Peter Faneuil

Peter Faneuil
Peter Faneuil by John Smibert, 1739
Born	(1700-06-20)June 20, 1700 New Rochelle, Province of New York, British America
Died	March 3, 1743(1743-03-03) (aged 42) Boston, Province of Massachusetts Bay, British America
Occupation(s)	Slave trader, merchant, and philanthropist

Peter Faneuil (June 20, 1700 – March 3, 1743) was a wealthy American colonial merchant, slave trader and philanthropist who donated Faneuil Hall to Boston.

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Samuel Adams stands in front of Faneuil Hall. Faneuil Hall is where the Boston town meetings happened. Samuel Adams from the 1760's through the 1770's dominated the town meeting through his caucus club; organized political activity and leading the town of Boston in opposition to the policies of the British Crown. Faneuil Hall, where the meetings happened, was a gift to Boston from Peter Faneuil, a very successful merchant of French decent. French Huguenots, that is French protestants who had gone into exile in the 16th century, found themselves in New Rochelle in New York. Peter Faneuil came here and was a very successful merchant. One thing he saw that Boston could use was a central market place, so he offered to build one at his own expense. Other merchants were very wary. "Why is Faneuil going to build a marketplace, he is going to control it." Faneuil threw in something to sweeten the deal. He would build a meeting place for the town of Boston, a place where the town meeting to happen. The first floor would be a market and the second floor would be a meeting house. By a vote of 618 to 601 the town allowed Peter Faneuil to build them a marketplace and a meeting house. Faneuil Hall, it's first public function was actually for Peter Faneuil's funeral. After the revolution, Faneuil Hall was too small to accommodate the town meeting so it was expanded. Charles Bullfinch happened to be chairman of the board of selectmen, and was awarded the contract to oversee the expansion of Faneuil Hall. Doubling it's size. In the 19th century even as the Boston town government moved out, Faneuil Hall remained a meeting place. William Lloyd Garrison spoke here, Frederick Douglass, John Quincy Adams, and Lucy Stone spoke here. In the 20th century John McCain spoke here, John F. Kennedy, and most political figures have spoken in Faneuil Hall. Still dedicated to the ideas of free speech, free expression. You too can speak in Faneuil Hall, if you will pay the city of Boston a $200 fee for it's use and also you cannot have a meeting that would advocate the overthrow of the government of the United States. There is a experience in Faneuil Hall with meetings advocating the overthrow of government and we have learned our lesson from that.

Childhood

Peter Faneuil was born on June 20, 1700, in New Rochelle, New York, to Benjamin Faneuil and Anne Bureau, the eldest child of one of three Huguenot brothers who fled France with considerable wealth after the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Having emigrated to America about a decade earlier and become freemen of Massachusetts Bay in 1691, Peter's father, Benjamin, and his uncle, Andrew, had subsequently been early settlers of New Rochelle. Shortly thereafter, Andrew made Boston his permanent residence. Benjamin married Anne Bureau in 1699, and they had at least two sons and three daughters who lived to maturity.

Little is known of Peter's boyhood. His father, prominent and fairly well-to-do, died in 1719 when Peter was 18, and soon Peter, his brother, Benjamin Jr., and his sister Mary moved to Boston. Their widowed, childless uncle Andrew had become one of New England's wealthiest men through shrewd trading and Boston real estate investments. Andrew may have formally adopted his two nephews. Peter Faneuil's first claim to fame occurred in 1728 when he helped his brother-in-law Henry Phillips escape to France after he killed Benjamin Woodbridge in the first duel ever to take place in Boston.

Life as a merchant

Peter Faneuil entered Boston's commission and shipping business and soon proved a competent trader, assisting his uncle in running a lucrative mercantile establishment that traded with Antigua, Barbados, Spain, the Canary Islands, and England, only a few of the places from which Faneuil's correspondence survives.

Prominent in the triangular trade, Peter shipped enslaved people to the West Indies and brought molasses and sugar to the colonies. He handled merchandise from Europe and the Caribbean, exported rum, fish, and produce, and engaged in shipbuilding. When he ventured both ship and cargo in transatlantic or coastal commerce, he customarily shared the risk with others. Charging 5% for handling consignments, he used advanced business methods and kept careful records. Fishing-grounds agents kept him informed of market prices and furthered his commercial connections. Not all of his trade was legal. When in 1736 his ship Providence was seized for exchanging fish and oil for French gold, he complained that only the "caprice" of the admiralty judge, a "Vile" man, was responsible for "Impositions" on a "fair trader" that was "in no way founded on law and justice."^{[citation needed]}

A childless widower, Andrew Faneuil for some reason threatened to disinherit either of his two nephews if they married. Benjamin Jr. preferred wedlock to a share of the enormous Faneuil fortune, which in addition to ships, shops, and a mansion in Tremont Street included £14,000 in East India Company stock. During his uncle's final illness Peter managed Andrew's business as well as his own. Peter, who was swarthy, stocky, and disabled since childhood, remained single, inheriting most of the fortune. Peter became—despite handsome bequests to his sisters—one of America's wealthiest men, living sumptuously in a Beacon Street mansion. Writing to his London partners to inform them of his uncle's death, he also requested five pipes of Madeira wine: "As this wine is for the use of my house, I hope you will be careful that I have the best." Soon thereafter, he requested a "handsome chariot" emblazoned with the family crest, accompanied by a coachman unlikely "to be debauched with strong drink, rum, etc." as were most European servants. He also asked for "the latest, best book of the several sorts of cookery, which pray let be of the largest characters, for the benefit of the maid's reading."^{[citation needed]}

Faneuil Hall and other gifts

Most noteworthy was Faneuil's gift to the town of Boston of Faneuil Hall, which opened in September 1742, scarcely six months before his death. In July 1740 Faneuil had offered the town a large market building. This offer was by no means uncontroversial: Bostonians had debated throughout the eighteenth century whether a centralized market was preferable to peddling in the streets, bringing conveniences such as home delivery but also inconveniences including noisy push-cart hucksters and higher prices. Markets built by the town had been destroyed by a mob disguised as clergymen in 1737. Only by a vote of 367 to 360 did the Boston Town Meeting accept Faneuil's offer. The building took two years to construct and was named for Faneuil after his death. It was gutted by fire in March 1761; the walls remained, but the interior structure, to which the town meeting frequently adjourned to protest British policy as the American Revolution approached, was added after the fire. The room above the market stalls became a civic center where so many prerevolutionary meetings were held that Faneuil Hall became known as America's "Cradle of Liberty." Faneuil Hall still stands, although it is dwarfed by the Quincy Market complex built behind it in the nineteenth century.

Although Faneuil enjoyed the good life, his contemporaries and posterity honor him most highly as a public benefactor. John Lovell, who gave his funeral eulogy, said that Faneuil "fed the hungry and he cloathed the naked, he comforted the fatherless, and the widows in their affliction." An obituary noted that he was "a gentleman, possessed of a very ample fortune and a most generous spirit," his "noble benefaction to his town and constant employment of a great number of tradesmen, artificers, and laborers, to whom he was a liberal paymaster . . . made his life a public blessing, and his death a general loss." In Faneuil's case such praise was more than routine kindness to the recently deceased. He donated liberally to the Episcopal Charitable Society, an endowment for the families of the deceased clergymen of Trinity Church, to which he belonged, and was treasurer of the project to build the present King's Chapel. Other wealthy Boston Anglicans apparently lacked his fervor, for the project languished for five years after his death following his gift of £200 sterling.

Evidently little is known of Faneuil's treatment of his own slaves, only that he engaged in a trade that was lawful at the time.

Death

Faneuil died unmarried in Boston of dropsy on March 3, 1743, at the age of 42.^[1] He was interred in the Granary Burying Ground.^[2] He left his fortune, including five enslaved black people and 195 dozen bottles of wine, to his sister Mary and brother Benjamin Jr. (who was later to become a Loyalist in the American Revolution).

19th-century historian Lucius M. Sargent said of Peter Faneuil that he "lived as magnificently as a nobleman, as hospitably as a bishop, and as charitably as an apostle."^[3]