Big Sister

Sarah Paine Perkins, the second child of James Perkins Jr and Eliza Green Perkins was named after her grandmother Perkins, and was always very close to her. Sarah was born in 1818 and was brought up at Pine Bank where the family moved after the Pearl Street mansion was given to the Athenaeum, and her grandfather died. Her older brother James died in 1824 when she was six, and her father passed away in 1828 when she was ten, and then her mother married Bishop Doane and moved to New Jersey, so Sarah stayed on where she was most comfortable, at Pine Bank with her grandmother and her younger brothers Ned and Charlie and Hal.

When she turned twenty she married a young man ten years her senior with literary inclinations. Henry Russell Cleveland had graduated from Harvard in 1827, was known to have clear judgment, a lively fancy, and an almost instinctive elegance of taste, and particularly enjoyed the English poets and the great Latin writers.

Henry had always been of delicate health, and after college he had headed west on the new canal to Geneseo where he had helped start an academy for boys. In Geneseo he contracted a fever, perhaps malaria, and almost died. His father was Vice-Consul in Havana so he visited Cuba in 1830, hoping the travel would help his health. He then travelled on to Europe; to England in 1831, and then on to Paris where he became private secretary to the American minister Rives and also secretary to the American Polish Committee where he became acquainted with Lafayette. He continued on to Geneva, and then to Florence, Rome, and Naples. When he finally returned to America in 1833 he became a proctor at Harvard. He certainly had literary inclinations, but, thinking practically, he started an academy in Boston and resumed his teaching career, documenting his methods in his book “Remarks on the Classical Education of Boys” (1834).

Henry formed an informal social group (a "mutual admiration society" in the words of one critic) called the Five of Clubs, which included the law partners Charles Sumner and George Hillard, the classicist Cornelius Felton, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The five young men met together at Pine Bank on Saturday afternoons, and talked of society and experiences and books and travels. They reviewed each others works and helped launch each others careers.

When he married Sarah in 1838, Henry's life changed. The marriage settlement stipulated that of her inheritance from her father, $30,000 would be paid to Henry as his own property. Beyond that sum, the inheritance would be given over to a trust, with the income to benefit Sarah free from the control of any husband. Soon after the marriage, he suffered an attack by a kind of nervous fever, which hung about him for some weeks, and he stopped teaching. He soon realized that his retiring habits and the delicacy of his organization gave him a strong preference for that "Domestic life, in rural leisure passed," which the poet Cowper pronounced to be so favorable to virtue and happiness.

From this period on the course of his life became placid and uneventful as, with the exception of a winter spent in Boston, a few months in Cambridge, and occasional visits to his wife's mother in New Jersey, he resided at the beautiful estate of Pine Bank.

His occupations were almost exclusively literary, though no inconsiderable portion of his time was devoted to the duties of a wide and generous hospitality. His friends long associated his smile of welcome and the cordial pressure of his hand with the breezy lawns of Pine Bank, the beautiful belt of trees which skirts its borders, its winding walks, and gentle waves that die away on its pebbled shore.

Henry's brother Horace had just returned from the "dream-land" of the west, and moved into Pine Bank as well. Horace joined into the literary activities of the Five of Clubs, and eventually went on to become one of America's first landscape architects and an associate of Frederick Law Olmsted (who would eventually turn Pine Bank into part of Boston's "Emerald Necklace"). Ralph Waldo Emerson hired Horace Cleveland to design Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, and then Horace returned west, to his "dream-land", where with a nod to his friendship to Longfellow and the Song of Hiawatha, he developed the Minneapolis park system including Minnehaha Park.

When her grandmother died in 1841, and with her mother in New Jersey with her second family, Sarah had to take care of her brothers. Charles had been suspended from Harvard in 1841 for leaving at the end of the term without permission and without passing his exams, and Sarah had to write to Longfellow to intercede with President Josiah Quincy to have Charlie reinstated. Her youngest brother Hal was expelled from Harvard for good in October 1842. She tried to help him become a farmer, but Hal, like his father, couldn't escaped his alcohol addiction and died young at the age of 25. She even took care of her mother when Bishop Doane got into severe financial distress because of the mortgages he had signed (along with funds from Charlie and Ned) made to found schools in New Jersey.

Her husband Henry Cleveland was never well. In 1841 he traveled on horseback with Charlie west through Greenfield, Charlemont, North Adams, and Williamstown, to Troy, and then back to Boston, but he developed a cough which stayed with him and made the trip uncomfortable for all. The following year he tried going back to Cuba and the Caribbean, and sailed to Bonaire, using the trip for his literary pursuits:

"I have studied Sales's Spanish Grammar entirely through, with care and attention, performing all the exercises twice; I have translated four books of Telemaque from the French into Spanish, carefully correcting my work by a Spanish translation; I have studied critically, and reviewed with care, two plays of Calderon, occupying two hundred pages; and in the same careful manner have studied through, three or four times, a volume of poetry, by Espronceda, a modern Spanish poet, the volume containing about three hundred pages. I have read Alison's History of the French Revolution, four volumes of Addison's works, all Byron's dramatic works, Dana's " Two Years Before the Mast," McKenzie's " Paul Jones," and Commodore Perry; besides a whole rabble rout of novels, tales, poems, romances, reviews, magazines, and newspapers, too numerous to be catalogued."

In May he took a steamboat for St. Louis, but his cough got progressively worse, and when he arrived he was carried to a hotel. He was feverish and bleeding from his lungs. Sarah and Charles had been summoned, and arrived in early June just in time to be with him as the last rites were administered. He died June 12th, 1843. The last words he spoke, addressed to his wife, were, "Whatever happens, we must trust in God."

Sarah returned to Pine Bank. Charlie took off to join Ned in Europe. Pine Bank seemed awfully big. Five years later, when Ned got engaged to Mary Spring, Sarah decided to give him the house.

She lived with Charlie at Oakwood on the north shore of the pond until she built her own house, Nutwood, in 1867, next door on the corner of Chestnut and Perkins Streets.

Sarah stayed in touch with Longfellow, and gave a complete set of Shakespeare to her favorite nephew Teddy when he married Edith Wharton in 1885. Sarah Paine Perkins Cleveland died, fifty years after her huband, in 1893.

Both sides of Chestnut Street on the Boston side were Perkins land until the area on the Ward's Pond side was sold to the Jamaica Plain Aqueduct Company to become parkland in the 1890's. Oakwood and Nutwood stood until the early 1970's when they became part of the Cabot Estate Condominiums and were demolished.

Books

"You have his countenance very correctly given in the family portrait, which Stuart painted. It was not his way to volunteer advice. Once, and I am sorry to say once only, as we sat together after dinner, he turned to me with great seriousness, and spoke to me earnestly and at considerable length on the importance of my becoming well grounded in English literature, — and I very well remember that he especially directed my attention to the ‘ Lives of the Poets,' by Dr. Johnson;
"Thus I answer your inquiries, and remain ever very faithfully yours,
Geo. Bancroft.

James’s copy of “Lives of the Poets” sits on my bookshelf, with his enthusiastic comments in the frontispiece; “Notwithstanding the Errors and Instances of Partiality and Misrepresentation . . . the Lives of the Poets cannot be perused by any reader of taste without a great Degree of Pleasure.” The book was printed in Dublin in 1779, by a consortium of thirteen gentlemen (Messrs. Whitestone, Williams, Colles, et al.). Holding the book, I am drawn to the consistency of the typography and the presswork; the impression “bites” into the old style laid rag bond. The book is bound in calfskin, although curiously, pages 531 through 534 are bound in error between the title page and the table of contents. Books of this period were substantial objects of considerable value, the labor of many hours of painstaking labor, each individual letter set by hand, each sheet hand fed into the press, the impression the result of the pressman's skill and brawn, each signature hand folded with an ivory bone, then individually sewn and bound by the bookbinder.

James appreciated the niceties of style and he loved books. While he never had the public personality of his younger brother Tom, his friends and family appreciated the generous warmth of his personality. He was a constant reader and a bibliophile. He collected books even while living in Haiti, and was one of the original subscribers to the Boston Athenaeum, and a trustee for many years. In 1822, when the Athenaeum’s collection of books and artwork had grown to the point where it needed a permanent home, he donated his Mansion on Pearl Street to the growing society. Ralph Waldo Emerson appreciated the house “royally fitted up for elegance & comfort” where he enjoyed its amenities with his literary friends and colleagues.

That same year James sat to have his portrait painted by Gilbert Stuart. The two were good friends and James had a cellar full of excellent Madeira wine which they both enjoyed. Presumably, the portrait was coming along quite well as they spent considerable time together. The sitting was unfortunately cut short however, when James died rather suddenly from pneumonia on the first day of August.

Shortly after the death, James’s brother Tom called at the studio, expecting to see the portrait almost complete. There was only an initial sketch on the easel, and Colonel Perkins was outraged. Stuart did his best to explain the situation, but Tom stormed out, “Very well, Mr. Stuart, you have inflicted an irreplaceable loss by your dilatoriness, and I shall never enter your studio again!” The words had particular effect as Thomas Handasyd Perkins was the richest man in Boston, and the acknowledged leader of the Brahmin caste.

Stuart worked feverishly from memory for the next several weeks. Meeting Colonel Perkins by chance in the street, he begged him to reconsider and visit his studio. Tom relented; “I entered the studio, and there on the easel I saw the perfect portrait of my dear brother, which (pointing to the picture on the wall) now hangs before you.”

The Athenaeum Trustees attended their late benefactor’s funeral en masse, and commissioned their first purchase, a copy of the portrait of their benefactor.

The Athenaeum portrait varies in several ways from the family portrait. In the family portrait, James sits at a desk with a sheaf of papers, a few books, and a quill pen. His gaze is direct and completely self-assured. The Athenaeum portrait embellishes his surrounding considerably. He sits, a public personality, slightly bemused, holding an open letter, before a Roman column and tapestry, with shelves of books in the background.

An editorial in the Commercial Advertiser noted that James gave $20,000 to the Boston Athenaeum in 1821, and left $25,000 to Harvard University in his estate, and lamented that "We are astonished that capitalists, in their liberal moments, never think of Yale College. Cambridge, before, had so much money that they hardly knew what to do with it - while modest and unassuming Yale..."

In 1826 the Athenaeum commissioned Stuart to paint a portrait of Thomas Handasyd Perkins to hang alongside his brother James. Two years later, it was the Trustees who were outraged by Stuart’s dilatory nature, when Stuart died, deeply in debt as usual, and the unfinished portrait found in the studio was not the commissioned painting, but the portrait being painted for Mrs. Perkins.

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.