Susan May Williams (2 April 1812 - 15 September 1881) was the daughter of Benjamin Williams, a prominent Baltimore merchant originally from Roxbury, Massachusetts, and his wife, Sarah Copeland, widow of Nathaniel Morton. In response to the opening of the Erie Canal, which was in direct competition with the port of Baltimore, Benjamin Williams became one of the founders of the first railroad company in the United States, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, chartered on 24 April 1827.
In November 1829, Susan married Jérôme Napoleon Bonaparte (1805–1870), son of the King of Westphalia, and a nephew of Napoleon I. He had refused to wait for an arranged marriage to a European princess, opting instead for the promise of the $200,000 fortune Susan brought to the marriage. The groom's maternal grandfather, William Patterson, one of the wealthiest men in Maryland, gave the couple a mansion (now Montrose Mansion) as a wedding gift in an attempt to match the bride's dowery.
Their children were:
- Charles Joseph Bonaparte; United States Attorney General and Secretary of the Navy.
- Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte II; served as an officer in the armies of both the United States and France.
Famous quotes containing the words susan and/or williams:
“Before any woman is a wife, a sister or a mother she is a human being. We ask nothing as women but everything as human beings.”
—Ida C. Hultin, U.S. minister and suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 17, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“In nothing was slavery so savage and relentless as in its attempted destruction of the family instincts of the Negro race in America. Individuals, not families; shelters, not homes; herding, not marriages, were the cardinal sins in that system of horrors.”
—Fannie Barrier Williams (1855–1944)