Peter Faneuil

Merchant, born in New Rochelle, New York, USA. Of Huguenot descent, he went to Boston and became the favourite of his uncle Andrew, from whom he inherited a large fortune (1738). He offered to donate a public marketplace to Boston. The hesitant townspeople approved the gift by a vote of 367 in favour, 360 opposed (1740). He died as the building was being completed.

Peter Faneuil (June 20, 1700 – March 3, 1743) was a wealthy American colonial merchant and philanthropist who donated Faneuil Hall to Boston.

The eldest child of one of three Huguenot brothers who fled France with considerable wealth after the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Peter Faneuil was born in New Rochelle, New York to Benjamin Faneuil and Anne Bureau. Having emigrated to America about a decade earlier and become freemen of Massachusetts Bay in 1691, Peter's father, Benjamin, and his uncle, Andrew, had subsequently early settlers of New Rochelle.

Little is known of Peter's boyhood. His father, prominent and fairly well-to-do, died in 1719 when Peter was 18, and soon Peter, his brother, Benjamin Jr., and his sister Mary moved to Boston. Their widowed, childless uncle Andrew had become one of New England's wealthiest men through shrewd trading and Boston real estate investments.

Peter Faneuil's first claim to fame occurred in 1728 when he helped his brother-in-law Henry Phillips escape to France after he killed Benjamin Woodbridge in the first duel ever to take place in Boston. He also entered Boston's commission and shipping business and soon proved a competent trader, assisting his uncle in running a lucrative mercantile establishment that traded with Antigua, Barbados, Spain, the Canary Islands, and England, only a few of the places from which Faneuil's correspondence survives. Prominent in the Triangular trade, Peter shipped slaves to the West Indies and brought molasses and sugar to the Colonies.

A childless widower, Andrew Faneuil for some reason threatened to disinherit either of his two nephews if they married. preferred wedlock to a share of the enormous Faneuil fortune, which in addition to ships, shops, and a mansion in Tremont Street included £14,000 in East India Company stock. During his uncle's final illness Peter managed Andrew's business as well as his own. Peter became–despite handsome bequests to his sisters–one of America's wealthiest men, living sumptuously in a Beacon Street mansion. For the five brief years of life that remained to him after his uncle's death in February 1738 he lived up to the name of one of his best ships: The Jolly Batchelor. Writing to his London partners to inform them of his uncle's death, he also requested five pipes of Madeira wine: "As this wine is for the use of my house, I hope you will be careful that I have the best."

Most noteworthy was Faneuil's gift to the town of Boston of Faneuil Hall, which opened in September 1742, scarcely six months before his death. In July 1740 Faneuil had offered the town a large market building. Only by a vote of 367 to 360 did the Boston Town Meeting accept Faneuil's offer. The building took two years to construct and was named for Faneuil after his death. The room above the market stalls became a civic center where so many prerevolutionary meetings were held that Faneuil Hall became known as America's "Cradle of Liberty." Faneuil Hall still stands, although it is dwarfed by the Quincy Market complex built behind it in the nineteenth century.

Although Faneuil enjoyed the good life, his contemporaries and posterity honor him most highly as a public benefactor. John Lovell, who gave his funeral eulogy, said that Faneuil "fed the hungry and he cloathed the naked, he comforted the fatherless, and the widows in their affliction." In Faneuil's case such praise was more than routine kindness to the recently deceased. Other wealthy Boston Anglicans apparently lacked his fervor, for the project languished for five years after his death following his gift of £200 sterling.

Faneuil died in Boston of dropsy in 1743. The unmarried Faneuil left his fortune, including five black slaves and 195 dozen bottles of wine, to his sister Mary and brother Benjamin Jr. Sargent said of Peter Faneuil that he "lived as magnificently as a nobleman, as hospitably as a bishop, and as charitably as an apostle."