-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Before The Trumpet
Geoffrey C. Ward©1985
Harper & Row
ISBN 0-06-015451-9
390pps -- First Edition -
---[1a]--
--In 1879, thirty-three years after he left Canton, when both he and Robert
Bennet Forbes were old and important men with fortunes hoarded from a dozen
other industries, Forbes wrote his old partner asking him to write down all
that he remembered of his early years in China. Forbes was requesting each of
the old Russell partners to do the same—some 100 men in all—and hoped to
compile a detailed and anecdotal history from their collective reminiscences.
Warren responded with a brief and colorless outline of his Canton career
without mentioning his part in the drug traffic. Other former partners were
still less cooperative. One worried that any account based on the fading
memories of old men would exaggerate the parts played by some partners and
ignore those of others. Several old Russell men wanted no part of any
history. Such a book would be "Intrusive," one wrote.
Even Robert Forbes began to have second thoughts. "The only thing I fear," he
told Warren, "is that in giving a sketch of the causes and effects of the
opium traffic and our imprisonment I may say too much."
Forbes's projected history of Russell and Company was never published.[4]--
--Dora had to wait to marry until Will Forbes had earned his $100,000
competence as a Russell partner. Annie, too, fell in love with a Russell man,
a heavyset earnest young clerk named Frederick Hitch. He came from a fine
family but had entered the firm with no funds of his own. Warren insisted
that there be no wedding until Hitch, too, had become a wealthy man. Fred and
Annie may have discussed marriage as early as 1865, when she was only
sixteen. If so, she loyally waited for him for nine years; they were not
permitted to marry until the autumn of 1877--
CHAPTER 2
ALGONAC
Once during her son's presidency, Sara Delano Roosevelt was asked why the
Oyster Bay Roosevelts had grown so antagonistic toward the Hyde Park branch
of the family. "I can't imagine," she said, "unless it's because we're
better-looking than they are."
Certainly Sara Delano was better-looking than almost anyone. A photograph of
her, made about the time Mr. James first saw her, shows why he was
transfixed. She was one of four daughters of Warren Delano II of Newburgh who
were known to New York society as "the beautiful Delano sisters," and she is
sometimes said to have resembled the ideal American beauty made popular a
decade later by the artist Charles Dana Gibson. There is a superficial
resemblance. She was tall and had the Gibson girl's long graceful neck, her
large eyes and upswept hair, her fine regular features of the kind inevitably
called "chiseled."
But she was not a girl in 1880. She was twenty-six, half Mr. James's age, and
precisely Rosy's, but past the age when most women of her class married. Her
chin was square and stubborn, and there was already something regal,
reserved—substantive—about her.
She retained those qualities all her life. Even at eighty-six, in a newsreel
made in Paris where she had gone to visit her sister Dora in the early spring
of 1940, she has an extraordinary impact. Surrounded by photographers and by
reporters shouting questions in two languages, she is unruffled, removed, yet
somehow in charge. She stands straight, gazes directly into the camera, and
answers the questions she wishes to answer slowly, with care, in a mellow,
beautifully modulated voice. Her French is flawless; her accent when speaking
English almost British in its crisp precision.
What are her impressions of France on this visit?
"Pour moi, c'est toujours la belle France, sympathique et loyale.
Does she think France will be invaded?
She doesn't know, of course, but if so, the French army-which she has seen
parading—"is ready for anything. "
Will FDR run again for the White House?
"I have never even heard him speak of a third term. He always considers the
pleasure of returning to his home at Hyde Park."
What she says is banal. The way she says it-the fact that she has said
it-makes it important.
She herself first experienced the pleasures of Hyde Park just a few weeks
after she met Mr. James. She may have been invited to visit that very first
evening, at Mittie Roosevelt's table. Mr. James knew her father fairly well;
they had been allies on the board of Consolidated Coal. And he was at least
slightly acquainted with her mother, Catherine Lyman Delano.
Now he wrote to Mrs. Delano directly, asking whether "Miss Sallie" might be
allowed to visit Springwood with some friends in early May.
Mrs. Delano granted permission, and on April 7, Sara Delano came to Hyde Park
for the first time, accompanied by a full complement of escorts: Bamie and
Corinne Roosevelt, and their mother. They stayed a week, taking long carriage
rides on the Albany Road beneath the branches of the big old trees that then
formed an unbroken leafy vault that ran for miles. There were visits to St.
James and to Rosedale, where Sara was introduced to Mr. James's brother and
sister-in-law and to his mother, now an old lady in a lace cap. There were
quiet strolls through the woods, boat rides on the river, tea on the piazza.
One morning, Mr. James asked Sara if she would be kind enough to arrange the
flowers for the luncheon table. She agreed, gathering a bouquet from the
enclosed garden and choosing a blue-green English bowl of Oriental design. It
was shallow and wide-mouthed, not ideal for arranging flowers, but she fussed
until she got them right, and Mr. James was delighted.
More than half a century later, in 1932, Sara wrote to her son how grateful
she still was for that first invitation to Springwood. Had she not come, she
said, "I should now be 'old Miss Delano' after a rather sad life." And as
often as she could until the end—for some sixty years in all—she would
continue to arrange fresh flowers daily in that bowl.
Before she returned to Algonac, her home, twenty miles down-river, she and
Mr. James seem to have reached a secret understanding. He would ask her
father for her hand. If her father agreed, she would gladly marry him.
Algonac's name was said to have been derived from the Algonquian words for
"hill" and "river," and it was in every way a grander place than Springwood.
It was more than twice as large, with forty rooms, and stood on the opposite
side of the Hudson on a high hill that jutted far out into the river, so that
the house was nearly surrounded on three sides by water. From its tall
bracketed tower there were views of the sparkling Hudson and the far-off
mountains, north and south. A wall of trees and flowering shrubs hid the
compound from the road, and visitors passed through stone gates to approach
the house along a graded gravel road that coiled through some sixty acres of
lawns and orchards and formal beds of flowers.
Mr. James made that journey one bright morning in late May.
Warren Delano II, the absolute master and vigilant guardian of this tranquil
walled-off world, was a formidable man, blind in one eye and able to walk
only with a cane, but at seventy-one still big and fierce-looking. His gray
side-whiskers were enhanced by a swooping mustache and a protruding tuft of
beard below his lower lip.
He had decided views about everything, and they were rarely challenged,
either by his eight children, his admiring wife, or his invited guests. His
father had taught him that tuberculosis was the product of too little fat in
the diet, and so a soft yellow brick of butter always sat in front of his
plate from which he pared thick slices for his children—and made sure they
ate them.
He had unshakable convictions about religion, too: "There is no standing room
for any creed between our Unitarian faith and the Papal church." And about
labor: "I cannot and will not pay any man more than $1.50 a day" for ten
hours' work, he once told one of his sons; if workers complained, they could
always be replaced by immigrants, "a new element that knows the value of
shelter, food & clothing."
And he was an implacable Republican, fond of saying that while all Democrats
were not horse thieves, it had been his experience that all horse thieves
were Democrats.
He had subjected every. suitor for his daughters' hands to an exacting
interrogation. Some years earlier, Sara or one of her sisters had invited two
young men to visit Algonac. One of them had been a Harvard classmate of
Sara's brother Warren Delano III, and her father wrote to his son right away:
"Mr. Coles is accredited with being your friend and seems ... bright and
intelligent and I dare say is better than he looks.... But what do you know
of him and how did he stand at Cambridge and what is he doing now! Who and
what are his Parents and family, etc.?"
When another young man of whom Mr. Delano did not approve sent Sara flowers,
he drafted a formal note—at once courteous and dismissive—which she dutifully
copied out in her own hand and sent off.
Mr. Delano greeted Mr. James warmly, understandably thinking that he had
simply come to make a social call on an old friend. The true purpose of the
visit dawned slowly; and when things became clear, he was not pleased. There
were plenty of objections to the match. Mr. James was an Episcopalian for one
thing. Then, too, he and Sara had only known one another for a few weeks.
Above all there was the question of Mr. James's age.
James Roosevelt was patient but persistent. He loved Sara, would always
cherish her, could promise her a comfortable quiet life on the Hudson very
much like that she had led at Algonac. Presumably he avoided discussing
politics on this visit; some time would have to pass before Warren Delano
grudgingly admitted that his son-in-law had demonstrated that one could
simultaneously be a gentleman and a Democrat.
Certainly Mr. James's prosperity and good reputation were well established,
and Mr. Delano liked him, though he had at least once confidentially
questioned his sense of purpose. (During a short-lived internal squabble
within Consolidated Coal he had worried to his son that Mr. Roosevelt's good
manners and charm would make him "vibrate" between two factions when he
should stand on principle—and side with Warren Delano.)
Sara was not present at these discussions about her future, of course, but
she must have made her feelings known to her mother in private, and perhaps
to her father as well. Perhaps, too, Mrs. Delano had delicately pointed out
to her husband that she had been only slightly over half his age when they
had been married thirty-seven years before.
In any case, Mr. Delano did not reject the suit outright, and a few days
later, after Mr. James had returned to Springwood, Sara's older sister Dora
and her husband, Will Forbes, went up for a five-day visit. Clearly they had
been sent to inspect the Roosevelt holdings—and Mr. James himself.
They evidently pronounced themselves satisfied, for James Roosevelt continued
to call at Algonac,[1] and in late July he and Sara announced their
engagement.
Friends and family were astonished. Elliott Roosevelt thought Mr. James a
"sly old chap" for having conducted his courtship in secret, but believed him
devoted to Sara. Elliott's sister Bamie wrote to the couple expressing both
her pleasure and her surprise. She was delighted that Sara and Mr. James had
found one another—"it is hard to think of two people who will be more
absolutely happy together than you both"—but she was a little concerned that
everything had happened so fast. Their courtship had lasted just ten weeks.
Mr. James wrote back from his room at Algonac. "I do not think the affair has
been in the least rapid or bewildering," he said. "As you know Miss Sallie
rather well, you must know how very difficult it was to win her."
Mr. Delano wrote of the engagement to his son Warren III. The "suddenness or
haste" with which everything had happened had so stunned him, he said, that
"I can scarcely yet realize that it is a veritable fact." Still, he now
professed to be pleased. "The great secret of our dear Sallie's life ... is
being divulged.... Of this choice of our dear one, I can say that it is very
satisfactory to me, to Mama, to each and all of the family. Both Roosevelt
and Sallie seem to be earnestly, seriously, entirely in love." (The use of
"Roosevelt" rather than "James" in this letter at least suggests that Mr.
Delano was still not entirely comfortable with the coming marriage; he called
his other sons-in-law by their first names.) The engagement, he continued,
"relieved my mind of many anxieties! It leaves my child within comparatively
little distance from here ... and so far as I can know or judge, it assures
her of all the comforts and necessary luxuries of life."
The comforts and necessary luxuries with which Sara Delano had always been
surrounded had been hard won by her father. The clandestine nature of the
trade upon which he built much of his fortune, his subsequent struggle to
overcome financial disaster and rebuild, and his simultaneous effort to
shield every member of his big family from the stern realities of life out
from under Algonac's sheltering treesall marked her character in ways that
would in turn mark her son's.
The Delanos were an old family in America, older even than the Roosevelts,
and at least as proud of their ancestry. Sara Delano was fond of saying that
her son was "a Delano, not a Roosevelt at all."
The first American Delano was Philippe de la Noye, a Huguenot who arrived at
Plymouth Colony in 162 1. He came out of love, not religious zeal, hoping to
marry Priscilla Mullens (the same Priscilla with whom Myles Standish and John
Alden were later smitten). His dramatic arrival on her doorstep did him no
good. She turned him down, and he did not marry for thirteen more years. When
he did, he chose another Englishwoman, Hester Dewsbury, with whom he had
several children. One of these, Jonathan Delano, married Mercy Warren, fought
in King Philip's War, and was rewarded for his service with an 800-acre tract
of land at New Bedford, Massachusetts, which then encompassed the coastal
village of Fairhaven.[2]
There his sons and their sons prospered as mariners and whalers and
shipbuilders, and there Warren Delano II was born in 1809. His grandfather
Ephraim had been a sea captain. His father, the first Warren, had begun his
career at sea at nineteen, ferrying cargoes of corn and salt, bathwood and
potatoes to New Orleans and Liverpool and the Canary Islands. Later he
purchased interests in a number of fine ships, came to own several more, and
was captured at sea and endured two grim weeks aboard a British prison ship
after the War of 1812 had officially ended. He returned to Fairhaven in 1815,
alive but "sick enough," he said. After that he built himself a great
rambling house and settled into a lucrative if less eventful life ashore as a
whaling executive.
One of his eldest son's earliest memories was of being bundled up by his
mother and hurried aboard a boat and taken to Acushnet at the head of the
Acushnet River during the war with England; a British frigate had sailed into
Buzzards Bay and threatened to shell Fairhaven. So many women and children
were sheltered in one house that night, Warren would later tell his grandson
Franklin Roosevelt, that the smallest children were put to bed on the stairs.
It was probably inevitable that Warren II would first seek to make his
fortune from the sea; it is unlikely that he ever seriously considered any
other life. But his father knew from experience the risks of actual
seafaring; the business side of the maritime trade was the place for a likely
young man to make his mark. Young Warren was graduated from Fairhaven Academy
at fifteen in 1824. Two years later, his father had him apprenticed as a
junior clerk to Hathaway and Company, a Boston importer; later he worked for
Goodhue and Company, one of the biggest import firms in New York, gaining
what one business associate later called "a first rate mercantile education."
In 1833, he sailed for China as supercargo aboard the ship Commerce, plunging
through heavy seas around the Horn and stopping at several ports along the
western coast of South America. He was twenty-four. At Canton he was offered
a junior partnership in the new firm of Russell, Sturgis and Company of
Boston and Manila. In 1840, at thirty-one, he would become a senior partner
with Russell and Company, by then the largest American firm in the China
trade. The object of every partner was to gain a "competence"—$100,000—before
returning home. Warren Delano would earn at least two, one with each of the
trading companies he served.
The China trade was already a century and a half old when Warren arrived in
Canton. Britain was the dominant power, but American ships had been competing
with her since 1785. Tea and silk were the chief Chinese commodities, for
which the Americans traded an odd assortment of foreign goods that included
sheets of tin from New England mills, beaver and fox pelts, sandalwood logs
stripped from the forests of Hawaii, and ginseng, the man-shaped root that gre
w wild along the Hudson and which the Chinese believed held aphrodisiac
powers.
The politics of the trade were complex and sometimes treacherous. The
Manchu emperor at Peking, believed that the Americans and other foreigners
were Fan Kuei—barbarians-tribute—bearing vassals un-worthy even of simple
courtesy and pitiful in their desperation for Chinese goods. China, on the
other hand, needed nothing from the west. "The Celestial Empire possesses all
things in abundance and lacks no products within its borders. There is
therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians."
To insure that his subjects' contacts with these ill-mannered outsiders were
minimal, the emperor limited all trade to the port of Canton, and further
decreed that the western "devil-ships" had to anchor at Whampoa, twelve miles
from the city at the mouth of the Pearl River. Goods were unloaded onto
barges for the trip upriver to the quay. There, all trading was done within a
tiny enclave, barely one quarter mile square, where Warren Delano and the
other traders lived, worked, and stored their goods in a block of thirteen
whitewashed factories.
There were still more restrictions. Westerners could not carry arms or gather
in groups larger than ten. There was to be no rowing on the river or walking
within the city walls of Canton. Foreigners could stroll in the square in
front of the factories but could not walk in the gardens on the opposite
shore more than once a year, and then only in the company of an official
translator. The Chinese were forbidden to teach foreigners their language;
all transactions were conducted in pidgin English.
And all dealing was done through one of thirteen Chinese traders, who were
held personally responsible for the actions of their foreign associates. This
was sometimes a touchy business. Sailors reeling back to their ships from an
evening in Hog Lane, the single narrow street of grog shops they were
permitted to visit on shore leave, occasionally got into trouble, requiring
their Chinese sponsors to pay stiff damages to the imperial viceroy. But it
was worth the inconvenience. Houqua, the agent who handled business for most
American firms, became probably the wealthiest merchant on earth, said to
have compiled a fortune of some $26 million by the year Warren Delano first
came to know him.
Delano and his fellow traders lived comfortable if cramped lives at Canton,
cut off from the real China that began just a few feet behind their
factories, but generally content. Their quarters, furnished with chairs and
tables and bedsteads brought from home, were two floors above the guarded godo
wn in which cargoes were stored; in early spring, when Chinese goods were
heaped there awaiting shipment, the rich smell of spices and tea perfumed
their rooms. There were servants to cook and clean and launder and wait
table; each man's desk had a bell with which to summon a snack or a glass of
water.
Foreign women were forbidden in Canton. Those few traders whose wives and
children had crossed the ocean with them had to-be satisfied with summers
together at the family compound in the Portuguese colony of Macao, some
eighty-five miles down river. But for those willing to risk trouble with the
authorities there were the flower boats, moored brothels with gilded
balconies on which women hobbled back and forth to emphasize the alluring
tininess of their broken feet.
The square in which the traders were permitted to take the air was filled
daily with a swarm of cobblers, jugglers, fortunetellers, tailors,
musicians—and beggars. There were some 1,000 official alms seekers in Canton,
all dues-paying members of the Flower Society of Beggars, and they included a
long file of blind men who made their way into the factory square each
afternoon, roped together, banging the ground with staves and chanting "Cash,
foreign devils, Cash!" When the clamor grew intolerable, a complaint was
registered with the militia and the square was cleared with whips.
The Chinese took an amused view of the foreigners, and often turned out in
large numbers just to look at them, locked up in their compound. One of
Warren's friends, longing perhaps for wide-open spaces back home, brought his
horse from Macao and doggedly rode it back and forth across the Canton square
every afternoon. The owner of a shop past which the horse plodded daily
improved business by hanging a sign which said he had "hired a fanqui to ride
opposite [my] house for the diversion from five to six every evening"; those
who wanted to see the sight in comfort were welcome at his tea stall.
The world inside the factories was hearty, profane, profoundly masculine, and
not notably taxing. "Canton was and is and will be ... a most stupid place,"
Warren once wrote. Only the promise of profits kept him there, and when his
younger brother Edward, just twenty-two, arrived in 1839, it was Warren's
fond hope that Ned would not have to stay in China as long as he had.
Business picked up with the going and coming of the trading ships in winter,
but the rest of the time there was little to do. Most merchants spent several
months relaxing at Macao. But even at Canton, the traders found that a good
many of the emperor's strictures could safely be ignored, a few coins in the
right hands making all the difference. Though venturing out onto the Pearl
River was officially outlawed, for example, Delano and his friends formed a
Canton Regatta that raced on its muddy waters every spring. In the first
annual races in 1837, his six-oared gig, The Not So Green, outpulled its
British rivals for the cup. The high points of the Canton social season for
the Americans were the sumptuous banquets held at the home of Houqua on the
midriver island of Honam. Houqua was a thin, fragile, sad-eyed man with a
wisp of gray beard and an air of unfailing kindness. He wore silk brocade
robes and clattering ropes of jade and a silk cap with a bright blue button
that denoted his special status. The bohea tea grown on the slopes of his
family estate and shipped aboard American ships was said to be among the
finest in the world and he was generous toward those who had made him rich.
His trading partners all admired him—a portrait of Houqua always hung in the
Delano parlor at Algonac—and once when he was being harshly treated by
imperial officials one of his old American friends wrote to suggest that he
might consider moving to the United States; St. Augustine, Florida, the
American thought, might be just the place to start over.
The move would have required a considerable adjustment. Houqua lived in
splendor on Honam. At noon on banquet days, he dispatched a fleet of
intricately carved houseboats to carry his guests across the water. His home
was a dazzling complex of kiosks and ponds and pavilions, walled gardens and
shrines and a pillared banquet hall, its marble floor covered with silk, all
tended by a silent army of servants. The first course was served in the early
afternoon; the last near dawn the following morning. Warren Delano and his
fellow New Englanders found themselves seated on japanned chairs, dining on
plovers' eggs, sturgeon's nose, and soup brewed from sea slugs while sipping
green-pea wine from dainty silver cups.
William Hunter, one of Warren's Canton friends, loved the life. "We pursued
the even tenor of our way with supreme indifference," he remembered years
later, "took care of our business, pulled boats, walked, dined well and so
the years rolled by as happily as possible."
The idyll was abruptly interrupted in 1838. Opium was the cause. Traffic in
the drug was the dirty little secret of the China trade, almost universally
practiced, almost never discussed. And as an increasingly important Canton
trader, Warren Delano was deeply involved in it.
The British controlled the business; perhaps a third of their Chinese
revenues came from the sale of opium, though its importation had been
expressly forbidden by the emperor since 1729. Massive bribery of local
officials made it possible; the drug's compactness and the almost insatiable
demand for it among Chinese addicts made it spectacularly lucrative.
The Americans did their best to keep up with the British, but never came
close to matching their earnings. Every American firm took part, with the
lone exception of D. W. C. Olyphant and Company, run by Quakers opposed to
selling opium on principle and derided by the other traders as "Zion's
Corner" for their abstemiousness. Warren once tried to put the business in
what he saw as the proper perspective for his brothers back home. "I do not
pretend to justify ... the opium trade in a moral and philanthropic point of
view," he wrote, "but as a merchant I insist that it has been ... fair,
honorable and legitimate ... liable to no further or weightier objections
than is the importation of Wines, Brandies & Spirits into the U. States." Nor
did he deny that opium had an "unhappy effect" upon the Chinese people, and
his brother Ned, at least, would witness that effect firsthand. In the autumn
of 1844, on the way to India to arrange to buy the season's supply of the
drug, he had stopped at Singapore and there visited several licensed dens.
"Found smokers in all of them," he noted in his diary. "One man was prostrate
under its effects-pale, cadaverous, death-like ... for when I took his pipe
from his hand he offered no resistance, though his eyes tried to follow me."
Ned continued with his mission, evidently unperturbed.
Robert Bennet Forbes, Warren's friend and immediate predecessor as head of
Russell and Company in Canton, offered still another justification for taking
part in the trade: the best seafaring families of New England were involved
in it, "those to whom I have always been accustomed to look up as exponents
of all that was honorable in trade—the Perkins's, the Peabodys, the Russells
and the Lows." There was a huge profit to be made. Others were enriching
themselves; Warren Delano and his fellow traders saw no reason not to get
their share. Under Robert Forbes's energetic direction, Russell and Company
became the third-most important single firm in the opium trade, British or
American. As Forbes's successor as head of the company, Warren Delano
improved upon his performance.
It was a matter of supply, not scruples then, that kept the Americans from
doing even better. The British owned their own poppy fields in India. Their
American competitors had to make do with opium bought in Turkey, or to sell
the Indian drug on consignment for British or Indian firms.
The mechanics of smuggling were simple. Chinese buyers placed their orders
with a Canton trader and paid for it in hard cash. Incoming vessels carrying
the drug stopped briefly under the lee of Lintin Island in Canton Bay before
proceeding to the official anchorage at Whampoa. Scarlet-painted buyers'
boats, called "fast crabs" or "scrambling dragons" by the Chinese, scurried
out to meet them, propelled by sixty oarsmen and armed against pirates. An
agent of the Canton firm waited on deck to open the chests, weigh out the
fist-sized cakes of the drug, and repack them in bags made of matting. Some
ships carried as many as 100 chests, each containing one picul or 133.33
pounds, enough to supply 8,000 addicts for a month.
For each chest he processed, the agent received five dollars, plus more if
the buyer had dallied too long in presenting his receipted order. Robert
Forbes handled this chore himself for Russell and Company and is said to have
earned $30,000 in commissions; Warren may have done the same when his turn
came.
The Manchus were powerless to stop it, though they despaired over opium's
impact on their subjects and worried at the drain the trade made on precious
specie. Crackdowns were announced from time to time, but they were mostly
shadow plays staged by local officials to please the emperor at Peking.
Traders and buyers alike knew that corruption was too widespread for profits
permanently to be affected on either side; Warren himself wrote that if the
Chinese ever seriously attempted to enforce their laws against opium, "the
Foreigners cannot by any possibility sell or smuggle the drug into the
country."
In 1838 the emperor again declared his determination to crush the opium
business, and the viceroy of Canton found it necessary to placate him with a
new theatrical gesture. A number of oarsmen from the buyers' boats were
seized and publicly strangled. Ordinary opium traffic on the river halted
briefly, but the flow of profits continued without a break, the viceroy
having quietly chartered his own fleet of junks to ferry the contraband
inland until things quieted down again.
On December 12, however, another staged event got out of hand. That afternoon
traders sitting on the verandas of their factories noticed a Chinese official
being carried into the square in his sedan chair. With him came a battered
prisoner and two executioners. The official got down, took his seat beneath a
hastily erected tent, and ordered that tea be brought to him while the
prisoner was lashed to a wooden cross. The westerners realized that a man was
about to be strangled before their eyes.
Several hurried out to protest, led by Hunter, the only trader at Canton who
spoke Chinese. The official explained that the criminal was the operator of
an opium den and had been dragged into the square to die as an object lesson
to all the barbarians who had dared to supply him. Hunter said this was an
intolerable insult. There matters stood for a few minutes, the prisoner and
his executioners waiting patiently as his fate was argued back and forth.
Then a band of British sailors who had just stepped ashore on leave took
matters into their own hands. They smashed the cross and used the fragments
to beat back the executioners. A small riot began, growing larger fast as the
westerners, perhaps 100 strong and possibly including Warren Delano, poured
into the square, only to be driven back inside by an expanding mob of angry
Cantonese.
Soon some 8,000 Chinese had besieged the factories, hurling rocks and
battering at the doors. Warren and his friends helped barricade the back
entrances with canisters of coal, and they scattered broken glass out the
front windows to make an all-out assault as painful as possible to the
barefooted mob. When things seemed darkest, Houqua came to the rescue,
persuading the authorities to send in the militia. Russell and Company
resolved to withdraw from the opium business, at least for the time being.
There things might have ended had a new imperial high commissioner not just
been appointed with orders to stop the smuggling. His name was Lin Tse-hsu,
and he was incorruptible. As governor general of Hukwang he had eradicated
the narcotics problem in his province by the simple expedient of executing
every smoker who refused to turn in his pipe.
He arrived at Canton in March of 1839, surrounded the factories with troops,
and declared that the barbarians would stay inside until they turned over to
him for destruction all the opium in and around Canton, and further pledged
not to import more on pain of the "extreme rigor of the law"—decap'tation.
Armed junks patrolled the waterfront to bar foreign reinforcements, all
Chinese servants were withdrawn and food supplies were cut off, though the
resourceful Houqua managed to smuggle in pigs, sheep, and chickens when
needed. The entire merchant community was held hostage for opium.
Captain Charles Elliot, the British trade superintendent, tried to negotiate,
but he was in a poor position to bargain, and Lin refused to budge.
Meanwhile, the imprisoned traders struggled to maintain their morale. They
held rat hunts and cricket matches and contests to see who could shinny
highest up a flagpole. The Russell men enjoyed roughing it. "We laughed
rather than groaned over the efforts to roast a capon, to boil an egg,"
William Hunter remembered. "We could all clean knives, sweep the floors, even
manage the lamps." They were less capable in the kitchen, where, one of them
admitted, "no white man had ever been before," and Warren was eventually
elected chief cook, displacing Robert Forbes, who had blistered the toast and
served ham and eggs which even he confessed "bore the color and consistency
of dirty sole leather."
Elliot was finally forced to capitulate, surrendering 20,280 chests of opium
to the Chinese. The men of Russell and Company gave up an additional 1,540
chests, which they had been holding on consignment for others. All of it was
ceremoniously dissolved in water, further diluted with salt and lime, then
sluiced into the harbor, after it was suggested to the spirits of the sea
that they get out of the way of this unavoidable desecration. It took 500
workmen to finish the job, and when one man tried to save a morsel for
himself he was beheaded on the spot.
The British traders then withdrew from Canton-first to Macao and then onto
their anchored ships-waiting for London to dispatch an expeditionary force to
punish the Chinese. It arrived in June of 1840 and the Opium War that
followed, bloody but sporadic, lasted nearly three years.
During that time the Americans continued to trade at Canton, and Warren
Delano was never busier. As senior American merchant, he served as vice
consul, oversaw the Russell accounts, and also acted as agent for the absent
British. Profits soared and opium continued to be carried inland, 8,000
chests of it in 1839 alone.
Americans were not directly involved in the fighting, and Warren and Ned were
ambivalent as to who they hoped would win. They sympathized with the Chinese
for wishing to defend their homeland, especially when rumors reached them of
atrocities, including widespread rape, committed by British sailors ashore.
"I truly wish that John Bull would meet with one hearty repulse," Ned wrote,
"for why should he enter their peaceful habitations and commit the horridest
brutalities upon the women?" On the other hand, official Chinese hauteur had
angered the Americans just as much as it had the British. "Great Britain owes
it to herself and to the civilized world (in the West)," Warren wrote early
in the conflict, "to knock a little reason into this besotted people and
teach them to treat strangers with common decency."
Still, if they were not combatants, the war came very close to the Delano
brothers. Shortly after the British fleet arrived, it imposed a blockade on
Chinese shipping at Canton. The Chinese reciprocated with a counterblockade
of their own. Only hours before it was to go into effect, a British ship, the
900-ton Cambridge, slipped into Whampoa from Singapore. After she was
unloaded, her captain, seeing no way to return safely to sea, sold her cheap
to Warren. He renamed her the Chesapeake, but before she could enter
Russell's service, Commissioner Lin himself asked to buy her. Delano was in
no position to argue, and she was sold to the Chinese navy—in fact she was the
Chinese navy, except for a handful of junks hastily fitted out for battle.
The Celestial Empire had never seen much need for sea power.
The ship was towed to the mouth of the river. Her prow was painted with
crimson dragon's eyes, bright streamers emblazoned with the Chinese
characters for "courage" flew from her masts, and her decks were lined with
every imaginable sort and size of cannon, each conveniently surrounded with
its own casks of gunpowder. A crew of 400 men lived aboard.
The blockade stayed in effect for seven months while skirmishes were fought
elsewhere at sea and intermittent talks yielded no concessions on either
side. British patience eventually wore thin. Two ancient fortresses guarded
the mouth of the Canton River. On January 7, 1841, at 9:30 A.M., warships
moved in on both citadels simultaneously. Five hundred Chinese died in the
bombardment. Not one British sailor was seriously injured. The British now
anchored. Three smaller forts were all that stood between them and Canton
itself. They could be taken any time the talks broke down.
Ned and a friend were rowed out to one of the ruined forts the next day.
"What horrid butchery!" he wrote, and described "the burned body of a
Chinaman. Some sailors had put a bamboo in his mouth surmounted by a Chinese
scroll."
A few days later, the Delanos were returning to Canton aboard a dispatch boat
after a brief visit to Macao. Identifying themselves as Americans they were
allowed to pass among the tall British warships that now filled the river's
mouth, even though they carried an arsenal of weapons in plain view on
deck-swords, two double-barreled shotguns, two single-shot pistols, and a
brace of Colts, each with five revolving barrels. These offered protection
against pirates, but also allowed the brothers to take a shot from time to
time at the ducks that sometimes lighted among the river islands.
Their boatmen acted as loaders and later in the day, while one of the
shotguns was being put back onto the deck, it went off. Two Chinese
collapsed, streaming blood. One died within five minutes, his face, neck, and
chest riddled with buckshot; the other was slightly wounded in the scalp.
Their angry companions refused to row further until every weapon aboard was
emptied into the water. That done, the dead man and his groaning companion
were carried below and the boat continued on toward the factories. The
accident, Ned wrote, had the effect of "saddening our hearts and therefore
our dinner was not eaten with that good relish with which it ordinarily is."
Word of the incident reached Canton ahead of the dispatch boat, and the dead
man's family rowed out to meet them just offshore. When the widow saw her
husband's bloody corpse, Ned wrote, she "set up an ugly howling and walling."
Warren offered her $150—"in charity," Ned said-but she was not content with
that and "after humbugging for two or three hours, she accepted $200" to keep
quiet about what had happened. Ned thought Warren had been too generous;
after all, the dead boatman had been happy to work for $1.50 a month when he
was alive. Later, when an excited trader whispered to Ned that he had heard a
rumor that foreigners had shot two Chinese somewhere on the river, Ned
assured him "it is all nonsense."
On February 2, the British paddle steamer Nemesis approached the refitted Ches
apeake which Warren had sold to Lin a year and a half earlier and which now
floated empty at anchor, its crew having fled. A single Congreve rocket arced
across the water and landed among the powder barrels on deck. The ship
disintegrated with an explosion so daunting that Ned saw its "sudden and
brilliant light" from the factory twelve miles away.
Exactly one month later, on March 2, a British assault on the city itself
seemed imminent and the Prefect of Canton begged Warren as the senior
foreigner left in the factories to go to Whampoa and intercede on behalf of
the Chinese. Warren refused to take sides, but agreed to do what he could as
a neutral party. The British commander was cordial but unyielding.
In a letter to his brother Joseph back home, Warren told what happened to him
on his way back to Canton on the eighteenth. The "cowardly Chinese let go a
shot at my boat," he said, "which passed some thirty feet over our heads, two
men jumped overboard, two or three threw themselves in the bottom of the
boat, and roared like squalling babies." (The ancient cannon in the Chinese
forts were rarely accurate, since they could not be made to swivel; to hit
something, Chinese gunners had to wait till it slid into view, then hope it
stayed there until the charge could be touched off.)
His boat now floating helplessly, Warren was towed ashore. Chinese troops
marched him three-quarters of a mile into the city "to the* wondrous
astonishment, admiration and gratification of the gaping multitude, the
gallant soldiers informing those we passed of the terrible conflict which had
taken place." He was brought before "His Excellency, the Commissioner Yang, a
decrepit looking man at the age of 74 years, with bleared eyes and deaf as a
haddock." The old official inspected his clothing, "took my hands, examining
them carefully and smelling them, asked me to unbutton my shirt-bosom and
show him my hide, which I did, and then pronounced me a good man, an
excellent man, one of the best he had ever known, and seizing a lousy ragged
dirty soldier who stood within three inches of His Excellency, said I was
'all the same as he.'
Warren got back to the factory In time to watch from the roof as the British
shelled the last three Chinese forts, then headed toward shore. A few shells
were lobbed over the factories and Into the city before the longboats landed,
driving the other traders to take cover. Warren Delano alone stayed on the
roof to watch.[3]
Opium helped make Warren a wealthy man. Neither he nor his descendants were
proud of that fact. He kept his business affairs to himself. Years later, one
of his sons remembered "how strictly he complied with the admonition not to
let his right hand know what his left hand was doing." In a family fond of
retelling and embellishing even the mildest sort of ancestral adventures, no
stories seem to have been handed down concerning Warren Delano's genuinely
adventurous career in the opium business.
In 1879, thirty-three years after he left Canton, when both he and Robert
Bennet Forbes were old and important men with fortunes hoarded from a dozen
other industries, Forbes wrote his old partner asking him to write down all
that he remembered of his early years in China. Forbes was requesting each of
the old Russell partners to do the same—some 100 men in all—and hoped to
compile a detailed and anecdotal history from their collective reminiscences.
Warren responded with a brief and colorless outline of his Canton career
without mentioning his part in the drug traffic. Other former partners were
still less cooperative. One worried that any account based on the fading
memories of old men would exaggerate the parts played by some partners and
ignore those of others. Several old Russell men wanted no part of any
history. Such a book would be "Intrusive," one wrote.
Even Robert Forbes began to have second thoughts. "The only thing I fear," he
told Warren, "is that in giving a sketch of the causes and effects of the
opium traffic and our imprisonment I may say too much."
Forbes's projected history of Russell and Company was never published.[4]
In January of 1843, Warren Delano set sail for New York. He had been in China
for nine years and had built his fortune. Home leave was long overdue. He
arrived in the spring, visited his family at Fairhaven, and then took his two
sisters on a long slow carriage ride through Massachusetts. At the home of
his Canton friend John Murray Forbes at Northampton he met a Forbes cousin,
Judge Joseph Lyman, who invited the Delanos to his home that evening.
The Lymans, too, were members of a distinguished old Massachusetts family,
not wealthy but intellectually rich. Northampton was smaller then, and mostly
made up of farmers who looked upon the Lymans fondly but with something
approaching awe. They owned the town's first piano and taught their children
to play it, and they ordered the latest books from Boston and read them aloud
to one another in the evenings. Eminent men and women often stayed with them.
The judge was an influential Federalist and Whig whose friends included John
Quincy Adams and Daniel Webster. His second wife was Anne jean Robbins, also
of strong Yankee stock.
They were an unfailingly gracious couple, but formidable. Their friend Ralph
Waldo Emerson wrote that he had never seen "so stately and naturally
distinguished a pair." Mrs. Lyman was especially impressive, "a queenly
woman, nobly formed ... made for society, with flowing conversation, high
spirits and perfectly at ease." The Lymans often had distinguished guests,
Emerson remembered-sometimes twenty of them at a time for breakfast-but "none
came or could come ... who surpassed the dignity and intelligence of the
hosts."
It was not the judge and his wife who interested Warren that evening,
however. It was their youngest daughter Catherine Robbins Lyman, just
eighteen, dark-eyed, cultured, shy, and good-humored. He was newly rich and
at thirty-three ready to start a family.
We know little of their courtship except that it was brief. Warren was
committed to return to Canton before the first of the year. Catherine's
parents liked him. "We have from the first been delighted by him," Mrs. Lyman
wrote. "He has such a composed and dignified air for a man of business, such
a quiet and sensible mode of expressing his rational opinions, that ... there
can be nothing but pleasure in his society."
The difference in their ages was no barrier to marriage. Catherine was
accustomed to living in a patriarchal household. Her father was twenty-one
years older than his wife, who reverently called him "Judge Lyman" even at
home. His opinions became hers. Mrs. Lyman never contradicted him,
Catherine's sister once wrote, and was the ruler only of "the kingdom of her
own mind."
Catherine had evidently modeled herself after her mother. She, too, was kind
and deferential, "lovely in her character," her mother wrote, "never out of
temper, and always ready to oblige to any extent that her friends can claim."
Her readiness to oblige would be tested many times during her marriage; it
was never found wanting.
Her engagement to Warren Delano was announced in midsummer and they were
married at Northampton on November 1. On December 4, the newlyweds sailed for
China aboard John Bennet Forbes's sleek new Paul Jones. With them went
Warren's younger sister Deborah. The voyage was calm and relatively
brief-just 104 days. The Paul Jones was the first ship in the China trade to
have its own ice house aboard, and according to its proud builder, the
Delanos became "the first Americans ever to eat canvas-back ducks and mutton
off the Cape of Good Hope." They had enough ice left over at Canton to
present chunks of it along with crisp New England apples to Ned as gifts.
Catherine Delano had not wanted to go to China. It seemed impossibly remote.
"I feel it is my duty to go," she told a friend, yet "it seems almost
dangerous to undertake such a thing.... I hope I shall have the courage to
the last." But she liked Macao when she got there. The harbor and its
hillside covered by white houses with white shutters reminded her of Nahant,
she said, and Arrowdale, her husband's big house on the fashionable Ridge was
magnificent. "I am the happiest person living," she wrote home to Northampton
shortly after she had settled in.
The Delanos stayed in China for three years. Warren continued to run Russell
and Company, increasing both its profits and his own with each successive
season. Their domestic life was more difficult. Arrowdale burned, taking all
their possessions with it. They lived in the Canton factory after that. Some
restrictions on barbarians had been lifted and they were even legally
permitted to visit the old city of Canton itself. Popular feeling against the
Fan Kuei still ran high after the Opium War, however, and Warren insisted
Catherine stay within the compound. She acquiesced, though she admitted to
her mother that it sometimes made her feel like a prisoner.
A baby girl was born in 1844 and named Susan. She died before her second
birthday, in the spring of 1846; her body was eventually brought home to
Fairhaven for burial. For a time after the infant's death, Warren feared for
Catherine's sanity; she had been "queer" ever since the tragedy, he told Ned
that summer, and he was afraid she might kill herself in her grief. She seems
to have steeled herself after a second daughter, Louise, was born later that
same year; the baby fell ill, recovered, but was always frail.
Toward the end of 1846 the Delanos returned to America to stay. Warren threw
himself into business with what one friend called "his accustomed vigor and
... great force," investing his new fortune in a host of likely ventures—New
York waterfront property, railroads, copper mines in Tennessee and Maryland,
land and anthracite coal in Pennsylvania, where a mining town was named
Delano in his honor. He never entirely abandoned the China trade, building
and owning several clippers, and when gold was discovered in California it
provided him with a whole new market for his cargoes. His ship, the Mint, buil
t with Robert Forbes and the Swedish engineer John Ericsson, was the first
American paddle steamer on the Sacramento River.
Both Warren and Catherine had been raised in small New England villages in
homes that were comfortable but not opulent. Their new and growing wealth now
dictated a style of living altogether novel and enticing. They first bought
themselves a five-story Manhattan town house at 39 Lafayette Square, one of
nine unusual Greek Revival dwellings designed by Ithiel Town and Alexander
Jackson Davis. These were called "Colonnade Row" because all nine were linked
together by a common porch and a cornice supported by twenty-eight lofty
Corinthian columns. The house itself was grand, inside and out, with marble
mantelpieces, coffered plaster ceilings and massive doors of mahogany hung on
silver-plated hinges.
So was the address. Their neighbors included the writer Washington Irving;
John Jacob Astor, now nearing eighty-four but still the wealthiest man in
America; and Warren's younger brother Franklin, who had married Mr. Astor's
granddaughter Laura Astor just two years earlier. He too had been in the
shipping business but had recently "retired" at thirty-one to live off his
wife's immense trust fund. While Warren had had to buy his house, Franklin's
had been free, a token of the old man's fondness for his granddaughter.
William Backhouse Astor, Laura Delano's father, lived just across the street.
He had also been generous to the young couple, giving them as a wedding
present a handsome country seat at Barrytown, twenty miles north of Hyde
Park. It was an old Dutch farm called "Steen Valetje" and adjoined his own
sprawling estate, Rokeby.
Warren Delano wanted a country place, too. He now had a city house but as one
of his children wrote, "he looked forward to a home in the country." Back in
1825, when he had been a boy of sixteen, his father had sailed with him up
the Hudson to Albany to witness the impressive ceremonies that inaugurated
the Erie Canal. But it was the scenery, not the celebration, that had
remained with him, the gleaming span of the river and the imposing houses of
the wealthy that could be glimpsed through the trees along its high banks. He
had promised himself then that he would someday live in one of them himself.
For three summers the Delanos rented an enormous granite Greek Revival house
at Danskammer Point, a rocky promontory that jutted far out from the river's
west bank, six miles north of Newburgh. Three more children were born during
these years: Deborah (known always as Dora) in 1847; Annie in 1849; and in
1850, Warren Ill (who died in infancy).
Meanwhile, Warren searched for a place of his own to buy. In 1851, he found
it four miles downriver, a sixty-acre fruit farm with a modest brick and
stucco house and handsome views of the river and the Hudson Highlands. He
named it "Algonac."
More than half a century later, on June 15, 1905, Sara Delano Roosevelt
received a cable from her son Franklin and his new bride, Eleanor, who had
sailed for England on their honeymoon aboard the RMS Oceanic, eight days
earlier. The telegram was datelined Liverpool, the newlyweds' landing place.
Its message consisted of a single word: "Algonac."
Mrs. Roosevelt knew instantly that all was well. Algonac was a code word
within the family for good news; for everything that made one feel safe,
tranquil, protected.
That had been her father's intention. To an extraordinary degree he sought to
keep his growing family from unpleasantness of any kind. Algonac's setting
high above the river provided a natural sanctuary, and the architect and
landscape gardener whom he hired to improve his new house and grounds shared
fully his love for at least the illusion of isolation.
Andrew Jackson Downing, just thirty-six, was already one of the best-known
builders in America. A slim, dark-eyed romantic, steeped in the Gothic novels
of Sir Walter Scott, he had written several hugely influential books on
"rural architecture," urging an end to the Classic revival-which he derided
as "the Greek temple disease"—in favor of a pseudo-Gothic style he thought
better suited to American ideals and atmosphere.
When Warren Delano approached Downing, the architect was busily laying out
the grounds for the U.S. Capitol, the White House, and the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington at the personal invitation of President Fillmore.
He found the time for Algonac, nonetheless; he was a local boy, the son of a
Newburgh nurseryman, with a special fondness for designing fine houses in his
native valley. When he planned a home on the river, he once wrote, he tried
always to achieve that "accessible perfect seclusion" which is "one of the
most captivating features in the life of the country gentleman whose lot is
cast on the banks of the Hudson." It was his aim always that when one of his
houses was completed and stood surrounded by suitable gardens at once
beautiful and picturesque, "one might fancy himself one thousand miles from
all the crowded and busy haunts of men."
Downing designed three kinds of rural homes: farmhouses for those who
actually worked the soil; cottages meant for gentlemen of modest means (those
whose households required no more than two domestics); and villas, or country
houses, "requiring the care of at least three ... servants."
Algonac was emphatically a villa.[5] It was to have a permanent staff of ten,
with additional temporary help hired as needed. Downing greatly enlarged the
existing house, facing it south instead of east to take full advantage of its
view of the broad busy stretch of the river known as Newburgh Bay. He added
the big square tower and deep verandas, and designed a compatible gatehouse
along with barns and greenhouses, and stables with arched windows and brick
courtyards, across which Warren Delano's horses came and went with a pleasing
clatter.
Because the Delanos wanted to be able to make their home at Algonac the year
round, trees and shrubs suitable to each season were planted throughout the
grounds, a rich profusion of evergreens for winter, selected maples, elms,
beeches, locusts, oaks, and flowering species from China for the warmer
months. At Downing's instruction, the shady green lawn that sloped down
toward the river was mown "into a softness like velvet."[6]
Downing was a moralist as well as an architect and gardener, believing that
it was to houses such as those he designed "that we should look for the
happiest social and moral progress of our people." But he was not
doctrinaire, and he did not believe in ostentation. "There is . . . something
wonderfully captivating in the idea of a battlemented castle," he warned in
his The Architecture of Country Houses, "even to an apparently modest man who
thus shows to the world his unsuspected vein of personal ambition by trying
to make a castle of his country house. But unless there is something of the
castle in the man It is very likely, if it be a real castle, to dwarf him to
the stature of a mouse."
Warren Delano was never dwarfed. His great energy made Algonac go. The big
high-ceilinged rooms were crowded with evidence of his enthusiasms. The
entrance hall was hung with armor and paintings he had brought back from
China. Pieces of fine porcelain and curiously carved jade were displayed
behind glass cabinet doors and along the mantel. Guests left their hats and
shawls on a round Chinese marble-topped table at the foot of the sweeping
central staircase. Even the Delanos' bedstead was Chinese and inlaid with
mother-of-pearl.
The family-Warren, Catherine, and their three children-moved to Algonac
in 1852. With them came several servants and two unmarried relatives,
Warren's sister Sarah and his brother Ned, now home from China and without
much initiative of his own. Later that year, another boy was born and given
his dead brother's name, Warren III.
And there, two years later, on September 21, 1854, Sara Delano was born. She
was the seventh child (and the fifth to live); there would be four more
before she reached her teens. She was named for her resident aunt. There had
been talk of giving her a middle name, Philippa, in honor of her ancestor
Philippe de la Noye, and her grandfather Delano was relieved when her parents
thought better of it. "Plane Sarah," he wrote, "is decidedly better." The
final "h" was dropped from her name, too, so that she and her aunt could be
told apart in family correspondence, and when there was still confusion she
became Sallie. (Obeisance to the founder of the American Delanos would be
paid in 1857, when a second son was named Philippe.)
Algonac was a sunny, loving place in which to grow. Sara tottered after her
older sisters and brother, watched them climb the apple trees she would soon
climb herself, grew "more cunning every day," according to her eight-year-old
sister Dora.
Her mother was warm and sympathetic, devoted to her children, tirelessly
willing to read aloud to them from improving works. She was "very angelic,"
Sara once said, "almost too good, and never could deny us anything. And she
never disciplined anything in her life!"
She worshipped her husband, just as her mother had worshipped her father, and
was unwilling ever to seem to make the simplest decision without consulting
him. And she taught her children to revere him, too.
Her husband was "a dominant character," one of his sons wrote' accustomed to
planning the lives of everyone around him. The servants did his bidding and
those who did not meet his standards were quickly replaced. And the other
adults in the family also relied upon him-Ned, Aunt Sarah, and Nancy Church,
his unmarried cousin known to all as "Nannie," who came to Algonac to stay in
1860.
Warren Delano's authority was loving but absolute. He rarely spanked his
children. Even in her old age, Sara was proud that he had never spanked her.
The children were expected to keep a respectful quiet when he was home. "We
were not afraid of him," Sara remembered, "but if we were quarreling or doing
something we shouldn't in the room in which he was writing, he would say
'What's that? Tut, Tut,' and we would immediately stop."
Bad news was never discussed in front of the children. Looking back, Sara
marveled at the way her parents "carefully kept away ... all traces of
sadness or trouble or the news of anything alarming." Their lives were
"tranquil," she said, "unmarked by adult emotions."
No one was to complain. When one of the children grumbled about the weather
one rainy day, their father said, "Nonsense. All weather is good weather."
And no one was ever to be alarmed, a lesson Sara learned early. At four she
fell against the sharp corner of a cabinet in the drawing room, deeply
cutting her scalp. Bleeding and frightened, she ran to her father. He washed
the gash and then, fearing that there would be a scar if he waited for the
doctor to ride out from Newburgh, he told her to be brave, gripped her
between his knees to keep her from squirming, and sewed the wound shut
himself, using a needle and fine thread. The pain was excruciating, but Sara
never moved or cried out. It was wrong to worry others.
It sometimes seemed as if Algonac was its own peaceful country. Warren Delano
was its chronicler as well as its creator. He and his wife took the time
nearly every evening of their long lives together to note in near-obsessive
detail everything that had happened that day within their realm. They left
almost nothing out. The pages of the Algonac diaries, thousands of them,
include the names of callers who came to the door; what everyone gave
everyone else for Christmas; the symptoms and progress of every illness large
or small suffered by family members or the servants; the butchering of every
pig and the arrival of every kitten born in the barn. Precise temperatures
were recorded, morning and night. There were meticulous lists of all that was
bought or planted or picked; notes on the appearance of the first asparagus
and katydid, interspersed with newspaper clippings that had provoked
discussion over dinner. And there were other clippings, too, news stories of
floods and fires and drownings, the death notices of far-off friends and
relatives—reports of the dreadful things that happened to those unfortunate
enough to live beyond Algonac's borders.
Nothing that affected a Delano was unimportant.
The Lymans had been a close, cohesive family, but the fierce sense of unity
fostered by Warren Delano seems to have been a legacy of his father, Warren
the First, whose clannishness approached xenophobia. When Sara and the other
grandchildren went to visit him at Fairhaven as they did nearly every summer,
they took the Fall River Line steamer, carrying a picnic hamper so as not to
have to eat restaurant food, and traveling on the night boat to avoid having
to stay in a hotel. "It would never have occurred to our parents to take us
to a hotel in this country," Sara once said.
A servant met them at the dock and drove them and their trunks and carpetbags
to the family home, where their grandfather waited on the steps. The old
captain was an imposing figure in a black frock coat, leaning on a
gold-handled cane. His son Ned had once called him "impregnable." He was
tall, massive, jut-jawed, and utterly bald except on public occasions when he
insisted on wearing a tousled and unpersuasive black toupee to which no one
in the family dared object. His wife, short and fat in a white lace cape and
black silk dress, stood next to him. She was his second wife, sour and
sensitive to slights and heartily disliked by all her husband's children, who
never called her anything but "Mrs. Delano." The grandchildren called her
Grandmama, anyway.
She greeted her guests, then gave orders to her butler that every piece of
baggage was to be opened in the back yard and each article of clothing taken
out, unfolded, and thoroughly shaken because, Sara remembered, "she never
knew otherwise what might be brought into the house."
The homestead was enormous and filled with mementos of its owner's career at
sea. A high stone wall enclosed it, and tall oaks shaded the lawn,
"magnificent trees," said a local reporter, "which seem to belong to an
ancient family." The Delano coat of arms hung above the door, and Sara and
her brothers and sisters would come to think of Fairhaven as "a family shrine"
all of their lives.
It stood on a shady village street along which other children lived. This was
a great novelty for the young Delanos, raised in the country in the midst of
their secluded estate, but they were not expected to make friends. Sometimes
as a special treat they were allowed to walk unaccompanied to the post
office, a block and a half away. "It was the most exciting thing we did,"
Sara recalled at eighty. "I still have a thrill when I go there."
On sunny afternoons they went bathing-not swimming-in the quiet water near
their grandfather's wharf, changing into their bathing costumes in one of his
warehouses, "just our family."
In later years, a friend asked Sara why she thought she and her brothers and
sisters had been so scrupulously kept apart from other children. She wasn't
sure. She guessed that "grandpapa was rather hoity toity ... he had a large
family and lived for himself and for them." No one else mattered very much;
no one else was needed.
His son, Sara's father, felt that way, too. He had "the patriarchal spirit,"
Sara said, "he cared little for outsiders, but would do anything for his own
family."
Her sister Dora once put it in more positive terms. The Delanos of Algonac
were "a united family, she said. She had seen other families whose members
seemed to care more for other people than for their own, but "as I look back
we always cared most for each other."
--[cont]--
Om
K
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