Theophilus Cazenove was born on October 13, 1740 in Amsterdam, Holland. He was the fourth of nine children. His father, Theophile, belonged to a French Protestant family long resident in Switzerland; his mother, Marie, was the daughter of Paul de Raspin-Thoyras, a French Protestant historian and soldier.
For the next twenty-five years he carried on a brokerage and commercial business in Amsterdam. At the end of the period, in 1788, he was co"perating with Claviere, a Swiss banker of Paris, and Pieter Stadnitski, a wealthy financier of Amsterdam, in an unsuccessful attempt to convert the American debt to France into obligations which could be sold to private holders. By the end of 1788 he was bankrupt. Nevertheless he was now selected by Stadnitski and three other Amsterdam firms, who were speculating in American state and federal securities, to go to the United States as their purchasing agent. Arriving in America early in 1790, he established himself in Philadelphia, the seat of the federal government upon whose action largely depended the fate of the state bonds. At first he bought such securities exclusively. Then he invested for his principals in various canal and manufacturing companies, more fruitful in the development of the new country than in profits for the investors. He then persuaded his employers, who had made large profits from their bond operations, to invest in wild lands, a field in which American speculative fever was running high. Having enlarged their combination and laid the foundation for what became in 1796 the Holland Land Company, the Dutch bankers between 1792 and 1794 bought directly or through Cazenove over five million acres of land in western New York and in northern and western Pennsylvania. Cazenove's advice had determined the lands selected, but his judgment left much to be desired. The investment in New York lands, realized only forty years later, proved moderately successful; that in Pennsylvania led to heavy losses. From 1794 to 1799 Cazenove was engaged in perfecting his employers' title to the lands, in providing for their survey, and in opening some of them for sale through sub-agents. Accustomed to good living, he was something of a grand seigneur in Philadelphia where he kept a coach and four, a coachman, postillion, and valet. In spite of the gout, which kept him to a regime of water and vegetables, he was entertained much in the political circles of the federal capital. Hospitable and generous, he shared his own well-filled table not alone with the natives whose official positions might supply information valuable to the foreign investor. Timid he certainly was not in his American business dealings, but there is no doubt of his extreme carelessness. He kept almost no accounts and he carried his insouciance to the point of confusing his employers' money with his own. Early in 1799 he returned to Europe. Three years later he left the employ of the Dutch bankers and spent most of his remaining years in Paris, where renewed relations with Talleyrand, now in charge of French foreign affairs, helped him to eke out a precarious existence.
The younger Theophile by his marriage in 1763 to Margaretha Helena van Jever became connected with a prominent trading family of Amsterdam.
