American Kings of Finance
of finance, nobody can question their courage in the presence of danger and difficulty. In this review of the lives of seven pioneers of finance in the United States at the beginning
of the nineteenth century, Mr. Minnigerode tells us, in a- style at once simple and effective, how several great family
fortunes of America were built up. • -
There is a curious sameness in the characters of these, gentlemen. They were buccaneers all—but they were
pirates with vision who sheltered their predatory instincts. under a coat of religious sentiment and a fervent belief in the future of their country. No matter how relentless' in business and no matter how unscrupulous in the pursuit of wealth, each. and all of them contributed to the progress of America. In their favour, too, was their great generosity.. If their gains were in many cases ill-gotten they all shared the impulse to build a church, endow a hospital or establish a library. .
Stephen Girard, son of a French naval officer, went to America as a cabin boy at the age of fourteen. In 1774, when twenty-eight, he settled in New York and began to engage in shipping. His first vessel was seized by the British. Undeterred, he continued his enterprise. By the time he was forty he had a fleet of ships, often making as much as $100,000 on a single successful voyage. When in 1791 the new national bank was opened in Philadelphia he made up the deficit by subscribing over $3,000,000.
This amazing man never mastered the English tongue, was ungracious and repellent, yet when he died it was discovered that he had left five and a half million dollars to found a college for " poor male white orphan children." In his favour one should remember that when his city was swept by yellow fever in 1793 and successive years, he volunteered his services and went everywhere among the stricken people.
Of the Astors, we learn that John Jacob was born in the little German village of Waldorf, the youngest of four sons of Jacob Ashdor, a butcher. John Jacob made his way to America and soon became known as a fur trader. In ten years he was worth £50,000. Then came disaster. His ship Tonquin ' on the Columbia river was raided by Indians and the crew slaughtered to the last man. A mortally wounded clerk touched off the powder magazine, so the ship was a total loss. Mr. Astor heard of it a month later and went to the theatre with a friend, who remonstrated with him at his callous behaviour. " Would you have me stay at home and weep for what I cannot help ? " he asked. " Fortitude in distress," was the motto of all these rugged pioneers. But John Jacob Astor had eggs in other baskets. He had been steadily buying property on the outskirts of New York, astute transactions involving the buying of mortgages and foreclosing, only to purchase at ridiculous sums at the public sale. He left eighteen million dollars to his son William and half a million to found a library.
Jay Cooke, another character of the period, failed three times before he was forty and within a. few years of that time he was head of " the greatest banking firm in the world —Jay Cooke and the American people." Just after the battle of Bull Run he raised two million dollars for the Government in a few hours and then went on to raise fifty million more from the New York bankers. More than once he saved the United States Treasury. Then came another crash. His Northern Pacific railway speculation failed, and the great panic of 1873 followed. His company was liquidated. At the age of fifty-two his career was over. • Poverty and disgrace faced him. Was he a failure ? Not at all. He lived to see his railway completed and Duluth- become_ the industrial centre he had foreseen. He was to engage in another venture and find success and rehabilitation. The Horn Silver Mine in Utah needed finance. He raised it and the property paid him $80,000 a year until he sold out in five years' time for one million dollars. At eighty-four he died, after building a seminary for girls. In this he resembled the others, but unlike them all men spoke well of him. " Uncle " Daniel Drew, of the Erie Railway, and his two apprentices, Jay Gould and the incredible James Fisk, occupied a large place in the most fantastic era of American finance. In the background were other mighty men including the great " Commodore " Cornelius Vanderbilt. Drew, Fisk, Gould and Vanderbilt—three bears and a bull. The bull beat them all eventually.
Jay Gould described himself as " the most hated man in America," and Wall Street called him the Corsair. Mr. Minnigerode gives a graphic description of the scene in the Gold Room when Gould sat and watched his partners going to destruction. Gould was a bear in bull's clothing, for while he had bargained with his associates to buy gold, he was secretly selling. He came out of the crash with $11,000,000 to the good. " One may condemn Mr. Gould but one cannot absolve a community, a Federal adminis- tration, a generation so crassly tolerant of depravity," remarks Mr. Minnigerode. When the English stockholders protested, Gould was made to disgorge $6,000,000 and resign from the Erie Railway. Even out of this he made money for, knowing that its stock would rise on his retirement, he bought heavily. Unlike the others Gould came of a dis- tinguished family. His grandfather, Colonel Abraham Gold, served with distinction in the Revolutionary War, himself descended from the worshipful Major Nathan Gold, a Deputy Governor and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Jay Gould died in 1892.after suffering from dyspepsia and insomnia for years. He left $72,000,000 to his sons and daughters and, like Commodore Vanderbilt, established a dynasty.
Mr. Burton Hendrick has described this period in American history as " an era of ruthlessness, of personal selfishness, of corruption, of disregard of private rights, of contempt for law, and yet of vast and beneficial achievement." Whether or not that is a right judgment, Mr. Minnigerode's book gives us vivid material on which to form our own
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