1MIDDLE SON (1836–1859)
BOSTON FACES THE SEA. The city perches on the bulbous end of a narrow peninsula, fewer than two miles broad and a mile deep. Water encircles it, with the fresh stream of the Charles River on one side and the salt brew of the Atlantic on the other. In the 1830s Boston’s 75,000 inhabitants crowded the city, the nation’s fifth largest. Their carts and animals flooded the twisting streets of the North End, and the busy wharves that extended those streets into Boston’s harbor.1 The dome of the elegant State House loomed high on Beacon Hill, a proud emblem of democracy fulfilling John Winthrop’s vision: “a City on a Hill.” But for most people, the constant flow of goods absorbed all their attention—up and down those streets, on and off those wharves. Over the streets and around the wharves, the gulls of Boston circled, their eyes ever attentive. But the city’s men and women had little time, or space, for gazing.
As the sun rose on Wednesday, February 24, 1836, it began to melt the heavy snows fallen on the busy streets, crowded also with talk of politics and commerce that last full winter of Andrew Jackson’s presidency.2 Among the least of North End houses was a well-visited one on Friend Street. Charles and Henrietta Homer lived there, amid a swarm of relatives who were quick to arrive that first day in the life of a boy whose parents named him Winslow.3 He was their second son; their first, Charles Jr., was bright-eyed and nearly two. The baby’s grandmother Mary Bartlett Homer lived a few doors down on Hanover Street with her husband, Eleazer, for many years Boston’s Surveyor of Lumber, responsible for the quality of all lumber sold in the city.4 His longtime post had assured both stable income and wide contact with merchants. He was a fixture in the North End and on the noisy, smelly wharves studding Boston’s edges like jagged teeth. As a young man he risked his capital investing in Boston ships, which sailed far in the first years of the American republic.5 Some of those investments were more rewarding than others. Still working at seventy-five, now he could be found at the State House as an agent in the Pension Office.
Mary Bartlett Homer had ample firsthand experience with childbirth, and Henrietta may well have asked her mother-in-law for help. Mary was now sixty-six and had lived in the North End for nearly fifty years.6 She was sixteen the day she married Eleazer; their first child, Jacob, was born five months later, and for twenty-five years she produced children: eight sons and six daughters.7 Life had not been easy. She was a child of ten when she lost her own mother, and twelve when her father died.8 The War of Independence was ending then and for some it was a time of hope. But for an orphaned daughter, prospects were dim. Marriage to Eleazer, nine years her senior, offered the best path forward.
She had lost both a son and a daughter as children, but the five daughters and seven sons who had grown to adulthood over this half-century of marriage brought her many joys. Each of the first four daughters had married Boston merchants and between them had produced eleven sons and ten daughters. Her youngest child, Almira (twenty-four in 1836), was still unmarried and not happy about it.9 But Mary counseled patience, a virtue she knew better herself with each passing year.
It was not by chance that her daughters all married merchants. She and Eleazer raised them to know it was trade that mattered in the world. But Mary’s sons listened more attentively than perhaps she’d intended to the stories she told them in their boyhood. The stories were of the sea, particularly of her father, Abraham Bartlett. He had commanded four of the eight hundred ships the Continental authorities authorized as privateers to capture British merchant vessels. Bartlett served the Patriot cause by harassing British commerce, while standing to make a profit through the sale of cargoes his privateers seized.
Three of the seven sons became sea captains. The eldest, Jacob, settled in Mobile, Alabama, and died there at forty-two, in 1829, leaving a ten-year-old son.10 Around the time of Jacob’s death (and perhaps because of it), his younger brother, Abraham Bartlett Homer, now thirty-six, had moved to Mobile, too.11 Despite Abraham’s northern roots, he and his Nantucket-born wife were raising their children to be Alabamians. The last of Mary’s three sea captain sons, James, thirty-two in 1836, was nominally a resident of Massachusetts. But like those of his brothers, James’s cargoes were closely tied to the plantation economies of the American South. The vessels he captained carried commodities of all kinds, from yellow pine floorboards to vegetables to tin plate.12 Not only did Abraham own slaves, he transported them as commodities. James, who lived with Abraham for a while, may have done so as well.13
James served as captain between the southern ports and Boston and along the cargo corridors of the South. One of his ships was the William, “a staunch fast sailing brig,” which James captained on behalf of his older brother.14 The vessel typically sailed as a “regular trader” on the route connecting New Orleans, Mobile, and Havana. Her principal use was for cargo but she also offered “handsome accommodation” for six cabin passengers.
On occasion, James ventured farther, to more remote parts of the Caribbean and even to South America, seeking even higher returns. These forays didn’t always work out. Just a year earlier, in 1835, he had sailed all the way to Rio de Janeiro and made it back as far north as the Virgin Islands, only to be shipwrecked in the Bahamas.15 Stranded, he saved his life but lost both his ship and her cargo. Storms arose often in the tropics. Only with risk—to capital and to life—did goods make their way to the Boston wharves the Homers knew so well.
In this city where trade was the lifeblood of the economy, Mary’s sons included several merchants. Eleazer Bartlett Homer sold lumber, likely often bought from his brother Abraham and delivered on ships skippered by James.16 William Flagg Homer sold crockery from his large store near Faneuil Hall.17 Henry, the sole bachelor son, may have achieved the greatest commercial success.18 Active in the Whig party, he traveled as a ship’s officer, but also invested in Boston real estate. Three months after Winslow’s birth, an advertisement appeared for 800,000 square feet of land for sale in South Boston. “A rare chance for speculators and capitalists,” the notice crowed.19 Winslow’s grandfather Eleazer was credited as the seller, but by then, at seventy-five, he showed no other indications of the independent entrepreneurship characterizing his sons, for one or more of whom he was probably fronting. The businesses of his merchant sons depended on the success of ships commanded by his sea captain sons, or by other men like them. Merchants’ businesses also depended on open seas for those ships, on peace, and on light government oversight. They needed commodities from the South, the Caribbean, and South America to move freely to the North, and manufactured goods—particularly American—to move freely also, in and out of Boston and to southern ports.20
Figure 7: Unidentified photographer, William Flagg Homer (1802–1883), Henry Homer (1807–1878), Eleazer Bartlett Homer (1796–1869), Charles Savage Homer (1809–1898), and James Bartlett Homer (1804–1885), in Boston, 1858. Photograph, 10? in. × 104 in.
The youngest of the seven sons was Winslow’s father, Charles Savage Homer (1809–1898). In 1836, he was twenty-six and eager to make his way in the world. But the prosperity Charles projected was paper thin. He shared his brothers’ desire for independence, but lacked their commercial instincts, so necessary to be a successful entrepreneur. He didn’t know what he didn’t know and kept trying, again and again, for a business breakthrough. He was a dreamer, overshadowed by his brothers, and forever frustrated. Chafing under his parents’ roof at seventeen, he had begun boarding at the home of a hardware merchant, John C. Proctor.21
There, Charles experienced a religious conversion. Proctor attended the Bowdoin Street Church, whose pastor was the eloquent Lyman Beecher. By contrast to the Unitarianism then on the rise in Boston, Beecher preached an ardent Christian faith lived out in daily life. His sermons were famous. He was a passionate advocate for temperance, but also railed against the slave trade and those who benefited from it, and praised the courageous men and women who fought it. That commerce had been “sanctioned by custom, defended by argument, and, still more powerfully, by a vast monied capital embarked in the trade.”22
Charles committed to Christ and to Beecher’s church. In a spiritual autobiography, he confessed that he “felt deeply his lost and ruined condition … loves the Bible and can understand it—rejoices that God rules and reigns in heaven and on earth.”23 He followed his mentor Proctor into the hardware business, working initially with another church member at his store, near Proctor’s.24 And at twenty-five, Charles established a new hardware dealership on Dock Square in partnership with William Gray, another young man at the church.25 Among their first advertisements was one for a variety of circular saws, indispensable to housewrights in the rapidly growing city.
Figure 8: Unidentified photographer, Dock Square, Boston, c. 1850. Albumen stereograph print, detail.
Copyright © 2022 by William R. Cross