Warren Delano Jr.

Warren Delano Jr. (July 13, 1809 – January 17, 1898) was an American merchant and drug smuggler who made a large fortune smuggling opium into China. He was the maternal grandfather of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Early life

Delano was born on July 13, 1809, in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He was the eldest son of Captain Warren Delano Sr. (1779–1866) and Deborah Perry (née Church) Delano.

After his mother's death in 1827, his father, who was involved in the New England sea trade, remarried to Elizabeth Adams, a widow of Captain Parker of the United States Navy.

A descendant of Philip Delano (a Pilgrim who arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1621), Warren Jr.'s paternal grandparents were Ephraim Delano and Elisabeth (née Cushman) Delano, and his maternal grandparents were Joseph Church and Deborah (née Perry) Church.

He graduated from the Fairhaven Academy at the age of 15 and by age 17 was a trader in the import business. Opium, a highly addictive narcotic (which pharmacists later found can be refined into heroin), was illegal in China.

By the 1800s, there was an immense European demand for Chinese luxury products such as silk, tea, porcelain ("china"), and furniture, but Chinese demand for European products was much less.

As a result, many European nations ran large trade deficits with China. Foreign traders such as the Scottish merchant William Jardine of Jardine Matheson introduced large-scale opium smuggling into China as merchandise to pay for coveted Chinese products. The vast illegal opium trade resulted in millions of Chinese becoming addicted, and in a drastic reversal of the trade imbalance to favor Europe. This led to the First Opium War of 1840–1843.

By early 1843, Delano had prospered greatly in the Chinese opium trade, rising to become the head partner of the biggest American firm trading with China. He had witnessed the destruction of the Canton trading concession system, the humiliation of the Chinese government, and the creation of New China.

In the 1850s, Delano, along with his brother Franklin and Asa Packer, builder of the Lehigh Valley Railroad and founder of Lehigh University, headed a land company that purchased several thousand acres and established the town of Delano, Pennsylvania.

Delano lost much of his fortune in the Panic of 1857. In 1860, he returned to China, except this time to Hong Kong, where he rebuilt his fortune. During the U.S. Civil War, Delano shipped opium to the Medical Bureau of the U.S. War Department. Anne Lyman Delano (1849–1926), who married merchant Frederic Delano Hitch in 1877. Sara Ann Delano (1854–1941), who married James Roosevelt I and became the mother of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Death and burial

His wife Catherine died on February 10, 1896, in Newburgh, New York. Delano died in Algonac on January 17, 1898, of bronchial pneumonia. After a funeral there, he was buried next to his wife in the Delano Family Tomb at Riverside Cemetery in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, which Delano had established in 1850. The tomb was erected in 1859 and designed by Richard Morris Hunt.

Descendants

Through his daughter Sara, he was a grandfather of the 32nd President of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who married his fifth cousin, Eleanor Roosevelt, and was the father of six children, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, James Roosevelt II, Franklin Roosevelt (who died in infancy), Elliott Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., and John Aspinwall Roosevelt II.

Through his daughter Katherine, he was a grandfather of four, including diplomat Warren Delano Robbins and Katharine Price Collier, a Republican U.S. Representative who in 1917 married George St. George, third son of the second Sir Richard St George, 2nd Baronet.

Legacy Both Delano, Pennsylvania, and Delano Township, Pennsylvania, were named for Warren Delano Jr.