The Dukes of Durham, 1865-1929

by Robert F. Durden

Overview

This is the history of Washington Duke and two of his sons, Benjamin Newton Duke and James Buchanan Duke. Although numerous other members of the family play their parts in the story it focuses primarily on the three men who were at the center of the economic and philanthropic activities which made the Dukes of Durham one of America's famous families. The Dukes operated closely and constantly as a family, and only in that context is their full story told.

In the years after the Civil War, Washington Duke proved to be an unusually able industrialist and a conscientious, Methodist philanthropist. He was, in fact, a major Southern pioneer in both industry and philanthropy. His two sons by a second marriage were remarkably devoted to each other as well as to their father. Both sons also reflected traits of thier father. While Benjamin N. Duke and James B. Duke had life-long involvement with the business world-first in tobacco, then textiles, and finally electric power-as well as with philanthropy, they actually developed complementary specializations. Benjamin N. Duke, the older of the two, served as the family's primary agent for philanthropy from his early manhood in the late 1800's until he gradually became semi-invalid after 1915. James B. Duke, on the other hand, early displayed a marked talent, even a genius, for business. Toward the end of his life, with the establishment of The Duke Endowment late in 1924, he emerged as one of the nation's major philanthropists, ranking alongside Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. A central theme of this book is, however, that the Endowment, despite its magnitude and far-reaching scope, was essentially the institutionalization and culmination of a pattern of family philanthropy that emerged in the 1890's and for which the older brother, Benjamin N. Duke, had always been the primary agent. Thus, the story of James B. Duke, who was and has remained much the more well-known of the two brothers, cannot properly be told out of the family context from which he emerged and in which occurred most of the important phases of his life.

Washington Duke, as a small, land-owning yeoman farmer, was typical of the great majority class not only in antebellum North Carolina but in the South as a whole. Only after the war, when he and his sons emerged as large-scale industrialists and philanthropists, did the Dukes become atypical. Their story is, then, both agricultural and industrial, both Southern and national. Born North Carolinians, they moved onto a national, even global, stage. Yet all the while they kept deep roots, as well as vast investments of capital, in the Old North State, and they poured many millions into philanthropy, largely in the two Carolinas. Based largely on manuscript sources, many of them hitherto unused, this is the first study of the Duke family. The "New South," as recent historians have told us, may not have been so new-but it was certainly different in important ways, and the Dukes loomed large among those who helped to make it so.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822307433
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	01/06/1987
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	328
Sales rank:	711,465
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.69(d)

Read an Excerpt

The Dukes of Durham, 1865-1929

---

By Robert F. Durden

Duke University Press

Copyright © 1975 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-0743-3

---

CHAPTER 1

YEOMAN FARMER HOME FROM THE WAR

Footsore veterans of the Confederate army dotted the Southern landscape in the early summer of 1865. Thus Washington Duke's trek of some 130 miles from New Bern, North Carolina, to his inland home in what was then Orange County was not unusual. Nor was it out of the ordinary that he had virtually nothing in the way of material possessions awaiting him at his home. Even the relatively few Southerners who were rich before the Civil War faced destitution in the summer of 1865, and Washington Duke had never belonged to that class anyhow. Poverty would be no novelty to him. The prospect of regathering and then rearing his four, motherless children must have been both heart-warming and frightening as he tramped homeward.

The eighth of ten children, Washington Duke was born to Taylor Duke and Dicey Jones Duke on December 20, 1820. Taylor Duke's father had been born in Virginia, where the family had come from England in the seventeenth century, but Taylor Duke was born in Orange County, North Carolina, on the eve of the American Revolution, and Dicey Jones was of Welsh ancestry. Other than that they owned and tilled their modest farm along the Little River near his birthplace, only a few scattered facts are known about Taylor and Dicey Jones Duke. As a captain of the militia in his district and a constable, Taylor Duke was clearly a person of substance and one respected by his neighbors.

Washington Duke later recalled that he grew up in a section where there were no extremes of wealth or poverty. He meant, of course, that everyone had enough to eat, since beyond that, life was hard. Hillsborough, the nearest town and the county seat, was some twelve miles away, and Raleigh, the state capital, about twice as far. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the lack of transportation facilities bought special problems and hardships for North Carolinians in the Piedmont and mountain regions, and Washington Duke had little choice but to spend most of his early life behind a plow. "I have made more furrows in God's earth than any man forty years old in North Carolina," he later declared. Receiving only a few months of formal schooling, he spent his days laboring. For some years prior to his eighteenth birthday, he and one of his brothers lived with their oldest brother, William James Duke, who was born in 1803, but Washington Duke soon began to farm on his own.

Renting land at first, he worked hard and lived frugally. When he married Mary Caroline Clinton in 1842, her father gave the couple land, and by the time of the Civil War Washington Duke owned some 300 acres, on the cultivated parts of which he grew corn, wheat, oats and, on the eve of the war, a little tobacco. Two sons were born to the young couple, Sidney Taylor Duke in 1844 and Brodie Leonidas Duke in 1846. When the latter was only a little more than a year old, his mother died.

With his small sons in the care of relatives, Washington Duke toiled away on the land. In the early 1850's he built a modest frame house of hand-dressed lumber and brought to it in December, 1852, his second wife, Artelia Roney, from nearby Alamance County. A year later, a daughter, Mary Elizabeth, was born and then two sons, Benjamin Newton on April 27, 1855, and James Buchanan on December 23, 1856.

Tragedy soon again struck Washington Duke, however, for his oldest son Sidney died of typhoid fever in the late summer of 1858, and the same disease killed Artelia Roney Duke some ten days later. Two of her unmarried sisters, first Elizabeth and later Ann Roney, with Malinda Duke, a maiden sister of Washington Duke, took turns helping with the four children, and the three youngest may have spent some time with their Roney grandparents in Alamance County. Having grown up motherless, all four were to display in their later lives, as will be shown, a special sympathy and benevolence toward orphans.

Outside of his family, clearly the most important institution for Washington Duke and the one which exerted the greatest influence on him from his childhood was the Methodist church. The impassioned evangelical movement that swept through American Protestantism in the early decades of the nineteenth century retained its full vigor in Piedmont North Carolina during Washington Duke's youth. Converted at an early age in Mount Bethel Church at a crossroads settlement known as Balltown (later Bahama), he, like so many of his kins-people and neighbors, enjoyed both the spirited singing of such hymns as "Amazing Grace" and the fiery preaching that characterized early Methodism. William J. Duke so liked one particularly moving hymn, "The Old Ship of Zion," that he acquired the nickname of "Uncle Billy of the Old Ship."

In the latter part of the 1830's, William J. Duke constructed an arbor on his land where outdoor services and "protracted meetings," or extended revivals, could be held. Then about 1840 he donated an acre of land and helped to build a rough log structure which became the home of the small congregation of Mount Hebron Church, to which Washington Duke and his family belonged. Served by circuit-riding preachers who made up in zeal what they lacked in formal training, Methodism of the variety that he embraced from his childhood gained a powerful and lifelong hold on Washington Duke.

The Church not only provided the spiritual focus for Washington Duke's early life but also served as the principal center for socializing. With its "dinners-on-the-grounds" and all day meetings, a church like Mount Hebron understandably loomed large in this simple, rural society.

Civic and reform activities were apt to be church-based, too. Reflecting a widespread, national movement against the alleged evils of intoxicating drink, William J. Duke early in 1842 presided over a meeting that organized the Mount Hebron Temperance Society. Among the members of the standing committee for the society was twenty-one-year-old Washington Duke.

Alongside the crusade for temperance another important reform movement of the era was reflected in the strong hunger for schools that many North Carolinians were beginning to manifest. With its high rate of illiteracy and steady out-migration of population, North Carolina had become known to many outsiders as "the Rip Van Winkle state." One who determined to change that situation, and the most famous educational pioneer in North Carolina, was Calvin H. Wiley, a native of nearby Guilford County. While Wiley fought his successful battles in the state legislature and became the first state superintendent of schools in 1853, Washington Duke and his neighbors struggled, with only limited success, to provide for their children the educational opportunities that they and the vast majority of Tarheels had never known.

In 1850 the Hillsborough Recorder reported that the board for the "common schools" of Orange County had met in Hillsborough and appointed committees in fifty-one districts to take a census of the white population between the ages of five and twenty-one years. In district number six, "W. Duke" was listed as one of the three committeemen, but whether that was Washington Duke or his older brother William is not-known. In 1851 and 1852 "Wm. Duke" served on the school committee for the district. At any rate, it is clear that, though genuine public schools for most rural North Carolinians were still at least a half century away, the idea was indeed alive. In the case of Washington Duke, he saw to it, through his own efforts combined with those of some of his neighbors, that his children at least received a bit more schooling than he had enjoyed.

With schools not yet in existence to rival the churches as key institutions, Methodism remained the true passion of Washington Duke's life, and unlike many of his contemporaries he apparently took little part in antebellum politics. Benjamin N. Duke later asserted that his father had been an "ardent Whig" before the Civil War. Professor John Spencer Bassett, however, came to know Washington Duke rather well in the 1890's and wrote a biographical sketch of him which, according to Bassett, was based partly on their conversations. In that sketch, Bassett declared that up to the Civil War Washington Duke had "been a Democrat, and in his loyalty he had named his youngest son James Buchanan, after a Democratic President."

Both Taylor Duke and William J. Duke in 1840, at a time when Washington Duke was still too young to be actively involved in politics, served on a "committee of vigilance" for the Democratic party and the presidential candidacy of Andrew Jackson's successor, Martin van Buren. And as for the youngest son's name, William J. Duke later asserted that he had picked the name, with the "James" representing his own middle name and only the "Buchanan" representing the new president.

The fact that Washington Duke became a staunch and well-known Republican soon after the Civil War is firmly established. Republicanism was, at least in its economic orientation toward a high protective tariff and "sound" currency, much closer to pre-Civil War Whiggery than to Jacksonian Democracy. Thus Benjamin N. Duke may simply have unconsciously "read backwards" when he identified his father with the Whigs. The scanty evidence suggests that before the war Washington Duke belonged, however tenuously, to the Democratic party that he came to oppose bitterly later in the century.

However little he may have involved himself in the stormy politics of the 1850's, Washington Duke, like the vast majority of his fellow North Carolinians, opposed secession. Nevertheless, the Confederate firing on Fort Sumter and President Abraham Lincoln's ensuing call upon the various states for troops to be used against "rebels" seemed to leave North Carolinians no alternative but to throw in their lot with their fellow Southerners.

Not until the Confederacy in late 1863 moved to draft men up to forty-five years of age did Washington Duke make his preparations to enter the Confederate service. With a teenage son, Brodie, and three small children to care for, he may well have resented the necessity that confronted him. But on October 7 and 14, 1863, the following advertisement—one of many of a similar kind as men readied to leave for the war—appeared in the Hillsborough Recorder:

PUBLIC SALE

I will sell at my residence, on the 20th of this month, about one hundred bushels of corn, my entire stock of Cows, Hogs, Farming Tools and Wagon, Oats, Fodder, Hay, Wheat, and many other articles too tedious to mention; and perhaps some eight or ten likely NEGROES will be sold the same day.

Terms made known on the day of the sale.

Washington Duke

The announcement about the "eight or ten likely NEGROES" poses another problem, for before the war Washington Duke briefly owned only one slave, not necessarily because he may not have wished to own more but because he did not have enough money. Benjamin N. Duke's later contention that his father was "opposed to slavery and [was] a Union man" is not as convincing evidence as the census returns for 1850 and 1860. These listed no slave property for Washington Duke, though the census of 1850 showed that a "mulatto laborer" by the name of Alexander Weaver lived on the premises, and "laborer" clearly meant hired hand rather than slave.

Also arguing against his ownership of any eight or ten slaves is the fact that during the war Washington Duke hired the use of a slave named "Jim," a practice that was widespread throughout the South. When "Jim" ran away, apparently briefly or at least not permanently, Washington Duke notified the owner. And then as the Confederate draft threatened, Duke sent the following letter to the owner of "Jim":

Having to brake [sic] up and go into the Service, I let Mr. Wm. E. Walker have your boy Jim until his time would be up—he, Jim, went to sulking last night and is absent this morning, his clothes is gone. I expect therefore he will go to see you—if he should you will please send him down to Mr. Walker who will take care of him until his time is up—unless he should run off.

Yours respectfully Washington Duke

The census returns, the hiring of "Jim," and the tentativeness of the wording in the advertisement— "... and perhaps some eight or ten likely NEGROES will be sold the same day"—suggest that Washington Duke, possibly hoping to attract more people to his own sale, allowed one of his neighbors or an acquaintance to employ the occasion for the sale of the slaves.

At any rate, he had to "brake up." The three small children were sent to live with their Roney grandparents on their farm in Alamance County, and Brodie, weighing only ninety-six pounds and too thinfor the regular army, served with a Major Gee in the Confederate prison at Salisbury, North Carolina.

With the children arranged for, Washington Duke departed for the war. On April 4, 1864, he signed a receipt for a private's uniform at Camp Holmes in Raleigh. Many North Carolina conscripts received some basic training at Camp Holmes before being sent to the front; in Washington Duke's case he either requested or was assigned duty in the Confederate navy. Some time shortly after the middle of June, 1864, he reported for duty aboard a Confederate receiving ship in the besieged port of Charleston, South Carolina.

Many years later a wartime comrade wrote that he had been aboard the Indian Chief at Charleston with Washington Duke and would be glad to see him and "talk about old times in the Confederate navy." But reminiscing about the war was not, apparently, something that Washington Duke enjoyed. Perhaps because the Confederate veterans' organization acquired in later years a partisan Democratic tinge (as the Grand Army of the Republic in the North became a powerful ally of the Republican party), Washington Duke never became a professional "Wearer of the Gray." Few stories of his wartime experiences survive.

One story that does survive, and which has the ring of truth about it, concerns his dread of a certain part of the duty involved on the receiving ship. At night small boats were secured to long beams of the ship, and the beams extended high over the water. Washington Duke, who had probably never seen the ocean before the war, nervously observed the men who had to go out on the beams and disconnect the lines holding the boats. When the dread day came and an officer ordered him to proceed out on the beam, the Orange County farmer at first refused and declared that it was impossible for him "to walk that sleek log." When the officer began to curse and finally to threaten punishment, Washington Duke summoned his courage and, probably praying to the God of all good Methodists, executed the order.

His duty at Charleston was cut short, however, by needs that grew out of the desperate situation of the Confederate forces near Richmond, Virginia. The James River squadron of the Confederate navy finally had to man artillery batteries on the banks of the river, and in September, 1864, Washington Duke, together with additional men from Charleston, was transferred to Virginia. There he became an able artillerist, was promoted to the rank of orderly sergeant, and survived the rain, mud, and flood waters that harassed the men at Battery Brooke on the James. Rear Admiral Raphael Semmes, the famed Confederate seaman who assumed command of the James River squadron late in the war, noted in his diary that supplies were exhausted and that the command was merely living "from hand to mouth."

In the confusion surrounding the Confederate evacuation of Richmond on April 1 and 2, 1865, Washington Duke was captured by Union troops. He was imprisoned in Richmond only a week before General Robert E. Lee's surrender on April 9 at Appomattox Court House. Gaining his parole later in the spring or early summer, Washington Duke was sent by ship to New Bern. From there he walked home to his reunion with his children—Brodie, Mary, Ben, and "Buck."

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from The Dukes of Durham, 1865-1929 by Robert F. Durden. Copyright © 1975 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Preface xi

1. Yeoman Farmer Home from the War 3

2. Beginning Anew in 1865: The Early Phase of W. Duke, Sons and Company 11

3. James B. Duke, The Bonsack Cigarette Machine, and the Origins of the American Tobacco Company 26

4. Building a Commercial Empire: The American Tobacco Company, 1890-1904 56

5. "Durham in on the way to heaven rejoicing": Early Philanthropy of the Dukes 82

6. "Trinity College is the best institution of learning in the South": The Philanthropic Pattern Takes Shape 97

7. New Myths for Old: The Dukes and the Textile Industry of North Carolina 122

8. A Time of Troubles—And Splendor on Fifth Avenue 152

9. Electric Power for the Piedmont Region of the Carolinas 177

10. The Philanthropic Culmination: The Establishment of the Duke Endowment 199

11. The Launching of Duke University and the Deaths of the Duke Brothers 233

A Note on the Sources 261

Appendix. James B. Duke's Indenture Creating the Duke Endowment 268

Index 281