Forgotten merchants: The pioneers who shaped early Greek American success
Source: NEOS KOSMOS
Our standard Greek American narrative tells the story of a late nineteenth and twentieth century mass migration of largely poor villagers, part of the huge wave of Southern and Eastern European immigrants from 1880s and beyond. This initial wave, and several thereafter, lasted seven or eight decades and overcame hardship and prejudice to attain the American dream. While this narrative is largely true, and one that Greek Americans hold with justifiable pride, there is a larger story to Greek migration to America.
One other part of the story is that of the merchant migration to America. While Greece was (and to a degree still is) a poor country that sent out waves of migrants, one group of emigres had established vast, tight-knit, and highly successful merchant networks. Indeed, these networks, which by the 1820s included compact and successful communities in Austria-Hungary, the various Italian principalities, the Russian Empire, France, and Britain, played an important political, financial, and personal part in the very resurrection of the Greek state.
Chiot merchant networks: Global traders with deep roots
Consider the Ypslilantis brothers, who organized Russo-Greeks to attack Ottoman-controlled Romania, firing the first shots of the Greek War of Independence. Or Manto Mavrogenous, the wealthy Greek merchant’s daughter from the Austrian port of Trieste, who gave all her wealth and talents to birth the state, dying in poverty in 1840s Cyclades. No good deed goes unpunished, particularly when it concerns the Greek state.
While the merchant class gave much to the Greek state’s establishment, and some merged into the new Greek kingdom’s ruling class, most stayed abroad, particularly those from the island of Chios, which remained outside of the Greek state until 1913. Chios was the scene of perhaps the greatest atrocity of the Greek War of Independence; the Chios Massacre which killed more than half the island’s population and scattered survivors and enslaved Chiots to the four winds. Despite this horrific trauma, the Chiots gathered, supported one another, and built one of the industrial revolution’s foremost merchant networks, spanning five continents. The new, muscular American Republic could hardly escape their notice.
While some Chiots arrived in America as refugees from the Greek War of Independence, often sponsored by active Philhellenes, another group arrived as well financed cadres of Chios merchant families. As might be expected of nautically minded global merchants, the merchants focused on two port cities.
The first was New York, as the Dutch-founded port city served as the central nervous system for American finance, brokerage, and culture. The cosmopolitan Chiots found a global city, which was, along with London, the co-capital of the Atlantic economy, suited to their needs and tastes. New York from then on would be the key center of Greek America, with a Greek consulate and Greek academics and philhellenes. Beyond the financial and brokerage work, New York served as a key shipment hub for commerce with Britain and France, and the Chiotes worked on account with their kinsmen and compatriots in those countries, controlling both ends of their transactions.
Cotton, commerce, and conflict: Greeks in the American South
More importantly (at the time), several Chios “Houses” (firms) established themselves in New Orleans. As the terminus to the vast Mississippi River network, which covered much of America’s vast interior, the port had long been a key commercial zone and the most important port for cotton, America’s greatest export crop and the key raw material for British, French, and (northern) US industrialization.
By the 1850s, the lower Mississippi Valley had emerged as the center of America’s vast cotton production, powered by the most vicious and financialized slave system in history.
A dozen Greek concerns, nearly all Chiot, and most related by marriage or kinship, played an important role in the export of cotton to Europe, particularly to Britain where firms staffed by other Chiots in Liverpool and Manchester sold to manufacturers in the British Midlands.
New Orleans experienced an exodus of Greek merchants due to the American Civil War and the severance of the Southern cotton trade, both due to an ill-advised self-imposed cotton embargo at the start of the Civil War but later by an effective Northern (Union) blockade. Regardless, the community was still large enough to boast a Greek consulate in 1864 (after the Union conquest of the city), and the consecration of the first Greek Orthodox Church in America in 1866.
Greek merchants who left New Orleans often ended up in Egypt or India, where their kinsmen had already established presence in these prime cotton regions and they used their expertise, particularly their knowledge of the American cotton seed varieties which British and French mills were used to processing. Greek concerns controlled a fair percentage of Egyptian and Indian cotton production, which increased exponentially due to the absence of Southern cotton supplies. The availability of alternative cotton supplies eased the economic pressure on Britain and France to give in to the “Cotton Card” played by the South.
After the American Civil War, the Greeks recouped their position in Southern cotton, expanding their reach in the US South to include a presence in Memphis aside from New Orleans, where America’s first (though generally forgotten) “Greektown” developed in the vicinity of Holy Trinity Church, the first Orthodox Church in the continental United States, founded by two Greeks and a Serbian in 1866.
The career of Alexander Michael Agelasto is illustrative of the mid nineteenth century Chios merchant in America. Born in 1833 in Syros, Greece (where many Chiots had fled due to the massacres on their home island), he arrived in New Orleans in the 1850s, when the city was at the height of its cotton boom. Like many other Greeks in New Orleans, Agelasto left the city (which had been occupied by Northern forces in 1862) and returned to Europe via New York in 1863. He married in Syros, and with his bride, Polyxene Mavrogordato (of an illustrious Phanariot family which married into the Chiot Ralli family), they left for India in 1865 where he immediately got involved in the cotton trade. His brother, John M. Agelasto, worked in Egypt, also in the cotton booming cotton trade. The Chios network was actively involved in developing alternative cotton sources to the Confederates, to their considerable economic advantage.
Legacy of innovation: Lessons from the Chiot Diaspora
With the end of the war, A. M. Agelasto, like many other Greek cotton merchants, returned to the United States, though many of their compatriots had never left. As the devastated country rebuilt, cotton again became an important export commodity, and the Greeks continued to leverage their wide network while also branching into other businesses. While New Orleans and New York were their prime locations, Memphis and St. Louis also emerged as new hubs of Greek activity. Their commercial savvy was well known to their contemporaries in the business, who praised their “sagacity” and “nerve,” as well as their “ability to ship cotton when others could not.”
In Memphis the peripatetic A. M. Agelasto was a founder of the city’s cotton exchange, and the considerable Greek mercantile and riverine activity in St. Louis resulted in the opening of a Greek consulate there (the fourth, after New York, Boston, and New Orleans) in 1864. The St. Louis consul was Constantine P. Ralli, a scion of the large and powerful Chiot Ralli family and related to Agelasto, and other Chiot merchants. A. M. Agelasto eventually settled in Norfolk, where he and his descendants would be active in assisting the thousands of Greeks who arrived there with the turn of the twentieth century.
While most of these Chiot families have integrated into American society, they often retain strong ties to kin throughout the world, in perhaps the noblest and most enduring of Chiot traditions—family. Though Greek America today is largely based on the mass migration of largely poor rural folk, and generally from several waves in the twentieth century, it is worth remembering that the first large Greek presence here were merchants at the cutting edge of globalization, who played a vital niche role in the global economy, and in the birth and nurturing of the Greek state, and also they merged with the Greek shipping clans, which remain the world’s largest shipowners. Theirs is a story worth remembering. Perhaps, too, there are lessons for our own Greek Diasporas of today, in centers such as the US, Canada, and Australia—how to assimilate while retaining key ties to the larger Greek world, and how to go from a mass émigré setting to a smaller, nimbler, more diverse one.
Perhaps the past can be instructive.
*Alexander Billinis is a Greek-American historian and regular contributor to Neos Kosmos, with a special focus on the Greek Diaspora and Greek maritime history. He is a full-time lecturer in political science at Clemson University and a PhD candidate in Clemson’s Digital History program. Billinis graduated from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in 1991.
The original article: belongs to NEOS KOSMOS .
