Financier merchant philanthropist
John Cleve Green was born on April 4, 1800 in Maidenhead (now Lawrenceville), New Jersey, the son of Caleb Smith and Elizabeth (Van Cleve) Green. He was descended from William Green who came from England and settled near Trenton about 1700, and from Jonathan Dickinson, first president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton).
John was one of the first class to enter what became the Lawrenceville School, then, after studied in Brooklyn.
John entered the employ of N. L. & G. Griswold, prominent New York merchants with extensive foreign trade. Compromising between the New England quarterdeck and the New York counting-house systems of training young merchants, he spent some ten years at sea as supercargo of Griswold ships, frequently visiting South America and China.
In 1833, while in Canton as agent for the Griswolds, he accepted an invitation to join the firm of Russell & Company, the most powerful American house in the China trade. A year later he was head of the firm. When the end of the East India Company’s monopoly added the lucrative opium trade to the previous tea and textile business, he grew rich along with the company. It was here that he commenced his long intimacy with John M. and Robert B. Forbes.
In 1839 he retired three months after Commissioner Lin at Canton launched his attack on the opium trade. R. B. Forbes, who succeeded him as head of the company, has implied that Green, then head of the chamber of commerce at Canton, signed the agreement to abstain from the opium trade all the more readily since he was giving up his active connection with the firm. In any case he returned to New York with an ample fortune, which he continued to increase by combined shrewdness and caution. He continued for some time as consignee of Chinese tea cargoes and also became a director of the Bank of Commerce and president of the Bleecker Street Savings Bank.
The most important source of the money which he accumulated, however, was investment in railroads. In 1846 he was the heaviest financial backer of his old Canton partner, J. M. Forbes, who purchased and became president of the Michigan Central Railroad. He also supported Forbes in gaining control of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy system, continuing as a director in that road and the New Jersey Central until his death. The dividends from these investments frequently reached fifteen per cent, and Green was probably worth three millions by 1870.
He made very generous gifts to philanthropic and educational institutions while he still lived. He was one of the founders of the Home for Ruptured and Crippled, served long as governor of the New York Hospital, and contributed heavily to the Deaf and Dumb Asylum. He is particularly remembered, however, for his very liberal gifts to three educational institutions near his old home. In response to a request made by the treasurer of Princeton, he gave the college about a half-million dollars, its largest benefaction up to that time, which saved it from a critical financial situation; secured the present northeast corner of the campus; and financed the construction of three buildings which were rated as the finest in their day.
He also endowed three chairs in science and financed a school of civil engineering, augmenting these donations by the terms of his will. For some twenty-five years he was a trustee of the Princeton Theological Seminary, where he endowed a chair in church history, built a professor’s house, and made further gifts. The Lawrenceville School, which he had attended as a boy, received even more from him and later from his estate, and was thus enabled to inaugurate the house system and to attract a faculty which gave it a high place among American preparatory schools.
He died in New York City and was buried in the Ewing Cemetery near Trenton.
He was a devoted Presbyterian.
Portraits of him in the trustees’ room at Princeton and at the Lawrenceville School show a tall, erect figure with clean-cut features characterized by high cheek-bones and an aquiline nose.
Quotes from others about the person
R. B. Forbes called him a man of “great experience and uncompromising ability, ” while J. M. Forbes more than once referred to him as cautious and “tender hearted. ”
He married Sarah, the daughter of George Griswold, junior partner of the firm. His three children died young.
