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1864
Businessman Financier politician
George Trenholm was born on February 25, 1807, in Charleston, South Carolina, United States. He was the son of William and Elizabeth Irene De Griffin Trenholm. His father was a merchant, and his mother was the daughter of the Comte de Greffin, a French landowner on the island of San Domingue (now Haiti).
George's father died young, and he left school in the early 1820s to join the firm of John Fraser and Company, shippers of sea-island cotton.
Starting with John Fraser & Company, extensive shippers of sea-island cotton, George Alfred Trenholm eventually was made a partner in this firm, and in 1853 became senior partner and principal owner. His enterprises prospered and in time he was regarded as one of the richest men in the South, his holdings consisting of steamships, hotels, cotton presses, wharves, plantations, and slaves. He served as a director of the Bank of Charleston; as a director of the South Carolina Railroad, and was an early advocate of direct rail communication between Charleston and the Northwest. Trenholm's wealth, the foreign connections of his firm, and his financial sagacity enabled him to render aid to the Confederate cause which, since it was not spectacular and often of a secret nature, has been little known and inadequately appreciated.
He had political experience as the representative of St. Philip's and St. Michael's (Charleston) parishes in the General Assembly of the state from 1852 through 1856. When the war came, he put his business organization and his political and financial wisdom at the disposal of the Confederacy. As a member of the state marine battery commission he aided in the construction of the ironclad gunboat Chicora for the defense of Charleston and personally financed a flotilla of twelve small boats for the offense. The Liverpool branch of Trenholm's firm, Fraser, Trenholm & Company, became the financial agents of the Confederacy, the depository of its funds in Europe, and the headquarters of Capt. James D. Bulloch, Henry Hotze, and other agents for the construction of ships, the purchase of arms, the dissemination of propaganda, the securing of private loans, and the direction of other foreign affairs of the Confederate Government. Large quantities of cotton and such commodities as resin, tobacco, and turpentine were regularly carried in the company's ships to England by running the blockade to Nassau. United States Consul T. H. Dudley estimated that during the first half of 1863 Fraser, Trenholm & Company succeeded in shipping to England cotton valued at $4, 500, 000. Iron, arms and ammunition, salt, saltpeter, and nitric acid were transported back to ports in the South in the more than sixty vessels owned or controlled by this firm. Many of these vessels were constructed in England for the Confederacy in the name of Fraser, Trenholm & Company, and some of them, such as Florida, became successful cruisers. Trenholm had a hand, also, in shaping the fiscal policy of the Southern government.
By appointment of his friend and adviser, Secretary of the Treasury Christopher G. Memminger, he presented the program of the Treasury Department to a conference of bankers at the beginning of the war. He was a member of the House of Representatives of South Carolina during much of the war period. When in June 1864 Memminger relinquished the office of the secretary of the treasury because of the failure of Congress to support his policies, President Davis appointed Trenholm to that position despite the fact that he refused to repudiate his predecessor's policy.
As he entered the Confederate cabinet he was generally hailed as the one man most likely to reconstruct a discredited financial system. He soon won the confidence of the press and the Confederate House of Representatives but not of the Senate. Charges of war profiteering were brought against him, but apparently these had no foundation.
The evacuation of Richmond on April 2, 1865, found Trenholm seriously ill but he fled by train with other civil leaders to Greensboro, N. C. From there he escaped in an ambulance, with the aid of his wife and cabinet colleagues, to Fort Mill, South Carolina, where on April 27, finding himself too ill to proceed, he resigned. Six weeks later he was arrested at Columbia and sent under a Negro guard to jail in Charleston and was subsequently imprisoned at Fort Pulaski. He was paroled the following October, and, one year later, pardoned.
The business interests of Charleston following the close of hostilities depended largely on Trenholm's companies. Through their assistance normal business relations were partially resumed and many enterprises that had been ruined by the war were revived. In 1867, however, bankruptcy engulfed his companies. This failure, regarded by De Bow's Review as "one of the heaviest disasters that could have befallen" Charleston, was attributed to the influence of the United States Government, to heavy purchases of cotton in the winter of 1866 and the subsequent severe decline in price, to the refusal of the Bank of England to give any accommodation, and to the attempt on the part of the firm itself to help a customer recover from cotton losses estimated at $3, 500, 000.
Trenholm was able to reorganize his cotton brokerage business in Charleston the following year under the name of George A. Trenholm & Son, and by 1870 his real-estate holdings were listed at $300, 000. Trenholm returned to public life in 1874 as one of five Democrats elected to the General Assembly of South Carolina. A laudatory contemporaneous comment declared he "exerted a powerful influence even with the colored Republicans" but that the labor and anxiety involved undoubtedly were the cause of his fatal illness in 1876.
George Alfred Trenholm became a well-known banker and businessman and was generally thought to be the wealthiest man in the Confederacy.
Trenholm is remembered as a prominent politician in the Confederate States of America and served as the Secretary of the Treasury during the final year of the American Civil War.
Trenholm was a Democrat who supported secession. During the war, he put his financial wisdom and business at the disposal of the Confederacy. He financed a flotilla of boats, including the ironclad gunboat Chicora, and he ran the blockade to Nassau.
He opposed inflation and speculation and, after it was too late to affect the finances of the war, recommended interest-bearing Confederate bonds. His tax reforms were too little, and he tried unsuccessfully for a foreign loan.
George had on April 3, 1828, married Anna Helen Holmes. One of their thirteen children, Anna Helen, became the wife of James M. Morgan. A son, William Lee Trenholm, was a civil service commissioner, controller of the currency under President Cleveland, and author of "The People's Money" (1893).
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