Great Fortunes Chapter 8: George Peabody
It is not often that men who pass their lives in the acquisition of money are able to retain the desire to give it to others who have had no share in the earning of it. In European countries, the wealthy merchant commonly uses his fortune for the purpose of founding a family, and securing sometimes a title of nobility. His wealth is entailed, that it may remain in his family and benefit remote generations; but few save those of his own blood enjoy any benefit from it, and the world is no better off for his life and success than if he had never been born. In America, instances of personal generosity and benevolence on a large scale are of more common occurrence than in the Old World. We have already borne witness to the munificence of Girard, Astor, Lawrence, Longworth, and Stewart, and shall yet present to the reader other instances of this kind in the remaining pages of this work. We have now to trace the career of one who far exceeded any of these in the extent and magnitude of his liberality, and who, while neglecting none connected with him by ties of blood, took the whole English-speaking race for his family, and by scattering his blessings far and wide on both sides of the Atlantic, has won a proud name
“As one who loved his fellow-men.” GEORGE PEABODY
George Peabody came of an old English family, which traced its descent back to the year of our Lord 61, the days of the heroic Boadicea, down through the brilliant circle of the Knights of the Round Table, to Francis Peabody, who in 1635 went from St. Albans, in Hertfordshire, to the New World, and settled in Danvers, Massachusetts, where the subject of this memoir was born one hundred and sixty years later, on the 18th of February, 1795. The parents of George Peabody were poor, and hard work was the lot to which he was born, a lot necessary to develop his sterling qualities of mind and heart. He was possessed of a strong, vigorous constitution, and a quick, penetrating intellect. His education was limited, for he was taken from school at the age of eleven, and set to earning his living. Upon leaving school, he was apprenticed to a Mr. Sylvester Proctor, who kept a “country store” in Danvers. Here he worked hard and faithfully for four or five years, devoting himself, with an energy and determination surprising in one so young, to learn the first principles of business. His mind matured more rapidly than his body, and he was a man in intellect long before he was out of his teens. Having gained all the information it was possible to acquire in so small an establishment, he began to wish for a wider field for the exercise of his abilities. A retail grocery store was no longer the place for one possessed of such talents, and thoroughly conscious of them at such an early age, and it was natural that he should desire some more important and responsible position.
Accordingly, he left Mr. Proctor’s employment, and spent a year with his maternal grandfather at Post Mills village, Thetford, Vermont. “George Peabody’s year at Post Mills,” says a writer who knew him, “must have been a year of intense quiet, with good examples always before him, and good advice whenever occasion called for it; for Mr. Dodge and his wife were both too shrewd to bore him with it needlessly.
