George Peabody, a 19th century merchant banker whose bicentenary birthday is being celebrated in Baltimore today, was a rare and wonderful character: a poor New England farm boy who became a brilliant financier beloved for his generosity.
A tall, genial man with demonic work habits, he came to like well-cut clothes, good food, fine wines, old friends and pretty women. But most of all he loved making money.
He certainly was good at it, especially for a man who never got past the fourth grade and who made his first half-buck as a patched-pants kid tending sheep.
He came to Baltimore and made money. He went to London and made more. He accumulated one of the first great American fortunes. He became the first great modern philanthropist on either side of the Atlantic. He made money diligently and he gave it away prodigiously. By his death in 1869, his gifts totaled $7 million -- something like $70 million in today's dollars.
George Peabody was only 20 when he arrived in Baltimore in 1815 as the junior partner of Elisha Riggs, a member of the family whose name survives in the Riggs
National Bank. Peabody had served briefly in an artillery company with him during the War of 1812.
Elisha Riggs and Peabody moved their dry goods company from Georgetown to Baltimore, then the fastest-growing city in America and a mercantile center second only to New York. Over the next 22 years, Peabody became a towering figure in the Baltimore business community before moving to London, the world's international finance center. He single-handedly saved Maryland from bankruptcy during the Panic of 1837 when he persuaded British investors to buy the state's bonds. Typically, he turned down his $60,000 commission.
He launched one of his first great benefactions here 45 years later, when he founded the Peabody Institute in 1857 and funded it with $1.4 million -- $14 million these days.
Today, a piper named Big John McCruden will lead the entire community of what is now the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University -- students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends -- in celebration of George Peabody's 200th birthday.
They'll march in procession to the Peabody statue in Mount Vernon Square. There, the conservatory's director, Robert Pierce, will place flowers at the base of the statue. He'll also unveil a new plaque extolling the seated gentleman gazing benignly toward the Walters Art Gallery, or perhaps the setting sun.
The coupling of Peabody with Johns Hopkins in the institute's name is a reminder that the George Peabody was the inspiration for that remarkable group of Baltimore philanthropists who came after him in the late 19th century: Johns Hopkins, Moses Sheppard, Enoch Pratt, William and Henry Walters.
The founding of Johns Hopkins University is said to have come after a long, late-night talk between Hopkins and Peabody at the home of John Work Garrett, the president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.
Baltimoreans probably need a reminder of just how remarkable George Peabody was. The farm boy with little schooling grown wealthy, Peabody moved easily and urbanely in a circle that included the richest, the most powerful and the most highly educated people in Baltimore and then in London. He dined with prime ministers, novelists and social reformers.
He was a unparalleled businessman in his time. He founded the firm that became the House of Morgan, one of the world's great banking dynasties, which carries on today as J. P. Morgan & Co., Morgan Grenfell Holdings Ltd. in England and a multitude of subsidiaries.
George Peabody made money selling tea and silk, and steel for (( railroad tracks. He financed the westward thrust of the railroad and the telegraph cable east beneath the Atlantic to Britain. He ++ eventually had a virtually monopoly on the sale of American securities in Europe.
The bronze Peabody, with sideburns plump as aubergines and wearing a vested 19th century business suit, sits at ease in an armchair with his legs crossed. He looks quite comfortable and perhaps self-satisfied, a man about to order a jeroboam of champagne or a half-million railroad bonds.
The Mount Vernon Square statue, in fact, is a replica of an original unveiled in 1869 by the Prince of Wales. The statue still stands -- or, rather, sits -- in Threadneedle Street before the Bank of England in the heart of the City of London. The city remains one of the world's great financial and banking heartlands, even as it was in 1837 when Peabody settled there.
The Peabody Bicentenary is being celebrated in London today. A gaggle of Peabody relatives is to dine with directors of the Peabody Trust, which George Peabody began with $2.5 million in 1862 ($25 million today) to provide housing for the working poor.
On Saturday, the 200th anniversary of his birth on Feb. 18, 1795, his descendants will lay a wreath on a memorial in Westminster Abbey. When he died in 1869, Peabody was interred for about a month in Westminster.
"The whole of London came to a halt for the funeral," says Anne Garside, a spokeswoman for the Peabody Institute. "Crowds swarmed on the pavement and the Prince of Wales followed in his carriage, and so did William Gladstone, the prime minister."
Queen Victoria approved his burial in Westminster because of the "great benefactions to the City of London." She had offered him a baronetcy a year earlier in recognition of his generosity in creating the Peabody Trust.
Peabody declined: He would have had to become a subject of the queen. And although he had lived in Britain 32 years, he was a fervent American patriot. George Washington was still president when he was born. He'd volunteered during the War of when Britain was the enemy. Later, his Fourth of July banquets helped close British-American wounds and became a hot ticket during the London social season.
So when it came time for Peabody to return home at last, Gladstone ordered the Monarch, the newest and largest warship in the British navy, to carry the casket back to America.
He's buried in Harmony Grove Cemetery near Peabody, Mass., where he was born. His hometown of South Danvers was renamed Peabody in his honor in 1868. He had established the first Peabody Institute, a community lecture hall, in South Danvers in 1852, and supported it with a fund that reached $217,600 -- about $2.2 million today.
All told, Peabody endowed seven institutes and libraries. He founded a museum of archaeology and ethnology at Harvard, influenced by a favorite nephew -- Othniel C. Marsh, America's first great paleontologist -- and a natural history museum of Yale, each with a donation of $1.5 million in 1995 dollars. After the Civil War, he established the Peabody Education Fund with $2 million ($20 million today) to provide schooling for the "destitute children of the Southern States."
He was a lifelong bachelor but he supported generously a vast extended family of brothers and sisters (he had seven), aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews. He always had a favorite niece or nephew he treated as a surrogate son or daughter.
He proposed to two beautiful woman and was rebuffed twice. But he remained a highly eligible prospect most of his life. He was, after all, very rich. And gossipy letters often linked him to pretty young women. According to one persistent rumor, he kept, very discreetly, a mistress in Brighton, who bore him a daughter.
In 1866, the 71-year-old Mr. Peabody presided over the dedication of the Peabody Institute in Baltimore as a patriarch of reconciliation. Baltimore had been sharply divided by the Civil War. For the first time, men who had been on opposite sides during the war came together in support of Peabody's project. Standing beside Peabody at the dedication, the trustees of his new institute included 13 Union men and 10 from the Confederacy.
Eighteen thousand schoolchildren came to the dedication and Mr. Peabody presented medals to 100. He raised a few eyebrows when he insisted on kissing all the girls.
"When I get tired, I will call on some of the younger men who would no doubt like to take my place," he snapped, according to a Peabody guidebook.
He gave his money without regard for gender, race or color, religious or political affiliation, says Elizabeth Schaaf, archivist at the Peabody Institute.
Mrs. Schaaf has plowed through Peabody correspondence, business papers, public records and accolades for an exhibition that will open at the Museum of London Feb. 25, and in Baltimore at the Maryland Historical Society Oct. 20.
Mrs. Schaaf, the curator of the exhibition, probably knows George Peabody as well as any other contemporary person. She's an enthusiastic fan.
"I think George Peabody was one of the good and solid, reliable people," she says. "I think he was the kind of person that almost anyone would feel grateful to have for a friend.
"I think he was a man of enormous integrity, a real visionary. Nineteenth century financial upheavals were just lethal. After one of these upheavals, one of his less fortunate business associates wrote to him 'not all of us had your prophetic eye.' "
That's the title of her George Peabody bicentenary exhibition: "The Prophetic Eye."