Rowland Gibson Hazard

Inducted: 2003
Born: 10/09/1801
Died: 06/24/1888

Rowland Gibson Hazard was born in South Kingstown, Rhode Island, on October 9, 1801, the fourth of nine children of Rowland Hazard and Mary Peace of Charleston, South Carolina, where his father had established trading contacts. In 1819, with his brother Isaac, Rowland assumed control of his father’s small woolen mill in Peace Dale, a South Kingstown village his father had named for his mother’s family. He had primary responsibility for marketing products to southern plantation owners in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi, and he wintered in New Orleans from about 1833 to 1842. His experience in the South and his Quaker faith led him to develop a hatred for slavery and to work on behalf of kidnapped free blacks in Louisiana. He secured the liberation of several unfortunate captives, a feat he regarded as the greatest of his many accomplishments.

The family’s woolen mill partnership, incorporated as the Peace Dale Manufacturing Company in 1848, became one of the largest businesses in the southern part of the state. Hazard eventually expanded his operations to another mill in neighboring Charlestown and gave its village the name Carolina, in honor of his wife.

Hazard also authored eleven books and a wide variety of articles, mostly on philosophical subjects, which gained him an intimate intellectual relationship with the Reverend William Ellery Channing. His 1841 essay, “Causes of Decline of Political Morality,” influenced the ban on lotteries in Rhode Island’s 1843 constitution. In 1849, he became a leading advocate of the regulation of railroad trusts, and his treatise on “The Relations of Railroad Corporation to the Public” led to a series of tumultuous state legislative hearings. He served intermittently in the state legislature—as a South Kingstown representative in 1851–52, 1854–55, and 1880–81 and as a senator in 1866–67. Hazard was a Rhode Island delegate to the founding conventions of the Republican Party at Pittsburgh and Philadelphia in 1856, drafted the economic planks for the national Republican campaign platforms in 1860 and 1868 and played an important role in planning the Union economy during the Civil War.

Hazard did much to sustain our national credit at home and abroad, especially when the Union cause looked bleak. His newspaper articles on public finance were collected and published in pamphlet form, mainly by bankers in New York for foreign readers. These essays induced European bankers to overcome their skepticism about the war’s outcome and hold or increase their investments in United States war bonds. In this endeavor, Hazard worked in concert with President Lincoln and Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, the father of Kate Chase Sprague, who was the wife of William Sprague III, Rhode Island’s Civil War governor.

In 1866, Hazard retired from the textile business and invested heavily in the Union Pacific Railroad, with the understanding that his involvement would be purely financial and would not interfere with his retirement. After the company fell into financial disarray and became embroiled in the Credit Mobilier scandal, Hazard spent much of his final years setting its affairs straight. He was one of the few investors to emerge from that railroad construction fiasco with his reputation unscathed. 

As a philanthropist and humanitarian, Hazard was a prominent supporter of Butler Hospital in Providence and a trustee and fellow of Brown University, where he endowed a chair of physics with a $40,000 gift. To his native South Kingstown, particularly his home village of Peace Dale, Hazard donated money for schools, churches, the town hall, the library and other civic improvements. He also provided steady financial support to Rhode Island’s abolition, temperance, free religion and women’s suffrage movements, and he frequently interacted with female reformers such as Paulina Wright Davis and Elizabeth Buffum Chace to advance these causes.

Rowland Gibson Hazard was significant on the national and international scene for both his financial activities and his writings on philosophical subjects. He corresponded often with its influential British economist John Stuart Mill, who expressed admiration for Hazard’s theoretical treatises. In a letter to Hazard, Mill wrote: “I wish you had nothing to do but philosophize; for though I do not often agree with you, I see in everything you write a well-marked natural capacity for philosophy.”

In 1828, Hazard married Caroline Newbold (1807–1868) of Bloomsdale, Pennsylvania. They had two sons who continued the operation of the South County woolen mills and their father’s other holdings after Rowland’s retirement from the business. The youngest son was John Newbold Hazard (1836–1900); the eldest, Rowland Hazard II (1829–1898), came to equal his remarkable father as a philanthropist, industrialist, and businessman (including his own acquisition of large mining interests in Missouri). His daughter, Caroline Hazard, became a noted author and educator and the benefactor and longtime president of Wellesley College. Rowland II is so designated not to distinguish him from his versatile father, who had the middle name “Gibson,” but in deference to his grandfather, who pioneered woolen manufacturing in South Kingstown.

After a long life embracing such diverse fields as business, economics, mathematics, politics, philosophy, philanthropy, and a variety of reform causes, Rowland Gibson Hazard died peacefully at Peace Dale on June 24, 1888, in his eighty-seventh year. Few Rhode Islanders, if any, matched him in the range of his talents and interests. Rowland G. Hazard was inducted into The Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame in 2003

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