Produced by Annie McGuire
THE HISTORY OF THE GREAT AMERICAN FORTUNES
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
* * * * *
THE HISTORY OF TAMMANY HALL
HISTORY OF THE PUBLIC FRANCHISES IN NEW YORK CITY
HISTORY OF THE GREAT AMERICAN FORTUNES
BY
GUSTAVUS MYERS
AUTHOR OF "THE HISTORY OF TAMMANY HALL," "HISTORY OF
PUBLIC FRANCHISES IN NEW YORK CITY," ETC.
* * * * *
VOL. I.
PART I: CONDITIONS IN SETTLEMENT AND COLONIAL TIMES
PART II: THE GREAT LAND FORTUNES
* * * * *
CHICAGO
CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
1910
Copyright 1907, 1908 and 1909
By GUSTAVUS MYERS
PREFACE
In writing this work my aim has been to give the exact facts as far as
the available material allows. Necessarily it is impossible, from the
very nature of the case, to obtain all the facts. It is obvious that in
both past and present times the chief beneficiaries of our social and
industrial system have found it to their interest to represent their
accumulations as the rewards of industry and ability, and have likewise
had the strongest motives for concealing the circumstances of all those
complex and devious methods which have been used in building up great
fortunes. In this they have been assisted by a society so constituted
that the means by which these great fortunes have been amassed have been
generally lauded as legitimate and exemplary.
The possessors of towering fortunes have hitherto been described in two
ways. On the one hand, they have been held up as marvels of success, as
preeminent examples of thrift, enterprise and extraordinary ability.
More recently, however, the tendency in certain quarters has been
diametrically the opposite. This latter class of writers, intent upon
pandering to a supposed popular appetite for sensation, pile exposure
upon exposure, and hold up the objects of their diatribes as monsters of
commercial and political crime. Neither of these classes has sought to
establish definitely the relation of the great fortunes to the social
and industrial system which has propagated them. Consequently, these
superficial effusions and tirades--based upon a lack of understanding of
the propelling forces of society--have little value other than as
reflections of a certain aimless and disordered spirit of the times.
With all their volumes of print, they leave us in possession of a
scattered array of assertions, bearing some resemblance to facts, which,
however, fail to be facts inasmuch as they are either distorted to take
shape as fulsome eulogies or as wild, meaningless onslaughts.
They give no explanation of the fundamental laws and movements of the
present system, which have resulted in these vast fortunes; nor is there
the least glimmering of a scientific interpretation of a succession of
states and tendencies from which these men of great wealth have emerged.
With an entire absence of comprehension, they portray our
multimillionaires as a phenomenal group whose sudden rise to their
sinister and overshadowing position is a matter of wonder and surprise.
They do not seem to realize for a moment--what is clear to every real
student of economics--that the great fortunes are the natural, logical
outcome of a system based upon factors the inevitable result of which is
the utter despoilment of the many for the benefit of a few.
This being so, our plutocrats rank as nothing more or less than as so
many unavoidable creations of a set of processes which must imperatively
produce a certain set of results. These results we see in the
accelerated concentration of immense wealth running side by side with a
propertyless, expropriated and exploited multitude.
The dominant point of these denunciatory emanations, however, is that
certain of our men of great fortune have acquired their possessions by
dishonest methods. These men are singled out as especial creatures of
infamy. Their doings and sayings furnish material for many pages of
assault. Here, again, an utter lack of knowledge and perspective is
observable. For, while it is true that the methods employed by these
very rich men have been, and are, fraudulent, it is also true that they
are but the more conspicuous types of a whole class which, in varying
degrees, has used precisely the same methods, and the collective
fortunes and power of which have been derived from identically the same
sources.
In diagnosing an epidemic, it is not enough that we should be content
with the symptoms; wisdom and the protection of the community demand
that we should seek and eradicate the cause. Both wealth and poverty
spring from the same essential cause. Neither, then, should be
indiscriminately condemned as such; the all-important consideration is
to determine why they exist, and how such an absurd contrast can be
abolished.
In taking up a series of types of great fortunes, as I have done in this
work, my object has not been the current one of portraying them either
as remarkable successes or as unspeakable criminals. My purpose is to
present a sufficient number of examples as indicative of the whole
character of the vested class and of the methods which have been
employed. And in doing this, neither prejudice nor declamation has
entered. Such a presentation, I believe, cannot fail to be useful for
many reasons.
It will, in the first place, satisfy a spirit of inquiry. As time
passes, and the power of the propertied oligarchy becomes greater and
greater, more and more of a studied attempt is made to represent the
origin of that property as the product of honest toil and great public
service. Every searcher for truth is entitled to know whether this is
true or not. But what is much more important is for the people to know
what have been the cumulative effects of a system which subsists upon
the institutions of private property and wage-labor. If it possesses the
many virtues that it is said to possess, what are these virtues? If it
is a superior order of civilization, in what does this superiority
consist?
This work will assist in explaining, for naturally a virtuous and
superior order ought to produce virtuous and superior men. The kind and
quality of methods and successful ruling men, which this particular
civilization forces to the front, are set forth in this exposition.
Still more important is the ascertainment of where these stupendous
fortunes came from, their particular origin and growth, and what
significance the concomitant methods and institutions have to the great
body of the people.
I may add that in Part I no attempt has been made to present an
exhaustive account of conditions in Settlement and Colonial times. I
have merely given what I believe to be a sufficient resume of conditions
leading up to the later economic developments in the United States.
GUSTAVUS MYERS.
September 1, 1909.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE iii
PART I
CONDITIONS IN COLONIAL AND SETTLEMENT TIMES
CHAPTER
I. THE GREAT PROPRIETARY ESTATES 11
II. THE SWAY OF THE LANDGRAVES 23
III. THE RISE OF THE TRADING CLASS 45
IV. THE SHIPPING FORTUNES 57
V. THE SHIPPERS AND THEIR TIMES 65
VI. GIRARD--THE RICHEST OF THE SHIPPERS 83
PART II
THE GREAT LAND FORTUNES
I. THE ORIGIN OF HUGE CITY ESTATES 97
II. THE INCEPTION OF THE ASTOR FORTUNE 109
III. THE GROWTH OF THE ASTOR FORTUNE 126
IV. THE RAMIFICATIONS OF THE ASTOR FORTUNE 155
V. THE MOMENTUM OF THE ASTOR FORTUNE 182
VI. THE PROPULSION OF THE ASTOR FORTUNE 202
VII. THE CLIMAX OF THE ASTOR FORTUNE 224
VIII. OTHER LAND FORTUNES CONSIDERED 242
IX. THE FIELD FORTUNE IN EXTENSO 262
X. FURTHER VISTAS OF THE FIELD FORTUNE 278
PART I
CONDITIONS IN SETTLEMENT AND COLONIAL TIMES
CHAPTER I
THE GREAT PROPRIETARY ESTATES
The noted private fortunes of settlement and colonial times were derived
from the ownership of land and the gains of trading. Usually both had a
combined influence and were frequently attended by agriculture.
Throughout the colonies were scattered lords of the soil who held vast
territorial domains over which they exercised an arbitrary and, in some
portions of the colonies, a feudal sway.
Nearly all the colonies were settled by chartered companies, organized
for purely commercial purposes and the success of which largely depended
upon the emigration which they were able to promote. These corporations
were vested with enormous powers and privileges which, in effect,
constituted them as sovereign rulers, although their charters were
subject to revision or amendment. The London Company, thrice chartered
to take over to itself the land and resources of Virginia and populate
its zone of rule, was endowed with sweeping rights and privileges which
made it an absolute monopoly. The impecunious noblemen or gentlemen who
transported themselves to Virginia to recoup their dissipated fortunes
or seek adventure, encountered no trouble in getting large grants of
land especially when after 1614 tobacco became a fashionable article in
England and took rank as a valuable commercial commodity.
Over this colony now spread planters who hastened to avail themselves of
this new-found means of getting rich. Land and climate alike favored
them, but they were confronted with a scarcity of labor. The emergency
was promptly met by the buying of white servants in England to be resold
in Virginia to the highest bidder. This, however, was not sufficient,
and complaints poured over to the English government. As the demands of
commerce had to be sustained at any price, a system was at once put into
operation of gathering in as many of the poorer English class as could
be impressed upon some pretext, and shipping them over to be held as
bonded laborers. Penniless and lowly Englishmen, arrested and convicted
for any one of the multitude of offenses then provided for severely in
law, were transported as criminals or sold into the colonies as slaves
for a term of years. The English courts were busy grinding out human
material for the Virginia plantations; and, as the objects of commerce
were considered paramount, this process of disposing of what was
regarded as the scum element was adjudged necessary and justifiable. No
voice was raised in protest.
THE INTRODUCTION OF BLACK SLAVES.
But, fast as the English courts might work, they did not supply laborers
enough. It was with exultation that in 1619 the plantation owners were
made acquainted with a new means of supplying themselves with adequate
workers. A Dutch ship arrived at Jamestown with a cargo of negroes from
Guinea. The blacks were promptly bought at good prices by the planters.
From this time forth the problem of labor was considered sufficiently
solved. As chattel slavery harmonized well with the necessities of
tobacco growing and gain, it was accepted as a just condition and was
continued by the planters, whose interests and standards were the
dominant factor.
After 1620, when the London Company was dissolved by royal decree, and
the commerce of Virginia made free, the planters were the only factor.
Virginia, it was true, was made a royal province and put under deputy
rule, but the big planters contrived to get the laws and customs their
self-interest called for. There were only two classes--the rich
planters, with their gifts of land, their bond-servants and slaves and,
on the other hand, the poor whites. A middle class was entirely lacking.
As the supreme staple of commerce and as currency itself, tobacco could
buy anything, human, as well as inert, material. The labor question had
been sufficiently vanquished, but not so the domestic. Wives were much
needed; the officials in London instantly hearkened, and in 1620 sent
over sixty young women who were auctioned off and bought at from one
hundred and twenty to one hundred and sixty pounds of tobacco each.
Tobacco then sold at three shillings a pound. Its cultivation was
assiduously carried on. The use of the land mainly for agricultural
purposes led to the foundation of numerous settlements along the shores,
bays, rivers, and creeks with which Virginia is interspersed and which
afforded accessibility to the sea ports. As the years wore on and the
means and laborers of the planters increased, their lands became more
extensive, so that it was not an unusual thing to find plantations of
fifty or sixty thousand acres. But neither in Virginia nor in Maryland,
under the almost regal powers of Lord Baltimore who had propriety rights
over the whole of his province, were such huge estates to be seen as
were being donated in the northern colonies, especially in New
Netherlands and in New England.
FEUDAL GRANTS IN THE NORTH.
In its intense aim to settle New Netherlands and make use of its
resources, Holland, through the States General, offered extraordinary
inducements to promoters of colonization. The prospect of immense
estates, with feudal rights and privileges, was held out as the alluring
incentive. The bill of Freedoms and Exemptions of 1629 made easy the
possibility of becoming a lord of the soil with comprehensive
possessions and powers. Any man who should succeed in planting a colony
of fifty "souls," each of whom was to be more than fifteen years old,
was to become at once a patroon with all the rights of lordship. He was
permitted to own sixteen miles along shore or on one side of a navigable
river. An alternative was given of the ownership of eight miles on one
side of a river and as far into the interior "as the situation of the
occupiers will permit." The title was vested in the patroon forever, and
he was presented with a monopoly of the resources of his domain except
furs and pelts. No patroon or other colonist was allowed to make woolen,
linen, cotton or cloth of any material under pain of banishment.[1]
These restrictions were in the interest of the Dutch West India Company,
a commercial corporation which had well-nigh dictatorial powers. A
complete monopoly throughout the whole of its subject territory, it was
armed with sweeping powers, a formidable equipment, and had a great
prestige. It was somewhat of a cross between legalized piracy and a body
of adroit colonization promoters. Pillage and butchery were often its
auxiliaries, although in these respects it in nowise equalled its twin
corporation, the Dutch East India Company, whose exploitation of
Holland's Asiatic possessions was a long record of horrors.
THE DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY.
The policy of the Dutch West India Company was to offer generous prizes
for peopling the land while simultaneously forbidding competition with
any of the numerous products or commodities dealt in by itself. This had
much to do with determining the basic character of the conspicuous
fortunes of a century and two centuries later. It followed that when
native industries were forbidden or their output monopolized not only by
the Dutch West India Company in New Netherlands, but by other companies
elsewhere in the colonies, that ownership of land became the mainstay of
large private fortunes with agriculture as an accompanying factor.
Subsequently the effects of this continuous policy were more fully seen
when England by law after law paralyzed or closed up many forms of
colonial manufacture. The feudal character of Dutch colonization, as
carried on by the Dutch West India Company, necessarily created great
landed estates, the value of which arose not so much from agriculture,
as was the case in Virginia, Maryland and later the Carolinas and
Georgia, but from the natural resources of the land. The superb
primitive timber brought colossal profits in export, and there were
also very valuable fishery rights where an estate bounded a shore or
river. The pristine rivers were filled with great shoals of fish, to
which the river fishing of the present day cannot be compared. As
settlement increased, immigration pressed over, and more and more ships
carried cargo to and fro, these estates became consecutively more
valuable.
To encourage colonization to its colonies still further, the States
General in 1635 passed a new decree. It repeated the feudal nature of
the rights granted and made strong additions.
Did any aspiring adventurer seek to leap at a bound to the exalted
position of patroonship? The terms were easy. All that he had to do was
to found a colony of forty-eight adults and he had a liberal six years
in which to do it. For his efforts he was allowed even more extensive
grants of land than under the act of 1629. So complete were his powers
of proprietorship that no one could approach within seven or eight miles
of his jurisdiction without his express permission. His was really a
principality. Over its bays, rivers, and islands, had it any, as well as
over the mainland, he was given command forever. The dispensation of
justice was his exclusive right. He and he only was the court with
summary powers of "high, low and middle jurisdiction," which were
harshly or capriciously exercised. Not only did he impose sentence for
violation of laws, but he, himself, ordained those laws and they were
laws which were always framed to coincide with his interests and
personality. He had full authority to appoint officers and magistrates
and enact laws. And finally he had the power of policing his domain and
of making use of the titles and arms of his colonies. All these things
he could do "according to his will and pleasure." These absolute rights
were to descend to his heirs and assigns.[2]
OLD WORLD TRADERS BECOME FEUDAL LORDS.
Thus, at the beginning of settlement times, the basis was laid in law
and custom of a landed aristocracy, or rather a group of intrenched
autocrats, along the banks of the Hudson, the shores of the ocean and
far inland. The theory then prevailed that the territory of the colonies
extended westward to the Pacific.
From these patroons and their lineal or collateral descendants issued
many of the landed generations of families which, by reason of their
wealth and power, proved themselves powerful factors in the economic and
political history of the country. The sinister effects of this first
great grasping of the land long permeated the whole fabric of society
and were prominently seen before and after the Revolution, and
especially in the third and fourth decades of the eighteenth century.
The results, in fact, are traceable to this very day, even though laws
and institutions are so greatly changed. Other colonies reflected the
constant changes of government, ruling party or policy of England, and
colonial companies chartered by England frequently forfeited their
charters. But conditions in New Netherlands remained stable under Dutch
rule, and the accumulation of great estates was intensified under
English rule. It was in New York that, at that period, the foremost
colonial estates and the predominant private fortunes were mostly held.
The extent of some of those early estates was amazingly large. But they
were far from being acquired wholly by colonization methods.
Many of the officers and directors of the Dutch West India Company were
Amsterdam merchants. Active, scheming, self-important men, they were
mighty in the money marts but were made use of, and looked down upon, by
the old Dutch aristocracy. Having amassed fortunes, these merchants
yearned to be the founders of great estates; to live as virtual princes
in the midst of wide possessions, even if these were still comparative
solitudes. This aspiration was mixed with the mercenary motive of
themselves owning the land from whence came the furs, pelts, timber and
the waters yielding the fishes.
One of these directors was Kiliaen van Rensselaer, an Amsterdam pearl
merchant. In 1630 his agents bought for him from the Indians a tract of
land twenty-four miles long and forty-eight broad on the west bank of
the Hudson. It comprised, it was estimated, seven hundred thousand acres
and included what are now the counties of Albany, Rensselaer, a part of
Columbia County and a strip of what is at present Massachusetts. And
what was the price paid for this vast estate? As the deeds showed, the
munificent consideration of "certain quantities of duffels, axes, knives
and wampum,"[3] which is equal to saying that the pearl merchant got it
for almost nothing. Two other directors--Godyn and Bloemart--became
owners of great feudal estates. One of these tracts, in what is now New
Jersey, extended sixteen miles both in length and breadth, forming a
square of sixty-four miles.[4]
So it was that these shrewd directors now combined a double advantage.
Their pride was satisfied with the absolute lordship of immense areas,
while the ownership of land gave them the manifold benefits and greater
profits of trading with the Indians at first hand. From a part of the
proceeds they later built manors which were contemplated as wonderful
and magnificent. Surrounded and served by their retainers, agents,
vassal tenants and slaves, they lived in princely and licentious style,
knowing no law in most matters except their unrestrained will. They
beheld themselves as ingenious and memorable founders of a potential
landed aristocracy whose possessions were more extended than that of
Europe. Wilderness much of it still was, but obviously the time was
coming when the population would be fairly abundant. The laws of entail
and primogeniture, then in full force, would operate to keep the estates
intact and gifted with inherent influence for generations.
Along with their landed estates, these directors had a copious inflowing
revenue. The Dutch West India Company was in a thriving condition. By
the year 1629 it had more than one hundred full-rigged ships in
commission. Most of them were fitted out for war on the commerce of
other countries or on pirates. Fifteen thousand seamen and soldiers were
on its payroll; in that one year it used more than one hundred thousand
pounds of powder--significant of the grim quality of business done. It
had more than four hundred cannon and thousands of other destructive
weapons.[5] Anything conducive to profit, no matter if indiscriminate
murder, was accepted as legitimate and justifiable functions of trade,
and was imposed alike upon royalty, which shared in the proceeds, and
upon the people at large. The energetic trading class, concentrated in
the one effort of getting money, and having no scruples as to the means
in an age when ideals were low and vulgar, had already begun to make
public opinion in many countries, although this public opinion counted
for little among submissive peoples. It was the king and the governing
class, either or both, whose favor and declarations counted; and so long
as these profited by the devious extortions and villainies of trade the
methods were legitimatized, if not royally sanctified.
AN ARISTOCRACY SOLIDLY GROUNDED.
A more potentially robust aristocracy than that which was forming in New
Netherlands could hardly be imagined. Resting upon gigantic gifts of
land, with feudal accompaniments, it held a monopoly, or nearly one, of
the land's resources. The old aristocracy of Holland grew jealous of the
power and pretensions of what it frowned upon as an upstart trading
clique and tried to curtail the rights and privileges of the patroons.
These latter contended that their absolute lordship was indisputable; to
put it in modern legal terminology that a contract could not be
impaired. They elaborated upon the argument that they had spent a "ton
of gold" (amounting to one hundred thousand guilders or forty thousand
dollars) upon their colonies.[6] They not only carried their point but
their power was confirmed and enlarged.
Now was seen the spectacle of the middle-class men of the Old World, the
traders, more than imitating--far exceeding--the customs and pretensions
of the aristocracy of their own country which they had inveighed
against, and setting themselves up as the original and mighty landed
aristocracy of the new country. The patroons encased themselves in an
environment of pomp and awe. Like so many petty monarchs each had his
distinct flag and insignia; each fortified his domain with fortresses,
armed with cannon and manned by his paid soldiery. The colonists were
but humble dependants; they were his immediate subjects and were forced
to take the oath of fealty and allegiance to him.[7]
In the old country the soil had long since passed into the hands of a
powerful few and was made the chief basis for the economic and political
enslavement of the people. To escape from this thralldom many of the
immigrants had endured hardships and privation to get here. They
expected that they could easily get land, the tillage of which would
insure them a measure of independence. Upon arriving they found vast
available parts of the country, especially the most desirable and
accessible portions bordering shores or rivers, preempted. An exacting
and tyrannous feudal government was in full control. Their only recourse
in many instances was to accept the best of unwelcome conditions and
become tenants of the great landed functionaries and workers for them.
THE ABASEMENT OF THE WORKERS.
The patroons naturally encouraged immigration. Apart from the additional
values created by increased population, it meant a quantity of labor
which, in turn, would precipitate wages to the lowest possible scale.
At the same time, in order to stifle every aspiring quality in the
drudging laborer, and to keep in conformity with the spirit and custom
of the age which considered the worker a mere menial undeserving of any
rights, the whole force of the law was made use of to bring about sharp
discriminations. The laborer was purposely abased to the utmost and he
was made to feel in many ways his particular low place in the social
organization.
Far above him, vested with enormous personal and legal powers, towered
the patroon, while he, the laborer, did not have the ordinary burgher
right, that of having a minor voice in public affairs. The burgher right
was made entirely dependent upon property, which was a facile method of
disfranchising the multitude of poor immigrants and of keeping them
down. Purchase was the one and only means of getting this right. To keep
it in as small and circumscribed class as possible the price was made
abnormally high. It was enacted in New Netherlands in 1659, for
instance, that immigrants coming with cargoes had to pay a thousand
guilders for the burgher right.[8] As the average laborer got two
shillings a day for his long hours of toil, often extending from sunrise
to sunset, he had little chance of ever getting this sum together. The
consequence was that the merchants became the burgher class; and all the
records of the time seem to prove conclusively that the merchants were
servile instruments of the patroons whose patronage and favor they
assiduously courted. This deliberately pursued policy of degrading and
despoiling the laboring class incited bitter hatreds and resentments,
the effects of which were permanent.
[Illustration: JEREMIAS VAN RENSSLAERR.
One of the Patroons.
(From an Engraving.)]
[Illustration: Signature]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] O'Callaghan's "History of New Netherlands," 1:112-120.
[2] Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New York,
1:89-100.
[3] O'Callaghan, 1:124. Although it was said that Kiliaen van Rensselaer
visited America, it seems to be established that he never did. He
governed his estate as an absentee landgrave, through agents. He was the
most powerful of all of the patroons.
[4] Ibid., 125.
[5] Colonial Documents, 1:41. The primary object of this company was a
monopoly of the Indian trade, not colonization. The "princely" manors
were a combination fort and trading house, surrounded by moat and
stockade.
[6] Colonial Documents, 1:86.
[7] "Annals of Albany," iii:287. The power of the patroons over their
tenants, or serfs, was almost unlimited. No "man or woman, son or
daughter, man servant or maid servant" could leave a patroon's service
during the time that they had agreed to remain, except by his written
consent, no matter what abuses or breaches of contract were committed by
the patroon.
[8] "Burghers and Freemen of New York":29.
CHAPTER II
THE SWAY OF THE LANDGRAVES
While this seizure of land was going on in New Netherlands, vast areas
in New England were passing suddenly into the hands of a few men. These
areas sometimes comprised what are now entire States, and were often
palpably obtained by fraud, collusion, trickery or favoritism. The
Puritan influx into Massachusetts was an admixture of different
occupations. Some were traders or merchants; others were mechanics. By
far the largest portion were cultivators of the soil whom economic
pressure not less than religious persecution had driven from England. To
these land was a paramount consideration.
Describing how the English tiller had been expropriated from the soil
Wallace says: "The ingenuity of lawyers and direct landlord legislation
steadily increased the powers of great landowners and encroached upon
the rights of the people, till at length the monstrous doctrine arose
that a landless Englishman has no right whatever to enjoyment even of
the unenclosed commons and heaths and the mountain and forest wastes of
his native country, but is everywhere in the eye of the law a trespasser
whenever he ventures off a public road or pathway."[9] By the sixteenth
century the English peasantry had been evicted even from the commons,
which were turned into sheep walks by the impoverished barons to make
money from the Flemish wool market. The land at home wrenched from them,
the poor English immigrants ardently expected that in America land would
be plentiful. They were bitterly disappointed. The various English
companies, chartered by royal command with all-inclusive powers, despite
the frequent opposition of Parliament, held the trade and land of the
greater part of the colonies as a rigid monopoly. In the case of the New
England Company severe punishment was threatened to all who should
encroach upon its rights. It also was freed from payment for twenty-one
years and was relieved from taxes forever.
THE COLONIES CARVED INTO GREAT ESTATES.
The New England colonies were carved out into a few colossal private
estates. The example of the British nobility was emulated; but the
chartered companies did not have to resort to the adroit, disingenuous,
subterranean methods which the English land magnates used in
perpetuating their seizure, as so graphically described by S. W.
Thackery in his work, "The Land and the Community". The land in New
England was taken over boldly and arbitrarily by the directors of the
Plymouth Company, the most powerful of all the companies which exploited
New England. The handful of men who participated in this division,
sustained with a high hand their claims and pretensions, and augmented
and fortified them by every device. Quite regardless of who the changing
monarch was, or what country ruled, these colonial magnates generally
contrived to keep the power strong in their own hands. There might be a
superficial show of changed conditions, an apparent infusion of
democracy, but, in reality, the substance remained the same.
This was nowhere more lucidly or strikingly illustrated than after New
Netherlands passed into the control of the English and was renamed New
York. Laws were decreed which seemed to bear the impress of justice and
democracy. Monopoly was abolished, every man was given the much-prized
right of trading in furs and pelts, and the burgher right was extended
and its acquisition made easier.
However well-intentioned these altered laws were, they turned out to be
shallow delusions. Under English rule, the gifts of vast estates in New
York were even greater than under Dutch rule and beyond doubt were
granted corruptly or by favoritism. Miles upon miles of land in New York
which had not been preempted were brazenly given away by the royal
Governor Fletcher for bribes; and it was suspected, although not clearly
proved, that he trafficked in estates in Pennsylvania during the time
when, by royal order, he supplanted William Penn in the government of
that province. From the evidence which has come down it would appear
that any one who offered Fletcher his price could be transformed into a
great vested land owner. But still the people imagined that they had a
real democratic government. Had not England established representative
assemblies? These, with certain restrictions, alone had the power of
law-making for the provinces. These representative bodies were supposed
to rest upon the vote of the people, which vote, however, was determined
by a strict property qualification.
THE LANDED PROPRIETORS THE POLITICAL RULERS.
What really happened was that, apparently deprived of direct feudal
power, the landed interests had no difficulty in retaining their
law-making ascendancy by getting control of the various provincial
assemblies. Bodies supposedly representative of the whole people were,
in fact, composed of great landowners, of a quota of merchants who were
subservient to the landowners, and a sprinkling of farmers. In Virginia
this state was long-continuing, while in New York province it became
such an intolerable abuse and resulted in such oppressions to the body
of the people, that on Sept. 20, 1764, Lieutenant-Governor Cadwallader
Colden, writing from New York to the Lords of Trade at London, strongly
expostulated. He described how the land magnates had devised to set
themselves up as the law-making class. Three of the large land grants
contained provisions guaranteeing to each owner the privilege of sending
a representative to the General Assembly. These landed proprietors,
therefore, became hereditary legislators. "The owners of other great
Patents," Colden continued, "being men of the greatest opulence in the
several American counties where these Tracts are, have sufficient
influence to be perpetually elected for those counties. The General
Assembly, then, of this Province consists of the owners of these
extravagant Grants, the merchants of New York, the principal of them
strongly connected with the owners of these Great Tracts by Family
interest, and of Common Farmers, which last are men easily deluded and
led away with popular arguments of Liberty and Privileges. The
Proprietors of the great tracts are not only freed from the quit rents
which the other landholders in the Provinces pay, but by their
influences in the Assembly are freed from every other public Tax on
their lands."[10]
What Colden wrote of the landed class of New York was substantially true
of all the other provinces. The small, powerful clique of great
landowners had cunningly taken over to themselves the functions of
government and diverted them to their own ends. First the land was
seized and then it was declared exempt of taxation.
Inevitably there was but one sequel. Everywhere, but especially so in
New York and Virginia, the landed proprietors became richer and more
arrogant, while poverty, even in new country with extraordinary
resources, took root and continued to grow. The burden of taxation fell
entirely upon the farming and laboring classes; although the merchants
were nominally taxed they easily shifted their obligations upon those
two classes by indirect means of trade. Usurious loans and mortgages
became prevalent.
It was now seen what meaningless tinsel the unrestricted right to trade
in furs was. To get the furs access to the land was necessary; and the
land was monopolized. In the South, where tobacco and corn were the
important staples, the worker was likewise denied the soil except as a
laborer or tenant, and in Massachusetts colony, where fortunes were
being made from timber, furs and fisheries, the poor man had practically
no chance against the superior advantages of the landed and privileged
class. These conditions led to severe reprisals. Several uprisings in
New York, Bacon's rebellion in Virginia, after the restoration of
Charles II, when that king granted large tracts of land belonging to the
colony to his favorites, and subsequently, in 1734, a ferment in
Georgia, even under the mild proprietary rule of the philanthropist
Oglethorpe, were all really outbursts of popular discontent largely
against the oppressive form in which land was held and against
discriminative taxation, although each uprising had its local issues
differing from those elsewhere.
In this conflict between landed class and people, the only hope of the
mass of the people lay in getting the favorable attention of royal
governors. At least one of these considered earnestly and
conscientiously the grave existing abuses and responded to popular
protest which had become bitter.
A CONFLICT BETWEEN LAND MAGNATES AND PEOPLE.
This official was the Earl of Bellomont. Scarcely had he arrived after
his appointment as Captain-General and Governor of Massachusetts Bay,
New York and other provinces, when he was made acquainted with the
widespread discontent. The landed magnates had not only created an
abysmal difference between themselves and the masses in possessions and
privileges, but also in dress and air, founded upon strict distinctions
in law. The landed aristocrat with his laces and ruffles, his silks and
his gold and silver ornaments and his expensive tableware, his
consciously superior air and tone of grandiose authority, was far
removed in established position from the mechanic or the laborer with
his coarse clothes and mean habitation. Laws were long in force in
various provinces which prohibited the common people from wearing gold
and silver lace, silks and ornaments. Bellomont noted the sense of deep
injustice smouldering in the minds of the people and set out to
confiscate the great estates, particularly, as he set forth, as many of
them had been obtained by bribery.
It was with amazement that Bellomont learned that one man, Colonel
Samuel Allen, claimed to own the whole of what is now the state of New
Hampshire. When, in 1635, the Plymouth Colony was about to surrender its
charter, its directors apportioned their territory to themselves
individually. New Hampshire went by lot to Captain John Mason who, some
years before, had obtained a patent to the same area from the company.
Charles I had confirmed the company's action. After Mason's death, his
claims were bought up by Allen for about $1,250. Mason, however, left an
heir and protracted litigation followed. In the meantime, settlers
taking advantage of these conflicting claims, proceeded to spread over
New Hampshire and hew the forests for cleared agricultural land. Allen
managed to get himself appointed governor of New Hampshire in 1692 and
declared the whole province his personal property and threatened to oust
the settlers as trespassers unless they came to terms. There was
imminent danger of an uprising of the settlers, who failed to see why
the land upon which they had spent labor did not belong to them.
Bellomont investigated; and in communication, dated June 22, 1700, to
the Lords of Trade, denounced Allen's title as defective and
insufficient, and brought out the charge that Allen had tried to get his
confirmation of his, Allen's, claims by means of a heavy bribe.
ATTEMPTED BRIBERY CHARGED.
"There was an offer made me," Bellomont wrote, "of L10,000 in money, but
I thank God I had not the least tempting thought to accept of the offer
and I hope nothing in this world will ever be able to attempt me to
betray England in the least degree. This offer was made me three or four
times." Bellomont added: "I will make it appear that the lands and woods
claimed by Colonel Allen are much more valuable than ten of the biggest
estates in England, and I will rate those ten estates at L300,000 a
piece, one with another, which is three millions. By his own confession
to me at Pescattaway last summer, he valued the Quit Rents of his lands
(as he calls 'em) at L22,000 per annum at 3d per acre of 6d in the pound
of all improv'd Rents; then I leave your lordships to judge what an
immense estate the improv'd rents must be, which (if his title be
allowed) he has as good a right to the forementioned Quit Rents. And all
this besides the Woods which I believe he might very well value at half
the worth of the lands. There never was, I believe, since the world
began so great a bargain as Allen has had of Mason, if it be allowed to
stand good, that all this vast estate I have been naming should be
purchased for a poor L250 and that a desperate debt, too, as Col. Allen
thought. He pretends to a great part of this province as far Westward as
Cape St. Ann, which is said to take in 17 of the best towns in this
province next to Boston, the best improved land, and, (I think Col.
Allen told me) 8 or 900,000 acres of their land. If Col. Allen shall at
any time go about to make a forcible entry on these lands he pretends to
(for, to be sure, the people will never turn tenants to him willingly)
the present occupants will resist him by any force he shall bring and
the Province will be put to a combustion and what may be the course I
dread to think."...[11]
But the persistent Allen did not establish his claim. Several times he
lost in the litigation, the last time in 1715. His death was followed by
his son's death; and after sixty years of fierce animosities and
litigation, the whole contention was allowed to lapse. Says Lodge: "His
heirs were minors who did not push the controversy, and the claim soon
sank out of sight to the great relief of the New Hampshire people, whose
right to their homes had so long been in question."[12]
Similarly, another area, the entirety of what is now the State of Maine,
went to the individual ownership of Sir Fernandino Gorges, the same who
had betrayed Essex to Queen Elizabeth and who had received rich rewards
for his treachery.[13] The domain descended to his grandson, Fernando
Gorges, who, on March 13, 1677, sold it by deed to John Usher, a Boston
merchant, for L1,250. The ominous dissatisfaction of the New Hampshire
and other settlers with the monopolization of land was not slighted by
the English government; at the very time Usher bought Maine the
government was on the point of doing the same thing and opening the land
for settlement. Usher at once gave a deed of the province to the
governor and company of Massachusetts, of which colony and later, State,
it remained a part until its creation as a State in 1820.[14]
These were two notable instances of vast land grants which reverted to
the people. In most of the colonies the popular outcry for free access
to the land was not so effective. In Pennsylvania, after the government
was restored to Penn, and in part of New Jersey conditions were more
favorable to the settlers. In those colonies corrupt usurpations of the
land were comparatively few, although the proprietary families continued
to hold extensive tracts. Penn's sons by his second wife, for instance,
became men of great wealth.[15] The pacific and conciliatory Quaker
faith operated as a check on any local extraordinary misuse of power.
Unfortunately for historical accuracy and penetration, there is an
obscurity as to the intimate circumstances under which many of the large
private estates in the South were obtained. The general facts as to
their grants, of course, are well known, but the same specific,
underlying details, such as may be disinterred from Bellomont's
correspondence, are lacking. In New York, at least, and presumably
during Fletcher's sway of government in Pennsylvania, great land grants
went for bribes. This is definitely brought out in Bellomont's official
communications.
VAST ESTATES SECURED BY BRIBERY.
Fletcher, it would seem, had carried on a brisk traffic in creating by a
stroke of the quill powerfully rich families by simply granting them
domains in return for bribes.
Captain John R. N. Evans had been in command of the royal warship
Richmond. An estate was his fervent ambition. Fletcher's mandate gave
him a grant of land running forty miles one way, and thirty another, on
the west bank of the Hudson. Beginning at the south line of the present
town of New Paltry, Ulster County, it included the southern tier of the
now existing towns in that picturesque county, two-thirds of the fertile
undulations of Orange County and a part of the present town of
Haverstraw. It is related of this area, that there was "but one house on
it, or rather a hut, where a poor man lives." Notwithstanding this lone,
solitary subject, Evans saw great trading and seignorial possibilities
in his tract. And what did he pay for this immense stretch of
territory? A very modest bribe; common report had it that he gave
Fletcher L100 for the grant.[16]
Nicholas Bayard, of whom it is told that he was a handy go-between in
arranging with the sea pirates the price that they should pay for
Fletcher's protection, was another favored personage. Bayard was the
recipient of a grant forty miles long and thirty broad on both sides of
Schoharie Creek. Col. William Smith's prize was a grant from Fletcher of
an estate fifty miles in length on Nassau--now Long Island. According to
Bellomont, Smith got this land "arbitrarily and by strong hand." Smith
was in collusion with Fletcher, and moreover, was chief justice of the
province, "a place of great awe as well as authority." This judicial
land wrester forced the town of Southampton to accept the insignificant
sum of L10 for the greater part of forty miles of beach--a singularly
profitable transaction for Smith, who cleared in one year L500, the
proceeds of whales taken there, as he admitted to Bellomont.[17] Henry
Beekman, the astute and smooth founder of a rich and powerful family,
was made a magnate of the first importance by a grant from Fletcher of a
tract sixteen miles in length in Dutchess County, and also of another
estate running twenty miles along the Hudson and eight miles inland.
This estate he valued at L5,000.[18] Likewise Peter Schuyler, Godfrey
Dellius and their associates had conjointly secured by Fletcher's
patent, a grant fifty miles long in the romantic Mohawk Valley--a grant
which "the Mohawk Indians have often complained of". Upon this estate
they placed a value of L25,000. This was a towering fortune for the
period; in its actual command of labor, necessities, comforts and
luxuries it ranked as a power of transcending importance.
These were some of the big estates created by "Colonel Fletcher's
intolerable corrupt selling away the lands of this Province," as
Bellomont termed it in his communication to the Lords of Trade of Nov.
28, 1700. Fletcher, it was set forth, profited richly by these corrupt
grants. He got in bribes, it was charged, at least L4,000.[19] But
Fletcher was not the only corrupt official. In his interesting work on
the times,[20] George W. Schuyler presents what is an undoubtedly
accurate description of how Robert Livingston, progenitor of a rich and
potent family which for generations exercised a profound influence in
politics and other public affairs, contrived to get together an estate
which soon ranked as the second largest in New York state and as one of
the greatest in the colonies.
Livingston was the younger son of a poor exiled clergyman. In currying
favor with one official after another he was unscrupulous, dexterous and
adaptable. He invariably changed his politics with the change of
administration. In less than a year after his arrival he was appointed
to an office which yielded him a good income. This office he held for
nearly half a century, and simultaneously was the incumbent of other
lucrative posts. Offices were created by Governor Dongan apparently for
his sole benefit. His passion was to get together an estate which would
equal the largest. Extremely penurious, he loaned money at frightfully
usurious rates and hounded his victims without a vestige of
sympathy.[21] As a trader and government contractor he made enormous
profits; such was his cohesive collusion with high officials that
competitors found it impossible to outdo him. A current saying of him
was that he made a fortune by "pinching the bellies of the
soldiers"--that is, as an army contractor who defrauded in quantity and
quality of supplies. By a multitude of underhand and ignoble artifices
he finally found himself the lord of a manor sixteen miles long and
twenty-four broad. On this estate he built flour and saw mills, a bakery
and a brewery. In his advanced old age he exhibited great piety but held
on grimly to every shilling that he could and as long as he could. When
he died about 1728--the exact date is unknown--at the age of 74 years,
he left an estate which was considered of such colossal value that its
true value was concealed for fear of further enraging the discontented
people.
EFFECTS OF THE LAND SEIZURES.
The seizure of these vast estates and the arbitrary exclusion of the
many from the land produced a combustible situation. An instantaneous
and distinct cleavage of class divisions was the result. Intrenched in
their possessions the landed class looked down with haughty disdain upon
the farming and laboring classes. On the other hand, the farm laborer
with his sixteen hours work a day for a forty-cent wage, the carpenter
straining for his fifty-two cents a day, the shoemaker drudging for his
seventy-three cents a day and the blacksmith for his seventy cents,[22]
thought over this injustice as they bent over their tasks. They could
sweat through their lifetime at honest labor, producing something of
value and yet be a constant prey to poverty while a few men, by means of
bribes, had possessed themselves of estates worth tens of thousands of
pounds and had preempted great stretches of the available lands.
In consulting extant historical works it is noticeable that they give
but the merest shadowy glimpse of this intense bitterness of what were
called the lower classes, and of the incessant struggle now raging, now
smouldering, between the landed aristocracy and the common people.
Contrary to the roseate descriptions often given of the independent
position of the settlers at that time, it was a time when the use and
misuse of law brought about sharp divisions of class lines which arose
from artificially created inequalities, economically and politically.
With the great landed estates came tenantry, wage slavery and chattel
slavery, the one condition the natural generator of the others.
The rebellious tendency of the poor colonists against becoming tenants,
and the usurpation of the land, were clearly brought out by Bellomont in
a letter written on Nov. 28, 1700, to the Lords of Trade. He complained
that "people are so cramped here for want of land that several families
within my own knowledge and observation are remov'd to the new country
(a name they give to Pennsylvania and the Jerseys) for, to use Mr.
Graham's expression to me, and that often repeated, too, what man will
be such a fool as to become a base tenant to Mr. Dellius, Colonel
Schuyler, Mr. Livingston (and so he ran through the whole role of our
mighty landgraves) when for crossing Hudson's River that man can, for a
song, purchase a good freehold in the Jerseys."
If the immigrant happened to be able to muster a sufficient sum he
could, indeed, become an independent agriculturist in New Jersey and in
parts of Pennsylvania and provide himself with the tools of trade. But
many immigrants landed with empty pockets and became laborers dependent
upon the favor of the landed proprietors. As for the artisans--the
carpenters, masons, tailors, blacksmiths--they either kept to the cities
and towns where their trade principally lay, or bonded themselves to the
lords of the manors.
ATTEMPT AT CONFISCATION THWARTED.
Bellomont fully understood the serious evils which had been injected
into the body politic and strongly applied himself to the task of
confiscating the great estates. One of his first proposals was to urge
upon the Lords of Trade the restriction of all governors throughout the
colonies from granting more than a thousand acres to any man without
leave from the king, and putting a quit rent of half a crown on every
hundred acres, this sum to go to the royal treasury. This suggestion was
not acted upon. He next attacked the assembly of New York and called
upon it to annul the great grants. In doing this he found that the most
powerful members of the assembly were themselves the great land owners
and were putting obstacle after obstacle in his path. After great
exertions he finally prevailed upon the assembly to vacate at least two
of the grants, those to Evans and Bayard. The assembly did this probably
as a sop to Bellomont and to public opinion, and because Evans and
Bayard had lesser influence than the other landed functionaries. But the
owners of the other estates tenaciously held them intact. The people
regarded Bellomont as a sincere and ardent reformer, but the landed men
and their following abused him as a meddler and destructionist.
Despairing of getting a self-interested assembly to act, Bellomont
appealed to the Lords of Trade:
"If your Lordships mean I shall go on to break the rest of the
extravagant grants of land by Colonel Fletcher or other governors, by
act of assembly, I shall stand in need of a peremptory order from the
King so to do."[23] A month later he insisted to his superiors at home
that if they intended that the corrupt and extravagant grants should be
confiscated--"(which I will be bold to say by all the rules of reason
and justice ought to be done) I believe it must be done by act of
Parliament in England, for I am a little jealous I shall not have
strength enough in the assembly of New York to break them." The majority
of this body, he pointed out, were landed men, and when their own
interest was touched, they declined to act contrary to it. Unless, added
Bellomont, "the power of our Palatines, Smith, Livingston, the Phillips,
father and son[24]--and six or seven more were reduced ... the country
is ruined."[25]
Despite some occasional breaches in its intrenchments, the landocracy
continued to rule everywhere with a high hand, its power, as a whole,
unbroken.
HOW THE LORDS OF THE SOIL LIVED.
A glancing picture of one of these landed proprietors will show the
manner in which they lived and what was then accounted their luxury. As
one of the "foremost men of his day," in the colonies Colonel Smith
lived in befitting style. This stern, bushy-eyed man who robbed the
community of a vast tract of land and who, as chief justice, was
inflexibly severe in dealing punishment to petty criminals and ever
vigilant in upholding the rights of property, was lord of the Manor of
St. George, Suffolk County. The finest silks and lace covered his
judicial person. His embroidered belts, costing L110, at once attested
his great wealth and high station. He had the extraordinary number of
one hundred and four silver buttons to adorn his clothing. When he
walked a heavy silver-headed cane supported him, and he rode on a fancy
velvet saddle. His three swords were of the finest make; occasionally he
affected a Turkish scimeter. Few watches in the colonies could compare
with his massive silver watch. His table was embellished with heavy
silver plate, valued at L150, on which his coat-of-arms was engraved.
Twelve negro slaves responded to his nod; he had a large corps of
bounded apprentices and dependant laborers. His mansion looked down on
twenty acres of wheat and twenty of corn; and as for his horses and
cattle they were the envy of the country. In his last year thirty horses
were his, fourteen oxen, sixty steers, forty-eight cows and two
bulls.[26] He lived high, drank, swore, cheated--and administered
justice.
One of the best and most intimate descriptions of a somewhat
contemporaneous landed magnate in the South is that given of Robert
Carter, a Virginia planter, by Philip Vickers Fithian,[27] a tutor in
Carter's family. Carter came to his estate from his grandfather, whose
land and other possessions were looked upon as so extensive that he was
called "King" Carter.
Robert Carter luxuriated in Nomini Hall, a great colonial mansion in
Westmoreland County. It was built between 1725 and 1732 of brick covered
with strong mortar, which imparted a perfectly white exterior, and was
seventy-six feet long and forty wide. The interior was one of unusual
splendor for the time, such as only the very rich could afford. There
were eight large rooms, one of which was a ball-room thirty feet long.
Carter spent most of his leisure hours cultivating the study of law and
of music; his library contained 1,500 volumes and he had a varied
assortment of musical instruments. He was the owner of 60,000 acres of
land spread over almost every county of Virginia, and he was the master
of six hundred negro slaves. The greater part of a prosperous iron-works
near Baltimore was owned by him, and near his mansion he built a flour
mill equipped to turn out 25,000 bushels of wheat a year. Carter was not
only one of the big planters but one of the big capitalists of the age;
all that he had to do was to exercise a general supervision; his
overseers saw to the running of his various industries. Like the other
large landholders he was one of the active governing class; as a member
of the Provincial Council he had great influence in the making of laws.
He was a thorough gentleman, we are told, and took good care of his
slaves and of his white laborers who were grouped in workhouses and
little cottages within range of his mansion. Within his domain he
exercised a sort of benevolent despotism. He was one of the first few to
see that chattel slavery could not compete in efficiency with white
labor, and he reckoned that more money could be made from the white
laborer, for whom no responsibility of shelter, clothing, food and
attendance had to be assumed than from the negro slave, whose sickness,
disability or death entailed direct financial loss. Before his death he
emancipated a number of his slaves. This, in brief, is the rather
flattering depiction of one of the conspicuously rich planters of the
South.
THE NASCENT TRADING CLASS.
Land continued to be the chief source of the wealth of the rich until
after the Revolution. The discriminative laws enacted by England had
held down the progress of the trading class; these laws overthrown, the
traders rose rapidly from a subordinate position to the supreme class in
point of wealth.
No close research into pre-Revolutionary currents and movements is
necessary to understand that the Revolution was brought about by the
dissatisfied trading class as the only means of securing absolute
freedom of trade. Notwithstanding the view often presented that it was
an altruistic movement for the freedom of man, it was essentially an
economic struggle fathered by the trading class and by a part of the
landed interests. Admixed was a sincere aim to establish free political
conditions. This, however, was not an aim for the benefit of all
classes, but merely one for the better interests of the propertied
class. The poverty-stricken soldiers who fought for their cause found
after the war that the machinery of government was devised to shut out
manhood suffrage and keep the power intact in the hands of the rich. Had
it not been for radicals such as Jefferson, Paine and others it is
doubtful whether such concessions as were made to the people would have
been made. The long struggle in various States for manhood suffrage
sufficiently attests the deliberate aim of the propertied interests to
concentrate in their own hands, and in that of a following favorable to
them, the voting power of the Government and of the States.
With the success of the Revolution, the trading class bounded to the
first rank. Entail and primogeniture were abolished and the great
estates gradually melted away. For more than a century and a half the
landed interests had dominated the social and political arena. As an
acknowledged, continuous organization they ceased to exist. Great
estates no longer passed unimpaired from generation to generation,
surviving as a distinct entity throughout all changes. They perforce
were partitioned among all the children; and through the vicissitudes of
subsequent years, passed bit by bit into many hands. Altered laws caused
a gradual disintegration in the case of individual holdings, but brought
no change in instances of corporate ownership. The Trinity Corporation
of New York City, for example, has held on to the vast estate which it
was given before the Revolution except such parts as it voluntarily has
sold.
DISINTEGRATION OF THE GREAT ESTATES.
The individual magnate, however, had no choice. He could no longer
entail his estates. Thus, estates which were very large before the
Revolution, and which were regarded with astonishment, ceased to exist.
The landed interests, however, remained paramount for several decades
after the Revolution by reason of the acceleration which long possession
and its profits had given them. Washington's fortune, amounting at his
death, to $530,000, was one of the largest in the country and consisted
mainly of land. He owned 9,744 acres, valued at $10 an acre, on the Ohio
River in Virginia, 3,075 acres, worth $200,000, on the Great Kenawa, and
also land elsewhere in Virginia and in Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York,
Kentucky, the City of Washington and other places.[28] About half a
century later it was only by persistent gatherings of public
contributions that his very home was saved to the nation, so had his
estate become divided and run down. After a long career, Benjamin
Franklin acquired what was considered a large fortune. But it did not
come from manufacture or invention, which he did so much to encourage,
but from land. His estate in 1788, two years before his death, was
estimated to be worth $150,000, mostly in land.[29] By the opening
decades of the nineteenth century few of the great estates in New York
remained. One of the last of the patroons was Stephen Van Rensselaer,
who died at the age of 75 on Jan. 26, 1839, leaving ten children. Up to
this time the manor had devolved upon the eldest son. Although it had
been diminished somewhat by various cessions, it was still of great
extent. The property was divided among the ten children, and, according
to Schuyler, "In less than fifty years after his death, the seven
hundred thousand acres originally in the manor were in the hands of
strangers."[30]
Long before old Van Rensselaer passed away he had seen the rise and
growth of the trading and manufacturing class and a new form of landed
aristocracy, and he observed with a haughty bitterness how in point of
wealth and power they far overshadowed the well-nigh defunct old feudal
aristocracy. A few hundred thousand dollars no longer was the summit of
a great fortune; the age of the millionaire had come. The lordly,
leisurely environment of the old landed class had been supplanted by
feverish trading and industrial activity which imposed upon society its
own newer standards, doctrines and ideals and made them uppermost
factors.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] "Land Nationalization,":122-125.
[10] Colonial Documents, vii:654-655.
[11] Colonial Documents, iv:673-674.
[12] "A Short History of the English Colonies in America":402.
[13] Yet, this fortune seeker, who had incurred the contempt of every
noble English mind, is described by one of the class of
power-worshipping historians as follows: "Fame and wealth, so often the
idols of _Superior Intellect_, were the prominent objects of this
aspiring man."--Williamson's "History of Maine," 1:305.
[14] The Public Domain: Its History, etc.:38.
[15] Pennsylvania: Colony and Commonwealth:66, 84, etc. Their claim to
inherit proprietary rights was bought at the time of the Revolutionary
War by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for L130,000 sterling or about
$580,000.
[16] Colonial Documents, iv:463.
[17] Ibid.:535.
[18] Ibid.:39.
[19] Colonial Documents, iv:528. One of Bellomont's chief complaints was
that the landgraves monopolized the timber supply. He recommended the
passage of a law vesting in the King the right to all trees such as were
fit for masts of ships or for other use in building ships of war.
[20] "Colonial New York," 1:285-286.
[21] According to Reynolds's "Albany Chronicles," Livingston was in
collusion with Captain Kidd, the sea pirate. Reynolds also tells that
Livingston loaned money at ten per cent.
[22] Wright's "Industrial Evolution in the United States"; see also his
article "Wages" in Johnson's Encyclopaedia. The New York Colonial
Documents relate that in 1699 in the three provinces of Bellomont's
jurisdiction, "the laboring man received three shillings a day, which
was considered dear," iv:588.
[23] Colonial Documents, iv:533-554.
[24] Frederick and his son Adolphus. Frederick was the employer of the
pirate, Captain Samuel Burgess of New York, who at first was sent out by
Phillips to Madagascar to trade with the pirates and who then turned
pirate himself. From the first voyage Phillips and Burgess cleared
together L5,000, the proceeds of trade and slaves. The second voyage
yielded L10,000 and three hundred slaves. Burgess married a relative of
Phillips and continued piracy, but was caught and imprisoned in Newgate.
Phillips spent great sums of money to save him and succeeded. Burgess
resumed piracy and met death from poisoning in Africa while engaged in
carrying off slaves.--"The Lives and Bloody Exploits of the Most Noted
Pirates":177-183. This work was a serious study of the different sea
pirates.
[25] Colonial Docs, iv:533-534. On November 27, 1700, Bellomont wrote to
the Lords of the Treasury: "I can supply the King and all his dominions
with naval stores (except flax and hemp) from this province and New
Hampshire, but then your Lordships and the rest of the Ministers must
break through Coll. Fletcher's most corrupt grants of all the lands and
woods of this province which I think is the most impudent villainy I
ever heard or read of any man," iv:780.
[26] This is the inventory given in "Abstracts of Wills," 1:323.
[27] "Journal and Letters," 1767-1774.
[28] Sparks' "Life of Washington," Appendix, ix:557-559.
[29] Bigelow's "Life of Franklin," iii:470.
[30] "Colonial New York," 1:232.
CHAPTER III
THE RISE OF THE TRADING CLASS
The creation of the great landed estates was accompanied by the slow
development of the small trader and merchant. Necessarily, they first
established themselves in the sea ports where business was concentrated.
Many obstacles long held them down to a narrow sphere. The great
chartered companies monopolized the profitable resources. The land
magnates exacted tribute for the slightest privilege granted. Drastic
laws forbade competition with the companies, and the power of law and
the severities of class government were severely felt by the merchants.
The chartered corporations and the land dignitaries were often one group
with an identity of men and interests. Against their strength and
capital the petty trader or merchant could not prevail. Daring and
enterprising though he be, he was forced to a certain compressed routine
of business. He could sell the goods which the companies sold to him but
could not undertake to set up manufacturing. And after the companies had
passed away, the landed aristocracy used its power to suppress all undue
initiative on his part.
THE MANORIAL LORDS MONOPOLIZE TRADE.
This was especially so in New York, where all power was concentrated in
the hands of a few landowners. "To say," says Sabine, "that the
political institutions of New York formed a feudal aristocracy is to
define them with tolerable accuracy. The soil was owned by a few. The
masses were mere retainers or tenants as in the monarchies of
Europe."[31] The feudal lord was also the dominant manufacturer and
trader. He forced his tenants to sign covenants that they should trade
in nothing else than the produce of the manor; that they should trade
nowhere else but at his store; that they should grind their flour at his
mill, and buy bread at his bakery, lumber at his sawmills and liquor at
his brewery. Thus he was not only able to squeeze the last penny from
them by exorbitant prices, but it was in his power to keep them
everlastingly in debt to him. He claimed, and held, a monopoly in his
domain of whatever trade he could seize. These feudal tenures were
established in law; woe to the tenant who presumed to infract them! He
became a criminal and was punished as a felon. The petty merchant could
not, and dared not, compete with the trading monopolies of the manorial
lords within these feudal jurisdictions. In such a system the merchant's
place for a century and a half was a minor one, although far above that
of the drudging laborer. Merchants resorted to sharp and frequently
dubious ways of getting money together. They bargained and sold
shrewdly, kept their wits ever open, turned sycophant to the aristocracy
and a fleecer of the laborer.
It would appear that in New York, at least, the practice of the most
audacious usury was an early and favorite means of acquiring the
property of others. These others were invariably the mechanic or
laborer; the merchant dared not attempt to overreach the aristocrat
whose power he had good reason to fear. Money which was taken in by
selling rum and by wheedling the unsophisticated Indians into yielding
up valuable furs, was loaned at frightfully onerous rates. The loans
unpaid, the lender swooped mercilessly upon the property of the
unfortunate and gathered it in.
The richest merchant of his period in the province of New York was
Cornelius Steenwyck, a liquor merchant, who died in 1686. He left a
total estate of L4,382 and a long list of book debts which disclosed
that almost every man in New York City owed money to him, partly for
rum, in part for loans.[32] The same was true of Peter Jacob Marius, a
rich merchant who died in 1706, leaving behind a host of debtors, "which
included about all the male population on Manhattan Island."[33] This
eminent counter-man was "buried like a gentleman." At his funeral large
sums were spent for wine, cookies, pipes and tobacco, beer, spice for
burnt wine and sugar--all according to approved and reverent Dutch
fashion. The actual currency left by some of these rich men was a
curious conglomeration of almost every stamp, showing the results of a
mixed assemblage of customers. There were Spanish pistoles, guineas,
Arabian coin, bank dollars, Dutch and French money--a motley assortment
all carefully heaped together. Without doubt, those enterprising pirate
captains, Kidd and Burgess, and their crews, were good customers of
these accommodating and undiscriminating merchants. It was a time when
money was triply valued, for little of it passed in circulation. To a
people who traded largely by barter and whose media of exchange, for a
long time, were wampum, peltries and other articles, the touch and clink
of gold and silver were extremely precious and fascinating. Buccaneers
Kidd and Burgess deserved the credit for introducing into New York much
of the variegated gold and silver coin, and it was believed that they
long had some of the leading merchants as their allies in disposing of
their plundered goods, in giving them information and affording them
protection.
THE TRADERS' METHODS.
By one means or another, some of the New York merchants of the period
attained a standing in point of wealth equal to not a few of the land
magnates. William Lawrence of Flushing, Long Island, was "a man of great
wealth and social standing." Like the rest of his class he affected to
despise the merchant class. After his death, an inventory showed his
estate to be worth L4,032, mostly in land and in slaves, of which he
left ten.[34] While the landed men often spent much of their time
carousing, hunting, gambling, and dispersing their money, the merchants
were hawk-eyed alert for every opportunity to gather in money. They
wasted no time in frivolous pursuits, had no use for sentiment or
scruples, saved money in infinitesimal ways and thought and dreamed of
nothing but business.
Throughout the colonies, not excepting Pennsylvania, it was the general
practice of the merchants and traders to take advantage of the Indians
by cunning and treacherous methods. The agents of the chartered
companies and the land owners first started the trick of getting the
Indians drunk, and then obtaining, for almost nothing, the furs that
they had gathered--for a couple of bottles of rum, a blanket or an axe.
After the charters of the companies were annulled or expired, the
landgraves kept up the practice, and the merchants improved on it in
various ingenious ways. "The Indians," says Felt,[35] "were ever ready
to give up their furs for knives, hatchets, beads, blankets, and
especially were anxious to obtain tobacco, guns, powder, shot and strong
water; the latter being a powerful instrument enabling the cunning
trader to perpetuate the grossest frauds. Immense quantities of furs
were shipped to Europe at a great profit."
This description appropriately applied also to New York, New Jersey, and
the South. In New York there were severe laws against Indians who got
drunk, and in Massachusetts colony an Indian found drunk was subject to
a fine of ten shillings or whipping, at the discretion of the
magistrate. As to the whites who, for purposes of gain, got the Indians
drunk, the law was strangely inactive. Everyone knew that drink might
incite the Indians to uprisings and imperil the lives of men, women and
children. But the considerations of trade were stronger than even the
instinct of self-preservation and the practice went on, not infrequently
resulting in the butchery of innocent white victims and in great cost
and suspense to the whole community.
Strict laws which pronounced penalties for profaneness and for not
attending church, connived at the systematic defrauding and swindling of
the Indians of land and furs. Two strong considerations were held to
justify this. The first was that the Indians were heathen and must give
way to civilization; that they were fair prey. The demands of trade,
upon which the colonies flourished was the second. The fact was that the
code of the trading class was everywhere gradually becoming the dominant
one, even breaking down the austere, almost ascetic, Puritan moral
professions. Among the common people--those who were ordinary wage
laborers--the methods of the rich were looked upon with suspicion and
enmity, and there was a prevalent consciousness that wealth was being
amassed by one-sided laws and fraud. Some of the noted sea pirates of
the age made this their strong justification for preying upon
commerce.[36]
In Virginia the life of the community depended upon agriculture;
therefore slavery was thought to be its labor prop and was joyfully
welcomed and earnestly defended. In Massachusetts and New York trading
was an elemental factor, and whatever swelled the volume and profits was
accounted a blessing to the community and was held justified. Laws, the
judges who enforced them, and the spirit of the age reflected not so
much the morality of the people as their trading necessities. The one
was often mistaken for the other.
THE BONDING OF LABORERS.
This condition was shown repeatedly in the trade conflicts of the
competing merchants, their system of bonded laborers and in the long
contests between the traders of the colonies and those of England,
culminating in the Revolution. In the churches the colonists prayed to
God as the Father of all men and showed great humility. But in actual
practice the propertied men recognized no such thing as equality and
dispensed with humility. The merchants imitated in a small way the
seignorial pretensions of the land nabobs. Few merchants there were who
did not deal in negro slaves, and few also were there who did not have a
bonded laborer or two, whose labor they monopolized and whose career was
their property for a long term of years. Limited bondage, called
apprenticeship, was general.
Penniless boys, girls and adults were impressed by sheer necessity into
service. Nicholas Auger, 10 years old, binds himself, in 1694, to
Wessell Evertson, a cooper, for a term of nine years, and swears that
"he will truly serve the commandments of his master Lawfull, shall do no
hurt to his master, nor waste nor purloin his goods, nor lend them to
anybody at Dice, or other unlawful game, shall not contract matrimony,
nor frequent taverns, shall not absent himself from his master's service
day or night." In return Evertson will teach Nicholas the trade of a
cooper, give him "apparell, meat, drink and bedding" and at the
expiration of the term will supply him with "two good suits of wearing
apparell from head to foot." Cornelius Hendricks, a laborer, binds
himself in 1695 as an apprentice and servant to John Molet for five
years. Hendricks is to get L3 current silver money and two suits of
apparell--one for holy days, the other for working days, and also board
is to be provided. Elizabeth Morris, a spinster, in consideration of her
transportation from England to New York on the barkentine, "Antegun,"
binds herself in 1696 as a servant to Captain William Kidd for four
years for board. When her term is over she is to get two dresses. These
are a few specific instances of the bonding system--a system which
served its purpose in being highly advantageous to the merchants and
traders.
THE FISHERIES OF NEW ENGLAND.
Toward the close of the seventeenth century the merchants of Boston were
the richest in the colonies. Trade there was the briskest. By 1687,
according to the records of the Massachusetts Historical Society, there
were ten to fifteen merchants in Boston whose aggregate property
amounted to L50,000, or about L5,000 each, and five hundred persons who
were worth L3,000 each. Some of these fortunes came from furs, timber
and vending merchandise.
But the great stimuli were the fisheries of the New England coast.
Bellomont in 1700 ascribed the superior trade of Massachusetts to the
fact that Fletcher had corruptly sold the best lands in New York
province and had thus brought on bad conditions. Had it not been for
this, he wrote, New York "would outthrive the Massachusetts Province and
quickly outdoe them in people and trade." While the people of the South
took to agriculture as a main support, and the merchants of New York
were contented with the more comfortable method of taking in coin over
counters, a large proportion of the 12,000 inhabitants of Boston and
those of Salem and Plymouth braved dangers to drag the sea of its spoil.
They developed hardy traits of character, a bold adventurousness and a
singular independence of movement which in time engendered a bustling
race of traders who navigated the world for trade.
It was from shipping that the noted fortunes of the early decades of the
eighteenth century came. The origin of the means by which these fortunes
were got together lay greatly in the fisheries. The emblem of the
codfish in the Massachusetts State House is a survival of the days when
the fisheries were the great and most prolific sources of wealth and the
chief incentive of all kinds of trade. A tremendous energy was shown in
the hazards of the business. So thoroughly were the fisheries recognized
as important to the life of the whole New England community that vessels
were often built by public subscription, as was instanced in Plymouth,
where public subscription on one occasion defrayed the expense.[37]
In response to the general incessant demand for ships, the business of
shipbuilding soon sprang up; presently there were nearly thirty ship
yards in Boston alone and sixty ships a year were built. It was a
lucrative industry. The price of a vessel was dear, while the wages of
the carpenters, smiths, caulkers and sparmakers were low. Not a few of
the merchants and traders or their sons who made their money by
debauching and cheating the Indians went into this highly profitable
business and became men of greater wealth. By 1700 Boston was shipping
50,000 quintals of dried codfish every year. The fish was divided into
several kinds. The choice quality went to the Catholic countries, where
there was a great demand for it, principally to Bilboa, Lisbon and
Oporto. The refuse was shipped to the West India Islands for sale to the
negro slaves and laborers. The price varied. In 1699 it was eighteen
shillings a quintal; the next year, we read, it had fallen to twelve
shillings because the French fisheries had glutted the market
abroad.[38]
"FORCE AS GOOD AS FORCE."
Along with the fisheries, considerable wealth was extracted in New
England, as elsewhere in the colonies, from the shipment of timber.
Sharp traders easily got the advantage of Indians and landowners in
buying the privilege of cutting timber. In some cases, particularly in
New Hampshire, which Allen claimed to own, the timber was simply taken
without leave. The word was passed that force was as good as force,
fraud as good as fraud. Allen had got the province by force and fraud;
let him stop the timber cutters if he dare. Ship timber was eagerly
sought in European ports. One Boston merchant is recorded as having
taken a cargo of this timber to Lisbon and clearing a profit of L1,600
on an expenditure of L300. "Everybody is excited," wrote Bellomont on
June 22, 1700, to the Lords Commissioners for Trades and Plantations.
"Some of the merchants of Salem are now loading a ship with 12,000 feet
of the noblest ships timber that was ever seen."[39]
The whale fishery sprang up about this time and brought in great
profits. The original method was to sight the whale from a lookout on
shore, push out in a boat, capture him and return to the shore with the
carcass. The oil was extracted from the blubber and readily sold. As
whales became scarce around the New England islands the whalers pushed
off into the ocean in small vessels. Within fifty years at least sixty
craft were engaged in the venture. By degrees larger and larger vessels
were built until they began to double Cape Horn, and were sometimes
absent from a year and a half to three years. The labors of the cruise
were often richly rewarded with a thousand barrels of sperm oil and two
hundred and fifty barrels of whale oil.
BRITISH TRADERS' TACTICS.
By the middle of the seventeenth century the colonial merchants were in
a position to establish manufactures to compete with the British. A
seafaring race and a mercantile fleet had come into a militant
existence; and ambitious designs were meditated of conquering a part of
the import and export trade held by the British. The colonial shipowner,
sending tobacco, corn, timber or fish to Europe did not see why he
should not load his ship with commodities on the return trip and make a
double profit. It was now that the British trading class peremptorily
stepped in and used the power of government to suppress in its infancy a
competition that alarmed them.
Heavy export duties were now declared on every colonial article which
would interfere with the monopoly which the British trading class held,
and aimed to hold, while the most exacting duties were put on
non-British imports. Colonial factories were killed off by summary
legislation. In 1699 Parliament enacted that no wool yarn or woolen
manufactures of the American colonies should be exported to any place
whatever. This was a destructive bit of legislation, as nearly every
colonial rural family kept sheep and raised flax and were getting expert
at the making of coarse linen and woolen cloths. No sooner had the
colonists begun to make paper than that industry was likewise choked.
With hats it was the same. The colonists had scarcely begun to export
hats to Spain, Portugal and the West Indies before the British Company
of Hatters called upon the Government to put a stop to this colonial
interference with their trade. An act was thereupon passed by Parliament
forbidding the exportation of hats from any American colony, and the
selling in one colony of hats made in another. Colonial iron mills began
to blast; they were promptly declared a nuisance, and Parliament ordered
that no mill or engine for slitting or rolling iron be used, but
graciously allowed pig and bar iron to be imported from England into the
colonies. Distilleries were common; molasses was extensively used in the
making of rum and also by the fishermen; a heavy duty was put upon
molasses and sugar as also on tea, nails, glass and paints. Smuggling
became general; a narrative of the adroit devices resorted to would make
an interesting tale.
These restrictive acts brought about various momentous results. They not
only arrayed the whole trading class against Great Britain, and in turn
the great body of the colonists, but they operated to keep down in size
and latitude the private fortunes by limiting the ways in which the
wealth of individuals could be employed. Much money was withdrawn from
active business and invested in land and mortgages. Still, despite the
crushing laws with which colonial capitalists had to contend, the
fisheries were an incessant source of profit. By 1765 they employed
4,000 seamen and had 28,000 tons of shipping and did a business
estimated at somewhat more than a million dollars.
FOOTNOTES:
[31] "Lives of the Loyalists,":18.
[32] "Abstracts of Wills," ii:444-445.
[33] Ibid., 1:323-324.
[34] "Abstracts of Wills," 1:108.
[35] "An Historical Account of Massachusetts Currency." See also
Colonial Documents, iii:242, and the Records of New Amsterdam. See the
chapters on the Astor fortune in Part II for full details of the methods
in debauching and swindling the Indians in trading operations.
[36] Thus Captain Bellamy's speech in 1717 to Captain Baer of Boston,
whose sloop he had just sunk and rifled: "I am sorry that they [his
crew] won't let you have your sloop again, for I scorn to do any one a
mischief when it is not for my advantage; damn the sloop, we must sink
her, and she might be of use to you. Though you are a sneaking puppy,
and so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich
men have made for their own security--for the cowardly whelps have not
the courage otherwise to defend what they get by their knavery. But damn
ye altogether; damn them for a pack of crafty rascals, and ye who serve
them, for a parcel of hen-hearted numbskulls. They villify us, the
scoundrels do, when there is only this difference: they rob the poor
under cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under protection
of our own courage. Had you better not make one of us than sneak after
these villains for employment." Baer refused and was put ashore.--"The
Lives and Bloody Exploits of the Most Noted Pirates":129-130.
[37] "A Commercial Sketch of Boston," Hunt's Merchant's Magazine, 1839,
1:125.
[38] Colonial Documents, iv:790.
[39] Ibid., 678.
CHAPTER IV
THE SHIPPING FORTUNES
Thus it was that at the time of the Revolution many of the consequential
fortunes were those of shipowners and were principally concentrated in
New England. Some of these dealt in merchandise only, while others made
large sums of money by exporting fish, tobacco, corn, rice and timber
and lading their ships on the return with negro slaves, for which they
found a responsive market in the South. Many of the members of the
Continental Congress were ship merchants, or inherited their fortunes
from rich shippers, as, for instance, Samuel Adams, Robert Morris, Henry
Laurens of Charleston, S. C., John Hancock, whose fortune of $350,000
came from his uncle Thomas, Francis Lewis of New York and Joseph Hewes
of North Carolina. Others were members of various Constitutional
conventions or became high officials in the Federal or State
governments. The Revolution disrupted and almost destroyed the colonial
shipping, and trade remained stagnant.
FORTUNES FROM PRIVATEERING.
Not wholly so, for the hazardous venture of privateering offered great
returns. George Cabot of Boston was the son of an opulent shipowner.
During the Revolution, George, with his brother swept the coast with
twenty privateers carrying from sixteen to twenty guns each. For four or
five years their booty was rich and heavy, but toward the end of the
war, British gun-boats swooped on most of their craft and the brothers
lost heavily. George subsequently became a United States Senator. Israel
Thorndike, who began life as a cooper's apprentice and died in 1832 at
the age of 75, leaving a fortune, "the greatest that has ever been left
in New England,"[40] made large sums of money as part owner and
commander of a privateer which made many successful cruises. With this
money he went into fisheries, foreign commerce and real estate, and
later into manufacturing establishments. One of the towering rich men of
the day, we are told that "his investments in real estate, shipping or
factories were wonderfully judicious and hundreds watched his movements,
believing his pathway was safe." The fortune he bequeathed was ranked as
immense. To each of his three sons he left about $500,000 each, and
other sums to another son, and to his widow and daughters. In all, the
legacies to the surviving members of his family amounted to about
$1,800,000.[41]
Another "distinguished merchant," as he was styled, to take up
privateering was Nathaniel Tracy, the son of a Newburyport merchant.
College bred, as were most of the sons of rich merchants, he started out
at the age of 25 with a number of privateers, and for many years
returned flushed with prizes. To quote his appreciative biographer: "He
lived in a most magnificent style, having several country seats or large
farms with elegant summer houses and fine fish ponds, and all those
matters of convenience or taste that a British nobleman might think
necessary to his rank and happiness. His horses were of the choicest
kind and his coaches of the most splendid make." But alas! this gorgeous
career was abruptly dispelled when unfeeling British frigates and
gun-boats hooked in his saucy privateers and Tracy stood quite ruined.
Much more fortunate was Joseph Peabody. As a young man Peabody enlisted
as an officer on Derby's privateer "Bunker Hill." His second cruise was
on Cabot's privateer "Pilgrim" which captured a richly cargoed British
merchantman. Returning to shore he studied for an education, later
resuming the privateer deck. Some of his exploits, as narrated by George
Atkinson Ward in "Hunt's Lives of American Merchants," published in
1856, were thrilling enough to have found a deserved place in a gory
novel. With the money made as his share of the various prizes, he bought
a vessel which he commanded himself, and he personally made sundry
voyages to Europe and the West Indies. By 1791 he had amassed a large
fortune. There was no further need of his going to sea; he was now a
great merchant and could pay others to take charge of his ships. These
increased to such an extent that he built in Salem and owned
eighty-three ships which he freighted and dispatched to every known part
of the world. Seven thousand seamen were in his employ. His vessels were
known in Calcutta, Canton, Sumatra, St. Petersburg and dozens of other
ports. They came back with cargoes which were distributed by coasting
vessels among the various American ports. It was with wonderment that
his contemporaries spoke of his paying an aggregate of about $200,000 in
State, county and city taxes in Salem, where he lived.[42] He died on
Jan. 5, 1844, aged 84 years.
Asa Clapp, who at his death in 1848, at the age of 85 years, was
credited with being the richest man in Maine,[43] began his career
during the Revolution as an officer on a privateer. After the war he
commanded various trading vessels, and in 1796 established a shipping
business of his own, with headquarters at Portland. His vessels traded
with Europe, the East and West Indies and South America. In his later
years he went into banking. Of the size of his fortune we are left in
ignorance.
A GLANCE AT OTHER SHIPPING FORTUNES.
These are instances of rich men whose original capital came from
privateering, which was recognized as a legitimate method of reprisal.
As to the inception of the fortunes of other prominent capitalists of
the period, few details are extant in the cases of most of them. Of the
antecedents and life of Thomas Russell, a Boston shipper, who died in
1796, "supposedly leaving the largest amount of property which up to
that time had been accumulated in New England," little is known. The
extent of his fortune cannot be learned. Russell was one of the first,
after the Revolution, to engage in trade with Russia, and drove many a
hard bargain. He built a stately mansion in Charleston and daily
traveled to Boston in a coach drawn by four black horses. In business he
was inflexible; trade considerations aside he was an alms-giver. Of
Cyrus Butler, another shipowner and trader, who, according to one
authority, was probably the richest man in New England[44]--and who,
according to the statement of another publication[45]--left a fortune
estimated at from three to four millions of dollars, few details
likewise are known. He was the son of Samuel Butler, a shoemaker who
removed from Edgartown, Mass., to Providence about 1750 and became a
merchant and shipowner. Cyrus followed in his steps. When this
millionaire died at the age of 82 in 1849, the size of his fortune
excited wonderment throughout New England. It may be here noted as a
fact worthy of comment that of the group of hale rich shipowners there
were few who did not live to be octogenarians.
The rapidity with which large fortunes were made was not a riddle. Labor
was cheap and unorganized, and the profits of trade were enormous.
According to Weeden the customary profits at the close of the eighteenth
century on muslins and calicoes were one hundred per cent. Cargoes of
coffee sometimes yielded three or four times that amount. Weeden
instances one shipment of plain glass tumblers costing less than $1,000
which sold for $12,000 in the Isle of France.[46]
The prospects of a dazzling fortune, speedily reaped, instigated owners
of capital to take the most perilous chances. Decayed ships,
superficially patched up, were often sent out on the chance that luck
and skill would get them through the voyage and yield fortunes. Crew
after crew was sacrificed to this frenzied rush for money, but nothing
was thought of it. Again, there were examples of almost incredible
temerity. In his biography of Peter Charndon Brooks, one of the
principal merchants of the day, and his father-in-law, Edward Everett
tells of a ship sailing from Calcutta to Boston with a youth of nineteen
in command. Why or how this boy was placed in charge is not explained.
This juvenile captain had nothing in the way of a chart on board except
a small map of the world in Guthrie's Geography. He made the trip
successfully. Later, when he became a rich Boston banker, the tale of
this feat was one of the proud annals of his life and, if true,
deservedly so.[47]
Whitney's notable invention of the cotton gin in 1793 had given a
stupendous impetus to cotton growing in the Southern States. As the
shipowners were chiefly centered in New England the export of this
staple vastly increased their trade and fortunes. It might be thought,
parenthetically, that Whitney himself should have made a surpassing
fortune from an invention which brought millions of dollars to planters
and traders. But his inventive ability and perseverance, at least in his
creation of the cotton gin, brought him little more than a multitude of
infringements upon his patent, refusals to pay him, and vexatious and
expensive litigation to sustain his rights.[48] In despair, he turned,
in 1808, to the manufacture in New Haven of fire-arms for the
Government, and from this business managed to get a fortune. From the
Canton and Calcutta trade Thomas Handasyd Perkins, a Boston shipper,
extracted a fortune of $2,000,000. His ships made thirty voyages around
the world. This merchant peer lived to the venerable age of 90; when he
passed away in 1854 his fortune, although intact, had shrunken to modest
proportions compared with a few others which had sprung up. James Lloyd,
a partner of Perkins', likewise profited; in 1808 he was elected a
United States Senator and later reelected.
William Gray, described as "one of the most successful of American
merchants," and as one who was considered and taxed in Salem "as one of
the wealthiest men in the place, where there were several of the largest
fortunes that could be found in the United States," owned, in his
heyday, more than sixty sail of vessels. Some scant details are
obtainable as to the career and personality of this moneyed colossus of
his day. He began as an apprenticed mechanic. For more than fifty years
he rose at dawn and was shaved and dressed. His letters and papers were
then spread before him and the day's business was begun. At his death in
1825 no inventory of his estate was taken. The present millions of the
Brown fortune of Rhode Island came largely from the trading activities
of Nicholas Brown and the accretions of which increased population and
values have brought. Nicholas Brown was born in Providence in 1760, of a
well-to-do father. He went to Rhode Island College (later named in his
honor by reason of his gifts) and greatly increased his fortune in the
shipping trade.
It is quite needless, however, to give further instances in support of
the statement that nearly all the large active fortunes of the latter
part of the eighteenth and the early period of the nineteenth century,
came from the shipping trade and were mainly concentrated in New
England. The proceeds of these fortunes frequently were put into
factories, canals, turnpikes and later into railroads, telegraph lines
and express companies. Seldom, however, has the money thus employed
really gone to the descendants of the men who amassed it, but has since
passed over to men who, by superior cunning, have contrived to get the
wealth into their own hands. This statement is an anticipation of facts
that will be more cognate in subsequent chapters, but may be
appropriately referred to here. There were some exceptions to the
general condition of the large fortunes from shipping being compactly
held in New England. Thomas Pym Cope, a Philadelphia Quaker, did a brisk
shipping trade, and founded the first regular line of packets between
Philadelphia and Baltimore; with the money thus made he went into canal
and railroad enterprises. And in New York and other ports there were a
number of shippers who made fortunes of several millions each.
THE WORKERS' MEAGER SHARE.
Obviously these millionaires created nothing except the enterprise of
distributing products made by the toil and skill of millions of workers
the world over. But while the workers made these products their sole
share was meager wages, barely sufficient to sustain the ordinary
demands of life. Moreover, the workers of one country were compelled to
pay exorbitant prices for the goods turned out by the workers of other
countries. The shippers who stood as middlemen between the workers of
the different countries reaped the great rewards. Nevertheless, it
should not be overlooked that the shippers played their distinct and
useful part in their time and age, the spirit of which was intensely
ultra-competitive and individualistic in the most sordid sense.
FOOTNOTES:
[40] "Hunt's Merchant's Magazine," 11:516-517.
[41] Allen's "Biographical Dictionary," Edition of 1857:791.
[42] Hunt's "Lives of American Merchants":382.
[43] Allen's "Biographical Dictionary," Edit. of 1857:227.
[44] Stryker's "American Register" for 1849:241.
[45] "The American Almanac" for 1850:324.
[46] "An Economic and Social History of New England," 11:825.
[47] Hunt's "Lives of American Merchants":139.
[48] Life of Eli Whitney, "Our Great Benefactors":567.
CHAPTER V
THE SHIPPERS AND THEIR TIMES
Unfortunately only the most general and eulogistic accounts of the
careers of most of the rich shippers have appeared in such biographies
as have been published.
Scarcely any details are preserved of the underlying methods and
circumstances by which these fortunes were amassed. Sixty years ago,
when it was the unqualified fashion to extol the men of wealth as great
public benefactors and truckle to them, and when sociological inquiry
was in an undeveloped stage, there might have been some excuse for this.
But it is extremely unsatisfactory to find pretentious writers of the
present day glossing over essential facts or not taking the trouble to
get them. A "popular writer," who has pretended to deal with the origin
of one of the great present fortunes, the Astor fortune, and has given
facts, although conventionally interpreted, as to one or two of Astor's
land transactions,[49] passes over with a sentence the fundamental facts
as to Astor's shipping activities, and entirely ignores the peculiar
special privileges, worth millions of dollars, that Astor, in
conjunction with other merchants, had as a free gift from the
Government. This omission is characteristic, inasmuch as it leaves the
reader in complete ignorance of the kind of methods Astor used in
heaping up millions from the shipping trade--millions that enabled him
to embark in the buying of land in a large and ambitious way. Certainly
there is no lack of data regarding the two foremost millionaires of the
first decades of the nineteenth century--Stephen Girard and John Jacob
Astor. The very names of nearly all of the other powerful merchants of
the age have receded into the densest obscurity. But both those of
Girard and Astor live vivifyingly, the first by virtue of a memorable
benefaction, the second as the founder of one of the greatest fortunes
in the world.
COMMERCE SURCHARGED WITH FRAUD.
Because of their unexcelled success, these two were the targets for the
bitter invective or the envy of their competitors on the one hand, and,
on the other, of the laudation of their friends and beneficiaries. Harsh
statements were made as to the methods of both, but, in reality, if we
but knew the truth, they were no worse than the other millionaires of
the time except in degree. The whole trading system was founded upon a
combination of superior executive ability and superior cunning--not
ability in creating, but in being able to get hold of, and distribute,
the products of others' creation.
Fraudulent substitution was an active factor in many, if not all, of the
shipping fortunes. The shippers and merchants practiced the grossest
frauds upon the unsophisticated people. Walter Barrett, that pseudonymic
merchant, who took part in them himself, and who writes glibly of them
as fine tricks of trade, gives many instances in his volumes dealing
with the merchants of that time.
The firm of F. & G. Carnes, he relates, was one of the many which made a
large fortune in the China trade. This firm found that Chinese
yellow-dog wood, when cut into proper sizes, bore a strong superficial
resemblance to real Turkey rhubarb. The Carnes brothers proceeded to
have the wood packed in China in boxes counterfeiting those of the
Turkey product. They then made a regular traffic importing this spurious
and deleterious stuff and selling it as the genuine Turkey article at
several times the cost. It entirely superseded the real product. This
firm also sent to China samples of Italian, French and English silks;
the Chinese imitated them closely, and the bogus wares were imported
into the United States where they were sold as the genuine European
goods. The Carneses were but a type of their class. Writing of the trade
carried on by the shipping class, Barrett says that the shippers sent to
China samples of the most noted Paris and London products in sauces,
condiments, preserves, sweetmeats, syrups and other goods. The Chinese
imitated them even to fac-similies of printed Paris and London labels.
The fraudulent substitutions were then brought in cargoes to the United
States where they were sold at fancy prices.
MERCHANTS THE PILLARS OF SOCIETY.
This was the prevalent commercial system. The most infamous frauds were
carried on; and so dominant were the traders' standards that these
frauds passed as legitimate business methods. The very men who profited
by them were the mainstays of churches, and not only that, but they were
the very same men who formed the various self-constituted committees
which demanded severe laws against paupers and petty criminals. A study
of the names of the men, for instance, who comprised the New York
Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, 1818-1823, shows that nearly
all of them were shippers or merchants who participated in the current
commercial frauds. Yet this was the class that sat in judgment upon the
poverty of the people and the acts of poor criminals and which dictated
laws to legislatures and to Congress.
Girard and Astor were the superfine products of this system; they did in
a greater way what others did in a lesser way. As a consequence, their
careers were fairly well illumined. The envious attacks of their
competitors ascribed their success to hard-hearted and ignoble
qualities, while their admirers heaped upon them tributes of praise for
their extraordinary genius. Both sets exaggerated. Their success in
garnering millions was merely an abnormal manifestation of an ambition
prevalent among the trading class. Their methods were an adroit
refinement of methods which were common. The game was one in which,
while fortunes were being amassed, masses of people were thrown into the
direst poverty and their lives were attended by injustice and suffering.
In this game a large company of eminent merchants played; Girard and
Astor were peers in the playing and got away with the greater share of
the stakes.
POST-REVOLUTIONARY CONDITIONS.
Before describing Girard's career, it is well to cast a retrospective
fleeting glance into conditions following the Revolution.
Despite the lofty sentiments of the Declaration of
Independence--sentiments which were submerged by the propertied class
when the cause was won--the gravity of law bore wholly in favor of the
propertied interests. The propertyless had no place or recognition. The
common man was good enough to shoulder a musket in the stress of war but
that he should have rights after the war, was deemed absurd. In the
whole scheme of government neither the feelings nor the interests of the
worker were thought of.
The Revolution brought no immediate betterment to his conditions; such
slight amelioration as came later was the result of years of agitation.
No sooner was the Revolution over than in stepped the propertied
interests and assumed control of government functions. They were
intelligent enough to know the value of class government--a lesson
learned from the tactics of the British trading class. They knew the
tremendous impact of law and how, directly and indirectly, it worked
great transformations in the body social. While the worker was
unorganized, unconscious of what his interests demanded, deluded by
slogans and rallying-cries which really meant nothing to him, the
propertied class was alert in its own interests.
PROPERTY'S RULE INTRENCHED.
It proceeded to intrench itself in political as well as in financial
power. The Constitution of the United States was so drafted as to take
as much direct power from the people as the landed and trading interests
dared. Most of the State Constitutions were more pronounced in rigid
property discriminations. In Massachusetts, no man could be governor
unless he were a Christian worth a clear L1,000; in North Carolina if he
failed of owning the required L1,000 in freehold estate; nor in Georgia
if he did not own five hundred acres of land and L4,000, nor in New
Hampshire if he lacked owning L500 in property. In South Carolina he had
to own L1,500 in property clear of all debts. In New York by the
Constitution of 1777, only actual residents having freeholds to the
value of L100 free of all debts, could vote for governor and other State
officials. The laws were so arranged as effectually to disfranchise
those who had no property. In his "Reminiscenses" Dr. John W. Francis
tells of the prevalence for years in New York of a supercilious class
which habitually sneered at the demand for political equality of the
leather-breeched mechanic with his few shillings a day.
Theoretically, religious standards were the prevailing ones; in
actuality the ethics and methods of the propertied class were all
powerful. The Church might preach equality, humility and the list of
virtues; but nevertheless that did not give the propertyless man a vote.
Thus it was, that in communities professing the strongest religious
convictions and embodying them in Constitutions and in laws and customs,
glaring inconsistencies ran side by side. The explanation lay in the
fact that as regarded essential things of property, the standards of the
trading class had supplanted the religious. Even the very admonition
given by pastors to the poor, "Be content with your lot," was a
preachment entirely in harmony with the aims of the trading class which,
in order to make money, necessarily had to have a multitude of workers
to work for it and from whose labor the money, in its finality, had to
come. In the very same breath that they advised the poverty-stricken to
reverence their superiors and to expect their reward in heaven, the
ministers glorified the aggrandizing merchants as God's chosen men who
were called upon to do His work.[50]
Since the laws favored the propertied interests, it was correspondingly
easy for them to get direct control of government functions and
personally exercise them. In New England rich shipowners rose at once to
powerful elective and appointive officers. Likewise in New York rich
landowners, and in the South, plantation men were selected for high
offices. Law-making bodies, from Congress down, were filled with
merchants, landowners, plantation men and lawyers, which last class was
trained, as a rule, by association and self-interest to take the views
of the propertied class and vote with, and for, it. A puissant
politico-commercial aristocracy developed which, at all times, was
perfectly conscious of its best interests. The worker was regaled with
flattering commendations of the dignity of labor and sonorous
generalizations and promises, but the ruling class took care of the
laws.
By means of these partial laws, the propertied interests early began to
get tremendously valuable special privileges. Banking rights, canal
construction, trade privileges, government favors, public franchises all
came in succession.
THE RIGORS OF LAW ON THE POOR.
At the same time that laws were enacted or were twisted to suit the will
of property, other laws were long in force oppressing the poor to a
terrifying degree.
Poor debtors could be thrown in jail indefinitely, no matter how small a
sum they owned. In law, the laborer was accorded few rights. It was easy
to defraud him of his meager wages, since he had no lien upon the
products of his labor. His labor power was all that he had to sell, and
the value of this power was not safeguarded by law. But the products
created by his labor power in the form of property were fortified by the
severest laws. For the laborer to be in debt was equal to a crime, in
fact, in its results, worse than a crime. The burglar or pickpocket
would get a certain sentence and then go free. The poor debtor,
however, was compelled to languish in jail at the will of his creditor.
The report of the Prison Discipline Society for 1829 estimated that
fully 75,000 persons were annually imprisoned for debt in the United
States and that more than one-half of these owed less than twenty
dollars.[51] And such were the appalling conditions of these debtors'
prisons that there was no distinction of sex, age or character; all of
the unfortunates were indiscriminately herded together. Sometimes, even
in the inclement climate of the North, the jails were so poorly
constructed, that there was insufficient shelter from the elements. In
the newspapers of the period advertisements may be read in which
charitable societies or individuals appeal for food, fuel and clothing
for the inmates of these prisons. The thief and the murderer had a much
more comfortable time of it in prison than the poor debtor.
LAW KIND TO THE TRADERS.
With the law-making mercantile class the situation was very different.
The state and national bankruptcy acts, as apply to merchants, bankers,
storekeepers--the whole commercial class--were so loosely drafted and so
laxly enforced and judicially interpreted, that it was not hard to
defraud creditors and escape with the proceeds. A propertied bankrupt
could conceal his assets and hire adroit lawyers to get him off
scot-free on quibbling technicalities--a condition which has survived
to the present time, though in a lesser degree.[52]
But imprisonment for debt was not the only fate that befell the
propertyless. According to the "Annual Report of the Managers of the
Society for the Prevention of Pauperism in New York City," there were
12,000 paupers in New York City in 1820.[53] Many of these were
destitute Irish who, after having been plundered and dispossessed by the
absentee landlords and the capitalists of their own country, were
induced to pay their last farthing to the shippers for passage to
America. There were laws providing that ship masters must report to the
Mayors of cities and give a bond that the destitutes that they brought
over should not become public charges. These laws were systematically
and successfully evaded; poor immigrants were dumped unceremoniously at
obscure places along the coast from whence they had to make their way,
carrying their baggage and beds, to the cities the best that they could.
Cadwallader D. Colden, mayor of New York for some years, tells, in his
reports, of harrowing cases of death after death resulting from
exposure due to this horrible form of exploitation.
Now when the immigrant or native found himself in a state of near, or
complete, destitution and resorted to the pawnbrokers's or to theft,
what happened? The law restricted pawnbrokers from charging more than
seven per cent on amounts more than $25, but on amounts below that they
were allowed to charge twenty-five per cent. which, as the wage value of
money then went, was oppressively high. Of course, the poor with their
cheap possessions seldom owned anything on which they could get more
than $25; consequently they were the victims of the most grinding
legalized usury. Occasionally some legislative committee recognized,
although in a dim and unanalytic way, this onerous discrimination of law
against the propertyless. "Their [the pawnbrokers'] rates of interest,"
an Aldermanic committee reported in 1832, "have always been exorbitant
and exceedingly oppressive. It has from time to time been regulated by
law, and its sanctions have (as is usual upon most occasions when
oppression has been legalized) been made to fall most heavily upon the
poor." The committee continued with the following comments which were
naive in the extreme considering that for generations all law had been
made by and for the propertied interests: "It is a singular fact that
the smallest sums advanced have always been chargeable with the highest
rates of interest.... It is a fact worthy of consideration that by far
the greater number of loans effected at these establishments are less
than one dollar, and of the whole twelve-fifteenths are in sums less
than one dollar and a half."[54]
On the other hand, the propertied class not only was able to raise money
at a fairly low rate of interest, but, as will appear, had the free use
of the people's money, through the power of government, to the extent of
tens of millions of dollars.
THE PENALTIES OF POVERTY.
If a man were absolutely destitute and took to theft as the only means
of warding off starvation for himself or his family, the whole force of
law at once descended heavily upon him. In New York State the law
decreed it grand larceny to steal to the value of $25, and in other
States the statutes were equally severe. For stealing $25 worth of
anything the penalty was three years in prison at hard labor. The
unfortunate was usually put in the convict chain-gang and forced to work
along the roads. Street-begging was prohibited by drastic laws; poverty
was substantially a crime. The moment a propertyless person stole, the
assumption at once was that he was _prima facie_ a criminal; but let the
powerful propertied man steal and government at once refused to see the
criminal _intent_; if he were prosecuted, the usual outcome was that he
never went to jail. Hundreds of specific instances could be given to
prove this. One of the most noted of these was that of Samuel Swartwout,
who was Collector of the Port of New York for a considerable period and
who, at the same time, was a financier and large land-speculation
promoter. It came out in 1838 that he had stolen the enormous sum of
$1,222,705.69 from the Government,[55] which money he had used in his
schemes. He was a fugitive from justice for a time, but upon his return
was looked upon extenuatingly as the "victim of circumstances" and he
never languished in jail.
Money was the standard of everything. The propertied person could commit
any kind of crime, short of murder, and could at once get free on bail.
But what happened to the accused who was poor? Here is a contemporaneous
description of one of the prisons of the period:
"In Bridewell, white females of every grade of character, from the
innocent who is in the end acquitted, down to the basest wretch
that ever disgraced the refuges of prostitution, are crowded into
the same abandoned abode. With the white male prisons, the case is
little altered.... And so it is with the colored prisoners of both
sexes. Hundreds are taken up and sent to these places, who, after
remaining frequently several weeks, are found to be innocent of
the crime alleged and are then let loose upon the community."[56]
"Let loose upon the community." Does not this clause in itself convey
volumes of significance of the attitude of the propertied interests,
even when banded together in a pseudo "charitable" enterprise, toward
the poverty-stricken? While thus the charitable societies were holding
up the destitute to scorn and contumely as outcasts and were loftily
lecturing down to the poor on the evils of intemperance and
gambling--practices which were astoundingly prevalent among the rich--at
no time did they make any attempt to alter laws so glaringly unjust that
they practically made poverty a distinct crime, subject to long terms of
imprisonment.
For instance, if a rich man were assaulted and made a complaint, all
that he had to do was to give bail to insure his appearance as a
witness. But if a poor man or woman were cheated or assaulted and could
not give bail to insure his or her appearance at the trial as a
complaining witness, the law compelled the authorities to lock up that
man or woman in prison. In the debates in the New York Constitutional
Convention of 1846, numerous cases were cited of this continuing
barbarity in New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania and other states. In
Maryland a young woman was assaulted and preferred criminal charges. As
she could not give bail she was locked up for eighteen months as a
detained witness. This was but one instance in thousands of similar
cases.
MASTER AND BONDED MAN.
For an apprenticed laborer to quit his master and job was a crime in
law; once caught he was forthwith bundled off to jail, there to await
the dispensation of his master. No matter how cruelly his master
ill-treated him, however dissatisfied he was, the apprenticed laborer in
law had no rights. Almost every day the newspapers of the eighteenth,
and the early part of the nineteenth, century contained offers of
rewards for the apprehension of fugitive apprentice laborers; from a
survey of the Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts and other colonial
and state newspapers it is clear that thousands of these apprentices had
to resort to flight to escape their bondage. This is a specimen
advertisement:
TWENTY DOLLARS REWARD.
RAN away from the subscriber, an Apprentice Boy, named William
Rustes, about 18 years and 3 months old, by trade a house
carpenter, of a dark complexion, dark eye brows, black eyes and
black hair, about 5 feet, 8 inches high, his dress unknown as he
took with him different kinds of clothes. The above reward will be
paid to any person that will secure him in gaol or return him to
his master.
GEORGE LORD,
No. 12 First Street.[57]
In contradistinction to the scorpion-like laws which worked such
injustice to the poor and which made a mockery of doctrines of equality
before the law, the propertied interests endowed themselves, by their
control of government, with invaluable exemptions and peculiarly
profitable special privileges.
Even where, in civil cases, all men, theoretically, had an equal chance
in courts of equity, litigation was made so expensive, whether purposely
or not, that justice was really a one-sided pastime, in which the rich
man could easily wear out the poor contestant. This, however, is not the
place for a dissertation on that most remarkable of noteworthy
sorcerer's arts, the making of justice an expensive luxury, while still
deluding the people with the notion that the law knows no preferences.
The preferences which are more to the point at present are those in
which government force is used to enrich the already rich and impoverish
the impoverished still further. At the very time that property was
bitterly resisting enlightened pleas for the abolition of imprisonment
for debt, for the enactment of a mechanic's lien law, and for the
extension of the suffrage franchise it was using the public money of the
whole people for its personal and private enterprises. In works dealing
with those times it is not often that we get penetration into the
underlying methods of the trading class. But a lucid insight is
inadvertently given by Walter Barrett (who, for sixty years, was in the
mercantile trade), in his smug and conventional, but quaintly
entertaining, volumes, "The Merchants of Old New York." This strong
instance shows like a flashlight that while the success of the shippers
was attributed to a fine category of energetic qualities, the benevolent
assistance of the United States Government was, in a large measure,
responsible for part of their accumulations.
THE SHIPPERS' HUGE GRAFT.
The Griswolds of New York owned the ship, "Panama." She carried spelter,
lead, iron and other products to China and returned with tea, false
cinnamon and various other Chinese goods. The duty on these was
extremely high. But the Government was far more lenient to the trading
class than the trader was to the poor debtor. It generously extended
credit for nine, twelve and eighteen months before it demanded the
payment of the tariff duties. What happened under this system? As soon
as the ship arrived, the cargo was sold at a profit of fifty per cent.
The Griswolds, for example, would pocket their profits and instead of
using their own capital in further ventures, they would have the
gratuitous use of Government money, that is to say, the people's money,
for periods of from six months to a year and a half. Thus the endless
chain was kept up. According to Barrett, this was the customary attitude
of the Government toward merchants: it was anything but unusual for a
merchant to have the free use of Government money to the sum of four or
five hundred thousand dollars.[58]
"John Jacob Astor," says Barrett in a view of admiration, "at one period
of his life had several vessels operating in this way. They would go to
the Pacific and carry furs from thence to Canton. These would be sold at
large profits. Then the cargoes of tea would pay enormous duties which
Astor did not have to pay to the United States for a year and a half.
His tea cargoes would be sold for good four and six months paper, or
perhaps cash; so that for eighteen or twenty years John Jacob Astor had
what was actually a free-of-interest loan from the Government of over
_five millions_ of dollars."[59]
"One house," continues Barrett, "was Thomas H. Smith & Sons. This firm
went enormously into the Canton trade, and, although possessing
originally but a few thousand dollars, Smith imported to such an extent
that when he failed he owed the United States three millions and not a
cent has ever been paid." Was Smith imprisoned for debt? Not at all.
It is such revelations as these that indicate how it was possible for
the shippers to pile up great fortunes at a time when "a house that
could raise $260,000 in specie had an uncommon capital." They showed how
the same functions of government which were used as an engine of such
oppressive power against the poor, were perverted into highly efficient
auxiliary of trading class aims and ambitions. By multifarious subtle
workings, these class laws inevitably had a double effect. They poured
wealth into the coffers of the merchant-class and simultaneously tended
to drive the masses into poverty. The gigantic profits taken in by
merchants had to be borne by the worker, perhaps not superficially, but
in reality so. They came from his slender wages, from the tea and cotton
and woolen goods that he used, the sugar and the coffee and so on. In
this indirect way the shippers absorbed a great part of the products of
his labor; what they did not expropriate the landlord did. Then when the
laborer fell in debt to the middleman tradesman to jail he went.[60]
UNITE AGAINST THE WORKER.
The worker denounced these discriminations as barbarous and unjust. But
he could do nothing. The propertied class, with its keen understanding
of what was best for its interests, acted and voted, and usually
dragooned the masses of enfranchised into voting, for men and measures
entirely favorable to its designs. Sometimes these interests conflicted
as they did when a part of New England became manufacturing centers and
favored a high protective tariff in opposition to the importing trades,
the plantation owners and the agricultural class in general. Then the
vested class would divide, and each side would appeal with passionate
and patriotic exhortations to the voting elements of the people to
sustain it, or the country would go to ruin. But when the working class
made demands for better laws, the propertied class, as a whole, united
to oppose the workers bitterly. However it differed on the tariff, or
the question of state or national banks, substantially the whole trading
class solidly combated the principle of manhood suffrage and the
movements for the wiping out of laws for imprisonment for debt, for
mechanic's liens and for the establishment of shorter hours of work.
Political institutions and their offspring in the form of laws being
generally in the control of the trading class, the conditions were
extraordinarily favorable for the accumulation of large fortunes,
especially on the part of the shipowners, the dominant class. The grand
climax of the galaxy of American fortunes during the period from 1800 to
1831--the greatest of all the fortunes up to the beginning of the third
decade of that century--was that of Girard. He built up what was looked
up to as the gigantic fortune of about ten millions of dollars and far
overtopped every other strainer for money except Astor, who survived him
seventeen years, and whose wealth increased during that time to double
the amount that Girard left.
FOOTNOTES:
[49] "The Astor Fortune," McClure's Magazine, April, 1905.
[50] Innumerable were the sermons and addresses poured forth, all to the
same end. To cite one: The Rev. Daniel Sharp of the Third Baptist
Meeting House, Boston, delivered a sermon in 1828 on "The Tendency of
Evil Speaking Against Rulers." It was considered so powerful an argument
in favor of obedience that it was printed in pamphlet form (Beals, Homer
& Co., Printers), and was widely distributed to press and public.
[51] Various writers assert that twenty dollars was the average minimum.
In many places, however, the great majority of debts were for less than
ten dollars. Thus, for the year ending November 26, 1831, nearly one
thousand citizens had been imprisoned for debt in Baltimore. Of this
number more than half owed less than ten dollars, and of the whole
number, only thirty-four individually had debts exceeding one hundred
dollars.--Reports of Committees, First Session, Twenty-fourth Congress,
Vol. II, Report No. 732:3.
[52] In his series of published articles, "The History of the
Prosecution of Bankrupt Frauds," the author has brought out
comprehensive facts on this point.
[53] The eminent merchants who sat on this committee had their own
conclusive opinion of what produced poverty. In commenting on the growth
of paupers they ascribed pauperism to seven sources. (1) Ignorance, (2)
Intemperance, (3) Pawnbrokers, (4) Lotteries, (5) Charitable
Institutions, (6) Houses of Ill-Fame, (7) Gambling.
No documents more wonderfully illustrate the bourgeois type of
temperament and reasoning than their reports. The people of the city
were ignorant because 15,000 of the 25,000 families did not attend
church. Pawnbrokers were an incentive to theft, cunning and lack of
honest industry, etc., etc. Thus their explanations ran. In referring to
mechanics and paupers, the committee described them as "the middling and
inferior classes." Is it any wonder that the working class justly views
"charitable" societies, and the spirit behind them, with intense
suspicion and deep execration?
[54] Documents of the Board of Assistant Aldermen of New York City,
1831-32, Doc. No. 45:1.
[55] House Executive Document, No. 13, Twenty-fifth Congress, Third
Session; also, House Report, No. 313.
[56] Report for 1821 of the "Society for the Prevention of Pauperism."
[57] "New York Gazette and General Advertiser", Aug. 5, 1797. The
rewards offered for the apprehension of fugitive apprentices varied. An
advertisement in the same newspaper, issue of July 3, 1797, held out an
offer of five dollars reward for an indented German boy who had
"absconded." The fear was expressed that he would attempt to board some
ship, and all persons were notified not to harbor or conceal him as they
would be "proceeded against as the law directs". That old apprentice law
has never been repealed in New York State.
[58] The Government reports bear out Barrett's statements, although in
saying this it must be with qualifications. The shippers engaged in the
East India and China trade were more favored, it seems, than other
classes of shippers, which discrimination engendered much antagonism.
"Why," wrote the Mercantile Society of New York to the House Committee
on Manufactures in 1821, "should the merchant engaged in the East India
trade, who is the overgrown capitalist, have the extended credit of
twelve months in his duties, the amount of which on one cargo furnishes
nearly a sufficient capital for completing another voyage, before his
bonds are payable?" The Mercantile Society recommended that credits on
duties be reduced to three and six months on merchandise imported from
all quarters of the globe.--Reports of Committees, Second Session,
Sixteenth Congress, 1820-21, Vol. I, Document No. 34.
[59] "The Old Merchants of New York," 1:31-33. Barrett was a great
admirer of Astor. He inscribed Vol. iii, published in 1864, to Astor's
memory.
[60] The movement to abolish imprisonment for debt was a protracted one
lasting more than a quarter of a century, and was acrimoniously opposed
by the propertied classes, as a whole. By 1836, however, many State
legislatures had been induced to repeal or modify the provisions of the
various debtors' imprisonment acts. In response to a recommendation by
President Andrew Jackson that the practise be abolished in the District
of Columbia, a House Select Committee reported on January 17, 1832, that
"the system originated in cupidity. It is a confirmation of power in the
few against the many; the Patrician against the Plebeian." On May 31,
1836, the House Committee for the District of Columbia, in reporting on
the debtors' imprisonment acts, said: "They are disgraceful evidences of
the ingenious subtlety by which they were woven into the legal system we
adopted from England, and were obviously intended to increase and
confirm the power of a wealthy aristocracy by rendering poverty a crime,
and subjecting the liberty of the poor to the capricious will of the
rich."--Reports of Committees, Second Session, Twenty-second Congress,
1832-33, Report No. 5, and Reports of Committees, First Session,
Twenty-fourth Congress, 1836, Report No. 732, ii:2.
CHAPTER VI
GIRARD--THE RICHEST OF THE SHIPPERS
Girard was born at Bordeaux, France, on May 21, 1750, and was the eldest
of five children of Captain Pierre Girard, a mariner. When eight years
old he became blind in one eye, a loss and deformity which subjected his
sensibilities to severe trials and which had the effect of rendering him
morose and sour. It was his lament in later life that while his brothers
had been sent to college, he was the ugly duckling of the family and
came in for his father's neglect and a shrewish step-mother's
waspishness. At about fourteen years of age he relieved himself of these
home troubles and ran away to sea. During the nine years that he sailed
between Bordeaux and the West Indies, he rose from cabin-boy to mate.
Evading the French law which required that no man should be made master
of a ship unless he had sailed two cruises in the royal navy and was
twenty-five years old, Girard got the command of a trading vessel when
about twenty-two years old. While in this service he clandestinely
carried cargoes of his own which he sold at considerable profit. In May,
1776, while en route from New Orleans to a Canadian port, he became
enshrouded in a fog off the Delaware Capes, signaled for aid, and when
the fog had cleared away sufficiently for an American ship, near by, to
come to his assistance, learned that war was on. He thereupon scurried
for Philadelphia, where he sold vessel and cargo, of which latter only
a part belonged to him, and with the proceeds opened up a cider and wine
bottling and grocery business in a small store on Water street.
Girard made money fast; and in July, 1777, married Mary Lum, a woman of
his own class. She is usually described as a servant girl of great
beauty and as one whose temper was of quite tempestuous violence. This
unfortunate woman subsequently lost her reason; undoubtedly her
husband's meannesses and his forbidding qualities contributed to the
process. One of his most favorable biographers thus describes him: "In
person he was short and stout, with a dull repulsive countenance, which
his bushy eyebrows and solitary eye almost made hideous. He was cold and
reserved in manner, and was disliked by his neighbors, the most of whom
were afraid of him."[61]
During the British occupation of Philadelphia he was charged by the
revolutionists with extreme double-dealing and duplicity in pretending
to be a patriot, and taking the oath of allegiance to the colonies,
while secretly trading with the British. None of his biographers deny
this. While merchant after merchant was being bankrupted from disruption
of trade, Girard was incessantly making money. By 1780 he was again in
the shipping trade, his vessels plying between American ports and New
Orleans and San Domingo; not the least of his profits, it was said,
came from slave-trading.
[Illustration: STEPHEN GIRARD.
(From an Engraving.)]
HOW HE BUILT HIS SHIPS.
A troublous partnership with his brother, Captain Jean Girard, lasted
but a short time; the brothers could not agree. At the dissolution in
1790 Stephen Girard's share of the profits amounted to $30,000. Girard's
greatest stroke came from the insurrection of the San Domingo negroes
against the French several years later. He had two vessels lying in the
harbor of one of the island ports. At the first mutterings of danger, a
number of planters took their valuables on board one of these ships and
scurried back to get the remainder. The sequel, as commonly narrated, is
represented thus: The planters failed to return, evidently falling
victims to the fury of the insurrectionists. The vessels were taken to
Philadelphia, and Girard persistently advertised for the owners of the
valuables. As no owners ever appeared, Girard sold the goods and put the
proceeds, $50,000, into his own bank account. "This," says Houghton,
"was a great assistance to him, and the next year he began the building
of those splendid ships which enabled him to engage so actively in the
Chinese and West India trades."
From this time on his profits were colossal. His ships circumnavigated
the world many times and each voyage brought him a fortune. He practiced
all of those arts of deception which were current among the trading
class and which were accepted as shrewdness and were inseparably
associated with legitimate business methods. In giving one of his
captains instructions he wrote, as was his invariable policy, the most
explicit directions to exercise secretiveness and cunning in his
purchases of coffee at Batavia. Be cautious and prudent, was his
admonition. Keep to yourself the intention of the voyage and the amount
of specie that you have on board. To satisfy the curious, throw them off
the scent by telling them that the ship will take in molasses, rice and
sugar, if the price is very low, adding that the whole will depend upon
the success in selling the small Liverpool cargo. If you do this, the
cargo of coffee can be bought ten per cent cheaper than it would be if
it is publicly known there is a quantity of Spanish dollars on board,
besides a valuable cargo of British goods intended to be invested in
coffee for Stephen Girard of Philadelphia.
By 1810 we see him ordering the Barings of London to invest in shares of
the Bank of the United States half a million dollars which they held for
him. When the charter expired, he was the principal creditor of that
bank; and he bought, at a great bargain, the bank and the cashier's
house for $120,000. On May 12, 1812, he opened the Girard Bank, with a
capital of $1,200,000, which he increased the following year by $100,000
more.[62]
A DICTATOR OF FINANCE.
His wealth was now overshadowingly great; his power immense. He was a
veritable dictator of the realms of finance; an assiduous, repellent
little man, with his devil's eye, who rode roughshod over every obstacle
in his path. His every movement bred fear; his veriest word could bring
ruin to any one who dared cross his purposes. The war of 1812 brought
disaster to many a merchant, but Girard harvested fortune from the
depths of misfortune. "He was, it must be said," says Houghton, "hard
and illiberal in his bargains, and remorseless in exacting the last cent
due him." And after he opened the Girard Bank: "Finding that the
salaries which had been paid by the government were higher than those
paid elsewhere, he cut them down to the rate given by the other banks.
The watchman had always received from the old bank the gift of an
overcoat at Christmas, but Girard put a stop to this. He gave no
gratuities to any of his employees, but confined them to the
compensation for which they had bargained; yet he contrived to get out
of them service more devoted than was received by other men who paid
higher wages and made presents. Appeals to him for aid were unanswered.
No poor man ever came full-handed from his presence. He turned a deaf
ear to the entreaties of failing merchants to help them on their feet
again. He was neither generous nor charitable. When his faithful cashier
died, after long years spent in his service, he manifested the most
hardened indifference to the bereavement of the family of that
gentleman, and left them to struggle along as best they could."
Further, Houghton unconsciously proceeds to bring out several incidents
which show the exorbitant profits Girard made from his various business
activities. In the spring of 1813, one of his ships was captured by a
British cruiser at the mouth of the Delaware. Fearing that his prize
would be recaptured by an American war ship if he sent her into port,
the English Admiral notified Girard that he would ransom the ship for
$180,000 in coin. Girard paid the money; and, even after paying that
sum, the cargo of silks, nankeens and teas yielded him a profit of half
a million dollars. His very acts of apparent public spirit were means by
which he scooped in large profits. Several times, when the rate of
exchange was so high as to be injurious to general business, he drew
upon Baring Bros. for sums of money to be transferred to the United
States. This was hailed as a public benefaction. But what did Girard do?
He disposed of the money to the Bank of the United States and charged
ten per cent. for the service.
BRIBERY AND INTIMIDATION.
The reestablishment and enlarged sway of this bank were greatly due to
his efforts and influence; he became its largest stockholder and one of
its directors. No business institution in the first three decades of the
nineteenth century exercised such a sinister and overshadowing influence
as this chartered monopoly. The full tale of its indirect bribery of
politicians and newspaper editors, in order to perpetuate its great
privileges and keep a hold upon public opinion, has never been set
forth. But sufficient facts were brought out when, after years of
partizan agitation, Congress was forced to investigate and found that
not a few of its own members for years had been on the payrolls of the
bank.[63]
In order to get its charter renewed from time to time and retain its
extraordinary special privileges, the United States Bank systematically
debauched politics and such of the press as was venal; and when a
critical time came, as it did in 1832-34, when the mass of the people
sided with President Jackson in his aim to overthrow the bank, it
instructed the whole press at its command to raise the cry of "the
fearful consequences of revolution, anarchy and despotism," which
assuredly would ensue if Jackson were reelected. To give one instance of
how for years it had manipulated the press: The "Courier and Enquirer"
was a powerful New York newspaper. Its owners, Webb and Noah, suddenly
deserted Jackson and began to denounce him. The reason was, as revealed
by a Congressional investigation, that they had borrowed $50,000 from
the United States Bank which lost no time in giving them the alternative
of paying up or supporting the bank.[64]
Girard's share in the United States Bank brought him millions of
dollars. With its control of deposits of government funds and by the
provisions of its charter, this bank swayed the whole money marts of the
United States and could manipulate them at will. It could advance or
depress prices as it chose. Many times, Girard with his fellow directors
was severely denounced for the arbitrary power he wielded. But--and let
the fact be noted--the denunciation came largely from the owners of the
State banks who sought to supplant the United States Bank. The struggle
was really one between two sets of capitalistic interests.
Shipping and banking were the chief sources of Girard's wealth, with
side investments in real estate and other forms of property. He owned
large tracts of land in Philadelphia, the value of which increased
rapidly with the growth of population; he was a heavy stockholder in
river navigation companies and near the end of his life he subscribed
$200,000 toward the construction of the Danville & Pottsville Railroad.
THE SOLITARY CROESUS.
He was at this time a solitary, crusty old man living in a four-story
house on Water street, pursued by the contumely of every one, even of
those who flattered him for mercenary purposes. Children he had none,
and his wife was long since dead. His great wealth brought him no
comfort; the environment with which he surrounded himself was mean and
sordid; many of his clerks lived in better style. There, in his dingy
habitation, this lone, weazened veteran of commerce immersed himself in
the works of Voltaire, Diderot, Paine and Rousseau, of whom he was a
profound admirer and after whom some of his best ships were named.
This grim miser had, after all, the one great redeeming quality of being
true to himself. He made no pretense to religion and had an abhorrence
of hypocrisy. Cant was not in his nature. Out into the world he went, a
ferocious shark, cold-eyed for prey, but he never cloaked his motives
beneath a calculating exterior of piety or benevolence. Thousands upon
thousands he had deceived, for business was business, but himself he
never deceived. His bitter scoffs at what he termed theologic
absurdities and superstitions and his terrific rebuffs to ministers who
appealed to him for money, undoubtedly called forth a considerable
share of the odium which was hurled upon him. He defied the anathemas of
organized churchdom; he took hold of the commercial world and shook it
harshly and emerged laden with spoils. To the last, his volcanic spirit
flashed forth, even when, eighty years old, he lay with an ear cut off,
his face bruised and his sight entirely destroyed, the result of being
felled by a wagon.
In all his eighty-one years charity had no place in his heart. But
after, on Dec. 26, 1831, he lay stone dead and his will was opened, what
a surprise there was! His relatives all received bequests; his very
apprentices each got five hundred dollars, and his old servants
annuities. Hospitals, orphan societies and other charitable associations
all benefited. Five hundred thousand dollars went to the City of
Philadelphia for certain civic improvements; three hundred thousand
dollars for the canals of Pennsylvania; a portion of his valuable estate
in Louisiana to New Orleans for the improvement of that city. The
remainder of the estate, about six millions, was left to trustees for
the creation and endowment of a College for Orphans, which was promptly
named after him.
A chorus of astonishment and laudation went up. Was there ever such
magnificence of public spirit? Did ever so lofty a soul live who was so
misunderstood? Here and there a protesting voice was feebly heard that
Girard's wealth came from the community and that it was only justice
that it should revert to the community; that his methods had resulted in
widows and orphans and that his money should be applied to the support
of those orphans. These protests were frowned upon as the mouthings of
cranks or the ravings of impotent envy. Applause was lavished upon
Girard; his very clothes were preserved as immemorial mementoes.[65]
"THE GREAT BENEFACTOR."
All of the benefactions of the other rich men of the period waned into
insignificance compared to those of Girard. His competitors and compeers
had given to charity, but none on so great a scale as Girard.
Distinguished orators vied with one another in extolling his wonderful
benefactions,[66] and the press showered encomiums upon him as that of
the greatest benefactor of the age. To them this honestly seemed so, for
they were trained by the standards of the trading class, by the
sophistries of political economists and by the spirit of the age, to
concentrate their attention upon the powerful and successful only, while
disregarding the condition of the masses of the people.
The pastimes of a king or the foibles of some noted politician or rich
man were things of magnitude and were much expatiated upon, while the
common man, singly or in mass, was of absolutely no importance. The
finely turned rhetoric of the orators, pleasing as it was to that
generation, is, judged by modern standards, well nigh meaningless and
worthless. In that highflown oratory, with its carefully studied
exordiums, periods and perorations can be clearly discerned the
reverence given to power as embodied by possession of property. But
nowhere do we see any explanation, or even an attempt at explanation, of
the basic means by which this property was acquired or of its effect
upon the masses of the people. Woefully lacking in facts are the
productions of the time as to how the great body of the workers lived
and what they did. Facts as to the rich are fairly available, although
not abundant, but facts regarding the rest of the population are
pitifully few. The patient seeker for truth--the mind which is not
content with the presentation of one side--finds, with some impatience,
that only a few writers thought it worth while to give even scant
attention to the condition of the working class. One of these few was
Matthew Carey, an orthodox political economist, who, in a pamphlet
issued in 1829[67], gave this picture which forms both a contrast and a
sequel to the accumulations of multimillionaires, of which Girard was
then the archetype:
A STARK CONTRAST PRESENTED.
"Thousands of our laboring people travel hundreds of miles in
quest of employment on canals at 62-1/2 cents to 87-1/2 cents per
day, paying $1.50 to $2.00 a week for board, leaving families
behind depending upon them for support. They labor frequently in
marshy grounds, where they inhale pestiferous miasmata, which
destroy their health, often irrevocably. They return to their poor
families broken hearted, and with ruined constitutions, with a
sorry pittance, most laboriously earned, and take to their beds,
sick and unable to work. Hundreds are swept off annually, many of
them leaving numerous and helpless families. Notwithstanding their
wretched fate, their places are quickly supplied by others,
although death stares them in the face. Hundreds are most
laboriously employed on turnpikes, working from morning to night
at from half a dollar to three-quarters a day, exposed to the
broiling sun in summer and all the inclemency of our severe
winters. There is always a redundancy of wood-pilers in our
cities, whose wages are so low that their utmost efforts do not
enable them to earn more than from thirty-five to fifty cents per
day.... Finally there is no employment whatever, how disagreeable
or loathsome, or deleterious soever it may be, or however reduced
the wages, that does not find persons willing to follow it rather
than beg or steal."
FOOTNOTES:
[61] "Kings of Fortune":16--The pretentious title and sub-title of this
work, written thirty odd years ago by Walter R. Houghton, A.M., gives an
idea of the fantastic exaltation indulged in of the careers of men of
great wealth. Hearken to the full title: "Kings of Fortune--or the
Triumphs and Achievements of Noble, Self-made men.--Whose brilliant
careers have honored their calling, blessed humanity, and whose lives
furnish instruction for the young, entertainment for the old and
valuable lessons for the aspirants of fortune." Could any fulsome
effusion possibly surpass this?
[62] "Mr. Girard's bank was a financial success from the beginning. A
few months after it opened for business its capital was increased to one
million three hundred thousand dollars. One of the incidents which
helped, at the outstart, to inspire the public with confidence in the
stability of the new institution was the fact that the trustees who
liquidated the affairs of the old Bank of the United States opened an
account in Girard's Bank, and deposited in its vaults some millions of
dollars in specie belonging to the old bank."--"The History of the
Girard National Bank of Philadelphia," by Josiah Granville Leach, LL.B.,
1902. This eulogistic work contains only the scantiest details of
Girard's career.
[63] The First Session of the Twenty-second Congress, 1831, iv,
containing reports from Nos. 460 to 463.
[64] Ibid.
An investigating committee appointed by the Pennsylvania Legislature in
1840, reported that during a series of years the Bank of the United
States (or United States Bank, as it was more often referred to) had
corruptly expended $130,000 in Pennsylvania for a re-charter.--Pa. House
Journal, 1842, Vol. II, Appendix, 172-531.
[65] In providing for the establishment of Girard College, Girard stated
in his will: "I enjoin and require that no ecclesiastic, missionary, or
minister of any sect whatsoever, shall ever hold or exercise any station
or duty whatsoever in the said college; nor shall any such person be
admitted for any purpose, or as a visitor within the premises
appropriated to the purposes of said college."--The Will of the Late
Stephen Girard, Esq., 1848:22-23.
An attempt was made by his relatives in France to break his will, one of
the grounds being that the provisions of his will were in conflict with
the Christian religion which was a part of the common law of
Pennsylvania. The attempt failed.
[66] For example, an address by Edward Everett, at the Odeon, before the
Mercantile Library Association in Boston, September 13, 1838: "Few
persons, I believe, enjoyed less personal popularity in the community in
which he lived and to which he bequeathed his personal fortune.... A
citizen and a patriot he lived in his modest dwelling and plain garb;
appropriating to his last personal wants the smallest pittance from his
princely income; living to the last in the dark and narrow street in
which he made his fortune; and when he died bequeathed it for the
education of orphan children. For the public I do not believe he could
have done better," etc., etc.--Hunt's "Merchant's Magazine," 1830, 1:35.
[67] "The Public Charities of Philadelphia."
PART II
THE GREAT LAND FORTUNES
[Illustration: GEN. STEPHEN VAN RENSSLAER.
The Last of the Patroons.
(From an Engraving.)]
CHAPTER I
THE ORIGIN OF HUGE CITY ESTATES
In point of succession and importance the next great fortunes came from
ownership of land in the cities. They far preceded fortunes from
established industries or from the control of modern methods of
transportation. Long before Vanderbilt and other of his contemporaries
had plucked immense fortunes from steamboat, railroad and street railway
enterprises, the Astor, Goelet, and Longworth fortunes were counted in
the millions. In the seventy years from 1800 the landowners were the
conspicuous fortune possessors; and, although fortunes of millions were
extracted from various other lines of business, the land fortunes were
preeminent.
At the dawn of the nineteenth century and until about 1850, survivals of
the old patroon estates were to be met with. But these gradually
disintegrated. Everywhere in the North the tendency was toward the
partition of the land into small farms, while in the South the condition
was the reverse. The main fact which stood out was that the rich men of
the country were no longer those who owned vast tracts of rural land.
That powerful kind of landowner had well-nigh vanished.
THE MANORIAL LORDS PASS AWAY.
For more than two centuries the manorial lords had been conspicuous
functionaries. Shorn of much power by the alterations of the Revolution
they still retained a part of their state and estate. But changing laws
and economic conditions drove them down and down in the scale until the
very names of many of them were gradually lost sight of. As they
descended in the swirl, other classes of rich men jutted into strong
view. Chief among these nascent classes were the landowners of the
cities, at first grabbling tradesmen and land speculators and finally
rising to the crowning position of multimillionaires. Originally, as we
have seen, the manorial magnate himself made the laws and decreed
justice; but in two centuries great changes had taken place. He now had
to fight for his very existence.
Thus, to give one example, the manorial men in New York were confronted
in 1839 by a portentous movement. Their tenants were in a state of
unrest. On the Van Rensselaer, the Livingston and other of the old
feudal estates they rose in revolt. They objected to the continuing
system which gave the lords of these manors much the same rights over
them as a lord in England exercised over his tenants. Under the leases
that the manorial lords compelled their tenants to sign, there were
oppressive anachronisms. If he desired to entertain a stranger in his
house for twenty-four hours, the tenant was required to get permission
in writing. He was forced to obligate himself not to trade in any
Commodities except the produce of the manor. He could not get his flour
ground anywhere else than at the mill of the manor without violating his
lease and facing ejectment, nor could he buy anything at any place
except at the store of the manorial magnate. These were the rights
reserved to the manorial lords after the Revolution, because theirs were
the rights of private property; and as has often been set forth,
property absolutely dominated the laws and greatly nullified the spirit
of a movement made successful by the blood and lives of the masses in
the Revolutionary Army. Tardily, subsequent legislatures had abolished
all feudal tenures, but these laws were neither effective nor were
enforced by the authorities who reflected and represented the interests
of the proprietors of the manors.
On their part the manorial men believed that self-interest, pride and
adherence to ancient traditions called for the perpetuation of their
arbitrary power of running their domains as they pleased. They refused
to acknowledge that law had any right to interfere in the managing of
what they considered their private affairs. Eager to avail themselves of
the police power of the law in dispossessing any fractious or
impecunious tenant and in suppressing protest meetings, they, at the
same time, denounced law as tyrannical when it sought to inject more
modern and humane conditions in the managing of their estates. They
stubbornly insisted upon a tenantry, and as obstinately contested any
forfeiture of what they deemed their property rights.
FEUDAL TENURES ABOLISHED.
A long series of reprisals and an intense agitation developed. The
Anti-Renters mustered such sympathetic political strength and threw the
whole state into such a vortex of radical discussion, that the
politicians of the day, fearing the effects of such a movement,
practically forced the manorial magnates to compromise by selling their
land in small farms,[68] which they did at exorbitant prices. They made
large profits on the strength of the very movement which they had so
bitterly opposed. Affrighted at the ominous unrest of a large part of
the people and hoping to stem it, the New York Constitutional Convention
in 1846 adopted a Constitutional inhibition on all feudal tenures, an
inhibition so drafted that no legislature could pass a law contravening
it.[69]
So, in this final struggle, passed away the last vestiges of the sway of
the all-powerful patroons of old. They had become archaic. It was
impossible for them to survive in the face of newer conditions, for they
represented a bygone economic and social era. Their power was one
accruing purely from the extent of their possessions and discriminative
laws. When these were wrenched from their grasp, their importance as
wielders of wealth and influence ceased. They might still boast of their
lineage, their aristocratic enclosure and culture and their social
altitude, but these were about the only remnants of consolation left.
The time was unpropitious for the continuation of great wealth based
upon rural or small-town land. Many influences conspired to make this
land a variable property, while these same influences, or a part of
them, fixed upon city land an enhancing and graduating permanency of
value. The growth of the shipping trade built up the cities and
attracted workers and population generally. The establishment of the
factory system in 1790 had a two-fold effect. It began to drain country
sections of many of the younger generations and it immediately enlarged
the trading activities of the cities. Another and much more considerable
part of the farming population in the East was constantly migrating to
the West and Southwest with their promising opportunities. Some country
districts thinned out; others remained stationary. But whether the rural
census increased or not, there were other factors which sent up or down
the value of farming lands. The building of a canal would augment the
value of land in section and cause stimulation, and depress conditions
in another section not so favored. Even this stimulation, however, was
often transient. With each fresh settlement of the West and with the
construction of each pioneer railroad, new and complex factors turned up
which generally had a depreciating effect upon Eastern lands. A country
estate worth a large sum in one generation might very well succumb to a
mortgage in the next.
THE NEW ARISTOCRACY.
But fortunes based upon land in the cities were indued with a
mathematical certainty and a perpetuity. City real estate was not
subject to the extreme fluctuating processes which so disordered the
value of rural land. All of the tendencies and currents of the times
favored the building up of an aristocracy based upon ownership of city
property. Compared to their present colossal proportions the cities were
then mere villages. There was a nucleus of perhaps a mile or two of
houses, beyond which were fields and orchards, meadows and wastes. These
could be bought for an insignificant sum. With the progressing growth
of commerce and population, with immigration continually going on, every
year witnessing a keener pressure for occupation of the land, the value
of this latter was certain to increase. There was no chance of its being
otherwise.
Up to 1825 it was a mooted question whether the richest landowners would
arise in New York, Philadelphia, Boston or Baltimore. For many years
Philadelphia had been far in the lead in extent of commerce. But the
opening of the Erie Canal at once settled this question. At a bound New
York attained the rank of the foremost commercial city in the United
States, completely outstripping its competitors. While the trade of
these fell off precipitately, the population and trade of New York City
nearly doubled in a single decade. The value of land began to increase
stupendously. The swamps, rocky wastes and flats and the land under
water of a few years before became prolific sources of fortunes. Land
which had been worth a paltry sum ten or twenty years before sprang to a
considerable value and, in course of time, with the same causes in a
more intense ratio of operation, was vested with a value of hundreds of
millions of dollars. This being so, it was not surprising that the
richest landowners should appear first in New York City and should be
able to maintain their supremacy.
The wealth of the landowners soon completely eclipsed that of the
shippers. Enormous as were the profits of the shipping business, they
were immediate only. In the contest for wealth it was inevitable that
the shippers should fall behind. Their business was one of peculiar
uncertainties. The hazards of the sea, the fluctuations and vicissitudes
of trade, the severe competition of the times, exposed their traffic to
many mutations. Many of the rich shipowners well understood this; the
surplus wealth derived from commerce on the seas they invested in land,
banks, factories, turnpikes, insurance companies, railroads and in some
instances, lotteries. Those shipping millionaires who clung exclusively
to the sea fell in the scale of the rich class, especially as the time
came when foreign shipping largely supplanted the trade hitherto carried
in American cutters. Other shippers who applied their surplus capital to
investments in other forms of trade and ownership advanced rapidly in
wealth.
CITY LAND THE SUPREME FACTOR.
Between land ownership and other forms, however, there was a great
difference. Trade was then extremely individualistic; the artificial
controlling power called the corporation was in its earliest infantile
condition. The heirs of the owner of sixty line of sail might not
possess the same astuteness, the same knowledge, adroitness, and
cunning--or let us say, unscrupulousness--the same severe application as
the founder. Consequently the business would decay or fall into the
hands of others shrewder or more fortunate. As to factories the
condition was somewhat the same; and, after the organization of labor
unions the possibility of strikes was an ever-present danger to the
constant flow of profits. Banks were by no means fixed, unchangeable
establishments. Like other media of profit-making, the extent of their
power and profits depended upon prevailing conditions and very largely
upon the favoritism or policy of Government. At any time the party
controlling government functions might change and a radically different
policy in banking, tariff or other laws be put in force.
These changing laws did not, it is true, vitally benefit the masses of
the people, for one set or other of the propertied interests almost
invariably benefited. The laws enacted were usually in response to a
demand made by contending propertied interests. The trade and political
struggles carried on by the commercial interests were a series of
incessant wars, in which every individual owner, firm or combination was
fiercely resisting competitors or striving for their overthrow.
THE INVULNERABLE LANDOWNER.
But the landowner occupied a superior position which neither political
conditions nor the flux of changing circumstances could materially
assail. He was ardently individualistic also in that he demanded, and
was accorded, the unimpaired right to get land in any way that he
legally could, hold a monopoly of as much of it as he pleased, and
dispose of it as he willed. In the very act of asserting this
individualism he called upon Society, through its machinery of
Government, for the enactment of particular laws, to guarantee him the
sole possession of his land and uphold his claims and rights by force if
necessary. These were all the basic laws that he needed and these laws
did not change. From generation to generation they remained fixed,
immovable. The interests of all landowners were identical; those of the
traders were varying and conflicting. For long periods the landowner
could expect the continuance of existing fundamental laws regarding the
ownership of land, while the shipper, the factory owner, the banker did
not know what different set of laws might be enacted at any time.
Furthermore, the landowner had an efficient and never-failing
auxiliary. He yoked society as a partner, but it was a partnership in
which the revenue went exclusively to the landowner. The principal
factor he depended upon was the work of collective humans in adding
greater and greater values to his land. Broadly speaking, his share
consisted in merely looking on; he had nothing to do except hold on to
his land. His sons, grandsons, his descendants down to remotest
posterity need do even less; they could leisurely hold on to their
inheritance, enlarge it, hire the necessary ability of superintendence
and vast and ever vaster riches would be theirs. Society worked
feverishly for the landowner. Every street laid and graded by the city;
every park plotted and every other public improvement; every child born
and every influx of immigrants; every factory, warehouse and dwelling
that went up;--all these and more agencies contributed toward the
abnormal swelling of his fortune.
A PROLIFIC BREEDER OF WEALTH.
Under such a system land was the one great auspicious, facile and
durable means of rolling up an overshadowing fortune. Its exclusive
possession struck at the very root of human necessity. At a pinch people
can do without trade or money, but land they must have, even if only to
lie down on and starve. The impoverish, jobless worker, with disaster
facing him, must first perforce give up his precious few coins to the
landlord and take chances on food and the remainder. Especially is land
in demand in a complicated industrial system which causes much of the
population to gravitate to centers where industries and trade are
concentrated and congest there.
A more formidable system for the foundation and amplification of lasting
fortunes has not existed. It is automatically self-perpetuating. And
that it is preeminently so is seen in the fact that the large shipping
fortunes of a century ago are now generally as completely forgotten as
the methods then used are obsolete. But the land has remained land; and
the fortunes then incubated have grown into mighty powers of great
national, and some of considerable international, importance.
It was by favor of these propitious conditions that many of the great
fortunes, based upon land, were founded. According to the successive
census returns of the United States, by far the greater part of the
wealth of the country as regards real estate was, and is, concentrated
in the North Atlantic Division and the North Central Division, the one
taking in such cities as New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, the other
Chicago, Cincinnati and other cities.[70] It is in the large cities that
the great land fortunes are to be found. The greatest of these fortunes
are the Astor, Goelet and Rhinelander estates in the East and, in the
West, the Longworth and Field estates are notable examples. To deal with
all the conspicuous fortunes based upon land would necessitate an
interminable narrative. Suffice it for the purposes of this work to take
up a few of the superlatively great fortunes as representatives of those
based upon land.
VAST FORTUNES FROM LAND.
The foremost of all American fortunes derived from land is the Astor
fortune. Its present bulk, embracing all the collateral family branches,
is estimated by some authorities at about $300,000,000. This, it is
generally believed, is an underestimate. As long ago as 1889, when the
population of New York City was much less than now, Thomas G. Shearman,
a keen student of land conditions, placed the collective wealth of the
Astors at $250,000,000.[71] The stupendous magnitude of this fortune
alone may at once be seen in its relation to the condition of the masses
of the people. An analysis of the United States census of 1900, compiled
by Lucien Sanial, shows that while the total wealth of the country was
estimated at about $95,000,000,000, the proletarian class, composed
chiefly of wage workers and a small proportion of those in professional
classes, and numbering 20,393,137 persons, owned only about
$4,000,000,000. It is by such a contrast, bringing out how one family
alone, the Astors, own more than many millions of workers, that we begin
to get an idea of the overreaching, colossal power of a single fortune.
The Goelet fortune is likewise vast; it is variously estimated at from
$200,000,000 to $225,000,000, although what its exact proportions are is
a matter of some obscurity.
In the case of these great fortunes it is well nigh impossible to get an
accurate idea of just how much they reach. All of them are based
primarily upon ownership of land, but they also include many other forms
such as shares in banks, coal and other mines, railroads, city
transportation systems, gas plants, industrial corporations. Even the
most indefatigable tax assessors find it such a fruitless and elusive
task in attempting to discover what personal property is held by these
multimillionaires, that the assessment is usually a conjectural or
haphazard performance. The extent of their land holdings is known; these
cannot be hid in a safe deposit vault. But their other varieties of
property are carefully concealed from public and official knowledge.
Since this is so, it is entirely probable that the fortunes of these
families are considerably greater than is commonly estimated. The case
of Marshall Field, a Chicago Croesus, who left a fortune valued at
about $100,000,000, is a strong illustration. This man owned $30,000,000
worth of real estate in Chicago alone. There was no telling, however,
what his whole estate amounted to, for he refused year after year to pay
taxes on more than a valuation of $2,500,000 of personal property. Yet,
after his death in 1906, an inventory of his estate filed in January,
1907, disclosed a clear taxable personal property of $49,977,270. He was
far richer than he would have it appear.
Let us investigate the careers of some of these powerful landed men, the
founders of great fortunes, and inquire into their methods and into the
conditions under which they succeeded in heaping up their immense
accumulations.
FOOTNOTES:
[68] In 1847 and 1849 the Anti-Renters demonstrated a voting strength in
New York State of about 5,000. Livingston's title to his estate being
called into question, a suit was brought. The court decision favored
him. The Livingstons, it may be again remarked, were long powerful in
politics, and had had their members on the bench.--"Life of Silas
Wright," 179-226; "Last Leaves of American History":16-18, etc.
[69] The debates in this convention showed that the feudal conditions
described in this chapter prevailed down to 1846.--New York
Constitution; Debates in Convention, 1846; 1052-1056. This is an extract
from the official convention report: "Mr. Jordan [a delegate] said that
it was from such things that relief was asked: which although the moral
sense of the community will not admit to be enforced, are still actually
in existence."
[70] Of a total of $39,544,333,000, representing wealth in real estate
and improvements, the census of 1890 attributed $13,905,274,364 to the
North Atlantic Division and a trifle more than $15,000,000,000 to the
North Central Division.
[71] The Forum (Magazine), November, 1889.