View Shopping Cart Your Famous Chinese Account Shopping Help Famous Chinese Homepage China Chinese Chinese Culture Chinese Restaurant & Chinese Food Travel to China Chinese Economy & Chinese Trade Chinese Medicine & Chinese Herb Chinese Art
logo
Search
March 8, 2014
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
John Murray Forbes

Wikipedia

 
Image:Johnforbes2.jpg|frame|John Murray Forbes

John Murray Forbes (February 23, 1813 - October 12, 1898), one of three brothers sent by their uncle to Guangzhou|Canton, amassed a fortune in the opium trade and China trade during the Opium Wars.

His parents were Ralph Bennet Forbes and Margaret Perkins, youngest daughter of the Perkins family, a merchant banking family in the China trade. He was born in Bordeaux, France. The Forbes family settled in Milton, Massachusetts. His father was an energetic but unsuccessful businessman who died when John was only six.

Forbes attended school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, then at Round Hill School in Northampton, Massachusetts, from 1823-28.

He settled in Boston and became an early railroad investor and landowner. As with Jay Gould and E. H. Harriman, he was an important figure in the building of America's railroad system. Between 1846 and 1855, as president of Michigan Central Railroad, and as a director and president of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy line, he helped with the growth of the American Middle West.

He supplied money and weapons to New Englanders to fight slavery in Kansas and in 1859 entertained John Brown (abolitionist)|John Brown. In 1860 he was an elector for Abraham Lincoln, and was a delegate to the Republican conventions of 1876, 1880 and 1884. He became displeased with the Republican party and worked successfully to get Democrat Grover Cleveland elected President.

Edward Waldo Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson's son, published Forbes biography in the September 1899 issue of "Atlantic" magazine. The Emerson and Forbes families were close. John Murray's son, William Forbes, married Ralph's daughter, Edith Emerson. In 1871, Ralph, John, Edward, Edith and William visited an opium den in San Francisco. In Letters and Social Aims, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of Forbes: "Never was such force, good meaning, good sense, good action, combined with such domestic lovely behavior, such modesty and persistent preference for others. Wherever he moved he was the benefactor... How little this man suspects, with his sympathy for men and his respect for lettered and scientific people, that he is not likely, in any company, to meet a man superior to himself," and "I think this is a good country that can bear such a creature as he."

His brother is the great-grandfather of 2004 U.S. United States Democratic Party|Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry|John Forbes Kerry.



  • Forbes family of Boston





  • Life and Recollections of John Murray Forbes, ed. by Sarah Forbes Hughes, Two Volumes, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1899.


  • An American Railroad Builder: John Murray Forbes, by Henry Pearson, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1911.


  • Forbes: Telephone Pioneer, by Arthur Pier, 1953.




  • http://www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/johnforbes.html Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography: John Murray Forbes


Category:1813 births|Forbes, John Murray
Category:1898 deaths|Forbes, John Murray
Category:People from Massachusetts|Forbes, John Murray
Category:U.S. businesspeople|Forbes, John Murray
Category:Forbes family|Forbes, John Murray

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "John Murray Forbes".


Last Modified:   2005-04-13


Search
All informatin on the site is © FamousChinese.com 2002-2005. Last revised: January 2, 2004
Are you interested in our site or/and want to use our information? please read how to contact us and our copyrights.
To post your business in our web site? please click here. To send any comments to us, please use the Feedback.
To let us provide you with high quality information, you can help us by making a more or less donation: