INTO THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND
The enthusiasm which Mr. Marcellus Massey showed over the extension of his railroad into Suspension Bridge was surface enthusiasm, indeed. In his heart he felt that it had taken a very dangerous step. His mind was full of forebodings. Some of these he confessed to his intimates in Watertown. He felt that a mistake—if you please, an irrevocable mistake—had been made. And there was no turning back.
These forebodings were realized. As we have just seen, the Lake Ontario Shore defaulted upon its bonds in 1876 and again in 1877. The reflection of this disastrous step came directly upon the R. W. & O. It ceased paying dividends. The North Country folk, who had come to regard its securities as something hardly inferior to government bonds, were depressed and then alarmed. Yet worse was to come. On August 1, 1878, the R. W. & O. defaulted in its interest on its great mass of consolidated bonds.
The blow had fallen! Failure impended! And receivership! Yet, in the long run, both were avoided. Into the directorate of the railroad, up to that time a fairly close Northern New York affair, a new man had come. He was a smallish man, with a reputation for keenness and sagacity in railroad affairs, second only to that of Jay Gould or Daniel Drew. There were more ways than one in which Samuel Sloan, known far and wide as plain “Sam Sloan,” resembled both of these men.
His touch with the R. W. & O. came physically, by way of the contact of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western with it at three points; at Oswego, at Syracuse, and at Rome—this last, at that time through its leased operation of the Rome & Clinton Railroad, which ceased July 1, 1883. He had looked upon the development and the despair of the Rome road with increasing interest. His careful and conservative mind must have stood aghast at the foolhardiness of the Lake Ontario Shore venture. Sam Sloan would have done nothing of that sort. The railroad that he dominated so forcefully for many years—Lackawanna—would have taken no step of that sort. Trust Sam Sloan for that.
And yet, despite his evident dislike for the property, the R. W. & O. had its fascinations for him. He must have seen certain opportunities in it. The fact that it touched his own road at so many points, and, therefore, was capable of becoming so large a potential feeder for it—despite the malign influence of those Vanderbilts with their important New York Central—must have appealed to the old man’s heart. At any rate he took direct steps to gain control of the Rome road.
The precise motives that impelled Samuel Sloan to gain a control of the R. W. & O., and having once gained a control of it, to conduct it in the remarkable manner that he did, in all probability, never will be known. One may only indulge in surmises. But just why he should seek, apparently with deliberateness and carefully preconceived plan, to wreck what had been so recently the finest of all railroads in the state of New York is not clearly apparent even to-day.
Sloan was a man of many moods. Receptive and interested to-day, he was cold and bitter to-morrow. One might never count upon him. He flattered Marcellus Massey, raised his salary as the President of the Rome road from $7500 to $10,000 a year, and then induced him to purchase large holdings of Lackawanna stock, putting up as collateral his large holdings of the shares of the R. W. & O., just beginning their long drop towards a pitifully low figure—all the time holding the bait to the old President of the amazing property that he was about to upbuild in Northern New York. So, eventually Sloan ruined Massey, financially and physically, and a broken hearted man went out from the old President’s office of the R. W. & O. in Watertown.
In 1877, the year before the Rome road all but created financial disaster in Northern New York, Sloan had bought enough of its bargain-sale stock to have himself elected as its President. The official roster of the road then became: