Going into Business

Young James Perkins loved books, and would have benefited greatly from a Harvard education, but the circumstances of the time dictated that he become apprenticed as a teenager to W. & J. Shattuck, merchants in Boston. On reaching the age of twenty-one in 1782 James came into an inheritance from his grandfather Peck, and set out on his own for Cap François on the island of Saint Domingue (Haiti), the richest, most elegant city in the West Indies, which supplied half the sugar and much of the coffee used in Europe.

The Revolutionary War was still underway; the first ship James sailed on was captured by a British frigate and taken as a prize into New York Harbor. He made his way back to Boston and sailed again, this time on his Mother’s boat The Beaver, which successfully carried him to Cap François along with a cargo of cavalry horses for the island’s French army.

Cap François was a two week sail, but a world away, from Boston. With its lush tropical climate, and fueled by unrelenting exploitation of slave labor, Saint Domingue was the most profitable and most cosmopolitan of all New World colonies during the last half of the eighteenth century. Cap François was the "Paris of the Antilles", famous throughout the Caribbean for its women, particularly the mulatto courtesans whose skills were advertised around the world by the sailors who came to port. Soon after James arrived, the Revolutionary War finally came to a close, and a sense of euphoria lifted the spirits of young Americans everywhere. Anything was possible now, and especially so for young men in their twenties, especially young Bostonians with some capital.

Jim went to work trading for the firm of Wall and Tardy, until that firm dissolved in 1786. His brother Tom then joined forces with Jim and his friend Walter Burling,who had just fled New York after shooting a man who had impregnated his sister, and set up business as Perkins, Burling, and Perkins. They sold the usual commodities: Slaves -- “Your negroes were sold at Auction, our W.B. attended and trumped up Bob to 2300 and odd livres, the other went for 1600, he was lame.” Flour -- “Our J.P. will be in Boston last of September and will communicate to you the means of Introducing Flour to this Port and taking away Contraband Goods.” Wine -- “Excellent Sherry wine in quarter casks, Madeira wine.”

Young Jim certainly enjoyed the pleasures of the Caribbean, but when his brother Tom took over on the Cape in the spring of 1786, he returned to Boston to act the firm’s Boston Agent. He had business of his own at home as well. In January, he rode out to Worcester in a sled with his sister Mary, getting dumped once in the snow along the way, to be married to twenty-one year old Sarah Paine, daughter of Judge Timothy Paine, of Worcester.

The portrait of Sarah as a young woman by Stuart Newton shows her as round faced, wearing a headband, with a slightly distrusting smile. In the Gambardella portrait painted later in life which hangs in my front room she seems rather dower – she keeps her lips pursed, probably missing some teeth; the blue ribbons in her hair were only revealed when the Keck’s cleaned the painting back in the seventies. Nevertheless, she must have been game. She accompanied Jim back to Haiti even though passage was not always assured; the eldest son of Jim’s sister Elizabeth had just sailed for the island that winter, but the ship had never arrived.

At Cap François Jim, who had drilled his youthful platoon in front of the garrisoned Redcoats, and his younger brother Sam were Captain and Lieutenant of the American "Corps de Garde ". This quasi-military position was a social distinction, but also a practical move, as the colony’s wealth was derived from the forced labor of five-hundred-thousand African slaves. Without the strong arm of the French military, and the para-military “gardes”, the colony’s agricultural economy could never survive.

The young married couple travelled between Boston and Cap François. In 1791 they were on the island with their infant son James when they travelled by coach to visit several plantations on the fertile plain which spread inland from the Cape. When they arrived at the Rouvry plantation, The Marquis was in the mountains on business, and their hostess was visiting a neighboring plantation, but expected them for dinner. When Madame finally arrived she was in a state of great alarm. The whole country was in revolt; the slaves were burning and looting everything. At their plantation, evidently, the slaves did not yet know about the uprising, but it was clear there was no time to lose. A plan was made to leave at midnight. As they sat down to dinner set on a rich service of plate, the boisterous noises outside made it clear news had arrived of the day’s events. Dinner was soon over; little food had been eaten in the silent gloom.

Madame de Rouvry packed up her plate. It took some money to bribe the driver to harness his horses, but just before twelve the three carriages were brought to the door. The Marchioness, her beautiful sixteen year old daughter, and her instructress were in the first carriage, with the plate; Sarah and infant son James, with Madame de Rouvry and her child, were in the second carriage; Mr. Perkins, and a lady who had escaped another plantation, were in a phaeton; and Mr. Baury was on horseback. James and Baury were both armed and agreed to shoot the drivers if they hesitated, and mount the horses and drive the carriages themselves.

They reached a village where the houses were all lit up and the slaves howling and dancing. The carriages came to a stop, but Madame de Rouvry ordered her driver to proceed instantly, or she would have him punished in the severest manner. The man hesitated, but her voice and Baury’s sword prompted him to spur the horses, and they proceeded so quickly that the insurgents who were all in the houses dancing and beating drums never discovered them.
They arrived safely at Fort Dauphin about six o'clock in the morning where they secured a boat and sailed for the Cape. Sarah spread a mattress on the ballast stones of the vessel, and she and her young son lay down to rest during the passage.

After the island finally fell to the slave revolt in 1798, James and Sarah Perkins brought their faithful Negro slave, Moose, who had saved their lives, back with them when they returned to the United States. Moose received his freedom; but the only use he ever wished to make of it was “to spend it in loving service to his former master, and all who were connected with him. He was a great favorite with young and old; and no wonder, for, to the day of his death at an advanced age, their joys and sorrows were his own.”

Sarah was the “Glue” that held the Perkins clan together until her death in 1841. She outlived James by almost twenty years, living in Pine Bank, their country home on Jamaica Pond. She looked tough, but she took care of her friends and relatives. Her Trumbull cousins in Worcester were not as well off as the Perkins, but Sarah purchased a home for them, and made sure the deed was conveyed through the female line.