Jean de Neufville or John de Neufville (Amsterdam, May 25, 1729 - Cambridge, Massachusetts, [1] in December 1796) was an Amsterdam banker who had a meeting in Aachen on September 4, 1778 with US William Lee, a diplomat. [2] [3]
Jean de Neufville or John de Neufville (Amsterdam, May 25, 1729 - Cambridge, Massachusetts, [1] in December 1796) was an Amsterdam banker who had a meeting in Aachen on September 4, 1778 with US William Lee, a diplomat. [2] [3]
Jean was the son of Leendert de Neufville Jansz (1698-1762) and Agneta de Wolff (1703-1750), who inherited from her mother Catharina de Neufville 350,000 guilders when she was 27. Their son Jean, a Mennonite, married in 1753 to Cornelia de Neufville (-1777) from Haarlem. In 1755 his son Leendert was born. (Jean had a cousin Leendert Pieter de Neufville who went bankrupt in 1763.) In 1765 Neufville bought a canal house, Keizersgracht 224 which he rebuilt. In 1776 he bought an estate, called Wester-Amstel.
De Neufville traded on the West-Indies. Already in 1761 he did business in America. [4] In 1768 he started a cotton printery. In 1773 he bought coffee and sugar plantations in Suriname; he sold his part in 1778. In 1779 he began to direct shipping of goods (including weapons) to the US.; France had already started doing so two years earlier. One of the guests he received in his house, was John Paul Jones, a prominent figure during the Revolutionary War. De Neufville bought 7326 acres in South Carolina and his son in Albany County, New York. In September 1780 the Mercury on its way to the Dutch Republic was seized by the British near Newfoundland. The draft treaty of 1778, stored in a lead coffin, was thrown overboard by Henry Laurens, a native of South Carolina. Laurens had the mission to borrow 10 million guilders in the Republic. [5] The British ambassador Sir Joseph Yorke demanded satisfaction. The previously closed secret agreement between American diplomat and Virginian planter William Lee and De Neufville, who were acting on their own name, but approval was given by Engelbert François van Berckel an Amsterdam magistrate, led to the severing of ties between Britain and the Republic, and on December 20 to the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War.
On March 1, 1781 John Adams commissioned the Neufville on behalf of the Congress to open a loan of ƒ 1,000,000. [6] In 1782 a consortium of banks granted a loan to the US for an amount of five million; there would be another four million within a few years. [7]
De Neufville corresponded with Benjamin Franklin. [8] [9] He sold his mansion Saxenburg and the warehouse behind on Prinsengracht in 1782. In April 1783 De Neufville went bankrupt; in the same year he remarried Anna Margaretha Langma(r)k, both domiciled in Neerlangbroek, and settled reportedly in Bonn. Leendert emigrated to Boston to start a new life. His father and stepmother followed in 1785. First he did business in Newburyport, [10] but started in 1786 a glass factory in Guilderland, New York, because of the suitable sand. Already in 1788 Leendert asked for financial support, but in 1791 the company went bankrupt. Leendert, who would correspond with George Washington, [11] lost his mind mid 90s. He died around 1812 in a mental asylum in Pennsylvania. [12]
His mother, the widow, received after 1796 a pension by the Congress. [13] The glass factory relaunched as Albany Glass Works. [14]
The Fourth Anglo-Dutch War was a conflict between the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Dutch Republic. The war, contemporary with the War of American Independence (1775–1783), broke out over British and Dutch disagreements on the legality and conduct of Dutch trade with Britain's enemies in that war.
Louis-Sébastien Mercier was a French dramatist and writer, whose 1771 novel L'An 2440 is an example of proto-science fiction.
HMS Drake was a Royal Navy 14-gun ship rigged sloop-of-war with a displacement of 275 tons burthen. Originally named the Royal Oak, she was built in New England in 1775 by John Wharton from Philadelphia. She first sailed between London and Stettin as a tobacco-ship. She was then sold in 1776 and renamed Resolution. Captained by Edward Hawker, the ship traded between London, Boston, and Cork. On 4 March 1777 the British navy purchased her at Plymouth for 3,000 pounds sterling. She completed fitting out as a warship on 24 May 1777. She became the ship-rigged sloop-of-war Drake with either 14, 18 or 20 guns. From July 17, 1777, she served in the American Revolutionary War. Her first mission was protecting the packet-boats between Harwich and Gorée
Henry Hope (1735–1811) was an Amsterdam merchant banker born in Braintree, Province of Massachusetts Bay. He emigrated to the Netherlands to join the family business Hope & Co. at a young age. From 1779, Henry became the manager of Hope & Co. and he participated in the firm for about a third from 1782. He is considered to be as great a genius as his uncle Thomas Hope. In 1786 Adam Smith dedicated the fourth edition of his book The Wealth of Nations to Henry Hope in hopes of increasing his readership:
Hope & Co. was a Dutch bank that existed for two and a half centuries. The bank was located in Amsterdam until 1795; originally it concentrated on Great Britain. From 1750 it played a major part in the finances of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) through Thomas Hope and his brother Adrian. During the Seven Years' War (1756–1763) the Hope brothers profited from the Netherlands' neutral position and became very wealthy. The Hopes became heavily involved in the Dutch Caribbean, and Danish West Indies. They specialised in plantation loans, in which the entire produce of the plantation was remitted to the lender, who would supervise its sale in order to secure repayment. In this way, the Hopes helped the plantation economy to become integrated into a global network of financiers and consumers. The Hope family were among the richest in Europe at the time. The family business focused on financing commercial transactions and especially on issuing money loans to monarchs and governments in Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Russia, Portugal, Spain, France and America. The bank was famous for having Catherine the Great as their client and Adrian supplied her several times with diamonds.
Nicolaas van Staphorst was a Dutch banker and financier. Nicolaas and Jacob van Staphorst were involved from 1782-1794 in a total of eleven loans to the United States with a value of 29 million guilders. Van Staphorst also invested with other Dutch investment houses in a series of ventures in the U.S. that developed into the Holland Land Company.
Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky was a Prussian merchant with a successful trade in trinkets, silk, taft, porcelain, grain and bills of exchange. Moreover, he acted as a diplomat and important art dealer. His paintings formed the basis and the beginning of the collection in the Hermitage Museum. Gotzkowsky died impoverished and having left behind an autobiography: Geschichte eines patriotischen Kaufmanns (1768), which was translated into French and reprinted three times in the 18th century.
John May Sr or Jan Maij was an English shipwright from Chatham who served from 1758-1779 as Master Shipbuilder of the Amsterdam Admiralty.
The Albany Glassworks Site is an archeological site in Guilderland, Albany County, New York. Approximately 2 acres (0.81 ha) in size, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.
Leendert Pieter de Neufville was a Dutch merchant and banker trading in silk, linen, and grain. His business grew quickly during the Seven Years' War. De Neufville secretly supplied the Prussian army with gunpowder. It is likely that the army's outsourcing of handling bills of exchange in commercial payment boosted his business in a sophisticated form of letters of credit, acceptance loans. His business model had similarities with the modern shadow banking system.
Jean Baptiste, chevalier de Ternant was a French soldier, diplomat, and French ambassador to the United States from 1791 to 1793.
Johann Georg Holtzhey, was an 18th-century Dutch medallist and mint master.
The Amsterdam banking crisis of 1763 in the Netherlands followed the end of the Seven Years' War. At this time prices of grain and other commodities were falling sharply, and the supply of credit dried up due to the decreased value of collateral goods. Many of the banks based in Amsterdam were over-leveraged and were interlinked by complex financial instruments, making them vulnerable to a sudden tightening of credit availability. The crisis was marked by the failure of one large bank - that of De Neufville - and many smaller financial enterprises. The extent of the crisis was mitigated by the provision of additional liquidity by the Bank of Amsterdam, the Dutch central bank. Similarities have been identified between these events and the financial crisis of 2007–2008.
George Washington, also entitled George Washington and William Lee, is a full-length portrait in oil painted in 1780 by the American artist John Trumbull during the American Revolutionary War. General George Washington stands near his enslaved servant William Lee, overlooking the Hudson River in New York, with West Point and ships in the background. Trumbull, who once served as an aide-de-camp to Washington, painted the picture from memory while studying under Benjamin West in London. He finished it before his arrest for high treason in November. The portrait, measuring 36 in × 28 in, is on view in Gallery 753 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Originally in the possession of the de Neufville family of the Netherlands, it was bequeathed to the museum by Charles Allen Munn in 1924.
Jan Gildemeester Jansz. was a Dutch art collector.
Marie Cathrine Preisler née Devegge (1761–1797), was a Danish stage actress.
Lucretia Johanna van Winter was a Dutch art collector.
Engelbert François van Berckel was a Dutch politician during the Patriottentijd.
Joachim Rendorp, Vrijheer of Marquette was a Dutch politician of the Patriottentijd in the Dutch Republic.
John Adams (1735–1826) was an American Founding Father who served as one of the most important diplomats on behalf of the new United States during the American Revolution. He served as minister to the Kingdom of France and the Dutch Republic and then helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris to end the American Revolutionary War.
