GOULD’S ROMANTIC MARRIAGE AND HIS FIRST RAILROAD.
When Jay Gould reached New York in 1860, after the tannery war, he
was almost impoverished. He settled down at the Everett House, a
comfortable hotel, and there he lived for a little time while waiting
for something to turn up. Gould was not very busy just then and used
to wander around the city, up town and down town, through Wall street
and Lower Broadway, where in later years he became such a power; maybe,
even then, wondering if he would ever reach the point in wealth and
influence that belonged to the men he met, and figuring, as every one
does at times, what he would do if he were a millionaire. He knew the
tannery business thoroughly and had many influential acquaintances in
“The Swamp,” which was the seat then, as it is now, of the leather
trade in New York. But he most wanted to get into the railroad
business. He believed that greater opportunities were there than in any
other occupation for the acquiring of wealth and influence. So he bent
all his energies in that direction.
One day just before the war, Gould came walking down the street toward
his hotel, and looking up toward the window of the parlor, he saw
seated there, looking toward him, a most charming young lady. He was
not by any means inclined toward flirtation, but he could not avoid an
appearance of interest in her, and he passed on into the hotel. Soon
after that the same episode was repeated. By a little investigation,
Mr. Gould learned that the young lady was Miss Ellen Miller, whose
father, a wealthy New York merchant, was a member of the grocery house
of Philip Dater & Co. She lived in a house across the street, and a
delightful flirtation with the girl whose pretty face appeared at
the window preceded any formal acquaintance. Circumstances, however,
permitted them to meet socially, and they became excellently well
acquainted. After a few weeks, the acquaintance became more and more
intimate and finally ripened into love. Miss Miller’s father indicated
opposition to their marriage, their desire for which they made evident,
and they were compelled to seek some roundabout way to accomplish their
purpose. The result was, that after trying several ways to circumvent
the unsympathetic parent, they decided upon a secret marriage, and this
was actually accomplished. There were no runaway features about the
match, except that to avoid the opposition that they were certain would
come, they simply walked to a minister’s, a short distance from their
home, and were married without letting any one know of it. When they
returned, Mr. Miller indicated no ill-will at their action, and went
to work to make the best of it all. He did this by giving the famous
financier his first introduction into the railroad business. Mr. Miller
owned some shares in the Rutland and Washington railroad. He asked his
son-in-law to look the property over and see if anything could be done
to save the investment. The road was sixty-two miles long, running from
Troy, New York, to Rutland, Vermont. The panic of 1857 had left this
road in a demoralized condition, and Gould found that he could buy a
majority of the first mortgage bonds at ten cents on the dollar. He
had now found the true field for his peculiar talent. He made himself
president, treasurer and general superintendent of the road, studied
the business of railroading on the ground, developed the local traffic,
and finally effected the Rensselaer and Saratoga Consolidation. By this
time, both bonds and stocks were good and he sold the latter for one
hundred and twenty dollars.
There has been no time when it was possible to estimate the wealth
of Mr. Gould, and as he was secretive in those early days as in his
later, there was no saying what he was worth when in 1860 he came into
Wall street. One statement has it that when the firm of Smith, Gould
& Martin was organized, Mr. Gould’s possessions amounted to thirty
thousand dollars in cash. Another is that when he sold out his holdings
in the Rensselaer and Saratoga Consolidation, he was worth seven
hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
With a mind peculiarly alert to all the influences which affected the
values of railway securities, with habits of great industry, with
phenomenal tenacity of purpose, with a fair amount at least of capital
to back him, it is not surprising that Mr. Gould profited largely
by his speculation in railway stocks and gold during the war of the
rebellion. The keen-sighted, intelligent men in “the Street” at that
time nearly all made money, and Mr. Gould was at least a millionaire
when the Confederacy fell. What his methods were at the time it is
useless to speculate about. It was before the day when by absolute
mastery of gigantic railway and telegraph systems he could at his will
depress the value of almost any institution on which he fixed his eye
by setting on foot a ruinous war in rates until he had made it to be
his own interest to restore a more normal and healthful condition of
affairs by ceasing his antagonism and building up the property which he
had acquired cheaply during the period of depression. But the details
of his operations were always so subtle as to be shut out from the
discovery of either friend or foe.
Gould was now fairly on the way toward his colossal fortune. Though
friends warned him against entering into the whirlpool of blasted
hopes and ruined fortunes of Wall street, his inclinations in that
direction were too strong to be resisted. Gould was a born speculator.
It is true that his great fortune was created mainly in hazardous
enterprises outside of Wall street, and that in stock speculations,
pure and simple, he was not always so successful or so infallible
as many have supposed, but by nature and habit Gould was at this
time of his life a commercial gambler, and it was as natural that he
should enter Wall street as for a duck to take to water. It was in
1859 or 1860 that Gould first entered Wall street. It was not very
long before he stepped to the front rank. What a long list of brainy
and courageous men do Gould’s contemporaries in the street make! With
most of them Gould has been at sword’s point, with a few he has been
an ally, with some he has been both ally and enemy. Most of them are
no longer powers in the speculative world. Some of them are dead. Not
a few have been overwhelmed in the swift, resistless torrent of stock
speculation. Three or four yet remain with power in their hands and
millions in their vaults. The Vanderbilts--the commodore, his son
and grandsons--Daniel Drew, James Fisk, Jr., the Beldens, Commodore
Garrison, Henry N. Smith, James R. Keene, William Heath, George I.
Seney, Gen. Thomas, Calvin S. Brice, D. O. Mills, Horace F. Clark,
Alfred Sully, Addison Cammack, C. F. Woerishoffer, the Rockefellers, S.
M. Kneeland, C. J. Osborn, D. P. Morgan, H. S. Ives, C. P. Huntington,
Russell Sage, Cyrus W. Field, John W. Garrett, Robert Garrett, J. P.
Morgan, the Seligmans, Brown Bros., Jay Cooke, Hugh J. Jewett, Lathrop,
Little and Austin Corbin, Henry Clews, Washington E. Connor, Burnham,
Gen. E. F. Winslow, Edward S. Stokes, S. V. White, William Dowd, Solon
Humphreys, William R. Travers, Rufus Hatch, Samuel Sloan--these were
some of the men identified with various Wall street interests with
whom Gould has been allied or at enmity, or both, during his long
career in the street. That he has been able among all these financial
giants to make himself the leader is the highest evidence that can
be given of his genius in speculation and railroad financiering. As
we read some of these names there arise before our eyes the visions
of murder, of suicide, of bankruptcy, of the debtor’s prison, of the
felon’s cell, of ruined fortunes and blasted reputations. Others of
the men have achieved wealth and honorable names. It is interesting
to note that at the time Gould first entered the street one of his
fellow-boarders at the Everett House was James Gordon Bennett, the
elder, with whose son and successor he became engaged in such bitter
business and personal antagonisms.
Gould not only gambled in Wall street, but he defended the operation.
“People,” he told a State Senate Committee which was investigating into
stock and grain corners, “will deal in chance. Your minister, doctor
and barber all have the same interest in speculation. Would you not, if
you stopped it, promote gambling?”
Jay Gould was twenty-three years old when he went into Wall street as
a broker. In addition to whatever amount of money he had, he had the
confidence of two or three large capitalists, which is the best capital
of all for beginning a business of speculation. He started on his Wall
street career in a small office and frequently took his stand with the
“curb-stone” brokers. He made money right along. In 1860 he became
intimately acquainted with Henry N. Smith, who was then one of the big
men in Wall street. Soon the firm of Smith, Gould & Martin was formed
and it was prosperous from the start. Gould made a careful study of the
railroad situation and became an expert in the manipulation of railroad
securities in the speculative market. He paid the closest attention to
business, allowing himself few of the social pleasures of which young
men are usually fond. He had no small vices, being a teetotaler.
During the war of the rebellion, the firm did a large business in
railway securities, and also made a great deal of money speculating in
gold. Gould had private sources of information in the field, and he
was able to turn almost every success or defeat of the Union army to
profitable account.
At last Gould had found his exact niche, the corner in which the
railroads were put away. That “corner” was ever after the one in which
he found both his labor and his recreation, his fortune bad and good.
He was a natural railroad magnate. Almost always he won, and when he
did not, it was simply because he attempted schemes that would have
seemed to any other man entirely beyond possibility. From this time his
history never loses its intense dramatic interest and never goes back
to the humdrum life that he had abandoned. From this time, there could
be no night in which Jay Gould could sleep in dreamless rest, with no
thought of the morrow. From this time, there could be never a day of
freedom from the intensest strain of business anxiety. He had chosen
speculation for a life work, and its cares must sit upon him. His could
not be the experience of the man in mercantile life, or of the man of
smaller affairs, who finishes his work in the evening and goes to his
home with never a thought of the cares to-morrow will bring. Great
enterprises make great responsibilities. From this time the enormous
weight of the responsibilities upon Jay Gould’s shoulders could never
again lessen.
Did he ever, in those years of scheming and fighting for wealth, cast
his recollection backward to the old days at Roxbury, when he was but
a barefoot farmer’s boy, with nothing more oppressive on his mind than
the necessity to go through the rain for the cows, or to find the nest
that the blue hen had hidden away some place in the hay-mow?
There was little in the associations that he made during these first
Wall street years to remind him of those days. For while many of the
men with whom he came in contact had been like himself, the sons of
farmers with the first years of their lives spent far from the city,
yet from this time, all their “watering” of stock was entirely in the
direction of stocks which represented the value of railroads and other
properties, and all their knowledge of farm products was devoted to the
manipulation of grain markets.
As Gould’s acquaintance grew larger, and his success in ordinary small
ventures became assured, his disposition began to demand something of
greater magnitude, something with more satisfaction in it for that
appetite that was already becoming insatiable. A few small railroad
ventures were carried through in a manner bordering upon perfection,
and this increased the confidence in him of those speculators who
were already his acquaintances. The way opened for him to enter into
the manipulations of Erie, and, as before, when opportunity came he
recognized and grasped it.