[5] When his mother died of smallpox, Cushing was raised by his uncle, slave and opium trader Thomas Handasyd Perkins (1764–1854).
[6] Cushing was reportedly very fond of the Perkins family and very often brought them house-warming gifts such as large boxes of the finest available white sugar.
They imported and traded rice during a famine in China and during the War of 1812, the family loaned their money out, at an interest rate of 18 percent, to other merchants in Canton.
The firm focused on opium and, by the 1820s, Cushing was known as the most influential of all the foreigners in Canton, having struck up a close relationship with the merchant Howqua, who at his death in 1843 was said to be the richest man in the world.
Cushing, eager for retirement and lacking a suitable replacement, made arrangements to dissolve Perkins & Company by a consolidation with Russell & Co. in 1830.
It was rumored at the time that there was much disappointment among the young ladies of Boston, who, as someone expressed it, "beset him like bumblebees about a lump of sugar."
[9] His obituary in The New York Times stated that: "He was so noted for his liberality to the poor that their pertinacity drove him from Boston, where he once had his residence.