This, however, was not all that the Government did for the favored, pampered class 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 class 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 Cass, 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 associated 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 nobility, 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 class 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 class 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 circumstances 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]