Background
Yeatman was born on August 27, 1818 in Wartrace, Tennessee, second among six children of Thomas Yeatman, a prosperous banker and manufacturer of iron materials, and Jane Patton (Erwin), of Buncombe County, North Carolina.
banker philanthropist Civic leader
Yeatman was born on August 27, 1818 in Wartrace, Tennessee, second among six children of Thomas Yeatman, a prosperous banker and manufacturer of iron materials, and Jane Patton (Erwin), of Buncombe County, North Carolina.
Educated privately and at the New Haven Commercial School, Yeatman enjoyed a sojourn abroad and in 1842, after an apprenticeship in his father's extensive business at Cumberland, Tennessee, became its representative in St. Louis, Missouri.
In St. Louis, Yeatman soon won a leading place among businessmen. In 1847 he joined in erecting "Yeatman's row, " an imposing housing project for the times, and in 1850 was one of the founders of the Merchants' Bank. Ten years later he gave up a flourishing commission business to become president of this institution, reorganized as the Merchants' National Bank; thereafter for thirty-five years he was largely responsible for the important place it occupied in the Mississippi Valley's financial life.
In 1850 he asked Congress for a right of way through Missouri for the Missouri Pacific Railroad, of which he was an incorporator. He was the first president of the St. Louis Mercantile Library Association (1846), first head of the board of trustees of the St. Louis Asylum for the Blind, and a generous benefactor of Washington University. In 1889 he was named one of the original trustees of the Missouri Botanical Garden in the will of Henry Shaw. He was also secretary and trustee of the St. Louis Medical College.
Yeatman's most important work was performed as president of the Western Sanitary Commission, created by order of Major-General John C. Fremont at St. Louis, September 5, 1861. Cooperating with Dorothea L. Dix, then in St. Louis, Yeatman gave virtually the whole of his time to organizing hospitals, recruiting nurses, improving prison conditions, establishing soldiers' and orphans' homes and schools for refugee children, and distributing sanitary supplies. Under his direction what were probably the first railroad hospital cars were outfitted on the Pacific Railroad and early in 1862 the commission placed on the Mississippi a hospital boat, the first of many such craft.
Yeatman spent much time in the field and the soldiers knew him affectionately as "Old Sanitary". In 1863 he made a trip along the lower Mississippi inspecting the plight of freedmen; President Lincoln asked him to head the Freedmen's Bureau when it organized, but Yeatman declined. Unquestionably Yeatman's genius for organization, tireless energy, and integrity were leading factors in the success of this pioneering effort at mitigating the misery of war. His great brick residence, "Belmont, " was a center of St. Louis' gay and leisurely ante-bellum society. Two of his five children were living when he died of the infirmities of age in his eighty-third year in a St. Louis hospital. He was buried in Bellefontaine Cemetery. In his last years his charitable gifts were so numerous that he left little besides his extensive library. His city mourned him as its first citizen.
Yeatman was a banker and philanthropist, known as the first president of the St. Louis Mercantile Library Association and benefactor of many organizations. He was president of the Western Sanitary Commission, which established hospital steamers, founded soldiers' homes, & took steps to provide relief for freedmen & former slaves. He also served as the first president of Bellefontaine Cemetery.
More than six feet tall, courtly and genial, Yeatman had an impressive presence.
Quotes from others about the person
Winston Churchill, who had Yeatman "very definitely in mind" when he drew the character of Calvin Brinsmade for The Crisis (1901), regarded him as "the flower of the American tradition. "
Yeatman was married, September 11, 1838, to Angelica Charlotte Thompson of Alexandria, Virginia, great-granddaughter of Charles Willson Peale; she died May 7, 1849, and on May 5, 1851, he married Cynthia Ann Pope of Kaskaskia, Illinois, daughter of Nathaniel Pope. His second wife died July 3, 1854.
