THE

MERCHANTS' MAGAZINE

AND

COMMERCIAL REVIEW.

MARCH, 1865.

HON. WILLIAM STURGIS,

OF BOSTON.

Ir is an instructive fact that the men who of late years have been chiefly distinguished, in New England, for elevation of character, and who have acquired the largest fortunes and exerted the greatest influence upon commercial and manufacturing interests, were men of no early advantages; with no means of providing their daily bread but their own industry; no better education than our public schools afforded; and no patrons but such as faithful service in humble stations had acquired for them. SAMUEL APPLETON, NATHAN APPLETON, AMOS LAWRENCE, ABBOTT LAWRENCE, and WILLIAM APPLETON, are names familiar among us as household words, in their suggestion of ability, wealth, influence, and intellectual and moral pre-eminence. And to the same list may be added the names of FRANCIS C. LOWELL and PATRICK T. JACKSON, who, under some few circumstances usually esteemed more advantageous, rose, independently of them, to be the architects of their own fortunes, and the founders of the vast manufacturing interests of the Eastern States.

The energy, self-devotion, personal independence, moral purity, and earnestness, ever exhibited by these eminently and truly successful men, find a new and wonderful illustration in the subject of this Memoir; who, entering life upon a little farm on the sands of Cape Cod, began his career of self-reliance when sixteen years old, as a sailor-boy before the mast, on wages of seven dollars a month, and has recently closed his days on earth at the ripe age of eighty-one years,-possessed of a most ample estate, standing with his family in the foremost rank of American society, and distinguished for a highly cultivated intellect, and for remarkably extensive knowledge, that embraced not only the commerce of the globe, but a wide field of historical and literary information. Nor was he less con