James Bowdoin II was born in Boston on August 7, 1726, to James Bowdoin and Hannah Portage Bowdoin. His paternal grandfather, Pierre Baudouin, was a French Huguenot refugee who traveled through Ireland and eastern Massachusetts before settling in Boston. James’s father transformed a modest inheritance and family trading concern into a substantial mercantile and landed fortune. The younger Bowdoin therefore grew up with both the memory of religious exile and the privileges of one of Massachusetts’s wealthiest commercial households.

Bowdoin attended Boston’s South Grammar School, now Boston Latin School, where the classical curriculum prepared boys for college through Latin, rhetoric, and disciplined reading. He entered Harvard College and graduated in 1745. At Harvard he studied the classical languages, logic, natural philosophy, mathematics, and theology. Instruction under the scientist John Winthrop helped awaken a lasting interest in astronomy and experimental science. Bowdoin’s curiosity about electricity later brought him into correspondence and collaboration with Benjamin Franklin, but its foundations lay in the education and intellectual habits he developed while young.

His father died in 1747, leaving the twenty-one-year-old Bowdoin a very large inheritance that included money, commercial interests, land in present-day Maine and elsewhere, and an ironworks. The fortune freed him from dependence upon a profession while imposing complicated responsibilities as a proprietor and investor. In 1748 he received his master’s degree from Harvard and married Elizabeth Erving, sister of his former college roommate. They eventually had two children who survived infancy.

Bowdoin spent his early adulthood managing property, expanding his learning, and participating in Boston’s cultivated social world. He traveled to Philadelphia in 1750 to meet Franklin and continued investigating electricity and astronomy. Wealth, education, marriage, and scientific reputation established him among the province’s leading gentlemen before he held major office. His election to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1753 marked the transition from private study and estate management to the political career that would place him at the center of the imperial crisis and the Revolution.