Preserved Fish: a Semi-important Historical Figure With a Fun Name

Part of an occasional series on semi-important historical figures with fun names

Preserved Fish (public domain)

Preserved Fish was an early member of the illustrious Fish clan, an important family in early American history. Among the most important Fishes were such delightfully named luminaries as Stuyvesant Fish (a railroad baron who once hosted the Russian Tsar at his Newport mansion) and Hamilton Fish (a political titan of the nineteenth century, serving as Secretary of State under Ulysses Grant).

But the member of the Fish family with the best name of all is Preserved Fish, a New York businessman who lived between 1766 and 1846.

If somebody named their kid Preserved Fish today, we’d assume it was a joke, or that the parents had spent a little too much time on tour with the Grateful Dead. Preserved’s name was anything but a joke; it was a family name (his father was also named Preserved), an old Quaker appellation that meant “preserved from sin.” There were at least 10 Preserved Fishes in the Fish family tree.

Preserved was part of an early New England tradition of “hortatory names” — many Puritans named their kids things like “Prudence” or “Abstinence” or even “Humiliation,” (which would supposedly remind the little tyke of the cruelty of the world). These naming practices had mostly died out by the middle of the 18th century, so Preserved’s name was a bit old-fashioned. Since his was an old-timey name, he would have pronounced it with an extra syllable: Preserv-ed.

How a Fish became a whale

The Fish family was not a prominent one — Preserved was a self-made man. According to his obituary, “he was a noisy, unruly youth,” and he struggled to make himself into a successful farmer or blacksmith for a while in his teens.

Finally, Preserved Fish found his calling in… wait for it… the whaling industry.

Hunting whales was a booming part of the economy in the late 1700s, when Preserved got his start, and it became even more dominant in the early 1800s. Whale products were very useful — Americans turned to whale oil to light their homes, they used baleen to create “whalebone” corsets, and they employed spermaceti (the goo in the big foreheads of sperm whales) as the raw material for candles. By the early 1800s, whalers had already depleted the populations of many whale species near the country’s coasts, and they were setting off on longer journeys, using more technologically sophisticated equipment. Preserved found himself serving on and eventually commanding ships off the coast of Africa and in the Pacific Ocean.

After serving for years as a whaling captain in the Pacific, Preserved seems to have realized that the real money was made by the merchants in the cities, not the gore-soaked butchers on the boats.

After a period trading in Massachusetts, Fish fell out with some local politicians, so he made his way to New York. He served there as harbor master for a few years and then, in 1815, formed a shipping company called Fish & Grinnell with his cousin Joseph Grinnell — who would later go on to become a congressman.

Fish and Grinnell’s timing couldn’t have been better. They were opening their business at the beginning of the “Golden Age of Whaling,” a period of peace on the high seas and huge demand for whale oil. The firm became a powerful force in the whaling industry and soon expanded to transatlantic shipping.

Preserved lucked out with his location, too. New York’s population was exploding in the early nineteenth century, increasing by as much as 50% every ten years. New York was becoming both the most important shipping hub in the country and a center of manufacturing. Fish & Grinnell quickly expanded its fleet and became one of the country’s most important shipping businesses.

After eleven years, Preserved quit the business, taking away enough money to make him one of the richest men in New York City. He did quite well, but he might have wanted to hang on a little longer — the company, renamed Grinnell & Minturn after his departure, would go on to become one of the giants of American commerce and make its partners incredibly wealthy.

Preserved was a cranky, strange guy. His obituary describes him as “undoubtedly a rough, obstinate, and eccentric man,” a person who had little formal education but relied on his excellent instincts. He was known for being very kind and charitable with his friends, but he did not suffer fools. Soon after quitting Fish & Grinnell, he partnered with a man named Samuel Alley. But Fish & Alley only lasted six months, because Alley one day had the temerity to greet Preserved with a sunny, “Hope you are well this morning,” to which Fish replied, “This is the place for business, sir, not for compliments.” The argument escalated from there, and the partnership dissolved.

After quitting Fish & Grinnell, Preserved diversified his commercial enterprises. He became one of the first brokers on the New York Exchange Board, which would eventually become the New York Stock Exchange. He also eventually ran several banks in New York City.

Preserved Fish vs. the Locofocos

After achieving immense business success, Preserved became deeply involved with New York politics. He, along with other prominent businessmen, had influence over the Tammany Hall political machine and helped to cement Tammany’s dominance in the city. Tammany was, during this period, an alliance between powerful business leaders and politicians. It was notoriously corrupt.

The period when Preserved was involved with Tammany Hall was an inflection point for the organization. At first, Tammany excluded immigrants, especially the Irish, from its ranks. But its leaders eventually realized — after an angry Irish mob broke into one of their meetings — that they needed the support of the immigrant community to succeed in the new New York. Tammany became immensely successful during this period, dominating city politics and even elevating one of its own, Martin Van Buren, to the presidency.

The machinations of Preserved and his fellow oligarchs didn’t go unnoticed; a faction of the Democratic Party emerged to champion a more laissez-faire system that they thought would solve some of the city’s corruption problems. These people, formally known as the Workingmen’s Party, called themselves “Locofocos,” after the type of matches that they lit when Tammany thugs shut off the lights at one of their rallies. Though they made a few concessions to the Locofocos, Preserved and his Tammany cronies eventually prevailed; Tammany Hall had become unassailably powerful in the city by the time of his death.

Preserved lived a long and vigorous life. He had three wives — the first, Abigail, died in childbirth at a relatively young age, and he then wed his second wife, Mary. Four months after Mary died, Preserved — then 73 years old — married his third wife, also named Mary. When his friends cocked an eyebrow, he said, “I am getting to be an old man, and I want to be happy while I continue in this world. I don’t care a farthing for the opinions of this world — I live for the living, not for the dead!” Preserved had only one child, an adopted son, but William Fish — no hortatory name for him — died a “disgraced man” because Preserved “ruined” him by treating him “too kindly” (I think you can tell by now that Preserved’s obituary pulled no punches).

After he died at age 80, Preserved left much of his property to his two sisters — whose existence he never told his wife about. His son William was told he could only inherit his father’s wealth if William disowned his mother. Must have been a fun will-reading.

Despite his unusual name and obscure upbringing, Preserved Fish managed to position himself at the center of some of America’s most important economic and political movements. He was both a product and a representative of the rough-and-tumble age of opportunity in early nineteenth-century America. This was an America in which an uneducated boy who started out as an unimpressive blacksmith could die a filthy-rich, politically connected power broker.

Preserved Fish’s life is a bridge between the old America — one in which there were still echoes of Puritanism, one in which you might still name your kid “Preserved” — and an industrial age of opportunity, industry, and dirty politics.