Born in 1814, the son of a shipmaster who died young, James Henry grew up on Maine’s Penobscot Bay in the misty coastal village of Castine. His family was poor, but rich in Yankee blue blood—his mother was a Phelps, a venerable Puritan name, and Carletons had been living in New England since the 1660s. Both lines of his family had mottoes and coats-of-arms and sterling genealogies they were proud to recite.
