Background
William Patterson was born on November 1, 1752 in Fanad, County Donegal, Ireland. He was of Scotch-Irish farmer parents, William and Elizabeth (Peoples) Patterson.
William Patterson was born on November 1, 1752 in Fanad, County Donegal, Ireland. He was of Scotch-Irish farmer parents, William and Elizabeth (Peoples) Patterson.
At the age of fourteen (1766) William Patterson was sent to Philadelphia to enter the counting-house of Samuel Jackson, an Irish shipping merchant.
In 1775, foreseeing an excellent sale for munitions in the rebellious colonies, William Patterson embarked all of his property in two vessels which went to France for these supplies, Patterson himself sailing in one of them. A single vessel returned, and, according to tradition, when it reached Philadelphia, the army of Washington, then before Boston, had not powder enough to fire one salute. On his way home Patterson tarried two years in the Dutch and French West Indies, which were the principal places of purchase and sale for the colonies. He was eighteen months at St. Eustatius, but finding the governor, Johannes de Graaff, unable to protect American interests, he moved to Martinique. He accumulated a fortune of more than $60, 000, half of which he lost by British captures in a month; the remainder he brought to Baltimore (July 1778) in goods and gold. He prospered from his first settlement in that city. It was his invariable rule to put half of his fortune into real estate, for he regarded "commerce in the shipping line as a hazardous and desperate game of chance". If he lost in his shipping ventures his family would thus have something to fall back upon, and heirs, furthermore, were not so apt to part with land as with securities.
William Patterson was typical of the Baltimore merchant princes who increasingly in the next fifty years, as the business of American ports flourished, made the clipper schooner and brig, and later the clipper ship, famous around the world. He was one of the Baltimore merchants who supplied Lafayette with 10, 000 guineas which were invested in supplies for the Yorktown campaign, and himself, as a member of the 16t Baltimore Cavalry, went to the peninsula. He was the first president of the Bank of Maryland, established in 1790. In 1799 he was active in raising money to complete the fortification of Whetstone Point (Fort McHenry), gathered supplies for the defense of the place in 1814, and welcomed Lafayette there on his visit in 1824.
Patterson was one of the organizers of the Merchants' Exchange in Baltimore in 1815, gave two acres of land to the city for a park in 1827, and was one of the incorporators and first directors of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in the same year. He took delight in riding on the first cars of the railroad, and was given the honor of being the first to cross the Patapsco viaduct, which was named for him. In 1828 he was one of the incorporators of the Canton Company, which has for a century been important in the commercial and industrial life of the city. One of his last public acts was to serve as vice-president of a meeting of Baltimore citizens which condemned the nullification ordinance of South Carolina in 1832. He died on July 7, 1835.
William Patterson's wife, who died in 1814, was Dorcas Spear, a sister of the wife of Gen. Samuel Smith. They had thirteen children, several of whom died in infancy. On Christmas Eve, 1803, his daughter Elizabeth ("Betsey"), eighteen years of age, was married to the nineteen-year-old Jerome Bonaparte, young brother of the First Consul of France. Her parents gave consent most reluctantly, and were prepared for the adamant opposition of Napoleon, which resulted in Betsey's abandonment by her husband at Lisbon in 1805, the annulment of the marriage by the French Senate, and a divorce by Maryland statute in 1812.