The Perkins family of Boston, Jamaica Plain and Brookline are known as generous philanthropists, but history reveals the brutal origin of their family fortune. The wealth supporting their donations originated in the profits made by buying and selling people into slavery and the products of slave labor as well as smuggling opium into China.

In the 1800s, the country estate of James Perkins stood beside Jamaica Pond, opposite what is now Lochstead and Moraine Streets. The first Perkins home, known as Pinebank, was built in 1802 and was later replaced by two subsequent houses built by the Perkins family. Visitors to the site today can still see the outline in stone of the third Perkins home built in 1870. Signage on the site describes the family as “prosperous merchants of the China Trade and prominent Bostonians.” [1]

Not mentioned is the reality that the family’s wealth originated primarily in the slave economy of the Caribbean where James Perkins, later joined by his younger brothers Thomas Handasyd and Samuel, began building the family fortune by slave trading in St. Domingue (now Haiti). [2]

James Perkins, portrait by Gilbert Stuart (Boston Athenaeum)

Twenty years prior to constructing Pinebank, in 1782, at the age of 21, James Perkins traveled to Cap Français, modern-day Cap Haitien in Haiti. St. Domingue was the wealthiest colony in the Americas, including the thirteen colonies. St. Domingue was built upon a rigorous racial hierarchy with a small White planter class and enslaved Africans who worked the island’s sugarcane, coffee and cotton fields at the base. At the height of its economy in this period, St. Domingue imported as many as 40,000 enslaved people per year, due in part to the high mortality of enslaved people on the island’s sugar plantations.[3] Enslavers treated enslaved workers so barbarously in Haiti that life expectancy after arrival was around seven years.[4]

Perkins Slave Trading
In 1786, James and his brothers Samuel and Thomas Handasyd founded a firm with Walter Burling to trade in enslaved people as well as the products of slave labor including sugar, molasses, coffee, and cocoa.[5] “Thomas Handasyd managed the company’s business in Boston, while James and Samuel lived primarily in St. Domingue. On the island, they boarded vessels in the Cap Français harbor to select enslaved people to purchase from among newly arrived Africans, and then sold them” to enslavers on the island.[6]

The Perkins’ ties to Atlantic slavery extended far beyond the French colony of St. Domingue. The family pursued commerce in many Caribbean colonies where plantation slavery dominated, including Cuba, Curacao, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Martinique, Puerto Rico, St. Croix and Trinidad.[7] Even after the Haitian revolution forced the Perkins family to abandon St. Domingue, they continued their slave trading activities until 1810, a total of at least 25 years. These extensive money-making activities contributed to the Perkins family wealth and status.

Perkins as Enslavers
The Perkins family enslaved multiple people in their business operations and homes in St. Domingue and later in the Boston area. The Perkins family account[8] mentions several enslaved people and tells the family’s narrative of Moussa Deyaha, an enslaved man who was brought from St. Domingue to Boston after the Haitian Revolution to work for the James Perkins family in Jamaica Plain and Boston. Read further on Moussa Deyaha.

From Slave Trading to Opium Smuggling
In 1791, enslaved people on the St. Domingue sugar plantations rebelled, threatening the slave economy. The multi-year revolution resulted in the establishment in 1804 of Haiti as the first free Black republic and first sovereign Caribbean nation. The revolution’s effects on the institution of slavery were felt throughout the Americas. And Haiti was made to pay the price through reparations of 90 million francs to former French enslavers that lasted until 1947. The indemnity bankrupted the Haitian treasury and left the country’s government deeply impoverished.

In the years following the Haitian Revolution, the Perkins family continued to traffic slaves because it was so lucrative. The Perkins family traded enslaved people in the Caribbean until around 1810, two years after the practice had been banned in the United States in 1808.[9] However, in response to global events and shifting public opinion, the Perkins family began to distance themselves from the trading of enslaved people. They redirected their primary business interest to the opium trade in China despite the Chinese government’s repeated bans on the addictive narcotic and thus continued to enlarge their fortune by inflicting misery on millions of Chinese (90 million people, one-third of China’s population, were addicted to opium by the end of the 19th century). [10],[11],[12],[13]

Eclipsing History
To distance themselves from the sources of their wealth and raise their image in Boston, the Perkins family also sought to recast themselves as generous benefactors through gifts and bequests to Harvard University, the Perkins School for the Blind, Massachusetts General Hospital, McLean Hospital, and the Boston Atheneum.[14] Subsequent generations of the Perkins family used the wealth generated by slavery and addiction to help found Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and support other institutions.[15]

Local community and city leaders rewarded the family with recognition and praise. In 1825, the town of Roxbury renamed Connecticut Road that ran between Hyde Square and Brookline in honor in honor of James Perkins. Today, in Jamaica Plain, both Perkins Street and the Pinebank home site serve as reminders of a family fortune built on exploitation, slave trading and opium smuggling and addiction.

Note on Terminology
Note on the Authors: Hidden Jamaica Plain

Notes

[1] Boston Parks & Recreation Department signage at the Pinebank site near Jamaica Pond

[2] Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery, Harvard University, 2022, Page 22. Sources cited are: Carl Seaburg and Stanley Paterson, Merchant Prince of Boston: Colonel T. H. Perkins, 1764–1854 (1971; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 37–44; Benjamin Grande, “Yankees in Haiti: Boston Merchant Trade in Revolutionary Saint Domingue” (master’s thesis, Tufts University, 2016), 72–105, https://hdl.handle.net/10427/011745.

[3] Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery, Harvard University, 2022, Page 23. Sources cited are: Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (New York, NY: Verso, 1988); Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004); Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1990).

[4] Hidden Brookline website, “Thomas Perkins, Slave Trader & Opium Smuggler” https://hiddenbrookline.weebly.com/perkins-page.html

[5] Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery, Harvard University, 2022, Page 23. Sources cited are: “The Copartnership, under the firm of Wall, Tardy and Co. of Cape-François,” Advertisement, The Massachusetts Centinel, June 7, 1786; Seaburg and Paterson, Merchant Prince of Boston, 39–40.

[6] Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery, Harvard University, 2022, Page 23. Sources cited are: Seaburg and Paterson, Merchant Prince of Boston, 40. In July 1792, Samuel Gardner Perkins wrote from St. Domingue to James of going in with a partner to purchase some newly imported enslaved Africans: “a ship arrived from the coast with slaves & we immediately proposed purchasing together, but as I was extremely busy he went on board [and] visited the negroes.” He describes boarding the slave ships as part of the normal course of business, and makes it clear that had not been otherwise occupied he would have gone himself. Samuel G. Perkins to James Perkins, July 16, 17, 1792, box 1, item 10, Perkins Family Papers, 1780–1882, MSS. L816, Boston Athenaeum, Massachusetts

[7] Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery, Harvard University, 2022, Page 23. Sources cited are: Captain Burk to James Yard, “At Sea,” June 16, 1792, box 2, item 15, Perkins Family Papers, 1780–1882, Boston Athenaeum, Massachusetts

[8] Reminiscences of the Insurrection in St. Domingo, by Samuel G. Perkins, annotated by Charles C. Perkins, Reprinted from the proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1886

[9] Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry, 1776-1848 by Lindsay Schakenbach Regele, Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019

[10] Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery, Harvard University, 2022, Page 24. Sources cited are: Samuel Perkins to James Perkins, June 28, 1792, box 2, item 20, Perkins Family Papers, 1780–1882, MSS. L816, Boston Athenaeum, Massachusetts; PB&Co to James Perkins, Cape, August 5, 1792, box 1, item 14, Perkins Family Papers, 1780–1882, MSS. L816, Boston Athenaeum, Massachusetts.

[11] Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery, Harvard University, 2022, Page 24. Sources cited are: Ralph W. Hidy, “Editor’s Foreward,” in Seaburg and Paterson, Merchant Prince of Boston, vii–viii; Our First Men, 35–36; Chapman, “Taking Business to Tiger’s Gate.” See Martha Bebinger, “How Profits from Opium Shaped 19th-Century Boston,” WBUR, July 31, 2017, https:// www.wbur.org/news/2017/07/31/opium-boston-history.

[12] Hidden Brookline website, “Thomas Perkins, Slave Trader & Opium Smuggler” https://hiddenbrookline.weebly.com/perkins-page.html

[13] October 30, 1989 letter to The New York Times by Gabriel G. Nahas, author of Cocaine: The Great White Plague.

[14] How Profits From Opium Shaped 19th-Century Boston https://www.wbur.org/news/2017/07/31/opium-boston-history

[15] Museum of Fine Arts Boston https://www.mfa.org/give/founders-and-benefactors

James Perkins: Slave Trader, Enslaver and Opium Smuggler