Boston Brahmin

Colonial Boston – The Boston Common in 1768

The Boston Brahmin or Boston elite are members of Boston's traditional upper class.[1] They form an integral part of the historic core of the East Coast establishment, along with other wealthy families of Philadelphia, New York City, Virginia and Charleston.[2] They are often associated with the distinctive Boston Brahmin accent, Harvard University, and traditional Anglo-American customs and clothing. Descendants of the earliest English colonists, such as those who came to America on the Mayflower or the Arbella, are often considered to be the most representative of the Boston Brahmins.[3]

The term was coined by the physician and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., in an 1860 article in the Atlantic Monthly.[4] The term Brahmin refers to the highest ranking caste of people in the traditional caste system in India. In the United States, it has been applied to the old, wealthy New England families of British Protestant origin which were influential in the development of American institutions and culture.

The term effectively underscores the strong conviction of the New England gentry that they were a people set apart by destiny to guide the American experiment as their ancestors had played a leading role in founding it. The term also illustrates the erudite and exclusive nature of the New England gentry as perceived by outsiders, and may also refer to their interest in Eastern religions, fostered perhaps by the impact in the 19th century of the transcendentalist writings of New England literary icons such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, and the enlightened appeal of Universalist Unitarian movements of the same period.

Characteristics

Typical dress of the Boston elite

The nature of the Brahmins is hinted at by the doggerel "Boston Toast" by Holy Cross alumnus John Collins Bossidy:

And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots,
And the Cabots talk only to God.[5][6]

While some 19th-century Brahmin families of large fortune were of bourgeois origin, others were of aristocratic origin. The new families were often the first to seek, in typically British fashion, suitable marriage alliances with those old aristocratic New England families that were descended from landowners in England to elevate and cement their social standing. The Winthrops, Dudleys, Saltonstalls, Winslows, and Lymans (descended from English magistrates, gentry, and aristocracy) were, by and large, happy with this arrangement. All of Boston's "Brahmin elite", therefore, maintained the received culture of the old English gentry, including cultivating the personal excellence that they imagined maintained the distinction between gentlemen and freemen, and between ladies and women. They saw it as their duty to maintain what they defined as high standards of excellence, duty, and restraint. Cultivated, urbane, and dignified, a Boston Brahmin was supposed to be the very essence of enlightened aristocracy.[7][8] The ideal Brahmin was not only wealthy, but displayed what was considered suitable personal virtues and character traits.

The Brahmin was expected to maintain the customary English reserve in his dress, manner, and deportment, cultivate the arts, support charities such as hospitals and colleges, and assume the role of community leader.[9]:14 Although the ideal called on him to transcend commonplace business values, in practice many found the thrill of economic success quite attractive. The Brahmins warned each other against avarice and insisted upon personal responsibility. Scandal and divorce were unacceptable. The total system was buttressed by the strong extended family ties present in Boston society. Young men attended the same prep schools, colleges, and private clubs,[10] and heirs married heiresses. Family not only served as an economic asset, but also as a means of moral restraint. Most belong to the Unitarian or Episcopal churches, although some were Congregationalists or Methodists. Politically they were successively Federalists, Whigs, and Republicans. They were marked by their manners and once distinctive elocution, the Boston Brahmin accent, a version of the New England accent. Their distinctive Anglo-American manner of dress has been much imitated and is the foundation of the style now informally known as preppy. Many of the Brahmin families trace their ancestry back to the original 17th- and 18th-century colonial ruling class consisting of Massachusetts governors and magistrates, Harvard presidents, distinguished clergy and fellows of the Royal Society of London (a leading scientific body), while others entered New England aristocratic society during the 19th century with their profits from commerce and trade, often marrying into established Brahmin families.

Brahmin families

Selected Boston Brahmin
American statesmen, Governor of Massachusetts, and founding father, Samuel Adams
American merchant, Samuel Appleton
Banking merchant, John Amory Lowell
U.S. Congressman and lawyer, Robert L. Bacon
Philanthropist, business magnate, namesake of Bates College, Benjamin Bates.
Federal judge, founder of Choate Rosemary Hall, William Gardner Choate
Officer of the Royal British Navy, Isaac Coffin
Railroad executive and son of U.S. President Calvin Coolidge, John Coolidge
Congregational minister, Samuel Cooper
Colonist, Benjamin Williams Crowninshield
Massachusetts colonial speaker of the house, Thomas Cushing
Royal Governor of Massachusetts, Joseph Dudley
American historian and president of Yale University, Timothy Dwight
President of Harvard University, Charles William Eliot
Massachusetts minister, William Emerson
American businessman and art collector, John Lowell Gardner
Boston manufacturer, Patrick Tracy Jackson
Politician and founder of Lawrence, Abbott Lawrence
American statesmen and congressman, Henry Cabot Lodge
Colonial lawyer, James Otis
Entrepreneur and philanthropist who founded the House of Morgan and the Peabody Institute, George Peabody
Art historian, philanthropist, founder of the Museum of Fine Arts, Charles C. Perkins
Educator and founder of Phillips Exeter Academy, John Phillips
President of the United States, John Quincy Adams
Sylvanus Thayer, the Father of West Point
Businessman and philanthropist, David Sears
U.S Congressman, John K. Tarbox
Major general and doctor, Joseph Warren

Adams

Adams Family

Amory

Amory Family

Appleton

Appleton Family

Patrilineal line:[11]

Other notable relatives:[12][13][14]

Bacon

Bacon Family

Bates

Bates family

Originally from Boston and Britain:

Boylston

Boylston Family

Bradlee

Bradlee Family

Direct line:[18][19][20]

Cabot

Chaffee/Chafee

Chaffee Family

Originally of Hingham, Massachusetts:[21]

Choate

Choate Family

Coffin

Coffin Family

Originally of Newbury and Nantucket:

Coolidge

Cooper

Crowninshield

Crowninshield Family

Descendants by marriage:

Cushing

Cushing Family

Originally of Hingham, Massachusetts:[22]

Descendant by marriage:

Dana

Dana Family

Delano

Delano Family

Dudley

Dudley Family

Dwight

Dwight Family

Eliot

Eliot Family

Emerson

Emerson Family

Endicott

Endicott Family

Salem:

Dedham:

Fabens

Fabens Family

Of Marblehead and Salem:[23]

Forbes

Forbes Family

Gardner

Gardner Family

Originally of Essex county:

Gillett

Healey/Dall

Holmes

Holmes Family

Jackson

Jackson Family

Lawrence

Lawrence Family

Descendant by marriage: Abbott Lawrence Lowell (1856–1943): president of Harvard University

Lodge

Lodge Family

Lowell

Lyman

Minot

Minot Family

Norcross

Norcross Family

Original from Watertown, Massachusetts

Otis

Otis Family

Parkman

Parkman Family

Peabody

Peabody Family

Perkins

Perkins Family

Phillips

Phillips Family

Other notable relatives:

Putnam

Putnam Family

Quincy

Quincy Family

Rice

Rice Family

Originally of Sudbury, Massachusetts:

Saltonstall

Saltonstall Family

Sargent

Sears

Sears Family

Tarbox

Tarbox Family

Thayer

Thayer Family

Thorndike

Thorndike Family

Tudor

Tudor Family

Warren

Weld

Weld Family

Wigglesworth

Wigglesworth Family

Winthrop

Winthrop Family

See also

References

  1. ↑ "People & Events: Boston Brahmins". PBS. PBS Online. Retrieved 29 November 2015.
  2. ↑ See generally, Burt.
  3. ↑ Greenwood, Andrew (11 August 2011). An Introduction to the Unitarian and Universalist Traditions. Cambridge University Press. p. LX. Retrieved 27 August 2015.
  4. ↑ Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Brahmin Caste of New England", The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 27, Chapter 1 (1860). The series of articles that this article was part of eventually became his novel Elsie Venner, and the first chapter of that novel was about the Brahmin caste.
  5. ↑ Andrews, Robert (ed.) (1996). Famous Lines: A Columbia Dictionary of Familiar Quotations. Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-10218-6. External link in |title= (help)
  6. ↑ McPhee, John. Giving Good Weight. p. 163.
  7. ↑ Ronald Story, Harvard and the Boston Upper Class: The Forging of an Aristocracy, 1800–1870 (1985).
  8. ↑ Paul Goodman, "Ethics and Enterprise: The Values of a Boston Elite, 1800–1860", American Quarterly, Sept 1966, Vol. 18 Issue 3, pp 437–451.
  9. ↑ Peter S. Field Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Making of a Democratic Intellectual Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. ISBN 0847688429. ISBN 978-0847688425
  10. ↑ Ronald Story, "Harvard Students, the Boston Elite, and the New England Preparatory System, 1800–1870", History of Education Quarterly, Fall 1975, Vol. 15 Issue 3, pp 281–298.
  11. ↑ Farrell, Betty (1993). Elite Families: Class and Power in Nineteenth-Century Boston. SUNY Press. ISBN 1438402325.
  12. ↑ Muskett, Joseph James, ed. (1900). "Appleton of New England". Suffolk Manorial Families. Exeter: William Pollard & Co. 1: 330–334. Retrieved February 20, 2014.
  13. ↑ Jewett, Issac Appleton (1801). Memorial of Samuel Appleton of Ipswich, Massachusetts: With Genealogical Notices of Some of His Descendants. Boston.
  14. ↑ Ipswich Historical Society (1906). "A Genealogy of the Ipswich Descendants of Samuel Appleton.*". Publications of the Ipswich Historical Society. Retrieved February 16, 2014.
  15. ↑ There is some speculation on the actual date of birth of the patriarch of the Bates family, with many agreeing on the
  16. ↑ "Benjamin Bates, Sr.". geni_family_tree. Retrieved 2016-03-22.
  17. ↑ "Benjamin Bates, Jr.". geni_family_tree. Retrieved 2016-03-22.
  18. ↑ Sarah Bradlee Fulton
  19. ↑ Quinn, Bradleeq. "Sarah Bradlee". Boston Tea Party Museum. Retrieved 25 August 2012.
  20. ↑ Quinn, Bradlee. "David Bradlee". Internet Archive. Retrieved 25 August 2012.
  21. ↑ History of the Town of Hingham, Plymouth County, Massachusetts, Solomon Lincoln Jr., Caleb Gill, Jr. and Farmer and Brown, Hingham, 1827
  22. ↑ History of the Town of Hingham, Plymouth County, Massachusetts, Solomon Lincoln, Jr., Caleb Gill, Jr. and Farmer and Brown, Hingham, Mass., 1827
  23. ↑ Perkins, Geo. A. (George Augustus), "Some of the descendants of Jonathan Fabens of Marblehead", 1881. Online at https://archive.org/details/someofdescendant1881perk
  24. ↑ Perkins
  25. ↑ Perkins
  26. ↑ William Chandler Fabens http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=118960395
  27. ↑ Perkins
  28. ↑ Capt Samuel Augustus Fabens http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=Fabens&GSiman=1&GSst=21&GRid=118950243&&
  29. ↑ Perkins
  30. ↑ Perkins
  31. ↑ "History of Fabens, Texas". Fabens Independent School District http://www.fabensisd.net/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=337295&type=d&pREC_ID=744789
  32. ↑ George Wilson Fabens http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=Fabens&GSiman=1&GSst=21&GRid=118950132&
  33. ↑ Hall, Alexandra [2009]. The New Brahmins. Boston Magazine Archived August 31, 2010, at the Wayback Machine.
  34. ↑ http://www.masshist.org/findingaids/doc.cfm?fa=fa0057
  35. ↑ John J. Waters, The Otis Family in Provincial and Revolutionary Massachusetts (U. of North Carolina Press, 1968)
  36. ↑ https://www.jpmorgan.com/pages/jpmorgan/about/history/month/apr
  37. ↑ Robert Moody, The Saltonstall Papers, 1607–1815: Selected and Edited and with Biographies of Ten Members of the Saltonstall Family in Six Generations. Vol. 1, 1607–1789 vol 2 1791–1815 (1975).
  38. ↑ Malcolm Freiberg, "The Winthrops and Their Papers", Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, 1968, Vol. 80, pp 55–70
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