Richard Saltonstall Rogers

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Richard Saltonstall Rogers (January 13, 1790 – June 11, 1873) was an early American shipping merchant from Salem, Massachusetts. He was the son of Abigail Dodge Rogers and Nathaniel Rogers and studied at Phillips Exeter Academy, graduating in 1800. With help from his brother Nathaniel Leverett Rogers, he began sending cargo to Russia and spent several years there helping manage his sister-in-law’s family affairs. In 1816 he served as the supercargo of the ship Friendship, owned by Waite and Pierce, traveling to Lisbon and India among other places. He later sailed on the Tartar.

Together with his brothers Nathaniel and John Wittingham Rogers, he started the Rogers Brothers company. They owned ships including the Tybee, Clay, Grotius, Augustus, Quill, and Charles Daggett, and pioneered trade with Zanzibar and New Holland. Their ships made more than 120 voyages around Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope. Later he was supercargo on the Ianthe and worked with his brother-in-law W. D. Pickman.

Rogers served on Salem’s Common Council and in the Massachusetts Legislature. He was a Whig and opposed Nathaniel Hawthorne, a Democratic-Republican, and helped in Hawthorne’s removal from the Boston Custom House. Some say Roger Chillingworth, a character in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, was based on Rogers.

He married Sarah Crowninshield Crowninshield on May 14, 1822; they had five sons and a daughter. After she died in 1835, he married Elizabeth Leavitt Pickman Rogers on March 17, 1847, and had additional children. Rogers died on June 11, 1873, in Salem at age 83 and was buried in Harmony Grove Cemetery. Through his daughter Elizabeth, he was the grandfather of Sir Dudley Pound, a senior British Admiral in World War II.