The charter of the Harvard Corporation also gave these board members the authority to choose successors to replace members of the board who died or resigned, so that their long-practiced habit of laundering drug money through the university system survives until the present day. Interestingly, it was some of these same families who were also involved in setting up an endowment at Yale College. Elihu Yale, who was born near Boston, educated in London, and served with the British East India Company, eventually became governor of Fort Saint George, Madras, in 1687. He amassed a great fortune from the trade and returned from India to England in 1699. Yale became known as quite a philanthropist; upon receiving a request for a donation from the Collegiate School in Connecticut, he sent only a gift of books, but after receiving subsequent bequests from him to the college, Cotton Mather suggested the school be named Yale College, in 1718. In 1823, Samuel Russell established Russell & Company for the purpose of acquiring opium in Turkey and selling it to China. Forced out of the lucrative African slave trade by U.S. law and Caribbean slave revolts, leaders of the Cabot, Lowell, Higginson, Forbes, Cushing and Sturgis families had married Perkins siblings and children. The Perkins opium syndicate made the fortune and established the power of these families. By the 1830s, the Russells had bought out the Perkins syndicate and made Connecticut the primary center of the U.S. opium business. Massachusetts families (Coolidge, Sturgis, Forbes and Delano) joined Connecticut (Alsop) and New York (Low) smuggler-millionaires under the Russell auspices. The Russell family was the largest slave-holders (47) in Green Turtle Bay in the Caribbean The Lowe family was the second largest.
Posted on: Sun, 03 Nov 2013 16:52:43 +0000
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