Background
John Murray Forbes was born in Bordeaux, France, the son of Ralph Bennet and Margaret Perkins Forbes of Boston, Massachusetts, and grandson of Rev. John Forbes, rector at St. Augustine in East Florida.
John Murray Forbes was born in Bordeaux, France, the son of Ralph Bennet and Margaret Perkins Forbes of Boston, Massachusetts, and grandson of Rev. John Forbes, rector at St. Augustine in East Florida.
At the age of fifteen he entered the counting-house of his uncles in Boston, and presently went to Canton, China, to represent them. During seven years in the Orient he gave evidence of unusual business abilities ; and when he returned to America at the age of twenty-four, he had accumulated a fortune sufficient to enable him to take a position of importance in the commercial world.
During the next nine years his investments on land and sea prospered, and in 1846 he turned his attention to railroad building and management in the West. A group of capitalists, of whom he was the prime mover, purchased the unfinished Michigan Central Railroad from the State for $2, 000, 000, carried it to Lake Michigan, and then to Chicago, at the same time supplying funds for the connecting link between Detroit and Buffalo through Ontario.
He next financed and put in operation the roads from Chicago to the Mississippi River and across Iowa, which formed the nucleus of what later became the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy system, and he was also responsible for the building of the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad in Missouri.
During the period of the Civil War and the years immediately following, his attention was given chiefly to public affairs; but in consequence of the panic of 1873 and of the necessity for effecting a change in the management of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, he became again the leading spirit in the direction of its affairs, occupying the position of president for two or three years, ending in 1881.
He brought to the problems of railroad-building energy, courage, sound business judgment, integrity, and a broad view of the relation of the railroads to the public interest. Through the force of his personality the roads in which he was interested acquired a character and stability which distinguished them sharply from most of the railroads of that day.
His important public service began at the outset of the Civil War, when he became the most active helper of Governor John A. Andrew in putting the State of Massachusetts on a war footing. Of his many activities perhaps the most distinctive was the help which he rendered in the organization of its negro regiments. At Washington his knowledge of maritime affairs made him particularly helpful to the Navy Department.
In 1863 he was sent unofficially to England to purchase, if possible, the ships known as the Laird rams, which were then being built for the Confederacy; and later he himself, with a few others, built a cruiser, larger than the Confederate Alabama, which he intended to sell to the government at cost.
After the war he was for some years a member of the national executive committee of the Republican party; but in 1884, as a protest against the nomination of James G. Blaine, he left the party and voted for Cleveland.
His intense desire that the war should be prosecuted vigorously made him chafe at Lincoln’s “slowness”; and he often made use of friends who had Lincoln’s ear to put before him policies, such as the arming of the blacks, which he believed essential to Northern success. He was known to be disinterested, and his influence and accomplishment were great in proportion; furthermore, he consistently maintained the policy of keeping himself in the background and letting the credit for his actions go to others.
His summer home, from 1857, was the island of Naushon at the entrance of Buzzard’s Bay, and he made the place memorable by the simple yet generous hospitality that he exercised and the distinguished men and women who were his guests.
It is Forbes’s quality as host that is the theme of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s well-known characterization of him in Letters and Social Aims (Riverside Edition, p. 101).
“Never was such force, good meaning, good sense, good action, combined with such domestic lovely behavior, such modesty and persistent preference for others. Wherever he moved he was the benefactor. It is of course that he should ride well, shoot well, sail well, keep house well, administer affairs well; but he was the best talker, also, in the company. . Yet I said to myself, How little this man suspects, with his sympathy for men and his respect for lettered and scientific people, that he is not likely, in any company, to meet a man superior to himself. And I think this is a good country that can bear such a creature as he is. ”
On February 8, 1834, Forbes was married to Sarah Hathaway of New Bedford. Of their six children the oldest son, William Hathaway, became president of the Bell Telephone Company.