American Men of Mind Part 18

Almost from the first years of her existence America has been known chiefly as a commercial nation, as a nation noted for her men of affairs, rather than for her artists and men of letters. Which is to say that the life of the Republic has been practical rather than artistic, and it is only of late years, except for a sporadic instance here and there, that any genuine artistic impulse has made itself felt.

This is not a cause of reproach. Given the circ.u.mstances, it was inevitable that America should develop first on her commercial side.

Here was a great continent, stretching thousands of miles to the westward, waiting for man's occupancy. Millions of acres of plain and woodland awaited development. There were cities to found and rivers to bridge and roads to make and soil to till and gold to dig before America could think of writing poetry or painting pictures. Think--it is only three centuries since Jamestown was founded; only a century and a quarter since we became a nation--a mere handbreadth of time when compared with the long centuries of English or French or Italian history. We have already said that for art historic background is necessary; a background of achievement and tradition. Such a background we are just achieving. Besides, during our first century, there were such great deeds of conquest and development to be done that they challenged our strongest men. Great fortunes were made, as a matter of course, and Europe witnessed the unique spectacle of men, born in poverty and obscurity, rising to be captains of the world. It is this which has never ceased to shock the European sense of the fitness of things--that the poor boy of yesterday may be the millionaire of to-morrow and take his place with the greatest of the nation. It is the story of a few such boys which will be told in this chapter.

First is the man who financed the Revolution and who to a large extent made possible its successful termination--Robert Morris. Born in Liverpool, England, in 1734, he came to this country with his father at the age of thirteen, and a place was soon found for him in the counting-house of Charles Willing, a wealthy merchant of Philadelphia.

By his diligence and activity, as well as unusual intelligence, he grew in favor and confidence, until, upon the death of the elder Willing, he was taken into partnership by the latter's son, and by the opening of the Revolution, the firm of Willing & Morris was one of the largest and most prosperous in Philadelphia.

Of English birth, and bound to England by the ties of business, Morris was nevertheless opposed to the stamp-act and was one of those who, in 1765, signed an agreement to import nothing further from England until the act was repealed. He was, however, opposed to independence, and, as a member of the Continental Congress, voted on July 1, 1776, against the Declaration. Three days later he declined to vote, but when the Declaration was adopted, he signed it, and threw in his fortunes unreservedly with his new country. His services were more than valuable--they were indispensable. As a member of the Committee of Ways and Means, he backed the government's credit with his own. Without his aid, the last campaigns of the war would have been impossible. It was he who supplied General Green with munitions of war for the great campaign of the south, and shortly afterwards raised a million and a half on his own notes to a.s.sist Washington in the movement which resulted in the capture of Cornwallis at Yorktown. A year later, when the financial situation of the government had become desperate, he organized the Bank of North America to a.s.sist in financing it. For three years, he acted as superintendent of finance, with complete control of the monetary affairs of the country. He was a member of the Const.i.tutional Convention, and when the new government was organized, Washington asked him to accept the treasury portfolio, but he declined, suggesting instead Alexander Hamilton. That was not the least of his services to America, for Hamilton was preeminently the man for the place.

It was the striking irony of fate that the man who had controlled the finances of a nation and by his personal exertions saved it from bankruptcy should himself die in a debtor's prison; yet such was the case. A series of unfortunate land speculations swept away his wealth and ruined his credit; he found himself unable to meet his obligations and was seized by his creditors and thrown into prison, where he remained for some years, and where death found him in 1806.

So Robert Morris was not one of the founders of great fortunes. Turn we to the earliest and perhaps most successful of these, John Jacob Astor, the very type of the astute, large-minded, and far-sighted financier.

Born at Waldorf, Germany, in 1763, the son of a poor butcher in whose shop he worked until sixteen years of age, there was nothing in his life or circ.u.mstances to indicate the future which lay before him. One of his brothers, however, had come to America and settled at New York, and young John Astor resolved to join him in the land of opportunity. At the age of twenty, he was able to do so, bringing with him some musical instruments to sell on commission, but a chance acquaintance which he made on shipboard changed the whole course of his life.

This acquaintance was that of a furrier, who told young Astor of the great profits to be made by buying furs from the Indians and selling them to the large dealers. Perhaps he exaggerated the profits of the business; at any rate, he fired the ambition of his hearer, and the latter decided to enter the fur business without delay. Upon landing in New York, therefore, he at once secured a position in the shop of a Quaker furrier, and after learning all the details of the business, opened a shop of his own.

Perhaps no one ever worked harder in establishing a business than John Jacob Astor did. Early and late he was at his shop, except when absent on long and arduous purchasing expeditions into the wilderness. More than that, he possessed admirable business judgment, so that, after fifteen years of work, he had succeeded in acc.u.mulating a fortune of a quarter of a million dollars. With careful and sagacious management, the business prospered so that Astor was soon able to send his furs to Europe in his own vessels, and bring back European goods. And about this time, he began working on a grandiose and picturesque enterprise.

The English Hudson Bay Company, established many years before, with hundreds of trappers and traders and scores of trading-posts, controlled the rich fur business of Canada and the northwest. We have seen how, years after the events which we are now narrating, the agents of the company tried to save Oregon for England and how Marcus Whitman foiled them. Astor's plan, in outline, was to render American trade independent of the Hudson Bay Company by establishing a chain of trading-posts from the great lakes to the Pacific, to plant a central depot at the mouth of the Columbia river, and to acquire one of the Sandwich Islands and establish a line of vessels between the western coast of America and the ports of j.a.pan, China and India. Surely a man who could conceive a plan like that was something more than a mere trader, and Astor proceeded at once to carry it into effect.

Two expeditions were sent out, one by land and one by sea, to open up intercourse with the Indians of the Pacific coast, and the settlement of Astoria was planted at the mouth of the Columbia river. Whether Astor would have been able to carry out the remainder of his plan is purely problematical, for before he had it fairly under way, the war of 1812 began, and he was forced to abandon the enterprise. The story of this far-reaching project has been told by Washington Irving in his "Astoria." Until his death, he continued to enlarge and increase his business, and left a fortune estimated at twenty millions of dollars.

The Astor plan of investment is one of the safest, most sagacious in the world. Practically all of his profits were invested by John Jacob Astor in real estate outside the compact portion of the city of New York. As the city grew out to his holdings, he would improve them, rent or sell them, and reinvest further out. In this way the growth of the city marked also the growth of his fortune, and this plan of investment has been followed by his descendants to the present day, until they have become by far the most important owners of real estate in New York City.

His son, William B. Astor, gave his life to the preservation and growth of the vast property he inherited, and at his death had more than doubled it, dividing an estate of $45,000,000 between his two sons.

Not that the whole thought of these two men was money-getting, for their public gifts were numerous and important. The most noteworthy was the Astor library, founded by John Jacob Astor at the suggestion of Washington Irving, and largely added to by his son, the total amount of the Astor donations to it exceeding a million dollars. But they stand as two types of sagacious and hard-headed business men, to whom money-making and the still more difficult art of money-keeping was an instinctive accomplishment.

The second great American fortune was that founded by Cornelius Vanderbilt, as remarkable and picturesque a character as this country ever produced. Born on Staten Island in 1794, the son of a farmer in moderate circ.u.mstances, the boy soon developed a remarkable talent for trade. His father owned a sail-boat, in which he conveyed his produce across the bay to the New York markets, and the boy soon learned to manage this and was intrusted with these daily trips. When he was sixteen years old, he bought a boat of his own, in which he ferried pa.s.sengers across the bay, and two years later he was owner of two boats and captain of a third. This was the beginning of the great fleet of steamers, sloops and schooners which he built up for the navigation of the sh.o.r.es of New York bay and the Hudson river, which won him the t.i.tle of "Commodore," which clung to him all his life. Before he was forty years old, he had acc.u.mulated a fortune of half a million dollars, and was ready for those great financial operations which marked his later life.

The discovery of gold in California led him to establish a pa.s.senger line by way of Lake Nicaragua which netted him ten millions in ten years; he established a fast line of pa.s.senger steamships between New York and Havre; and finally was attracted to railway development as a field of enterprise destined to win large returns. In the course of a few years he had secured control of both the Hudson River and New York Central roads, and brought both of them to the highest state of efficiency, and after consolidating them, extended the system to Chicago by the purchase of the Lake Sh.o.r.e, the Canada Southern and Michigan Central. He built a great terminal in New York City, and made the system so profitable that, from it, and a series of fortunate speculations, he acc.u.mulated a fortune of $100,000,000, practically all of which he bequeathed to his eldest son, William Henry. One million was also given for the establishment of Vanderbilt University at Nashville, Tennessee.

Cornelius Vanderbilt, for many years, had a very poor opinion of his son's financial ability, and giving him a small farm on Staten Island, left him to shift for himself. Everyone has read of the incident which changed this opinion. William needed some fertilizer for his farm, and asked his father to give him a load of manure from his stables. His father told him to go ahead and take a load, and William thereupon brought a great scow up to the pier near the stables, proceeded to load it, and when his father protested, pointed out that he had not specified the kind of load, but that he had meant a scow-load. This bit of sharp practice pleased his father, and, shortly afterwards, the great success with which he managed the Staten Island Railroad, as receiver, established him in his father's confidence. He continued and extended his father's policy of railway investment, and added to the great fortune which had been left him, and which still remains one of the greatest in America, though it has been split up among the different branches of the Vanderbilt family. William himself distributed about two millions in various benevolent and public enterprises, one of the queerest of which was the removal of one of "Cleopatra's Needles" from Egypt to Central Park, New York City, at a cost of over a hundred thousand dollars.

In the business world of New York City, half a century ago, no name was more prominent than that of A. T. Stewart, whose success as a merchant was one of the most astonishing features of the time. Born near Belfast, Ireland, in 1803, Stewart was a descendant from one of those hardy and thrifty Scotch-Irish, whom we have had occasion to mention before. His father was a farmer, but died while the son was still at school, and at the age of twenty the latter came to New York, and after looking over the field, opened a small store on lower Broadway, with a sleeping apartment for himself in the rear. Such was the beginning of the greatest dry-goods business this country ever saw. It increased by leaps and bounds, for Stewart seems to have had a sort of instinctive genius for the business. He was continually moving to larger and larger quarters, and in 1862, built on Broadway a store which was at that time the largest in the world, and which, even in this day of mammoth structures, commands attention. Its cost was nearly three millions, a colossal sum for those days; two thousand people were employed in it and it cost a million a year to run. But it brought a tremendous return, and its owner soon became one of the wealthiest men in New York.

He wanted more than wealth--he hungered for political and social honors which were never fully his. He had made a large contribution to the fund of $100,000 presented by the merchants of New York to General Grant, and in 1869, Grant appointed him secretary of the treasury. The senate refused to confirm the appointment, on the ground that the law excluded from that office anyone interested in the importation of merchandise.

Grant sent to the senate a message recommending that this law be repealed, but the senate refused; and Stewart thereupon offered to place his business in the hands of trustees and devote its entire profits to charity during his term of office; but still the senate refused, and the nomination was withdrawn. It was a bitter blow to Stewart, nor was his fight for social prominence much more fortunate. As his last stake, as it were, he began the erection of a great marble palace on Fifth Avenue, designed to cost a million and to be the finest private residence in the world, but he died before it was completed.

One of the great industries of the country is that of sugar refining, and it is inseparably connected with the name of Havemeyer, for to the Havemeyers is due its development and its formation into a so-called trust, which practically controls the market, and which has won great wealth for its organizers. The ancestor of the Havemeyers was a thrifty German who came to this country in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and, after engaging in various pursuits, opened a little sugar refinery in New York City, which soon brought him a comfortable income.

There, in 1804, William Frederick Havemeyer was born, and after a careful education, entered the refinery, gained a thorough knowledge of the business and, in 1828 succeeded to it, having as a partner his cousin, Frederick Christian Havemeyer. These two men developed the business in a wonderful manner, installing new machinery, inventing new processes, which reduced the manufacturing cost, acquiring possession of other plants and securing government support in the shape of a protective tariff, which made a naturally profitable business doubly so, and netted its owners many millions.

William Frederick Havemeyer found time, in the intervals of running his business, to take a prominent part in New York politics. He was mayor of the city from 1845 to 1851, and again in 1873, dying before the last term was finished.

As far as possible removed from Havemeyer's humdrum existence was that of Phineas Taylor Barnum, the greatest showman the world has ever seen, the originator of the great travelling circus, the exploiter of Tom Thumb and Jenny Lind, the owner of Jumbo, the most famous elephant that ever lived, whose name has pa.s.sed into the English language as a synonym for bigness.

Barnum was born at Bethel, Connecticut, in 1810. His father was an inn-keeper and died when the boy was fifteen years old, leaving no property. He tried his hand at store-keeping, and failed; ran a newspaper, and was imprisoned for libel, and finally reached New York at about the end of his resources and looking around for something to do.

That was in 1834, and by accident he hit upon his real vocation.

A man by the name of R. W. Lindsay was exhibiting through the country an old negro woman named Joice Heth, advertising her as being 161 years old, and as having been the nurse of George Washington. Barnum went to see her and found her an extraordinary-looking object. He has himself told how he was impressed by her.

"Joice Heth," he says, "was certainly a remarkable curiosity, and she looked as though she might have been far older than her age as advertised. She was apparently in good health and spirits, but from age or disease, or both, was unable to change her position; she could move one arm at will, but her lower limbs could not be straightened; her left arm lay across her breast and she could not remove it; the fingers of her left hand were drawn down so as nearly to close it, and were fixed; the nails on that hand were almost four inches long and extended above her wrist; her head was covered with a thick bush of gray hair; but she was toothless and totally blind, and her eyes had sunk so deeply in the sockets as to have disappeared altogether. Nevertheless she was pert and sociable and would talk as long as people would converse with her. She was quite garrulous about 'dear little George,' at whose birth she declared she was present, having been at the time a slave of Elizabeth Atwood, a half-sister of Augustine Washington, the father of George Washington. As nurse, she put the first clothes on the infant, and she claimed to have raised him."

Barnum was so impressed by this extraordinary object, that he bought her for a thousand dollars, putting his last cent into the venture and borrowing what he lacked. He proceeded to advertise her with characteristic energy, and great crowds thronged to see her, so that his receipts sometimes ran as high as $1,500 a week. However, the old woman died within a year, and a post-mortem examination showed that she was really only about eighty years old.

But Barnum had found his vocation, that of showman, and after a few unsuccessful ventures, bought Scudder's American Museum, in New York City, and started out on a brilliant career. It is interesting to note that the museum which Barnum purchased consisted in part of the curios collected years before by Charles and Rembrandt Peale. Barnum added to it, was indefatigable in securing curiosities, really created the art of modern advertising, and it was his proudest boast that no one ever left the museum without having got his money's worth. He was one of the first to realize that the best possible advertis.e.m.e.nt is a pleased customer, and he tried honestly to keep his museum supplied with every novelty.

The public soon came to appreciate this, and perhaps his greatest a.s.set was public confidence in his promises. People came to believe that when Barnum advertised a thing, he really had it. But the most fortunate day in all his life was that November day of 1842, when he discovered at Bridgeport, Connecticut, the midget whose real name was Charles S.

Stratton, but who was to become world-famous as General Tom Thumb.

The story of Tom Thumb's success reads like a romance. He was quite young when Barnum got him, and the showman took great pains with his education and training, for he wanted the midget to appear a finished man of the world. He became a great public favorite, toured America and Europe, was introduced to kings and princes and made a great fortune for himself and his exhibitor. Barnum struck the apogee of his fortunes when he discovered another midget, Lavinia Warren, who achieved a success scarcely less than Tom Thumb's. Indeed, she and the General fell in love with each other and were married at Grace Church, and as General and Mrs. Tom Thumb were perhaps the greatest drawing cards in the world.

Another triumph of his career was his engagement of Jenny Lind for a series of one hundred concerts, at a salary of a thousand dollars a night, the receipts of the tour being over seven hundred thousand dollars.

Barnum had many ups and downs, which he met with an invincible optimism.

His museum burned down and he rebuilt it, but it soon burned down again.

It was then that the idea occurred to him to establish a travelling museum, exhibiting under a tent, and it was this idea which developed into "The Greatest Show on Earth." It really was the greatest and its owner never spared money in his endeavor to keep it so. Large-hearted, benevolent, a true entertainer, he will always occupy a bright place in the memory of the American public.

Perhaps no name in the history of America was ever more closely connected in the public mind with money-making for its own sake than that of Russell Sage. It will be surprising news to many, who knew him only as a money-lender on a large scale, that he started out on a public career, as alderman, county treasurer, and finally as member of congress for two terms, from 1853 to 1857. He was the first person to advocate, on the floor of congress, the purchase of Mount Vernon by the government. His career on Wall street began shortly after that, at first in a small way; but before his death, he had developed into the greatest individual money-lender in the world.

That was his whole life. He took no part in any political or charitable movement; he had no interest in art, and he lived in the simplest manner. He used his wealth, not to procure enjoyment for himself or other people, but to procure more wealth. He was saving to the point of miserliness; he got the utmost he could out of his money; he never took a vacation--and dying, at the age of ninety, left a fortune of many millions. He had no children and the whole fortune went to his wife. She at once proceeded to bestow it in carefully-considered benevolences, so that the Sage millions are to benefit humanity, after all. In fact, it is doubtful if any other fortune, ama.s.sed by a single man, will, in the end, do so much good in the world as will this of Russell Sage, for Mrs.

Sage is devoting it to what may be called scientific charity, which has for its object the universal betterment of mankind.

Mrs. Sage, who thus becomes one of the world's great philanthropists, was Margaret Olivia Sloc.u.m, of Syracuse, New York, and was married to Mr. Sage in 1869. She was of a family in only moderate circ.u.mstances, and was a school teacher previous to her marriage. The turn of the wheel made her the wealthiest woman in the world, and she proceeded without delay to the carrying out of the immense benevolent enterprises which she had doubtless long meditated.

The name of Cyrus West Field is so closely a.s.sociated with his supreme achievement, the laying of the first Atlantic cable, that we are apt to forget that he was in the beginning a manufacturer and had ama.s.sed a considerable fortune before his attention was called to the possibility of linking Europe to America by a telegraph line laid on the bottom of the Atlantic. It was under A. T. Stewart that Field received his mercantile training, having gone to New York in 1834, at the age of fifteen, from his home in Stockbridge, Ma.s.sachusetts, and entering Stewart's employ as a clerk.

He was an apt pupil, and before he was of age, owned an establishment of his own for the manufacture and sale of paper. In this business, in the course of a dozen years, he had ama.s.sed a fortune so considerable that he was able to retire from active charge of it, and to spend his time in travel. It was in 1853 that the project of carrying a telegraph line across the Atlantic ocean suggested itself to him during a conversation with his brother, who was interested in building a line across Newfoundland. The more he considered and investigated the project, the more feasible it seemed, and he proceeded to organize the New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company, himself taking one fourth of the capital stock, and interesting such other capitalists as Peter Cooper, Moses Taylor, Chandler White and Marshall Roberts.

But the project which had appeared simple enough in theory and on paper, proved extremely difficult of execution. If Field could have foreseen the thirteen years of constant anxiety which awaited him, he would no doubt have hesitated to undertake it. It looked, at first, as though success would crown his efforts almost at the outset, for in 1858, the laying of a cable was completed, and for some days, messages were sent from one continent to the other. Then the signals began to grow fainter and fainter, until they became imperceptible, supposedly from the water of the ocean penetrating the cable covering.

At any rate, the work had to be done all over again, with little money on hand, and the coming of the Civil War helped to make further progress impossible. Field visited Europe more than twenty times in the effort to raise money for the enterprise and to keep it before the public, but it was not until 1865 that another effort to lay the cable could be made.

The "Great Eastern," the largest ship in the world, was secured, and began paying out the cable; but twelve hundred miles from sh.o.r.e the cable parted and could not be regained, although every effort was made to grapple it. So the vessel had to put back to England, and Field was confronted with the heart-breaking task of raising even more money. He succeeded in doing so, and in 1866, another expedition started out with a new cable. This time, it met with no serious misadventure, and on July 27, telegraphic communication was re-established between England and America, and has never since been interrupted.

That cable was the first of the hundreds which now encircle the globe.

Congress presented the bold adventurer with a gold medal and the thanks of the nation; John Bright p.r.o.nounced him "the Columbus of modern times, who, by his cable, has moored the New World alongside of the Old"; the Paris exposition of 1867 gave him the grand medal, the highest prize it had to bestow; and he received votes of thanks and medals and presents from all parts of the world.

In 1884, two other cables were laid across the Atlantic by John W.

Mackay and James Gordon Bennett, whose private property they remained.

Mackay had had an adventurous career, and was destined to be the founder of another of those great American fortunes which are the wonder and admiration of Europe. He was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1831, his father being another of those st.u.r.dy Scotch-Irish of whom we have already had occasion to speak. He was brought to New York at the age of nine; but his father died a short time thereafter and the boy was thrown practically upon his own resources.

When gold was discovered in California in 1849, Mackay joined the crowd that rushed to the new El Dorado, and for several years, he lived a typical miner's life, roughing it in the camps, but gaining little except a thorough knowledge of mining. In 1860, some guiding spirit led him eastward to Nevada; his fortunes there steadily improved, until he became one of the leading men in the settlement, and in 1872, he made one of the most famous and romantic discoveries in mining history, that of the famous Comstock lode, on a ledge of rock high in the Sierras, under which Virginia City now nestles. So rich in silver was this great ledge of rock and its enormous production added so greatly to the world's supply of silver that the market price fell to a point where such countries as India and China, whose currency was on a silver basis, were seriously embarra.s.sed to maintain values. From one mine alone over $150,000,000 was taken out. Mackay devoted himself personally to the superintendence of the mines, working in the lower levels with his men, who idolized him.

Let us turn for a moment to the career of another great fortune-builder, the man who was, perhaps, the greatest freebooter the American financial world ever saw, who made his money by destroying rather than building up, and whose wealth finally killed him--Jay Gould. Let us see if we can get some sort of idea of the personality of this extraordinary man.