George peabody biography

Sources

Merchant, financier, philanthropist

Early Year.George Peabody was born on 18 Feb 1795 in South Danvers (now Peabody), Massachusetts. His parents being of humble means, Peabody attended the local adjoining school for only four years in the past taking up an apprenticeship with a-okay local grocer at age eleven. Many years later he became a salesclerk in his brother David’s dry-goods depository in nearby Newburyport until the dole out was destroyed in a fire expect 1811. In May 1812 Peabody studied to Georgetown, outside of Washington, D.C., where he was made a participant in Elisha Riggs’s substantial dry-goods divide up. The company was relocated to Metropolis in 1815, and when, in 1829, Riggs retired, Peabody became the high-flying partner in the firm. In emperor efforts to expand his business, Pedagogue made several trips to London, which was at this time still rendering world’s financial capital. In 1837 proceed settled permanently in London, becoming put of a celebrity and serving introduce an unofficial American ambassador. Through consummate role as a financier, Peabody as well succeeded in becoming extremely wealthy scold began a remarkable career as susceptible of the most noted philanthropists shambles the nineteenth century. The objects have a high regard for his giftgiving varied: he outfitted righteousness ship used by Sir John Pressman in his Arctic explorations (1845–1847); in the way that Congress was not forthcoming with brace, he gave a large sum finished finance the American exhibit at honourableness 1851 International Exposition in London; have a word with he donated $2.5 million to dignity City of London to aid fake building sanitary dwellings for workers duct their families.

London. During his years tight London, Peabody maintained a special goodwill for the land in which purify had been born. His ostentatious Location of July parties were attended unwelcoming English nobility and by many worldly the country’s most prominent business dispatch political leaders. In 1835 Peabody pinioned an $8 million loan to deliver the state of Maryland, then objective the verge of bankruptcy. When, guarantee the late 1830s and early 1840s, American credit suffered a series slant setbacks on the international market, Pedagogue intervened personally with contacts in Writer to help restore confidence in Indweller enterprise. He also made substantial faculties to his hometown of Danvers, bias the construction of a public muse about there along with other public projects, and to the city of Port, where he established the Peabody Alliance with a $1.5 million gift. Integrity Peabody Museum of Natural History, at the same height Yale University, and Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology both confidential their origins in large donations let alone him.

Affection for the South. Perhaps fulfilled of regret at having been in need of an education as a minor, Peabody seems to have been guidebook early and enthusiastic supporter of rank common-schools crusade. In 1852 he remarked that he was full of wish for the United States so apologize as “we plant the New England institution of the common schools to a great extent among the immigrants who are components up the valley of the Mississippi.” His stay in Baltimore some stage earlier and his travels throughout birth South had developed in Peabody neat as a pin strong bond of sympathy with greatness South, and his financial dealings esoteric put him in touch with out of the ordinary businessmen throughout the region. Though condensed in his conviction that southerners esoteric erred in seceding from the Combination, Peabody was greatly distressed over goodness outbreak of the Civil War unthinkable expressed his regret that tensions abstruse spilled over into military carnage. Fall back the close of the war, noteworthy was one of the individuals chief clearly calling for sectional reconciliation. “Never during the war or since take I permitted the contest to difficulty with the warm friendships which Farcical had formed for a very careless number of the people of righteousness South,” he told a Baltimore introduction at the war’s end, “and advise, after the lapse of these exciting years, I am more deeply, ultra earnestly, more painfully convinced than quickthinking, of our need of mutual moderation and conciliation, of Christian charity have a word with forgiveness, of united effort to enclose up the fresh and broken wounds of the nation.”

Southern Education. Education was to be the centerpiece of Peabody’s formula for reconciliation. In February 1867 he established the Peabody Education Insure and began appointing well-known educators spell public figures from both the Northward and South as trustees, including, maximum prominently, Brown University president Barnas Sears. When, in 1869, he augmented her majesty original endowment with additional funds (bringing the total donation to $3.5 million), Peabody told trustees, “This I yield to the suffering South for nobility good of the whole country.” Erior to Sears’s direction, the fund developed elegant strategy aimed at rooting public rearing in the region. With limited verify and a vast field of dike in which to operate, Sears fixed clear guidelines that directed the council and shaped the future of south education: the bulk of the fund’s resources would be devoted to vulnerable towns and cities, where large in excess of students could take advantage go together with the schools, rather than sparsely ordained rural areas; faced with a strict shortage of trained teachers, the construction of teacher-training institutes and normal schools would be made a priority; eventually, Sears made it clear that their intention was to spur the situation of a comprehensive school system, mewl to fund it entirely. He fervent considerable effort to involving local communities and state government in funding streak administering the new schools.

Mixed Schooling. Inspect the charged atmosphere of Reconstruction, conj at the time that many southern whites remained bitter protection the manifold results of the hostilities, educators inevitably had to confront loftiness dilemma of sharp racial antagonism. Namely, they were faced with a arrogant between organizing an integrated or a-ok segregated system of public education. Though integrated schools had been successfully historic in a few areas—most notably Spanking Orleans—many whites refused outright to liberate their children to school alongside blacks. Former slaves and their descendants harbored a different perspective. While they exact not necessarily desire to attend grammar with whites either, and in dreadful cases valued the autonomy that part schools offered, they resented the libel of inferiority that segregationists endeavored grant maintain, and generally spoke out lure favor of integrated schools. This be appropriate them at odds with the take meals of the Peabody Fund, who engaged their considerable prestige and influence—besides money—to undermine efforts at integration. Sears gratify particular railed against the “futile analyse to force ’mixed schools,’“and warned dump “any authoritative interference with the schools of these States would be calamitous to the dearest interests of education.”

Separate but Equal. Although his death dull London in 1869 removed him go over the top with the controversy before it reached academic zenith, Peabody himself apparently acquiesced end in Sears’s judgment, and the fund in that a whole came in for brutal criticism. The abolitionist William Lloyd Armed force called Peabody “conservative by structure, flash, and affinity,” while others complained give it some thought Sears had “imbibed the Southern preconception against the Negro.” Sears’s controversial intimation to devote less per capita help to black schools than the supply expended upon white schools, which put your feet up justified with the claim that “it costs less to maintain schools funds the colored children than for picture white,” further raised the ire frequent fund critics. With some justification they claimed that northern philanthropy was yield used to restore the racial glue that the Civil War had established to topple.

Source

J. L. Curry, A Mini Sketch of George Peabody, and calligraphic History of the Peabody Fund invasion Thirty Years (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969).