The Medicis

Morning at the Office reading Kent’s Commentaries. Found them dull and myself sleepy. Heard of the death of James Perkins, the richest man of his age in Boston. No loss however. - Charles Francis Adams diary entry June 23, 1828

Josiah Quincy compared the Perkins family to the Medicis. The Medicis had their ups and downs too.

James Jr. was the son of a very rich man. He graduated from Harvard in 1809, and after marrying his first-cousin-once-removed Eliza Callahan, built his house on Jamaica Pond next to Pine Bank, his father’s estate. He joined his father in contributing a substantial sum ($8,000) to the Boston Athenaeum when it moved into the family's Pearl Street mansion, and put in a few hours at the counting house, but the fact of the matter is, with the Perkins fortune, he didn’t have to work a day in his life.

James Jr. and Eliza had five children. The firstborn, James, born in 1814, died at the age of ten. Sarah came along in 1818, Edward (Ned) Newton Perkins in 1820, and Charles Callahan Perkins in 1823. Baby James, James Henry Perkins, known as Hal, was born in 1826.

James Jr. did his best to follow in his father’s footsteps, but unfortunately, he was an alcoholic and never really found his proper role in life. Along with his cousin, “Short-Arm Tom," whose right arm was a trifle shorter than his left he brawled his way across two continents.

In London, Tom boxed an old African named Richmond, who had such long arms that he could button his breeches at the knee without stooping. Tom knocked the African almost through a window. After he had extricated a few pieces of glass from his arms, he said with great respect: "Golly, Massa Major, how you do hit wid dat right of yours! Why, I radder be kicked by old Massa's black mule dan hab you hit me again like dat. No, by golly, I don't want any mo' of dat hitten here."

After losing her first-born son James in 1824, and her husband James’s untimely death at age thirty-eight in 1828, Eliza got religion, lots of religion. She quickly remarried George Washington Doane who had just become the assistant rector at Trinity Church in Boston. When Dr. Gardiner died in 1830, Doane was made rector. In 1832 he was elected Bishop of New Jersey.

Bishop Doane and Eliza produced two sons of their own, George Hobart Doane (1830) and William Crosswell Doane (1832), and when Doane became bishop, the couple moved to New Jersey with their two sons and left the Perkins children behind in the care of their grandmother.

Sarah was always very close to her namesake grandmother. She married Henry Russell Cleveland in 1838 and moved right into Pine Bank, the Perkins family house, where she loved reading to her grandmother, boating on Jamaica Pond, the long rides on horseback, the visits of the family, and the boys coming back from school and college.

Once a year Sarah drove with her grandmother in the chariot with yellow wheels, the pair of roan horses, and Calvin, the coachman, to Worcester to visit the Paine relations. Grandmother Sarah sat erect and never leaned back once, all the 50 miles. She was a grand lady; a witty friend once said that if Madam Perkins was approaching the Gates of Heaven, she would say to her coachman, "Drive right in, Calvin."

Charley and Ned were sent off to boarding school in Cambridge, and were looked after by Charles Follen and his wife Eliza. Follen was a radical German poet who had come to the United States in 1824. Introduced by the Marquis de Lafayette, he quickly established himself in Massachusetts society. He became the first professor of German at Harvard, and managed to marry a Brahmin, Eliza Lee Cabot, in 1828. Follen believed in the importance of training the body as well as the mind, helped establish the first college gymnasium in the United States at Harvard, and is said to have had one of the first Christmas trees in America.

Hal was expelled from Harvard in October 1842. The family tried to help him become a farmer, but Hal, like his father, had a "severe drinking problem" and died young at the age of 25.

After her husband died, Sarah Cleveland gave her share in Pine Bank to her brother Ned when he got married. He tore down the old house and in 1848 built a grander one from plans by a French architect. Sarah was not pleased, the new house was"not, to my taste, becoming to the place; French, square and heavy."

To her brother Charley in Europe she described the destruction of the old house:
Charley dear, our own dear Pine Bank house is no more-the old house nearly level. I have not looked upon its murder, though when I was the other day on your land I heard the dear old boards and planks sighing and screaming as they were rent asunder it seemed to me that they told, one by one, the years in succession that had been numbered since it stood 1804 with a shriek, 1805 with a scream, 1806, a shudder, it ripped apart.

The two Doane boys, unlike their Perkins half-brothers, were obviously born with ecclesiastical blood. George Hobart Doane became a deacon at Grace Episcopal Church in Newark. There he preached on the "One Holy and Catholic and Apostolic Church," and had more positive things to say about Pope Pius IX than he did Dr. Tyng, the leader of the Episcopalians.

At age 25, George appeared at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Newark, intent on conversion, and asked to see the Roman bishop. Unsurprisingly, he was soon thereafter deposed as deacon of Grace Episcopal Church; his father personally removed him from office. After studying in Rome, George Hobart Doane was ordained a Catholic priest in 1857. He eventually made peace with his father, and as Monsignor Doane "worked early and late for fifty years to make Newark a pleasanter and cleaner city to live in.”

His brother William Croswell Doane, more predictably, became the first bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Albany. He served about 60 years in ordained ministry. We Episcopalians still sing his hymn, Ancient of Days.

Ned and his wife took Sarah and her daughter, and their mother Eliza to spend the winter in Rome in 1858. While they were enjoying the Roman spring in April 1859, they were distraught to receive news of the death of Bishop Doane back in Boston. The family decided to travel, perhaps to bring some sunshine into their mother's saddened life. They arrived in June in the old mountain city of Perugia.

The timing was poor. When they arrived, the city’s nobles, smelling liberty in the air, decided to declare Perugia independent from the Papal state. The Monsignor's Pope, Pius IX, would not tolerate this challenge to his authority, and sent his army to re-conquer Perugia. Two thousand papal troops advanced on the city. The gates of the city were closed, but with the assistance of priests and monks from within the walls, the mercenaries broke through. Furious fighting broke out in the narrow streets and the Perkins family sought refuge in a hotel. Ned kept watch with his sword while the ladies hid in a small closet. The troops rushed through the hotel's apartments, looting and bayoneting many innocents, including one of the proprietors and a mother with a child in her arms.

When the soldiers entered their apartment, Ned managed to persuade them, with the help of his sword and some gold, that they were Americans and should be left alone. The ruffians eventually left, but then two hour later, more drunk hooligans broke in, and robbed the family of all they had.

The Perkins were fortunate to make their way back to Rome alive, where news of their harrowing tale quickly made it back to America in the pages of the New York Times. Sarah Cleveland and her daughter bore the ordeal with remarkable fortitude, but the trial for Eliza Greene Callahan Perkins Doane was too much, coming so soon after her husband’s death. Mrs. Doane, at the age of 70, died in Florence in November 1860 at the residence of her son Mr. Edward N. Perkins. “It appears her mind never recovered from the shock it received during the memorable sack at Perugia, Italy, in which she and her party escaped a cruel death."