Three years later, in 1860, Gould set up as a leather merchant in New
York City; the New York directory for that year contains this entry:
"Jay Gould, leather merchant, 39 Spruce street; house Newark." For
several years after this his name did not appear in the directory.
He had been, however, edging his way into the railroad business with the sums that he had stolen from Pratt and Leupp. At the very time that Leupp committed suicide, Gould was buying the first mortgage bonds of the Rutland and Washington Railroad—a small line, sixty-two miles long, running from Troy, New York, to Rutland, Vermont. These bonds, which he purchased for ten cents on the dollar, gave him control of this bankrupt railroad. He hired men of managerial ability, had them improve the railroad, and he then consolidated it with other small railroads, the stock of which he had bought in.
With the passing of the panic of 1857, and with the incoming of the stupendous corruption of the Civil War period, Gould was able to manipulate his bonds and stock until they reached a high figure. With a part of his profits from his speculation in the bonds of the Rutland and Washington Railroad, he bought enough stock of the Cleveland and Pittsburg Railroad to give him control of that line. This he manipulated until its price greatly rose, when he sold the line to the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. In these transactions there were tortuous substrata of methods, of which little to-day can be learned, except for the most part what Gould himself testified to in 1883, which testimony he took pains to make as favorable to his past as possible.
His career from 1867 onward stood out in the fullest prominence; a multitude of official reports and investigations and court records contribute a translucent record. He became invested with a sinister distinction as the most cold-blooded corruptionist, spoliator, and financial pirate of his time; and so thoroughly did he earn this reputation that to the end of his days it confronted him at every step, and survived to become the standing reproach and terror of his descendants. For nearly a half century the very name of Jay Gould has been a persisting jeer and by-word, an object of popular contumely and hatred, the signification of every foul and base crime by which greed triumphs.
WHY THIS BIASED VIEW OF GOULD'S CAREER?
Yet, it may well be asked now, even if for the first time, why has Jay Gould been plucked out as a special object of opprobrium? What curious, erratic, unstable judgment is this that selects this one man as the scapegoat of commercial society, while deferentially allowing his business contemporaries the fullest measure of integrity and respectability?
Monotonous echoes of one another, devoid of understanding, writer has followed writer in harping undiscriminatingly upon Jay Gould's crimes. His career has been presented in the most forbidding colors; and in order to show that he was an abnormal exception, and not a familiar type, his methods have been darkly contrasted with those of such illustrious capitalists as the Astors, the Vanderbilts, and others.
Thus, has the misinformed thing called public opinion been shaped by these scribbling purveyors of fables; and this public opinion has been taught to look upon Jay Gould's career as an exotic, "horrible example," having nothing in common with the careers of other founders of large fortunes. The same generation habitually addicted to cursing the memory of Jay Gould, and taunting his children and grandchildren with the reminders of his thefts, speaks with traditional respect of the wealth of such families as the Astors and the Vanderbilts. Yet the cold truth is, as has been copiously proved, John Jacob Astor was proportionately as notorious a swindler in his day as Gould was in his; and as for Commodore Vanderbilt, he had already made blackmailing on a large scale a safe art before Gould was out of his teens.
Gould has been impeached as one of the most audacious and successful buccaneers of modern times. Without doubt he was so; a freebooter who, if he could not appropriate millions, would filch thousands; a pitiless human carnivore, glutting on the blood of his numberless victims; a gambler destitute of the usual gambler's code of fairness in abiding by the rules; an incarnate fiend of a Machiavelli in his calculations, his schemes and ambushes, his plots and counterplots.
But it was only in degree, and not at all in kind, that he differed from the general run of successful wealth builders. The Vanderbilts committed thefts of as great an enormity as he, but they gradually managed to weave around themselves an exterior of protective respectability. All sections of the capitalist class, in so fiercely reviling Gould, reminded one of the thief, who, to divert attention from himself, joins with the pursuing crowd in loudly shouting, "Stop thief!" We shall presently see whether this comparison is an exaggerated one or not.