James Rudolph Partridge was born in 1823 in Baltimore, Baltimore County, Maryland, United States. He was the son of the well-to-do merchant Eaton R. Partridge and of Susan (Crook) Partridge, his wife, who had come from Cecil County, Maryland, to Baltimore, where James Rudolph was born.
James Rudolph Partridge received the degree of Bachelor of Arts from Harvard in 1841 and that of Bachelor of Law from the Harvard Law School in 1843.
In Baltimore, which remained his home throughout his life, James Rudolph Partridge entered active politics in 1856, when he was elected to the legislature on the American ticket. Governor Thomas H Hicks, in 1858, made Partridge his secretary of state and in 1861, according to Henry Winter Davis, Secretary Partridge kept Governor Hicks loyal to the Union (undated letter to Lincoln, Department of State). He remained a strong Union man, and his name is to be found upon Governor Bradford's personal list of the prominent Union men of Baltimore in 1861. Indeed, if his plan for distributing arms from the arsenals and forts within Maryland to loyal men for use against secessionist trouble makers is any criterion, he ranked with the extremists within the Republican Party. After declining appointment as consul at Shanghai in 1861, Partridge was appointed in September 1862 commissioner to the Exhibition of the Industries of All Nations to be held in London the next year.
Shortly afterwards, February 10, 1862, he received appointment as minister resident to Honduras. In spite of his failure to bring Honduras to ratify a treaty negotiated in 1860 and to prevent the outbreak of war between Salvador and Guatemala, his work in Honduras seems to have won the approval of Secretary Seward. He was commissioned minister resident to Salvador in April 1863, where he served until ill health caused his resignation in March 1866. Meanwhile, the Salvadorean government had been overthrown and a new régime recognized in due course by the United States. After an interval of three years he was appointed April 21, 1869, minister, not to the Argentine as he had wished, but to Venezuela. Here he was chiefly concerned with persuading Venezuela to meet the payments which had been awarded by a mixed claims commission. His handling of the claims question received the commendation of Secretary Hamilton Fish.
After the death of one of his daughters James Rudolph Partridge returned to Baltimore in the fall of 1870. Less than a year later, May 23, 1871, he was appointed minister at Rio de Janeiro, then known as Petropolis. Here he was called upon in his official capacity to act with the Italian minister as arbitrator of the claims of Lord Dundonald against the government of Brazil. The arbitrators' award (1873) of £38, 675 to the British claimant was apparently more satisfactory to Brazil than to the British. Partridge returned to the United States in the summer of 1877. His last diplomatic mission was to Peru (appointed April 12, 1882), which had recently faced both civil and foreign war. He was instructed to cooperate with Cornelius A. Logan, minister to Chile, in bringing about a peace between Peru and Chile. Partridge seems to have exceeded his instructions in this matter and to have returned to the United States under a cloud. Ill health provided the ostensible reason for his resignation in 1883. The fact that he lost his wife and children perhaps caused his suicide at Alicante, Spain, early on February 24, 1884.
James Rudolph Partridge was a capable lawyer, a man of culture and of some literary ability, and the master of four foreign languages.
On October 21, 1847 James Rudolph Partridge married Mary, daughter of Jacob Baltzell. She died in 1854, and he lost both his children.
