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, 10⅞ 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.
By the time of Winslow’s birth in 1836, Charles and his partner seem to have already been flailing. The men had acquired a wide range of metal products with little regard for the market segments they wished to serve: cutlery for pantries, scythes and hay forks for farmers, and shovels for builders.26 The firm’s pleas for cash discounts grew louder. Charles was imaginative but had little realistic grasp of his markets. Somehow the other merchants selling hardware in Dock Square had a gritty understanding of their customers that Charles’s brothers possessed but he did not. The partnership with William Gray did not last. The hardware dealerships Charles established over the following years all seem to have ended in failure.27
Charles’s heart was in another place: invention. In 1840, the U.S. Patent Office awarded him a patent for a garden hoe designed to be more durable and stronger than other such tools available in the United States. In a detailed claim, he offered tangible evidence of his ingenuity. “My improvements consist principally in the modes of attaching the plate and shank of a hoe to each other,” he explained. “As a garden tool it is exceedingly simple … yet some slight or what is apparently a slight change in the mode of connection of the shank and plate may render it much more durable, effective and useful, and be productive of highly beneficial results.”28 Yet there is no evidence he was able to turn this invention, or others following, into commercial success.
Winslow’s mother, Henrietta Maria Benson (1808–1884), like her husband, Charles, grew up in a large family dependent on the sea. Born in 1808, three months before Charles, she spent the first twelve years of her life in the village of Bucksport, Maine, located at a strategic spot on the Penobscot River where it flows into the sea.29 Her father, John Benson, was a New Hampshire native who made his way to Bucksport not long after the village was founded in 1792.30 In 1802, at twenty-six, he married Sally Buck, whose father had given the town its name. Sally was seventeen on her wedding day, and (like Mary Bartlett Homer) pregnant; her daughter Clara was born five months later. Over two decades, the Bensons had five sons and three more daughters. John became a West Indies merchant, traveling repeatedly to the Caribbean to purchase commodities such as molasses and sugar, and then sailing back to sell them in New England.
By land, Bucksport was remote. By sea, however, well-established trade routes connected it to distant shores and weaned its merchants from parochialism. By the early nineteenth century, Maine had a thriving Black community, working primarily as mariners. Stevedores, shipwrights, and mates—and even some captains—had come from the West Indies and the Cape Verde Islands and had settled with their families in Portland and other Maine ports.31 Some may well have served on Benson’s ships. Many of these Black mariners were ardent Christians who may also have contributed to the evangelical theology Benson and his children practiced, including an early orientation toward abolitionism.32
Bucksport’s mariners were vulnerable to dangers of many kinds. As tensions rose between the young American nation and the stronger British forces up and down the Atlantic coast, import businesses such as Benson’s became more attractive targets for both British warships and American vessels seeking to commandeer them. But John Benson was savvy, knew Maine’s many hidden coves well, and proved himself a stealthy seaman. During the War of 1812, he served in the defense of Machias, eighty miles east of Bucksport, and was forever after called “Colonel.”33 His business entailed considerable risk, too, both to his capital and his life; in one case, the ship on which he was sailing was imprisoned in ice, and his rescue was noteworthy enough to make the newspaper in Portland, some sixty miles away.34
Figure 9: Unidentified photographer, Henrietta Benson Homer, 1847. Gelatin silver print on paper, 4⅞ × 3½ in.
In 1821, the Bensons moved from the Maine coast to facilitate the expansion of John’s West Indies import business. They lived partly in Kingston, Massachusetts, a South Shore town fronting Duxbury Bay, and in Bradford, where oceangoing ships found safe harbor on the Merrimack River. Although Bradford was thirty miles north of John’s offices at Central Wharf, Boston, the Bensons could educate their children at a renowned evangelical Christian school there, Bradford Academy.35 The Bensons also occupied a home in the North End, where their ninth and final child, John, was born in 1824, and where, fewer than two years later, in July 1826, Sally died.36
Henrietta was seventeen at her mother’s death; her eight siblings ranged in age from two to twenty-three years old.37 Within a year, the eldest, Clara, married the recently ordained Congregational minister Rev. Stephen Thurston and moved with him to his parsonage in Searsport, Maine (then called West Prospect).38 Clara left Henrietta and her two older brothers to support their father in raising their two younger sisters and three younger brothers.
Henrietta’s family was active at the Park Street Church, which in 1826 called as senior pastor a twenty-three-year-old prodigy, Edward Beecher, a son of Charles’s pastor, Lyman. Henrietta joined the church a year later, the summer her sister married there. She recalled being “much opposed to religion” prior to her attending Bradford Academy during these teenage years.39 Her commitment to Park Street Church, where she and her husband married, was strong. Over those years, the identities of the two churches diverged. Park Street Church insisted on the inextricable connections between personal Christian conviction and the application of Christian principles to a just and equitable society. The church hosted both a series of evangelical revival events and abolitionist leaders such as William Lloyd Garrison.40 By contrast, particularly after Rev. Hubbard Winslow succeeded Lyman Beecher in 1832, the Bowdoin Street Church shirked engagement with politically charged subjects, especially slavery. With increasing enthusiasm, Hubbard Winslow deployed Scripture to condemn abolitionists as agents who would “fill the land with violence and blood.”41 He praised the Kentuckian Whig Henry Clay and offered excuses for slavery, drawing Garrison’s full-throated ire: “Is it any wonder that the land is filled with all manner of crime, when such prophets of Baal as Hubbard Winslow are found ministering at the altar?”42 The diverging positions of the two churches probably contributed to Henrietta’s remaining at Park Street Church for a total of nine years, even as Charles worshipped at Bowdoin Street Church.
But in the summer of 1836, Henrietta resigned her membership at Park Street and joined her husband’s church, the one more congenial to merchant interests. Notably, when her second son was born earlier that year, in February, she agreed to name him Winslow. Although Boston had many Winslows, the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming: the baby was named for his pastor.43 Unlike the other members of his family, whose first and middle names reflected the Homers’ and Bensons’ awareness of their ancestry, this boy had no middle name. From the beginning he was distinct, but also linked to an identity beyond his blood relations.
Not long after Winslow’s birth, Charles and Henrietta moved to another house closer to the church, at 7 Bulfinch Street. Their third son, and final child, Arthur Benson Homer, was born there on October 28, 1842.44 He was named after one of Henrietta’s remarkable brothers.
Arthur W. Benson was exactly three years younger than Henrietta; in the year before Winslow’s younger brother’s birth, Arthur had a breakthrough of his own—one of many to follow.45 At age twenty-nine, he and an older brother, Alfred G. Benson (then thirty-five), had become secret agents for a scheme hatched by Daniel Webster (1782–1852), secretary of state, who was intent on fulfilling the manifest destiny of the United States, facing west. Through an exclusive contract, in 1841 the brothers became the U.S. Navy’s designated shippers for all supplies on the Pacific coast—at a 20 percent premium to the average freight pricing the Navy had paid over the previous ten years. An essential component of this advantageous arrangement was the Bensons’ agreement “to convey, passage free, all the emigrants that might offer, of both sexes (not exceeding fifty at each shipment), to the Oregon territory as permanent settlers therein.”46 The settlers on Benson ships took on a brutal 24,000-mile journey: east and south nearly to the Cape Verde Islands, then south and west around Cape Horn, north on the Pacific coast of South and Central America, sometimes as far west as the Hawaiian Islands, and only then to the Oregon Territory. But together with settlers traveling overland on the Oregon Trail, these settlers would effectuate de facto what the 1818 treaty that stipulated joint American and British control of the Oregon Territory had forbidden de jure: escalating United States dominion.47 Through this secret Benson contract, Webster used settlement activities in Oregon to widen support in Congress for formal annexation and a termination of the treaty. Within two years, the settlement had begun to achieve Webster’s objective, expanding at a rapid rate; in 1846, Britain and the United States signed the Treaty of Oregon,48 which paved the way for much wider U.S. expansion. Within two years, the United States had fought and concluded the Mexican-American War, by which Mexico ceded 55 percent of its territory to the United States, including all of Alta California.49
If Charles Homer had proven a poor fit with the demands of commercial life, his wife’s brothers fit those demands to perfection.50 The Bensons’ fleet of ships was well situated for further shipment of supplies and settlers both to the formerly Mexican territory and to Oregon. Among those ships was the Brooklyn, chartered by a group of 230 Mormon settlers who arrived in San Francisco on July 31, 1846. Just seventeen months later, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill, and the demand for transport of passengers and freight on Benson-owned ships increased substantially.
Henrietta Homer’s younger brother John Benson, twenty-four, was among those departing for San Francisco in January 1849 on a ship repurposed from its usual packet duties between Boston and Mobile.51 The same month, Henrietta’s twenty-two-year-old first cousin, Franklin A. Buck, also headed to California on a vessel owned by their uncle Richard P. Buck.52 The two young men appear to have been on an informal assignment for Richard Buck and Alfred Benson.53 By the end of 1849, newspapers were already reporting the winnings Richard Buck and others were achieving in the Gold Rush.54
By the summer of 1850, John Benson was well settled into his life as a trader in Butte County, California, serving miners sifting for gold in the foothills of the Sierra.55 Winslow’s father followed him, likely with more focused commercial intentions than guided most on the Gold Rush.56 By then he and his wife had both recognized the successes of the Bensons and the Bucks, and the opportunities those relatives might afford Charles in a role subordinate to them.
Winslow, aged fourteen, memorialized the voyage with an imaginative sketch of an intrepid argonaut riding across the country in an airship, his wheelbarrow and other tools tied behind him. The drawing appears to be inspired by a lithograph Nathaniel Currier had published in 1849.57 At first glance, it appears little more than a doodle. The stick-figure pilot guides his rocket over farms, hills, and towering mountains, his top hat lost to the winds. But the responses of the boy’s earthbound stick figures are telling. They open a narrative that Currier’s print closes, as they pull the viewer into the science fiction spectacle. Some of Homer’s figures salute the airship with a celebratory greeting, one dances a jig, while another looks closely through his telescope. It’s all about vision—or lack thereof. As the pilot makes his precipitous descent over the Sierra Nevada range, some miners react in alarm, while others naively fail to see the impending disaster. Winslow already knew the power of sight, the power of storytelling, the language of risk, and the effective role that sly humor might play in communicating ideas.
Copyright © 2022 by William R. Cross
Copyright © 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson
