History of the Great American Fortunes Part 10

CHAPTER III

THE GROWTH OF THE ASTOR FORTUNE

While at the outposts, and in the depths, of the Western wilderness an armed host was working and cheating for Astor, and, in turn, being cheated by their employer; while, for Astor's gain, they were violating all laws, debauching, demoralizing and beggaring entire tribes of Indians, slaying and often being themselves slain in retaliation, what was the beneficiary of this orgy of crime and bloodshed doing in New York?

For a long time he lived at No. 223 Broadway in a large double house, flanked by an imposing open piazza supported by pillars and arches. In this house he combined the style of the ascending capitalist with the fittings and trappings of the tradesman. It was at once residence, office and salesroom. On the ground floor was his store, loaded with furs; and here one of his sons and his chief heir, William B. could be seen, as a lad, a.s.siduously beating the furs to keep out moths. Astor's disposition was phlegmatic and his habits were extremely simple and methodical. He had dinner regularly at three o'clock, after which he would limit himself to three games of checkers and a gla.s.s of beer. Most of his long day was taken up with close attention to his many business interests of which no detail escaped him. However execrated he might be in the Indian territories far in the West, he a.s.sumed, and somewhat succeeded in being credited with, the character of a patriotic, respectable and astute man of business in New York.

ASTOR SUPERIOR TO LAW.

During (taking a wide survey) the same series of years that he was directing gross violations of explicit laws in the fur-producing regions--laws upon the observance of which depended the very safety of the life of men, women and children, white and red, and which laws were vested with an importance corresponding with the baneful and b.l.o.o.d.y results of their infraction--Astor was turning other laws to his distinct advantage in the East. Pillaging in the West the rightful and legal domain, and the possessions, of a dozen Indian tribes, he, in the East, was causing public money to be turned over to his private treasury and using it as personal capital in his shipping enterprises.

As applied to the business and landowning cla.s.s, law was notoriously a flexible, convenient, and highly adaptable function. By either the tacit permission or connivance of Government, this cla.s.s was virtually, in most instances, its own law-regulator. It could consistently, and without being seriously interfered with, violate such laws as suited its interests, while calling for the enactment or enforcement of other laws which favored its designs and enhanced its profits. We see Astor ruthlessly brushing aside, like so many annoying enc.u.mbrances, even those very laws which were commonly held indispensable to a modic.u.m of fair treatment of the Indians and to the preservation of human life.

These laws happened to conflict with the ama.s.sing of profits; and always in a civilization ruled by the trading cla.s.s, laws which do this are either unceremoniously trampled upon, evaded or repealed.

For all the long-continued violations of law in the West, and for the horrors which resulted from his exploitation of the Indians, was Astor ever prosecuted? To repeat, no; nor was he disturbed even by such a triviality as a formal summons. Yet, to realize the full enormity of acts for which he was responsible, and the complete measure of immunity that he enjoyed, it is necessary to recall that at the time the Government had already begun to a.s.sume the role of looking upon the Indians as its wards, and thus of theoretically extending to them the shield of its especial protection. If Government allowed a people whom it pleased to signify as its wards to be debauched, plundered and slain, what kind of treatment could be expected for the working cla.s.s as to which there was not even the fiction of Government concern, not to mention wardship?

LAW BREAKERS AND LAW MAKERS.

But when it came to laws which, in the remotest degree, could be used or manipulated to swell profits or to b.u.t.tress property, Astor and his cla.s.s were untiring and vociferous in demanding their strict enforcement. Successfully ignoring or circ.u.mventing laws objectionable to them, they, at the same time, insisted upon the pa.s.sage and exact construction and severe enforcement of laws which were adjusted to their interests. Law breakers, on the one hand, they were law makers on the other. They caused to be put in statute, and intensified by judicial precedent, the most rigorous laws in favor of property rights. They virtually had the extraordinary power of choosing what laws they should observe and what they should not. This choice was invariably at the expense of the working cla.s.s. Law, that much-sanctified product, was really law only when applied to the propertyless. It confronted the poor at every step, was executed with summary prompt.i.tude and filled the prisons with them. Poverty had no choice in saying what laws it should obey and what it should not. It, perforce, had to obey or go to prison; either one or the other, for the laws were expressly drafted to bear heavily upon it.

It is ill.u.s.trative, in the highest degree, of the character of Government ruled by commercial interests, that Astor was allowed to pillage and plunder, cheat, rob and (by proxy) slaughter in the West, while, in the East, that same Government extended to him, as well as to other shippers, the free use of money which came from the taxation of the whole people--a taxation always weighted upon the shoulders of the worker. In turn, this favored cla.s.s, either consciously or unconsciously, voluntarily or involuntarily, cheated the Government of nearly half of the sums advanced. From the foundation of the Government up to 1837, there were nine distinct commercial crises which brought about terrible hardships to the wage workers. Did the Government step in and a.s.sist them? At no time. But during all those years the Government was busy in letting the shippers dig into the public funds and in being extremely generous to them when they failed to pay up. From 1789 to 1823 the Government lost more than $250,000,000 in duties,[90] all of which sum represented what the shippers owed and did not, or could not, pay.

And no criminal proceedings were brought against any of these defaulters.

This, however, was not all that the Government did for the favored, pampered cla.s.s that it represented. Laws were severe against labor-union strikes, which were frequently judicially adjudged conspiracies.

Theoretically, law inhibited monopoly, but monopolies existed, because law ceases to be effective law when it is not enforced; and the propertied interests took care that it was not enforced. Their own cla.s.s was powerful in every branch of Government. Furthermore, they had the money to buy political subserviency and legal dexterity. The $35,000 that Astor paid to Ca.s.s, the very official who, as Secretary of War, had jurisdiction over the Indian tribes and over the Indian trade, and the sums that Astor paid to Benton, were, it may well be supposed, only the merest parts of the total sums that he disbursed to officials and politicians, high and low.

ASTOR'S MONOPOLIES.

Astor profited richly from his monopolies. His monopoly of furs in the West was made a basis for the creation of other monopolies. China was a voracious and highly profitable market for furs. In exchange for the cargoes of these that he sent there, his ships would be loaded with teas and silks. These products he sold at exorbitant prices in New York. His profits from a single voyage sometimes reached $70,000; the average profits from a single voyage were $30,000. During the War of 1812-15 tea rose to double its usual price. Astor was invariably lucky in that his ships escaped capture. At one period he was about the only merchant who had a cargo of tea in the market. He exacted, and was allowed to exact, his own price.

Meanwhile, Astor was setting about making himself the richest and largest landowner in the country. His were not the most extensive land possessions in point of extent but in regard to value. He aimed at being a great city, not a great rural, landlord. It was estimated that his trade in furs and a.s.sociated commerce brought him a clear annual revenue of about two million dollars. This estimate was palpably inadequate. Not only did he reap enormous profits from the fur trade, but also from banking privileges in which he was a conspicuous factor.

It was on one of his visits to London, so the recital goes, that he first became possessed of the idea of founding an extraordinarily rich landed family. He admired, it is told, the great landed estates of the British n.o.bility, and observed the prejudice against the caste of the trader and the corresponding exalted position of the landowner. Whether this story is true or not, it is evident that he was impressed with the increasing power and the stability of a fortune founded upon land, and how it radiated a certain splendid prestige. The very definition of the word landlord--lord of the soil--signified the awe-compelling and authoritative position of him who owned land--a definition heightened and enforced in a thousand ways by the laws.

The speculative and solid possibilities of New York City real estate held out dazzling opportunities gratifying his acquisitiveness for wealth and power--the wealth that fed his avarice, and the power flowing from the dominion of riches.

ASTOR NOT AN EXCEPTION.

It may here be observed that Astor's methods in trade or in acquiring of land need not be indiscriminately condemned as an exclusive mania. Nor should they be held up to the curiosity of posterity as a singular and pernicious exhibition, detached from his time and generation, and independent of them. Again and again the facts disclose that men such as he were merely the representative crests of prevailing commercial and political life. Substantially the whole propertied cla.s.s obtained its wealth by methods which, if not the same, had a strong relationship. His methods differed nowise from those of many cotton planters of the South who stole, on a monstrous scale,[91] Government land and then with the wealth derived from their thefts, bought negro slaves, set themselves up in the glamour of a patriarchal aristocracy and paraded a florid display of chivalry and honor. And it was this same grandiose cla.s.s that plundered Whitney of the fruits of his invention of the cotton-gin and shamelessly defrauded him.[92]

Far more flagrant, however, were the means by which other Southern plantation owners and business firms secured landed estates in Alabama, Georgia and in other States. Their methods in expropriating the reservations of such Indian tribes as the Creeks and Chickasaws were not less fraudulent than those that Astor used elsewhere. They too, those fine Southern aristocrats, debauched Indian tribes with whisky, and after swindling them of their land, caused the Government to remove them westward. The frauds were so extensive, and the circ.u.mstances so repellant, that President Andrew Jackson, in 1833, ordered an investigation. From the records of this investigation,--four hundred and twenty-five solid pages of official correspondence--more than enough details can be obtained.[93]

WHERE WAS FRAUD ABSENT?

In Wisconsin the most valuable Government lands, containing rich deposits of lead and other mineral ore, were being boldly appropriated by force and fraud. The House Committee on Public Lands reported on December 18, 1840, that with the connivance of local land agents, these lands, since 1835, had been sold at private sale before they were even subject to public entry.[94] "In consequence of which," the Committee stated, "many tracts of land known to be rich and valuable mineral lands for many years, and known to be such at the time of the entry, have been entered by evil-minded persons, who have falsely made, or procured others to make, the oath required by the land offices. Honest men have been excluded from the purchase of these lands, while the dishonest and unscrupulous have been permitted to enter them by means of false oath and fraud."[95]

These are but the merest glimpses of the widespread frauds in seizing land, whether agricultural, timber or mineral. What of the mercantile importers, the same cla.s.s that the Government so greatly favored in allowing it long periods in which to pay its customs duties? It was defrauding the Government on the very importations on which it was extended long-time credit for customs payments. The few official reports available clearly indicate this. Great frauds were continuously going on in the importations of lead.[96] Large quant.i.ties of sugar were imported in the guise of mola.s.ses which, it was discovered, after being boiled a few minutes, would produce an almost equal weight in brown sugar.[97]

Doubtless similar frauds were being committed in other lines of importations. Between the methods of these divisions of the capitalist cla.s.s, and those of Astor, no basic difference can be discerned.

Neither was there any essential difference between Astor's methods and those of the manufacturing capitalists of the North who remorselessly robbed Charles Goodyear of the benefits of his discovery of vulcanized rubber and who drove him, after protracted litigation, into insolvency, and caused him to die loaded down with worries and debts, a broken-down man, at the age of 60.[98] As for that pretentious body of gentry who professed to spread enlightenment and who set themselves high and solemnly on a pinnacle as dispensers of knowledge and molders of public opinion--the book, periodical and newspaper publishers--their methods at bottom were as fraudulent as any that Astor ever used. They mercilessly robbed and knew it, while making the most hypocritical professions of lofty motives. Buried deep in the dusty archives of the United States Senate is a pet.i.tion whereon appear the signatures of Moore, Carlyle, the two Disraelis, Milman, Hallam, Southey, Thomas Campbell, Sir Charles Lyell, Bulwer Lytton, Samuel Rogers, Maria Edgeworth, Harriet Martineau and other British literary luminaries, great or small. In this pet.i.tion these authors, some of them representing the highest and finest in literary, philosophical, historical, and scientific thought and expression, implore Congress to afford them protection against the indiscriminate theft of their works by American booksellers. Their works, they set forth, are not only appropriated without their consent but even contrary to their expressed desire. And there is no redress.

Their productions are mutilated and altered, yet their names are retained. They instance the pathetic case of Sir Walter Scott. His works have been published and sold from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico, yet not a cent has he received. "An equitable remuneration," they set forth, "might have saved his life, and would, at least have relieved his closing years from the burdens of debts and destructive toils."[99]

How fares this pet.i.tion read in the United States Senate on February 2, 1837? The booksellers, magazine, periodical and newspaper publishers have before succeeded in defeating one copyright bill. They now bestir themselves again; the United States Senate consigns the pet.i.tion to the archives; and the piracy goes on as industriously as ever.

LEGALIZED PIRACY IN ALL BRANCHES OF TRADE.

What else could be expected from a Congress which represented the commercial and landholding cla.s.ses? No prodding was needed to cause it to give the fullest protection to possessions in commerce, land and negro slaves; these were concrete property. But thought was not capitalized; it was not a manufactured product like iron or soap.

Nothing can express the pitying contempt or the lofty air of patronization with which the dominant commercial cla.s.ses looked down upon the writer, the painter, the musician, the philosopher or the sculptor. Regarding these "sentimentalists" as easy, legitimate and defenseless objects of prey, and as incidental and impractical hangers-on in a world where trade was all in all, the commercial cla.s.ses at all times affected a certain air of encouragement of the fine arts, which encouragement, however, never attempted to put a stop to piracies of publication or reproduction. How sordidly commercial that era was, to what extremes its standards went, and how some of the basest forms of theft were carried on and practically legalized, may be seen by the fate of Peter Cardelli's pet.i.tion to Congress. Cardelli was a Roman sculptor, residing in the United States for a time. He prays Congress in 1820 to pa.s.s an act protecting him from commercial pirates who make casts and copies of his work and who profit at his expense. The Senate Committee on Judiciary, to whom the pet.i.tion is referred, rejects the plea. On what ground? Because he "has not discovered any new invention on which he can claim the right."[100] Could stupidity go further?

All of the confluent facts of the time show conclusively that every stratum of commercial society was permeated with fraud, and that this fraud was accepted generally as a routine fixture of the business of gathering property or profits. Astor, therefore, was not an isolated phenomenon, but a typically successful representative of his time and of the methods and standards of the trading cla.s.s of that time.

Whatever in the line of business yielded profits, that act, whether cheating, robbing or slaughtering, was justified by some sophistry or other. Astor did not debauch, spoliate, and incite slaughter because he took pleasure in doing them. Perhaps--to extend charitable judgment--he would have preferred to avoid them. But they were all part of the formulated necessities of business which largely decreed that the exercise of humane and ethical considerations was incompatible with the zealous pursuit of wealth.

In the wilderness of the West, Astor, operating through his agents, could debauch, rob and slay Indians with impunity. As he was virtually the governing body there, without fear of being hindered, he thus could act in the most high-handed, arbitrary and forcible ways. In the East, however, where law, or the forms of law, prevailed, he had to have recourse to methods which bore no open trace of the brutal and sanguinary. He had to become the insidious and devious schemer, acting through sharp lawyers instead of by an armed force. Hence in his Eastern operations he made deception a science and used every instrument of cunning at his command. The result was precisely the same as in the West, except that the consequences were not so overt, and the perpetration could not be so easily distinguished. In the West, death marched step by step with Astor's acc.u.mulating fortune; so did it in the East, but it was not open and b.l.o.o.d.y as in the fur country. The mortality thus accompanying Astor's progress in New York was of that slow and indefinite, but more lingering and agonizing, kind ensuing from want, dest.i.tution, disease and starvation.

Astor's supreme craft was at no time better shown than by the means by which he acquired possession of an immense estate in Putnam County, New York. During the Revolution, a tract consisting of 51,012 acres held by Roger Morris and Mary his wife, Tories, had been confiscated by New York State. This land, it is worth recalling, was part of the estate of Adolphus Phillips, the son of Frederick who, as has been set forth, financed and protected the pirate Captain Samuel Burgess in his buccaneer expeditions, and whose share of the Burgess' booty was extremely large.[101] Mary Morris was a descendant of Adolph Phillips and came into that part of the property by inheritance. The Morris estate comprised nearly one-third of Putnam County. After confiscation, the State sold the area in parts to various farmers. By 1809 seven hundred families were settled on the property, and not a shadow of a doubt had ever been cast on their t.i.tle. They had long regarded it as secure, especially as it was guaranteed by the State.

A NOTED LAND TRANSACTION.

In 1809 a browsing lawyer informed Astor that those seven hundred families had no legal t.i.tle whatever; that the State had had no legal right to confiscate the Morris property, inasmuch as the Morrises held a life lease only, and no State could ever confiscate a life lease. The property, Astor was informed, was really owned by the children of the Morris couple, to whom it was to revert after the lease of their parents was extinguished. Legally, he was told, they were as much the owners as ever. Astor satisfied himself that this point would hold in the courts.

Then he a.s.siduously hunted up the heirs, and by a series of strategic maneuvers worthy of the pen of a Balzac, succeeded in buying their claim for $100,000.

In the thirty-three years which had elapsed since confiscation, the land had been greatly improved. Suddenly came a notification to these unsuspecting farmers that not they, but Astor, owned the land. All the improvements that they had made, all the acc.u.mulated standing products of the thirty-three years' labor of the occupants, he claimed as his, by virtue of the fact that, in law, they were trespa.s.sers. Dumfounded, they called upon him to prove his claim. Whereupon his lawyers, men saturated with the terminology and intricacies of legal lore, came forward and gravely explained that the law said so and so and was such and such and that the law was incontestible in support of Astor's claim. The hard-working farmers listened with mystification and consternation. They could not make out how land which they or their fathers had paid for, and which they had tilled and improved, could belong to an absentee who had never turned a spade on it, had never seen it, all simply because he had the advantage of a legal technicality and a doc.u.ment emblazoned with a seal or two.

THE PUBLIC UPROAR OVER ASTOR'S CLAIM.

They appealed to the Legislature. This body, influenced by the public uproar over the transaction, refused to recognize Astor's t.i.tle. The whole State was aroused to a pitch of indignation. Astor's claim was generally regarded as an audacious piece of injustice and robbery. He contended that he was not subject to the provision of the statute directing sales of confiscated estates which provided that tenants could not be dispossessed without being paid for improvements. In fine, he claimed the right to evict the entire seven hundred families without being under the legal or moral necessity of paying them a single cent for their improvements. In the state of public temper, the officials of the State of New York decided to fight his claim. Astor offered to sell his claim to the State for $667,000. But such was the public outburst at the effrontery of a man who had bought what was virtually an extinct claim for $100,000, and then attempting to hold up the State for more than six times that sum, that the Legislature dared not consent.

The contention went to the courts and there dragged along for many years. Astor, however, won his point; it was decided that he had a valid t.i.tle. Finally in 1827 the Legislature allowed itself[102] to compromise, although public opinion was as bitter as ever. The State gave Astor $500,000 in five per cent stock, specially issued, in surrender of his claim.[103] Thus were the whole people taxed to buy, at an exorbitant price, the claim of a man who had got it by artifice and whose estate eventually applied the interest and princ.i.p.al of that stock to buying land in New York City. Thus also can a considerable part of the Astor fortune be traced to Adolphus Phillips, son of Frederick, the partner, protector and chief spoil-sharer of Captain Burgess, sea pirate, and whose estate, the Phillips manor, had been obtained by bribing Fletcher, the royal governor.

But while Astor gradually appropriated vast tracts of land in Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa and other parts of the West, and levied his toll on one-third of Putnam County, it was in New York City that he concentrated the great bulk of his real estate speculations. To buy steadily on the scale that he did required a constant revenue. This revenue, as we have seen, came from his fur trading methods and activities and the profits and privileges of his shipping. But these factors do not explain his entire agencies in becoming a paramount landocrat. One of these was the banking privilege--a privilege so ordained by law that it was one of the most powerful and insidious suctions for sapping the wealth created by the toil of the producers, and for enriching its owners at a most appalling sacrifice to the working and agricultural cla.s.ses. And above all, Astor in common with his cla.s.s, made the most valuable a.s.set of Law, whether exploiting the violation, or the enforcement, of it.

If we are to accept the superficial, perfunctory accounts of Astor's real estate investments in New York City, then he will appear in the usual eulogistic light of a law-loving, sagacious man engaged in a legitimate enterprise. The truth, however, lies deeper than that--a truth which has been either undiscerned or glossed over by those conventional writers who, with a panderer's instinct, give a wealth-worshipping era the thing it wants to read, not what it ought to know. Although apparently innocent and in accord with the laws and customs of the times, Astor's real estate transactions were inseparably connected with consecutive evasions, trickeries, frauds and violations of law. Extraordinarily favorable as the law was to the propertied cla.s.ses, even that law was constantly broken by the very cla.s.ses to whom it was so partial.

Simultaneously, while reaping large revenues from his fur trade among the Indians in both the East and West, Astor was employing a different kind of fraud in using the powers of city and State government in New York in obtaining, for practically nothing, enormously valuable grants of land and other rights and privileges which added to the sum total of his growing wealth.