| Benjamin Hart | |
|---|---|
Benjamin Hart, New York City, about 1855 |
|
| Born | August 12, 1779 Montreal, Quebec |
| Died | February 27, 1855 (aged 75) New York City, New York |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Religion | Jewish |
| Spouse | Harriot Judith Hart |
Benjamin Hart (August 10, 1779 – February 27, 1855) was a Canadian businessman, militia officer, and justice of the peace.
Contents |
Benjamin Hart was born in Montreal to Aaron Hart, a prominent merchant of Trois-Rivières, and Dorothea Judah.
He was educated privately in Philadelphia and New York. In 1798 Benjamin returned to Trois-Rivières to assist his brothers and aged father with the family's extensive business. Among Benjamin’s assignments was that of travelling salesman for the family brewery.
When Aaron died in December 1800 he left to Benjamin the Harts' main store in Trois-Rivières and a two-storey stone house in the commercial heart of Montreal. In 1802 Benjamin went to England to make arrangements with Aaron's former suppliers, including the Ellice empire, recently taken over by Edward Ellice. In Montreal they operated as Alexander Hart and Company and in Trois-Rivières, where Benjamin directed the business, as Benjamin and Alexander Hart and Company.
On April 1, 1806, in New York, Hart made an advantageous marriage with Harriot Judith Hart, daughter of Ephraim Hart, a wealthy stockbroker who was one of the founders of the New York Stock Exchange. The couple had 16 children, of whom 8 survived.
He became a grand juror soon after 1800, and in 1811 he was treasurer of the Fire Society. He also joined the early struggles for Jewish civil liberties. In 1807 he urged his elder brother Ezekiel to contest the seat for Trois-Rivières in the House of Assembly and, when the seat was won but Ezekiel prevented from taking it on religious grounds, Benjamin encouraged him to seek re-election.
In February 1811 Benjamin petitioned the government for a commission in the Trois-Rivières battalion of militia, but was opposed by Colonel Thomas Coffin, the unit's commander, who argued that Christian militiamen would not wish to serve with or under a Jew. In response Hart sent to Governor Sir George Prévost favourable affidavits from leading residents of the town, including Louis-Charles Foucher, who was lieutenant-colonel under Coffin, Roman Catholic vicar general François Noiseux, and the Anglican priest at Trois-Rivières, Robert Quirk Short.
In 1812 he lent the military £1,000 to permit immediate establishment of a garrison at William Henry, and during the War of 1812 he served as a private in Captain John Ogilvy's company of light infantry in the Montreal Incorporated Volunteers.
Although Benjamin's partnership with Alexander had been dissolved on April 1, 1812, he continued in business in Trois-Rivières as a commission merchant, auctioneer, and broker. In 1818 Benjamin moved back to Montreal to start up a new business as a general agent and commission merchant. He retained his business in Trois-Rivières until May 1820. In October 1829 he was among eight men requesting incorporation of the Montreal Savings Bank, founded ten years earlier.
In October 1820 he was promoted from ensign to lieutenant in Montreal's 1st Militia Battalion. He contributed generously to the house of industry, founded in 1818, and to the Montreal General Hospital, established the following year. In 1829 he was appointed to the Montreal Board of Examiners of Applicants to be Inspectors of Pot and Pearl Ashes, and the same year he was a director of the Montreal Committee of Trade.
Benjamin contributed to the pressure that produced a law, passed in 1831 and sanctioned the following year, giving Jews equality of civil liberties. Consequently, he, Samuel Becancour Hart, and Moses Judah Hayes were offered appointments as justices of the peace in 1833, but because the recent legislation had provided only for a Christian oath of office, Benjamin and Hayes refused to accept the appointments until 1837.
Hart spent much time and money trying to revitalize Montreal's Jewish congregation. Its last resident minister, Jacob Raphael Cohen, had departed in 1782, and in 1825 the land on which Shearith Israel Synagogue stood reverted to the heirs of David David, depriving the Jews of their place of worship. In July 1826 Hart made a passionate printed appeal to his co-religionists of the city to reorganize Shearith Israel. A trustee of the congregation, he initiated a subscription campaign to finance construction of a new synagogue and was himself the third largest contributor to it. Meanwhile, he opened a room adjoining his home for religious services.
He was the city's agent for Minerva Life of London in 1843. Benjamin Hart and Company was one of Montreal's more active import firms in 1844, and by that year Benjamin's son Theodore had joined it as a partner. In the late 1840s, however, the company may have been caught up in a general trade collapse; in 1848 he declared bankruptcy at the same time as his wife sued him for the financial support guaranteed by their marriage contract.
In 1840 in Liverpool he had published a broadside ridiculing former governor Lord Acheson Gosford for presenting to the House of Lords a mammoth petition from Lower Canada against the union of the Canadas. The Rebellion Losses Bill of 1849 was the last straw. That year Hart signed the Annexation Manifesto, advocating economic and political union with the United States. When, in consequence, he was stripped of his magisterial and militia commissions (by 1846 he had become lieutenant-colonel, commanding Montreal's 3rd Militia Battalion), he moved to New York, in failing health. In this city, where his wife had property inherited from her father, Hart lived out his last years in retirement near his son Arthur Wellington. He died in 1855 in St George's Hotel on Broadway.