Benjamin P. (Benjamin Peter) Hunt

Benjamin P. Hunt, also listed as Benjamin Peter Hunt, was born in 1808. Archival records at the Boston Public Library identify him as a longtime merchant involved in commerce in Haiti and the West Indies, and note that he built an extensive collection of materials relating to the Caribbean. That collection was important enough to be preserved by the library after his death in 1877.

Hunt is associated with more than one kind of writing. He is credited with Why Colored People in Philadelphia Are Excluded from the Street Cars, a work connected with the fight over racial exclusion in public transit, and with Facts & Notes Relating to the Redemptioners and the Early Emigration of the Poor to America, a large historical compilation on immigration and indentured labor. Together, these works show an author interested in both urgent public issues and neglected corners of the past.

Much about his personal life remains unclear in the sources readily available online, so the picture is incomplete. Even so, the record that survives presents him as a serious compiler of evidence, a participant in 19th-century debates, and a figure whose interests stretched from Philadelphia reform questions to Atlantic and Caribbean history.