Appendix E: Biographies
Gibson
Abraham Gibson Priest (Rindge, NH 10 July 1791 – London 30 November 1852; see Image 279) was the son of John (1761–1830) and Rebecca (Gibson) Priest (1765–1814). He changed his name to Abraham Priest Gibson early in his life. He appears in New York City directories as a merchant from 1815 through 1818, working first at 81 South Street, moving in 1817 to 84 South Street. His home in 1816 was at 128 Broadway, but in 1817 and 1818 at 325 Greenwich Street.1 He was appointed the American consul general in St. Petersburg in 1819 and served in this post for thirty-one years, resigning in 1850.2 In St. Petersburg, he lived on Galernaia Street in the building belonging to Brandt, which stood alongside the building of the Holy Synod.3 Through his “diligent reporting,” there exists “a fairly complete file of arrivals and departures of American ships and their cargoes” to and from Russia.4 “The severity of the climate undermined [his] health to such an extent as to render a … residence in a milder atmosphere absolutely necessary for its reestablishment.”5 He annually “pass[ed] the winter months in the sunny south of Europe,” which enabled him “to serve for thirty-one years as one of the most competent and valuable American consuls.”6 When he left St. Petersburg for the winter, Mr. A. Van Sassen,7 a foreign merchant, took care of the American Consulate, which had little or no business to transact with the close of navigation.8 Anna Whistler’s diaries confusingly imply that his departure in 1846 was permanent, as he gave some of his furniture to the Whistlers on that occasion. John Stevenson Maxwell characterized him as “an amiable but sensitive old Bachelor, who has lived here long enough to be made quite nervous by the climate and been in office long enough to become particularly attached to all the forms of ceremony and etiquette.”9 He saw Gibson as “a singular sort of a personage,” who “must amaze the faculty,”10 and physically as “an extraordinary man. What a constitution he must have had.”11 Gibson contracted tuberculosis while serving in Russia.12 He resigned his post in 1850 and died, unmarried, on 30 November 1852 in London, England.13
Notes
1 Longworth’s American Almanac, New York Register, and City Directory (New York: David Longworth, 1815): p 221; 1816, p. 220; 1817, p. 213; 1818, p. 141; Mariam Touba (N-YHS) to E. Harden, 16 May 2012.
2 Mehitable Calef Coppenhagen Wilson, John Gibson of Cambridge, Massachusetts and his Descendants, 1634–1899 (Washington, DC: McGill & Wallace, 1900), pp. 74–76.
3 Grech, Ves’ Peterburg 1846, p. 25; Nistrem, Adres-Kalendar’, vol. 2, p. 39.
4 Norman E. Saul, “American Merchants in Russia, 1815–1845” (paper delivered at the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies [AAASS] Convention, Washington, DC, November 1990), note 27.
5 Patricia Herlihy, “‘The Honored Few’: American Consuls in the Russian Empire, 1800–1870” (paper delivered at the AAASS Convention, Washington, DC, November 1990), p. 3.
6 Herlihy, p. 3.
7 Abraham van Sassen was a Dutchman who had worked in St. Petersburg since 1813 as company secretary and associate in the firm of John Delaware Lewis (New Castle, Delaware 19 March 1774 – London 17 May 1841), an American merchant. Lewis was based in St. Petersburg for about 30 years. When Lewis died on a trip home to Great Britain, van Sassen took over the company; Lewis’s son, John Delaware Lewis Jr (St. Petersburg 3 June 1828 – Petersfield, Southhampton, England 31 July 1884), was too young to become involved. The name of the company became Van Sassen & Co. and existed until the 1860s as a broker of Havana sugar. (Kalevi Ahonen, Sugar Triangle to Cotton Triangle: Trade Shipping between America and Baltic Russia, 1783 –1860 [Jyväskylä, Finland: Jyväskylän Yliopisto, 2005]; Stuart R. Thompstone, “British Merchant Houses in Russia before 1914.” In Economy and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1860–1930, ed. L. Edmondson and P. Waldron [London: Palgrave Macmillan], doi:10.1007/978-1-349-22433-3_7; IGI)
8 A.P. Gibson to the Honorable Daniel Webster, Secretary of State, Consulate of the United States, St. Petersburg, Sept. 19 / Oct. 1, 1842, NAUS: Despatches from U.S. Consuls in St. Petersburg, 1803–1906, vols. 5–6, June 19, 1839 – Sept. 20, 1847.
9 John S. Maxwell to Mrs. Hugh Maxwell, St. Petersburg, Sept. 9, 1843, N-YHS: Maxwell Papers, no. 21. 10 John S. Maxwell to George Washington Whistler, Paris, November 18. 1845, N-YHS: Maxwell Papers. 11 John S. Maxwell to George Washington Whistler, New York. Monday–December 13. 1846, N-YHS: Maxwell Papers. 12 Herlihy, “Honored Few,” p. 5. 13 Wilson, John Gibson, p. 76; NEHGR 7, no. 2 (1853): 196. The NEHGR erroneously says he died in St. Petersburg.
