The Pentera Blog
The Amazing Story of the First American Charitable Gift Annuity
The history of the first American charitable gift annuity (CGA) and its connection to the American Revolution is told in stirring detail by Ron Brown, director of gift planning at Fordham University, on his Web site, www.giftplanninghistory.org, which he keeps up to date with new articles about the history of charitable gift planning.
The first modern CGA began in 1830 with John Trumbull, a renowned painter whose iconic Revolutionary War paintings were hanging in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol building (where they still are today). Despite his success, in 1830 he was 75 years old and broke.
Today the CGA is the second most common planned gift, after gifts by will, and the tried and true annuity concept dates back to antiquity and was particularly popular in ancient Rome. But annuities were little known in the American colonies, where Trumbull was born in 1756.
After graduating from Harvard, Trumbull served as an aide to General George Washington during the American Revolution. Despite being nearly blind in his left eye from a childhood injury, he was determined to become a painter - and with the encouragement of Thomas Jefferson began his celebrated historical series a few years after the war ended.
In 1817 Congress commissioned Trumbull to paint large versions of four of his works for the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., including his most famous painting, Declaration of Independence.
Despite such recognition, Trumbull was living alone in a New York City apartment in 1830, widowed and poor. His friend Benjamin Silliman, Yale's first science professor and the husband of Trumbull's niece, asked what he planned to do with more than a hundred paintings. Trumbull replied, according to the book Yale: A History: "I will give them to Yale College to be exhibited forever for the benefit of poor students provided the College will pay me a competent annuity for the remainder of my life."
Silliman thus became America's first gift planner, enduring a year and a half of difficult negotiations that were exacerbated because Yale had no money to either fund an annuity of $1,000 or to construct a gallery to display the works. But the amazing result was the nation's first college art gallery - and the first of the many thousands of CGAs that fund so much charitable work today.
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