CANTIDAD:

500

RESUMEN

Edwin Farnsworth Atkins (Jan. 13, 1850 - May 20, 1926), New England merchant and sugar plantation owner in Cuba, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Elisha Atkins, a merchant with deep ties to the Caribbean trade, and Mary Ellen Freeman. The first Atkins to arrive in America arrived on Cape Cod in 1639; the Freemans traced their ancestry to Elder Brewster, the leader of the Pilgrims who arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts, on the Mayflower in 1620. Edwin, the oldest of three surviving children, attended the Brooks Classical School for boys.

In 1838, twelve years before Edwin was born, Elisha Atkins began exporting molasses and from Cienfuegos in Cuba to Boston. The family’s business connection with the island continued and expanded and in January 1866, when Edwin was sixteen years old, he took his first trip to Cuba. Slavery had just ended in the United States, but it persisted in Cuba: 360,000 people of African descent were enslaved on the island, nearly half of them on sugar plantations.

After Atkins finished his education at Mr. Fette’s school in Boston, he entered the Boston office of his father’s firm, E. Atkins & Co. on the city’s India Wharf. Atkins’ first business connection with Cienfuegos was receiving sugar cargo from the city; he was responsible for tasting samples from hundreds of hogsheads to ascertain the quality of the import. E. Atkins & Co. then distributed the sugar to grocers and distillers.

In December 1869, Edwin’s father sent him back to Cienfuegos to learn Spanish and understand the business methods of the island. The de la Torriente family of Cienfuegos, owners of Torriente Bros. and associates of E. Atkins & Co., took young Atkins in for fifteen winters, treating him like a son and formalizing the long-lasting friendship and partnership between the two families. This deep connection was important since the Ten Years’ War (1868 - 1878) had devastating consequences for many sugar estates on the island. With the damages from revolts, the loss of slave labor, and a history of extravagant management, many plantations fell into financial ruin, and many were transferred and sold. Towards the end of the war, Elisha Atkins granted his son full authority over E. Atkins & Co. Soon after, Torriente Bros. was bankrupt, and the family turned over a foreclosed sugar estate by the name of Soledad to E. Atkins & Co. in 1884. In the 1877 census Soledad was a mid-sized (900 acre) sugar plantation on which 180 enslaved people labored. Gradual emancipation laws after 1880 reduced that number to 95 patriconados, former slaves who remained bound to their owner —now Atkins— as part of an eight-year “apprenticeship.” Recently, historians have noted that Atkins, like other plantation owners, expended great efforts to control the patriconados in conditions not far removed from slavery, despite their significant resistance, right up to the formal abolition of Cuban slavery in 1886.

In 1882, Edwin Farnsworth Atkins married Katharine Wrisley in Belmont, Massachusetts. Edwin and Katharine continued to go to Cuba every winter until their children were born, at which point Katharine stayed in Belmont with their three children, Robert, Edwin, and Helen, while their father traveled to the island.

Atkins was regarded as an expert on sugar conditions in the United States and throughout Cuba. He was often invited to testify at Congressional tariff hearings or any other investigations in sugar in the U.S. and was “one of the very few men who had an intimate knowledge of cane growing, manufacture of raw sugar, refining methods, and an active touch with the commercial end of the business.” (Claflin, 138). At the outbreak of the second Cuban War of Independence in 1895 he was the largest American landowner on the island; his holdings centered on Soledad totaled 12,000 acres and employed 1200 laborers in the cane-cutting season. His Cuban profits also boosted his U.S. based holdings in sugar refining and railroads, and he enjoyed close links to power brokers in Washington,DC. Atkins, enjoyed a very close friendship with Dupuy de Lome, the Spanish ambassador to the US, and promoted the Spanish government goal of Cuban autonomy under continued Spanish rule. Atkins told American leaders that only Blacks and bandits —men who had recently kidnapped planters and threatened to burn down Soledad and other sugar plantations— wanted full independence for Cuba. Right up to the outbreak of hostilities between the U.S. and Spain in April 1898 Atkins lobbied Washington to avoid war with Spain.

In 1898 and 1899 Atkins worked with the occupying US administration, while lobbying for Cuban annexation. Historian Christopher Harris notes annexation would have given duty-free access to US markets to Atkins and the other American planters who now controlled 40 percent of sugar production on the island. Atkins support of the 1900 Harvard Summer School for Cuban teachers —he donated $500— was certainly driven by his lifelong connection to the island, but his political views on Cuban independence were quite different to other New Englanders like Alexis Frye and Katherine Lee Bates, who were more sympathetic to genuine Cuban autonomy. Atkins and his wife also held a lawn party for 100 of the Cuban teachers from the Cienfuegos and Trinidad districts where his sugar interests were centered. (“Some Cuban Notes”)

In 1910, Robert W. Atkins, Edwin’s eldest son, joined E. Atkins Co. and in 1915, Robert founded Punta Alegre Sugar Co. ─a company that came to own many mills in Cuba. Together with E. Atkins & Co., the Atkins family came to operate many of the top sugar producing mills in Cuba controlling the Baguanos, Tacajó, Presidente, San Germán, and Ermita mills in Oriente province, Caracas, Trinidad, and San Agustín mills in Santa Clara province, and Baraguá, Florida, and Punta Alegre mills in Camagüey province.

He founded a botanical garden on the island in 1901, with the primary purpose of conducting research in the improvement of sugar cane. The operation of this garden was eventually transferred to Harvard University in 1919 as the Harvard Botanical Station for Tropical Research and Sugar Cane Investigation, to carry on work in economic botany “for the benefit of Cuba.” (A New England Family, 138). In 1924, the Harvard Biological Laboratory was added to the Station. In 1961, two years after the Cuban revolution of 1959, Harvard gave up control of the lands and facilities. The Cienfuegos Botanical Garden is now maintained by the government of Cuba and home to more than 2,000 species of tropical plants,

In 1926, just before his death, aged 76 years, Atkins published Sixty Years in Cuba which tells the story of the development of Soledad and his relationship with the island over several decades, but which elides his family’s role in the Caribbean slave economy and his close ties to the Spanish government prior to the Spanish-American war.


Further Reading

The Atkins Family Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, contains a wealth of information about the family and its business in the United States and Cuba.

1. Beckert, Sven and Katherine Stevens. Slavery, Harvard, and Seeking a Forgotten History (2011).

2. Claflin, Helen Atkins. A New England Family (1956).

3. Harris, Christopher. “Edwin F. Atkins and the Evolution of United States Cuba Policy, 1894-1902,” The New England Quarterly Vol. 78, No. 2 (Jun., 2005): 202-231.

4. Scott, Rebecca J. “A Cuban Connection: Edwin F. Atkins, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., and Former Slaves of Soledad Plantation,” Massachusetts Historical Review, Vol. 9 (2007): 7-34

5. “Some Cuban Notes,” Cambridge Tribune, 21 July, 1900.

6. St. John, A. “Introducing Mr. Edwin F. Atkins,” Barron's, Sep. 25, 1922.