Temporary record

The Hillard family of New York was among the great mercantile families of the first half of the 19th century. The family enterprise spread to a variety of cities in the 1820's through 1850's, including New York, London, Savannah, and Milwaukee, as sons and sons-in-law established themselves in new territories. As early as the 1830's, the Hillards and the Low family, relatives by marriage, became involved in trade in the Far East. John B. Hillard and his wife, Rebecca Allen Stillman (1783-1870) spent five years in Manila, Macao, and the Cape of Good Hope (1829-1834), establishing the contacts with merchants and shipping agents vital to conducting a successful business. After the violence of the Opium Wars subsided, their young son, Francis A. Hillard, travelled to Canton and Macao to reinitiate contacts, to learn the trade, and to take advantage of the burgeoning profits to be made in China. He remained in Canton from 1844 through 1847, living in the isolated European settlement, seldom able to venture into the Chinese quarter. Hillard managed trade in a variety of small goods, including laquerware from Japan and China.

Scope and contents:

The Hillard Family Papers consists largely of letters written by Francis Hillard to his father and mother while in China and after returning home to Brooklyn in 1848, when his father was employed as a commission merchant in Savannah. The letters are personal, family letters, but, particularly during the early stages of his Chinese sojourn, include remarkable descriptions of the foreign community in China, Chinese xenophobia, and the violent undercurrents seen everywhere around Canton. In one of his best individual letters, Francis described being chased by a mob of anti-foreigner Chinese men after having entered the Chinese quarter to look around. There are some descriptions of commerce and of running a commercial house in China. The collection incldues a letterbook kept by an unnamed member of the Hillard or Low families in Macao, 1842, and a copy of the published diary of Rebecca Stillman Hillard during her residence in the east, 1829-34, and typescripts of letters written by Harriet Low (who later married John Hillard, Jr.) from Macao, 1829-34, and from other members of the Low family in the later 1830s and 40s.

M-2916

China--Commerce
China--Description and travel
Hillard, Francis A.
Hillard, George S., 1808-1879
Stillman, Rebecca Allen, 1783-1870

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