FDR - Jean Edward Smith [11]
To redesign Algonac, Warren engaged Andrew Jackson Downing, the premier landscape architect in America, who was then laying out the grounds of the White House, the Capitol, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Downing converted the house at Newburgh into an Italianate villa of forty rooms and added a large square tower and deep verandas, as well as a compatible gatehouse, several barns, greenhouses, and stables. Plantings were designed to provide bloom or greenery year-round, and at Warren’s direction a broad lawn was constructed, sloping down to the river. The house was furnished with equal attention to detail, emphasizing Warren’s years in China. To tend the estate required a permanent staff of ten, with temporary help hired as needed.28
The Delanos prospered at Algonac, and Warren’s business affairs flourished.* That is, until the summer of 1857, when without warning the giant Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, the second largest bank east of the Mississippi, abruptly closed its doors. Panic struck the nation’s financial community. Years of wild speculation in railroads, coal mines, and real estate had vastly inflated stock prices. The market dropped 50 percent overnight. Banks suspended specie payment, thousands of businesses closed, commodity prices plummeted. Federal troops were called out to protect government buildings. In San Francisco, the fledgling banker William Tecumseh Sherman went under. In Missouri, Ulysses S. Grant was driven off his farm. Across America prosperity turned sour. Tens of thousands of people lost everything they had.
Warren Delano was caught in the downdraft. He was always an aggressive investor, and the collapse in stock prices found him dangerously overextended. For two years he fought to remain solvent as one after another of his investments failed. He cut back spending, sold the townhouse on Colonnade Row, and even tried to sell Algonac. All to no avail. In January 1860, at the age of fifty, Warren Delano faced bankruptcy.
“Warren has various projects, mostly impractical,” wrote his brother Ned. “One is to go to China to do business five years and return with a fortune.”29 Which is precisely what he did. Leaving his family at Algonac, Warren sailed for Hong Kong, where he organized another trading empire. This time it was not tea but opium—open, notorious, and far more profitable—a business not strictly legal, but nevertheless one conducted with the acquiescence and cooperation of Chinese authorities.30 Warren supplied medicinal opium to the War Department to alleviate the suffering of Union wounded, but that was scarcely his only market. “I do not pretend to justify the prosecution of the opium trade in a moral or philanthropic point of view,” he wrote his brothers from China. “But as a merchant I insist that it has been a fair, honorable and legitimate trade; and to say the worst of it, liable to no further or weightier objections than is the importation of wines, Brandies, and spirits into the UStates, England & c.”31
By 1862 Warren’s fortunes had improved to such an extent that he brought his family to join him. “I suppose it was altogether terrifying to my mother to give up her beautiful home and its peaceful security,” Sara observed, but if so, her mother said nothing about it.32 Warren leased Algonac to Abbot Low, the patriarch of another great mercantile family, and from Low chartered the Surprise, one of the sleekest, fastest clippers on the China run, to transport his family. For seven-year-old Sara it was the journey of a lifetime: four months at sea on a 183-foot square rigger with only her family and the crew. It was more like a yacht than a ship, Sara recalled. Seventy-five years later, she would entertain her great-grandchildren at Springwood by singing sea chanteys she learned from the sailors.33
Down the river hauled a Yankee clipper,
And it’s blow, my bully boys, blow!
She’s a Yankee mate and a Yankee skipper,
And it’s blow, my bully boys, blow!
For FDR, his mother’s trip to China was another family legend he could