Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,871

This is the grave of Amos Lawrence.

Born in 1786 in Groton, Massachusetts, Lawrence was of an OK but ultimately middling background. He went to some good schools, but but was apprenticed out as a clerk at the age of 13. He finished that apprenticeship in 1807 and went to Boston with $20 in his pocket, which was not nothing at that time, but still, was hardly the sign of someone who was going to get rich. But he was a good financial guy. His employer had gone bankrupt and Lawrence went to Boston to settle their accounts. He was able to work that out to everyone’s satisfaction. He stayed in the city and started a dry goods establishment. There were no shortages of this kind of business in early 19th century Boston, but Lawrence’s became among the most successful in the country, in part because he was able to survive the financial crises of the 1810s when many did not. He moved into selling woolens and cotton goods, being a key middleman in the slave-grown cotton to finished textile process.

By the 1820s, A.A. Lawrence & Co was the key financier of the growing cotton mill production in New England. It could fund mills and it could save mills from bankruptcy. The experimental town of Lowell, Massachusetts had a financial crisis in 1830 and Lawrence swooped in to back up those mills. Lawrence hired his brothers to help him run the operation and this family business became an institution in New England. Saving Lowell in 1830 made sense because he had been one of the people to found the town anyway. After all, for a reformer type capitalist such as Lawernce, being able to produce wealth without the horrible conditions of British textile cities such as Manchester and Birmingham was really important. It didn’t work out in the end–the endless desire of capital to eat workers alive in order to increase profits eventually won out, but that was a two decade experiment to see if we could employ young girls for a mere 14 hours a day and also provide them education and encourage them to write and have them attend lectures and have them overseen by responsible women in boarding houses. Turns out that in the end, the conditions still sucked, it broke the health of many of the young women, and they wanted shorter hours and better conditions. Can’t have that, not when we can just hire the Irish and who cares what happens to those semi-humans anyway. Also, the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts is named for Amos Lawrence, who of course funded a lot of the mills that gave it a reason to exist.

Lawrence basically personified Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic, as historians who have discussed him have pointed out. He had a great fear for much of his life that his sons would be lazy slackers who would live off dad’s wealth and he had no intention of raising that kind of worthless kid. So he spent those later years as well writing letters to his sons about the value of hard work and the need to do it themselves. His maxim was “Business before Friends.” He was one of these guys who liked to preach his ideas to everyone else in ways that sound tremendously annoying. He also prided himself on being early to the office and then hectoring everyone who arrived after he did. Also, he was very big on publicly discussing his observation of the Sabbath. I guess it worked in terms of the finances, but this kind of capitalist who thinks they are succeeding because of their personal behavior is in some ways the worst kind because they are so damned sanctiminous.

Let me digress slightly here on this subject. What is so morally correct about starting a day early? There’s nothing morally correct about it at all. It’s a aesthetic choice. That’s fine if you are an early bird. If you are a night owl who happens to be amazing at getting work done at 11 PM, that’s also fine! I suppose there is something to be said for being at your best as a capitalist or corporate functionary during business hours. But in the age of globalization, what does business hours even mean? Be a night owl, own the Asian market or something. Interestingly, since I scaled back my drinking by 80+% 6 months ago, I have turned into something of a morning person, which is weird and is now enforced by my morning oriented cat, but I do not feel like I am more morally correct for doing so, nor am I particularly getting more work done. I’m just getting it done at a different time. Yay me. But it’s a choice, it’s not a moral or financial prescription.

In 1831, Lawerence semi-retired. It is said his health failed, but I don’t really know what that means when he would live another twenty plus years. His brother took over active operations and it seems Lawrence decided to live the life of a rich guy for the rest of his time. In 1842, he decided he was rich enough. He pledged that he would keep his current value stable and give away the rest of his money over that amount for the rest of his life. Williams College became a big beneficiary of Lawrence in these years. In fact, he became a big funder of good colleges around the country, including Kenyon and Wabash, as well as theological seminaries. He also gave the bulk of the money for the Bunker Hill Monument to commemorate that early battle of the American Revolution. His father had fought in the battle, so it meant a lot to him.

Despite giving away a lot of money, upon his death in 1852, Lawerence was worth $14 million in 1852 dollars, which is about $600 million in real dollars today. So let’s just say he could afford all of this. His son Amos was the founder of Lawrence, Kansas and an important rich abolitionist, funding John Brown’s defense after Harpers’ Ferry.

Lawrence was 66 years old upon his death.

Amos Lawrence is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series to visit other textile capitalists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. John Paul Stevens, who founded the company that many decades after his death was the target of the famed “Norma Rae” strike, is in Scotch Plains, New Jersey. Red Lanier, a super rich textile heir who led some companies in the late twentieth century, is in Columbia, South Carolina. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.