Partly-printed vellum DS, signed “M. Van Buren,” one page, 14.5 x 12.25, July 6, 1838. President Van Buren recognizes the appointment of James Andrews as “Consul of Greece for the Port of Boston and its dependencies in the State of Massachusetts.” Signed at the conclusion by Martin Van Buren and countersigned by Secretary of State John Forsyth. The original embossed white seal remains affixed to the lower left. In fine condition, with the handwritten sections of text light, but fully legible.
James Winthrop Andrews was born in Boston around 1806. In 1824 he graduated from Harvard University, a school that his family had been long affiliated; his ancestor, John Winthrop, a friend of Benjamin Franklin, was a math and philosophy professor at Harvard in the middle 1700s. The younger Andrews read law and was admitted to the Suffolk County bar in 1828. He practiced law and worked in his father’s merchandise business, which moved to the newly built Commercial Wharf around 1840.
From the late 1820s until the early 1840s, Andrews was at various times a vice consul and consul in Boston for several foreign nations, which included Colombia, New Grenada, Denmark, Greece, and Venezuela. In 1838, President Martin Van Buren appointed Andrews a Consul of Greece for the Port of Boston. His job was to help citizens of those countries with travel and business while they were in the Boston area.
Andrews was part of the same lively Boston social scene as famous poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the late 1830s. Longfellow was a widower who taught at Harvard and, in 1836, he met Franny Appleton, daughter of a rich Boston industrialist, and tried hard for years to win her love. Attorney James Winthrop Andrews is mentioned in the recently published book Longfellow in Love by Edward M. Cifelli, which notes that Andrews was also trying to woo Appleton in February 1841, writing about her ‘diamond eyes’ and ‘lips of ruby hue.’
Andrews, who apparently never married, died in Boston just one year later on February 24, 1842, from highly contagious lung fever at the young age of 36. He is believed to have been buried in King’s Chapel Burying Ground, the historic Boston graveyard founded in 1630. Longfellow finally married his true love Appleton in 1843, and they had six children.
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