabid Unionist, there were complaints made by members of his New Jersey congregation.

Possibly that is why he signed on in 1865 as chaplain aboard the naval fleet bound for California, commanded by Commodore John Rodgers II.  Rodgers’ father was the senior officer of the United States Navy—having commanded brave young American seaman for years in battle against the more powerful British navy—when, in 1845, the U.S. Naval Academy was founded near his home at Annapolis, Maryland.[1] 

Was Rev. James Bush a mere man of the cloth, or were there other ambitions that took him across the continent with naval officer headed for California's new Pacific Navy Yard at Mare Island?[2]  Was his later retreat to nature sincere, and, if so, how do we explain his descendants' transition from transcendentalism to transnationalism?

Beginning of the Black Budget?

Military begging from Congress?

Strangely enough, though Congress approved the establishment of the naval academy at Annapolis and donated the Fort Severn Army base for its use, no funding for its construction and maintenance was provided.[3] This all-too-typical Congressional failure to fund what military men consider to be vital elements of national security helps explain how today's black budget funding of weapons systems and covert operations has come about. Numerous such examples from history can be found—institutions chartered by governments in name only—skeletons created without meat or blood to make them viable.  History also reveals myriad patriotic political and military leaders, who trustingly paid for necessary supplies from personal funds and then became frustrated by their inability to obtain reimbursement for such expenditures.  

As the years passed, such men would seek a means of funding their budgets in a way that would eliminate the need to beg for crumbs from Congress, as required by the United States Constitution.  A perhaps innocent and quite understandable intent to create a workable funding mechanism for national defense instead helped to breed a militant strain of what Thomas Hobbes called a "disease of the Commonwealth"—a ghostly off-the-books monster, separate from the sovereign and accountable to nobody. [4]  Our goal is to track how that malignant progeny was born—begotten through a marriage made in hell between makers of munitions and magicians of money.  Once we identify its parents, we may then be able to devise a way to excise and exterminate it—like the life-threatening tumor it has become. 

In his mature years S. P. Bush had a central role in arming Europe and America in The Great War and then died three years after grandson George was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery in action. Samuel Prescott Bush died a wealthy man—his fortune made from iron and steel—a necessary component, ironically, for both building a civilization and for tearing it apart.

Moving On

Samuel Prescott Bush was a two-year-old lad in Orange, New Jersey, when his father boarded the USS Vanderbilt in 1865. We are not told when the rest of the family joined Chaplain Bush in San Francisco, only that he served as minister at San Francisco's Grace Episcopal Church until 1872. Samuel was six years old when Leland Stanford drove the golden spike into the rails that linked the Atlantic and Pacific coasts in 1869. Before that auspicious date, travel was an arduous task, eased somewhat in the 1850's by steamers traveling through Panama or Nicaragua, though Rev. Bush had gone with the naval fleet around Cape Horn. Transportation technology was changing then as rapidly as communications has evolved in our own generation. 

In 1870 the promise of the future was the railroad. When the family journeyed back to the East in 1873, they in all likelihood made the trip by rail.  Rev. Bush was to become rector of the Church of the Ascension at Staten Island, New York, only a few miles from his first church in New Jersey. What an exciting journey for a nine-year-old boy that would have been—from coast to coast on a steam locomotive! 

The Camden & Amboy Railroad, built by Robert and Edwin Stevens, had leased its rails two years earlier to the Pennsylvania Railroad, expanding its route closer to New York in the hope of competing with Vanderbilt's New York Central. Debarking at its terminus in New Jersey, the Bushes were only a ferry ride away from Staten Island. The village of West New Brighton on the island’s north central part was just a stone's throw west of Commodore Vanderbilt's Staten Island Ferry, which carried commuters to Manhattan. North of the New Brighton city center, standing on the north shore, one could look  across a murky channel of water called Kill van Kull to where Upper New York Bay extends its fingers into the eastern boundary of Bayonne Peninsula. 

Coming of Age in Hoboken

Perhaps it was the change taking place across this channel near his home that caused Samuel to seek an education in New Jersey rather than go to Yale as his father had done. From his Hoboken vantage point, it was possible to watch New Jersey being transformed into an arsenal. By 1873 the Hazard Powder Company's gunpowder and explosives manufacturing center—first opened during the War of 1812—was booming, figuratively speaking. The area had become an active railroad departure point for the movement of troops and munitions during the civil war, a conversion which had spurred industrial growth of all types. Prentice Oil Company, established in 1875 in Bayonne, was purchased in 1878 by John D. Rockefeller of Cleveland, Ohio, as the site for his new oil refinery, Standard Oil of New Jersey, which later laid pipelines to bring crude oil directly from the West and Southwest areas of the country. Tidewater Oil Company, chartered in Pennsylvania, Rockefeller's biggest competitor, moved there in the same year.[5] Samuel's school, Stevens Institute is shown in the photo as it jutted into the Hudson River.

Stevens Institute, top

Little did Samuel realize when he entered Stevens Institute in Hoboken two years later (1875) what a significant role oil and pipelines would play in the lives of his descendants after his own death in 1948. As a young teenager, he watched as increasing numbers of ships cruised through the channel into Upper New York Bay. 

While attending classes at Stevens high school, followed by four years at Stevens Institute in the "Castle," perched as it was on a bluff jutting high above the Hudson River, directly across from Manhattan's Greenwich Village, he could watch Holland America Line's ships arriving at their Hoboken berth below.[6]  Before long, the Hoboken terminal would also be home to the North German Lloyd and Hamburg-Amerika lines as well. He could not have dreamed then that his own son, Prescott S. Bush, would in 1921 become the son-in-law of G. H. Walker, the St. Louis banker who moved to New York in 1920 to become president of W. A. Harriman & Co., a corporate device he helped the sons of railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman set up to invest his millions in American and foreign business opportunities. One of those opportunities was the shipping companies seized from America's German enemy at the outset of WWI.

Had he viewed the scene in person three decades later (instead of only mentally upon hearing news reports in 1916), he would have been in great danger. The entire area exploded in flames, sending shrapnel in every direction. With New Jersey's industries supplying almost ninety percent of war materiel to England and France, Hoboken—twenty percent of its population consisting of German immigrants—became the center of German sabotage activities.[7]  

Black Tom Island—today Liberty State Park, just south the Stevens campus—was a massive staging area for exportation of munitions.[8] Lehigh Valley Railroad, extending from Jersey City to Buffalo, N.Y.[9], would later be awarded $50 million in damages as a result of a lawsuit won by Wall Street attorney John J. McCloy, whom we met previously in Taking the Golden Eggs Part I and Part II.[10]  The significance of this seemingly irrelevant fact will become clear later in the history of the rivalry between the Samuel Bush’s first employer, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and its biggest competitor, the New York Central Railroad. That important story, unfortunately, must be saved for another day.

The Man of Steel

In 1884 Samuel Bush stood at the Pennsylvania Railroad station, ticket in hand—employed by the very railroad that would carry him west to a four-year apprenticeship in Logansport, Indiana, and then to Columbus, Ohio, with the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad. The next two years he would work as assistant engineer of motive power, followed by employment as master mechanic of the shops at Dennison, Ohio. By 1891, as a master mechanic, he had made Columbus, Ohio, his permanent residence. In 1894, the year he married Columbus native Flora Sheldon, he became superintendent of motive power of the southwest system of the Pennsylvania lines in Columbus, Ohio.  

In 1899, five years after marrying into the Sheldon family, Samuel took a job as superintendent of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad, a major investor in which was William G. Rockefeller.  During the two years the family lived in Milwaukee, the younger son (named Robert Sheldon for Flora’s father and brother) contracted scarlet fever and died. In their grief, the family returned to Columbus in 1901, when elder son Prescott was six years old. However, the Rockefeller connection was not broken by the return to Ohio. If anything, it was enhanced when he took a position with Buckeye Malleable Iron & Coupler Company, which owed a significant debt to the Rockefeller family.

Samuel became vice president and general manager of the company, known simply as Buckeye Steel Castings Company, a manufacturer of car couplers and all kinds of steel castings.[11] The corporation had begun business in 1881 amidst enormous competition—23 foundries competing in Columbus in 1887. The president, Wilbur Goodspeed, began producing railroad couplers in 1890, borrowing heavily from Frank Rockefeller, who then helped ensure their marketability by acquiring  Buckeye stock in exchange for the debt and for additional services. Rockefeller and another Standard Oil associate, Thomas Goodwillie, agreed to "use their best endeavor to secure the introduction and use upon railroads of the said couplers of the said corporation and in all ways to advance the interest of said corporation."[12] Goodspeed, an artillery man in the Civil War, maintained his shooting skills as a member of the Cleveland Gatling Gun Battery, where he and fellow member Goodwillie first met. Such a knowledge of artillery would come in handy when the factory would later produce weapons for World War I. By that time, Samuel would be guided by Frank Rockefeller to play a role in the national war effort.

Down at the Foundry

The new automatic coupler made in the foundry, like one patented by Eli Janney in 1873, as shown in the figure to the right, replaced the manual link and pin coupler which required a man to stand between railroad cars and insert a pin to hold the link in place.[13]  An Ohio law requiring all railroad cars to be equipped with automatic couplers by 1899, enacted shortly before the 1892 contract, promised that Buckeye could sell as many couplers as it could turn out, thus guaranteeing their success when combined with the sales to Rockefeller’s railroads.  This connection would be one of many to link the Bush family to the Rockefeller network.  Although some sources state that the Rockefeller brothers were at odds, the testimony that Frank Rockefeller gave in 1876 to Congress concerning the need for a law regulating interstate commerce, was actually in line with the plan devised to maintain their control over the government agency which would eventually regulate the industry.[14] 

Buckeye would eventually have offices in New York, Chicago and Atlanta, and Samuel would be listed as a director of the Hocking Valley Railway and the Sunny Creek Company, a trustee of Mercy Hospital, a member of the National Manufacturers Association, the Duquesne Club of Pittsburg and the Engineers Club of New York city, besides the Ohio Club, Columbus Club and the Arlington Country Club.  By 1908 he was promoted to president, a position that would advance him into the public eye as he chaired the executive committee for more than a hundred Columbus citizens appointed by the mayor  to raise funds for the war.  Shortly thereafter, he apparently went to Washington, D.C. as chief of the Ordnance, Small Arms and Ammunition section of the War Industries Board headed by Bernard Baruch, a position that would have placed him in a position to help Buckeye convert its production from railroad couplers to munitions, for which it had a ready market.[15]  Moreover, it would have brought him in contact with a cabal accused in 1933 of attempting to set up a military coup to replace FDR. See this blog. [16]  The relationships developed with the men on Baruch’s Board would also have helped to ensure the entry of his son, Prescott Bush, into an increasingly more complex military-industrial network.

                                                                                                                    

Climbing the Social Ladder

Butler Sheldon family mansion

Marrying into the Sheldon family had greatly 
improved Samuel’s social standing, to the delight of his widowed, social-conscious mother, Harriet Fay Bush. Flora was a daughter of Robert Emmett Sheldon and his wife Mary Elizabeth Butler Sheldon of Columbus. Mary’s father was Courtland Philip Livingston Butler, born in Clinton, New York, and her grandmother was "a Livingston" who was even more society oriented than Flora’s mother-in-law. Mary’s brother, Robert E. Sheldon, Jr. (born 1883) a 1904 graduate of Yale’s Sheffield School, married a member of the eminent Church family of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.[17] 

The Church family connection helps to explain Samuel Bush’s membership in the elite Duquesne Club of Pittsburgh, since his wife’s sister-in-law was the daughter of Samuel Harden Church (1858-1943)—secretary of the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad (Samuel Bush’s employer until 1899)—as well as a trustee of the Carnegie Institute, appointed by Andrew Carnegie himself.[18] Church’s work for the P,C,C & S.L Railroad, a subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Railroad, took him and his family back and forth between Pittsburgh, Pa. and Columbus, Ohio—both cities being steel-producing centers with many other overlapping interests.  It should be briefly noted here in passing that Church was a founding member of the American Liberty League, the “cabal” to be discussed in greater depth in the next segment.[19]

 

After Robert Sheldon, Jr. married Ruth Church, they built a home in Upper Arlington, northwest of the town center of Columbus.  Called Marble Cliff, this suburban area (which was made accessible in minutes as a result of Sheldon’s streetcar railway) became the home to some of the wealthiest citizens of the city.  Robert worked for many years at the family retail dry goods store which moved to extensive buildings in 1905, after Robert Sr. developed a wholesale trade.  This step up in the world came after the elder Sheldon first succeeded Emerson McMillin as president of the Columbus Street Railway Company and then in 1903 succeeded General John Beatty as President of the Citizens Savings Bank.[20]  

Even more significant than allowing him to accumulate a personal fortune, these positions reveal very clearly that Robert Sheldon, Sr. had become an insider in the syndicate headed by J.P. Morgan until his death in 1913.  Morgan bought out Pittsburgh’s leading steel producer, Andrew Carnegie, in 1901 for $500 million to merge into Morgan’s United States Steel Corporation. We have already seen in "Taking the Golden Eggs" how Morgan, operating as a clearinghouse between U.S. and foreign currencies,  used William C. Whitney’s streetcar holding companies’ “pump and dump” schemes to create income to finance the purchase of Edison’s electric utility companies by a syndicate of American investors. He used this model also to develop street railway, municipal light companies, and acquire steel production plants in numerous smaller cities of the country.  

It will be recalled that William Whitney was married to Flora Payne, whose father was Senator Henry B. Payne of Cleveland—a long-time associate of the Rockefellers. Flora’s mother was a granddaughter of Judge Nathan Perry, one of the city’s founders in 1796, and daughter of Nathan Perry, Jr., the largest dry goods wholesaler in Cleveland. Both Senator Payne and Samuel Bush also served on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, which began operations in 1914, covering not only Cleveland but Columbus, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh as well. It was William Avery Rockefeller’s son—William Goodsell Rockefeller (1870-1922)—who would leave Cleveland and establish National City Bank in New York City and would eventually usurp the Morgan Bank’s control of the New York Fed. That was a powerful rung on which Prescott Bush would begin his own career, as we shall see.

Scioto Country Club

Samuel built his family’s home, one of the first to be built in Upper Arlington, in 1908. All of the Sheldon siblings lived within walking distance from Flora and Samuel, and they all belonged to Arlington Golf and Riding Club, later to be known as Scioto Country Club, of which Samuel, along with developers of the new suburb, was a founding member. By far the grandest home was the mansion at 1599 Roxbury, owned by Flora’s brother, Butler Sheldon, who also served as mayor of the community in 1909.[21] Butler succeeded his father as President of Columbus Railroad, Columbus Light and Power, Columbus Traction and  Sheldon Dry Goods. Their sister, Mary Sheldon, married Carl J. Hoster, a grandson of a native of Germany and operator of the family brewery in downtown Columbus. He also was president of the Hoster-Columbus Associated Breweries, the U.S. Brewers Association, vice-president of the Ohio Trust Company and director of Columbus Railway & Light Company—no doubt a result of his marriage into the Sheldon family. 

Samuel seems like such a likeable fellow—football fan and avid golfer, community booster, loving father, attentive husband—just like all the Bush men. Quite a bit like Undershaft in Bernard Shaw’s play, actually.  He grew wealthy while manufacturing “mutilation and murder,” and tucked his cannons and torpedoes all neatly into his father’s religion. All in the name of patriotism.




ENDNOTES:

[1] See Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the War of 1812 (1869), online; to see the entire book, review Contents.  Also see Biography of John Rodgers, whose mother was a daughter of Commodore Matthew C. Perry, who opened Japan to American trade, and a niece of Commodore Oliver Hazzard Perry, who stated: "We have met the enemy and they are ours."  The Perrys of Newport, R.I., married into the notorious Slidell family, as well as with members of the Vanderbilt and August Belmont family—a fact which leads one to conclude that there is more to this relationship than can be seen on its face.

 

[2] See photo archive of Mare Island ships.

[3] "This brief phrase was followed by a quote from the Maryland Republican that began, 'The various buildings have been organized and surprisingly improved, considering the small expenditures and the brief time allowed, especially the quarters allotted to the midshipmen…' " [quoted by Ginger Doyel, "A Brief Look at Buchanan," found at USNA  website]. 

[4] Thomas Hobbs had little regard for the concept of separation of powers, which he considered to be a deterioration of the sovereign’s power to protect its subjects: "These are the rights which make the essence of sovereignty, and which are the marks whereby a man may discern in what man, or assembly of men, the sovereign power is placed and resideth. For these are incommunicable and inseparable. The power to coin money, to dispose of the estate and persons of infant heirs, to have pre-emption in markets, and all other statute prerogatives may be transferred by the sovereign, and yet the power to protect his subjects be retained. But if he transfer the militia, he retains the judicature in vain, for want of execution of the laws; or if he grant away the power of raising money, the militia is in vain; or if he give away the government of doctrines, men will be frighted into rebellion with the fear of spirits. And so if we consider any one of the said rights, we shall presently see that the holding of all the rest will produce no effect in the conservation of peace and justice, the end for which all Commonwealths are instituted." Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan.

[5] According to the PBS website:  "The Standard’s only serious competitor -- the Tidewater Pipe-Line Company (later the Tidewater Oil Company)–emerged in 1879-83. It took Rockefeller by surprise and succeeded in building a pipeline from the Oil Regions east across northern Pennsylvania to Williamsport, where the oil was transferred to the Reading Railroad. The Reading then took the oil down to a refinery at Chester, Pennsylvania on the Delaware Bay. Rockefeller tried to gain control of Tidewater but failed, and his rival had about 10% of the market in 1888."  In 1953 J. Paul Getty would gain control of Tidewater.  But that story will wait until another day.  For more information on the beginnings of the rock oil industry and the role played by Frederick Prenctice and George Bissell, founders of the New Jersey Oil Company in Bayonne, N.J., see Paul Frederick’s website about Venango County, Pa.

[6] A history of Stevens Castle from a 1902 book (Historic Houses of New Jersey by W. Jay Mills, 1902) is given at the website Get NJ , which states:

On the highest eminence of “Point Castile,” whose “greene and white cliffes” were supposed to be “copper or silver mynes” by the followers of Henry Hudson, on his memorable voyage up the river which bears his name, Colonel John Stevens, the famous inventor, built a handsome mansion soon after his purchase of Hobuck Island, in 1784, and called it the Castle.... Hobuck Island, or Hoboken Island, formed the largest part of the confiscated Bayard estate, and was much sought after when it was noised about that it was to be put upon the market.... Both the New Jersey and New York shore lines above the harbor presented a very rural appearance in those days. Back of the slim line of wharves were low houses and church spires, and stretches of green fields and undulating meadow-lands rolled away into a gradually rising and wilder landscape.... Hoboken as a pleasure resort, and the early Castle itself, are now but memories. The present Castle was erected about 1845, and is a familiar landmark to the millions who cross the New York and Jersey City ferries to the railroad termini. Rising out of a grove of old trees, it is a most imposing building, and it is pleasing to think that it is always to be owned by a Stevens and can come to a serene old age, smiling on generation after generation.... The Stevens home to-day does not miss the wide strip of pebbly beach, now profaned by huge piers and warehouses, the immortal river walk, which has disappeared, where old New York came to promenade and recruit its wasted energy, and the forgotten green where the weary rested and sipped their sangaree punch and strong waters. These all belong to another period, but it can ever look proudly on the great institute which the wealth given by Hoboken helped the family to establish, almost on the spot where Colonel John Stevens, the planner of the forgotten “Hoboken, the Beautiful” had his workshop and conducted his mechanical experiments.

                A terminal map showing Castle Point, as well as an interactive map of Hoboken in 1881.

[7] See "Imperial Germany's Sabotage Operations In The U.S." at Federation of American Scientists website.

[8] According to Jules Witcover, Sabotage at Black Tom: Imperial Germany's Secret War in America, 1914-1917 (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1989):

The explosion—“like the discharge of a great cannon,” as a newspaper report described it—sent flaming rockets and screeching shells high into the sky like a mammoth fireworks display, turning the night into day. Shrapnel scarred the Statue of Liberty and damaged buildings on Ellis Island. The shock wave from the blast slammed into Manhattan, Brooklyn, Jersey City and Bayonne, shattering thousands of windows. In Lower Manhattan, glass and debris plunged to the streets. Pedestrians were knocked off their feet. The blast jolted the Hudson Tubes train line that linked Jersey City and Hoboken with Lower Manhattan, panicking passengers.

[9] The Railroad's history shows how it came to be a wholly owned subsidiary by 1961 of the Pennsylvania Railroad.  When the LV first began expanding into Pennsylvania by joining in a lease with the Philadelphia & Reading (a railroad that had borrowed with assistance from financiers J. P. Morgan and Anthony Drexel), until Morgan backed out on the Reading and allowed its collapse.  Morgan then agreed to fund the Lehigh Valley and even moved its general offices from Philadelphia to New York. "The independent stockholders of the line protested the diversion of money from dividends into physical plant, and regained control in 1902. Several other railroads bought blocks of LV stock — New York Central, Reading, Erie, Lackawanna, and Central of New Jersey — and the road became part of William H. Moore's short-lived Rock Island system. In 1903 the company underwent some corporate simplification, merging and dissolving a number of subsidiaries....Several events during the teens adversely affected LV’s revenues: a munitions explosion on Black Tom island on the Jersey City waterfront in 1916, the divestiture of the Great Lakes shipping operation in 1917 (required by the Panama Canal Act), the divestiture of the coal mining subsidiary (required by the Sherman Antitrust Act), and a drop in anthracite traffic as oil and gas became the dominant home-heating fuels."  In the 1920's the Pennsylvania Railroad would hold 31% of the Lehigh Valley stock.   In 1961 the Pennsylvania Railroad bought all the outstanding stock to protect its previous investment in the Lehigh Valley.  The importance of this railroad and its merger with the New York Central cannot be overemphasized and will be explored in future segments.

[10] U.S. Supreme Court case Z. & F. Assets Realization Corporation v. Hull (found at 311 U.S. 470), can be read in full online.  McCloy also represented the other plaintiffs (the Agency of Canadian Car and Foundry Company, Limited and Bethlehem Steel Company), claiming arson against the German government under the Settlement of War Claims Act of 1928.  

[11] The name “Buckeye” came from the mascot of Ohio State University, where Samuel—a superior athlete and great fan of the new sport of football—volunteered to coach the university’s team.

[12] Quoted from "Memorandum of Agreement Made this 25^th day of November, 1892 by and between Orland Smith, S.P. Peabody, R.M. Roland, James Timms and W.F. Goodspeed,... and Frank Rockefeller and Thomas Goodwillie..." by Mansel G. Blackford, "Small Business in America:  Two Case Studies," paper delivered at Ohio State University.  See papers on other subjects at the "Business and Economic History" website.

[13] The Janney Coupler was one of 8,000 patents, but its design was probably the best.

[14] The testimony was quoted in Ida Tarbell's classic study, The History of Standard Oil.  It was the resulting commission which Gustavus Myers discusses in another classic work, History of the Great American Fortunes (1936).

[15] The word “apparently” is used here for lack of any official source having been found to verify his role.  In The Unauthorized Biography of George Bush, authors Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin cite their source for their statement as follows:  “Gen. Hugh S. Johnson to Major J.H.K. Davis, June 6, 1918, file no. 334.8/168 or 334.8/451 in U.S. National Archives, Suitland, Maryland”.   Johnson (1882–1942), a West Point graduate, worked under Quartermaster General George Goethals to reorganize army procurement, and he represented Goethals on the War Industries Board—helping to integrate military and industrial sectors behind a massive wartime buildup. He again returned to government in 1933 under the New Deal to head the National Recovery Administration.  Goethals had replaced John F. Stevens (from the family who founded Stevens Institute) as chief engineer of the Panama Canal.  The chapter entitled “The War Department From Root To Marshall” in the book by James E. Hewes, Jr., Special Studies:  From Root to McNamara; Army Organization and Administration (Washington, D. C.:  U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1975), gives a good history of the reorganization of procurement services during the first decades of the 20^th century.  (See Contents.)  However, it does not mention the name Samuel P. Bush.  A short time later, again according to Tarply and Chaitkin, he would move to the Facilities Division of the War Industries Board.

[16] General Smedley D. Butler accused Gerald McGuire, who worked for Col. Grayson Mallet-Prevost Murphy, of attempting to bribe him to use his influence with veterans to join the cabal, which included Gen. Hugh S. Johnson, Robert Sterling Clark and John W. Davis, attorney for the “Morgan Interests.”  The plot is described in the book by Jules Archer, The Plot To Seize the White House (New York:  Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1973), one review of the many which discuss the plot can be read online here.  

[17] Her great-grandfather Samuel Church (1800-1857), born in Ireland, was the  major partner in Kensington Iron Works after he moved to Pittsburgh in 1822—as well as a preacher for 17 years at the First Christian Church of Allegheny.  Colonel Samuel Harden Church’s importance in the community of Pittsburgh can easily be seen from his role in the Centennial Celebration of Pittsburgh in 1909.  The chapter on the celebration is excerpted from the book by J. H. Garrison, ed.   Program of the International Centennial Celebration and Conventions of the Disciples of Christ (1909), the contents of which can be searched and read online.

[18] Church had even been a guest at Carnegie’s Cluny Castle in Scotland while retracing Cromwell’s steps after his book was published in 1894.  See Volume XXIV, Biographical Review, Containing Life Sketches of Leading Citizens of Pittsburgh and Vicinity (Boston: Biographical Review Pub. Co., 1897), p. 288.  A photograph of Cluny Castle is online.  Another trustee of the board selected by Carnegie was modern painter John W. Beatty.  As stated in Garrison’s Program described above:  “Andrew Carnegie first chose Pittsburgh realist painter and friend John W. Beatty to head the institute's department of fine art.”  Another famous Pittsburgh citizen, Andrew W. Mellon, would also hold a seat on the board at a later date—as well as serving in the role of U.S. Treasury secretary under presidents William G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, the latter of which also appointed Mellon ambassador to Great Britain in 1932.  Mellon (1855-1937) was one of the richest men in the United States, owing to investments in aluminum, coke, oil, and steel.  Mellon will be profiled in a future article.

[19] A photo of Church and a brief description of Church’s role in the plot can be reviewed at the website maintained by the Coalition To Oppose the Arms Trade.

[20] William Alexander Taylor, Centennial History of Columbus and Franklin County, Ohio  (Chicago-Columbus: The S.J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1909), p. 198.  This book is online and has an excellent search engine.

[21] An excellent website—highly recommended—with historical information and photographs is maintained by the Grandview Heights neighborhood association.

 

The Family Business

While researching a totally different money trail on another blog, Quixotic Joust, the author/blogger  (i.e. me, Linda Minor) came across a point of intersection with the research being done currently for Where the Gold Is, and it rang a bell. That linking point was the Inniskillen Dragoons, a military regiment that shared links between the British government's presence in India during the Opium Wars era and also intermarriage with the banking family of Alexander Brown, whose sons operated the Brown Shipley company as well as being partners in their father's bank based in Baltimore. James Brown later became the senior partner in the New York investment bank set up around 1825 called Brown Brothers, which just over a century later merged with capital infused by sons of railroad tycoon E.H. Harriman.

In America 1825 was the year the Erie Canal opened and opened up new trade routes into what was then "the West," areas such as Ohio, Illinois and Indiana. Just as American business boomed, Britain was going through a devastating financial crisis that year, just a decade after the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

Alexander and Sarah Benedict Brown's son was James Clifton Brown, who married Amelia Rowe Brown:

1. Douglas Clifton Brown (b. 1879), married to Violet Cicely Kathleen Wollaston. Violet was Grace Brown Hargreaves' granddaughter; James Clifton Brown and Violet's mother, the former Anne Hargreaves, were first cousins. Named Viscount Ruffside, Douglas Clifton Brown served as Speaker of the House of Commons from 1943 to 1951.
2. Another son of James Clifton Brown—Edward Clifton Brown—became a partner in the Brown Brothers London office in 1899.

Arbuthnot in India

Anne had married a military man, Frederick Eustace Arbuthnott Wollaston, whose grandfather, Sir Alexander Dundas Young Arbuthnott, had fought in the Napoleonic wars—at Copenhagen in 1807, the capture of Antwerp, and in 1814 had escorted to the Emperor of Russia and the King of Prussia to England. He was 38 when he married in 1827. Their daughter, Josette, was born in France, and in 1850 she married another military man, Frederick Wollaston, a Major in the Enniskillen Dragoons. It was their son whom Anne Hargreaves chose for her husband in 1877.

Footnote: Intriguingly, Anne's marriage thus links the Brown family in a vague way to our previous research. You may recall these battles in which Admiral Arbuthnott was involved as occurring during the exact same time that John Murray "Jack" Forbes I was acting as consult and spy for President James Monroe and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams.

Violet Cicely Wollaston (daughter of Anne Hargreaves Wollaston) married Douglas Clifton Brown—second son of Grace Brown Hargreaves’ brother, Alexander, and Sarah Benedict Brown, daughter of James Brown (see the first Brown tree above)—thus uniting three branches of the Brown family, two in England and one in America. 

Sir Alexander Hargreaves Brown, who was born in 1844 (during England's second opium war with China), according to Kelly's Peerage, in 1876 married Henrietta Blandy, whose father Charles R. Blandy, was a wine merchant in Madeira, an island in the Atlantic, west of Portugal and Morocco. Two years earlier her sister had become the wife of the famous electrician who had met the Blandy family while engaged in laying the Atlantic Cable.

The island of Madeira had been a huge producer of sugar, using slave labor, late in the 15th century, but shifted to wine production by the 17th century. The defeat of Napoleon resulted in ceding the island to Britain in 1807, but it was returned to Portugal in 1814, while the British government kept its eyes on the strategic area through consuls, one of whom was Captain David Holland Erskine, who was in contact with Charles R. Blandy in 1862 concerning a claim against the Confederacy for destroying cargo belonging to him. Erskine died in 1869.

The pattern that emerges when we look closely at the sibling attachments of the Hargreaves children indicates that Sir William developed a strong connection through Grace Brown Hargreaves and her husband to military and Crown civil servants, whose role was to protect the British Empire’s investments during the late 18^th and the 19^th centuries. One after another of the sons and husbands of daughters was an officer in one of His Majesty’s Regiments. The Wollaston name was tied to the Inniskilling Dragoons, and the Arbuthnot(t) family stemmed from even higher rank in its closeness to royalty and, we would assume, to Royal Family investments.

The Royal Exchequer, we recall from history, felt forced to turn their eyes to the Far East in the attempt to siphon off a greater return from the East India Company’s charter. In 1784 the India Act was passed by Parliament to create a Board of Control to oversee the company and eliminate the reasons for previous corruption and bribery scandals (as well as reports of torture and rape) involving Company officials. This rings a bell with some of Erik Prince's shenanigans, does it not? After Blackwater scandals, the company was forced to change its name and go into deeper hiding.

But the most significant result, visible only in hindsight, was in giving these civil servants and soldiers the opportunity to observe first-hand how the Empire and its contractor, the Honourable East India Company, operated the lucrative opium trade. That knowledge would be stored away in their collective conscience for future reference. 

It is worthwhile to peruse the Contents of the public domain book, The Register of Letters, etc.: Of the Governour and Company of Merchants of London Trading Into the East Indies, 1600-1619, to gain a glimpse of the metaphor described in a previous blog post about global family networks. In 1600 Queen Elizabeth had commissioned the royal adventurers to explore and bring back wealth to sustain the government, as did James I in 1604. Note, for example, this fascinating entry: "Letters Patent exempting spices and drugs sold by the Company for re-exportation from the operation of the statute for the well garbling of spices, 9th August, 1606." A century later the contractors would be complaining that the requirement that they clean and garble spices was too "oppressive and vexatious," requesting that the government assume that role, saying that it would benefit the public and should therefore be paid for by the public rather than the businessmen.

The American Browns

Alexander’s linen trade did so well in Baltimore, that his two youngest sons moved to Philadelphia to set up a bank, primarily for the convenience of clients in Baltimore who wished to have an agent in Philadelphia to purchase manufactured goods there on their behalf. William, stationed in England, set up a separate partnership with his brothers for the dry goods trade in Liverpool, but also opened a London bank with a partner named Shipley to facilitate payments through the financial center.

It was the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 which resulted in New York’s becoming the dominant commercial and financial center in America and which inspired James Brown to set up Brown Brothers & Co. there. John A. Brown remained in Philadelphia, but retired in 1839, James to consolidate the Philadelphia concern with his New York office. Back in Baltimore, Alexander worked with the second son George beginning in 1827 in organizing the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Alexander died in 1834 and George retired in 1852. His son George Stewart Brown replaced him in their business interests in 1865, along with a partner, his sister's husband William H. Graham, whose son-in-law Benjamin Howell Griswold, Jr. joined the firm in 1904.

John A. Brown and George Brown sold their shares in 1840 to their brothers, William and James, leaving James the head of American operations, which also expanded to Boston during this period. More economic troubles in 1857 caused the firm to increasingly focus on banking operations and to ease out of importing and exporting completely. The two brothers shared power until William's death in 1864, and control passed entirely to James. In 1868 new articles of partnership were drawn up. By this time, William's sons had died, his grandsons were too young, and only two of James's sons had enough experience to run the business, making it necessary to bring in outside partners and thus jeopardizing the Brown family's control of the firm. Reorganized, however, Brown Brothers was now better suited to a changing world. Its credit business became so lucrative that the partners contributed outside money to maintain sufficient working capital. When William's grandson, Alexander Hargreaves Brown, became a partner in 1875, not only was family control restored, but a major portion of William's estate returned to the firm, helping Brown Brothers to prosper in the final decades of the 19th century. [Source: International Directory of Company Histories, Vol. 45. St. James Press, 2002.]

Moving from the British to the American family, we find that the oldest son in Baltimore, George Brown, succeeded his father at the Alex. Brown & Son bank and helped to finance much of the Baltimore infrastructure, including building the first railroad in America. When George died, his wife, Isabella McLanahan Brown—the granddaughter of an Irish-American who had served as U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania—donated funds for a new Presbyterian church in Baltimore, which to this day is still called the Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church. 

Elkridge Fox Hunt Club

Their second son, George Stewart Brown, was in charge of the bank until his own death in 1890, and was then succeed by his son, Alexander. George Stewart Brown’s major interest had been the founding of the Elkridge Fox Hunting Club in Maryland, which brought him into contact with the wealthy Anglophiles on the Southeast Coast, some of whom had relocated to Baltimore from Philadelphia, the original U.S. Capitol, and still had family back in Pennsylvania.

Alexander’s wife, for example, Bessie Montague, not only came from a long line of aristocrats from Virginia, but her father and brother headed a company in Baltimore which acted as agents for two London-based insurance companies. It was Bessie’s family from which Mrs. Wallis Simpson (later known as the Duchess of Windsor) claimed descent.

B. Howell Griswold, Jr.

Upon Alexander’s death, the Baltimore bank management passed to his son-in-law, Benjamin Howell Griswold, Jr., descendant of Matthew Griswold and Anne Wolcott, two of the most distinguished families in Connecticut. The branches of their family trees are not only inextricably interwoven with the most powerful names in Yale’s Skull and Bones hierarchy, but over the years have taken on an increasingly German connection, with a distinctly fascist-prone outlook.

The Griswold papers betray a strong distrust of power in the hands of commoners not bred to rule. This distrust exhibits itself in promoting ever greater secrecy in the government’s financing mechanism, which is slightly easier to detect from an examination of the other Brown family bank—Brown Brothers & Company—which would merge with the Harriman brothers’ bank in 1931.  

Rev. Alonzo Potter, Howard's father

During the first century of the bank’s existence, it was merely a brokerage operation in which all four Brown brothers were partners, though it was under the management of James, the youngest of them. Besides his eldest daughter, who married her cousin William in Liverpool, another daughter, Mary Louisa, married a man named Howard Potter, and their son, James Brown Potter, would become a partner in both Brown Brothers & Co. and Brown, Shipley & Co. Potter was a descendant of some of America's most noted Episcopal bishops.

From his marriage in 1879, a most strategic connection would subsequently arise when his daughter, Anne Urquhart Potter in 1901 married James Alexander Stillman, grandson of the founder of Citibank.  After Stillman’s death in 1944, Anne married Fowler McCormick, a descendant of the famous McCormick reaper family.  It was just after 1900, in fact, that the brokerage firm took on more of a private banking role—locating profitable investments for wealthy clients.

We find some of these names reappearing at the time the W. A. Harriman & Co. investment bank was merged in 1931 with that of Brown Brothers of New York and Philadelphia. When E. H. Harriman's youngest daughter, Carol Averell Harriman Penn Smith became a widow in 1929, she soon married W. Plunkett Stewart, who had been a horseman at the Green Valley Hunt Club in Maryland. Stewart's daughter, Doris Lurman Stewart, in 1931 married William Potter Wear, the first cousin of George Herbert (Herbie) Walker, Jr.