Throughout those years in the first decade of the nineteenth century he was constantly buying land on Manhattan Island. Practically all of it was bought, not with the idea of using it, but of holding it and allowing future populations to make it a thousand times more valuable. An exception was his country estate of thirteen acres at Hurlgate (Hellgate) in the vicinity of Sixtieth street and the East River. It was curious to look back at the fact that less than a century ago the upper regions of Manhattan Island were filled with country estates—regions now densely occupied by huge tenement houses and some private dwellings. In those days, not less than in these, a country seat was considered a necessary appendage to the possessions of a rich man. Astor bought that Hurlgate estate as a country seat; but as such it was long since discontinued although the land comprising it has never left the hold of the Astor family.
What were the intrinsic circumstances of the means by which he bought land, now worth hundreds of millions of dollars? For once, we get a gleam of the truth, but a gleam only, in the "popular writer's" account when he says: "John Jacob Astor's record is constantly crossed by embarrassed families, prodigal sons, mortgages and foreclosure sales. Many of the victims of his foresight were those highest in church and state. He thus acquired for $75,000 one-half of Governor George Clinton's splendid Greenwich country place [in the old Greenwich village on the west side of Manhattan Island].... After the Governor's death, he kept persistently at the heirs, lent them money and acquired additional slices of the family property.... Nearly two-thirds of the Clinton farm is now held by Astor's descendants, and is covered by scores of business buildings, from which is derived an annual income estimated at $500,000."
THE FATE OF OTHERS HIS GAIN.
In this transaction we see the beginnings of that period of conquest on the part of the very rich using their surplus capital in effacing the less rich—a period which really opened with Astor and which has been vastly intensified in recent times. Clinton was accounted a rich man in his day, but he was a pigmy in that respect compared to Astor. With his incessant inflow of surplus wealth, Astor was in a position where on the instant he could take advantage of the difficulties of less rich men and take over to himself their property. A large amount of Astor's money was invested in mortgages. In times of periodic financial and industrial distress, the mortgagers were driven to extremities and could no longer keep up their payments. These were the times that Astor waited for, and it was in such times that he stepped in and possessed himself, at comparatively small expense, of large additional tracts of land.
It was this way that he became the owner of what was then the Cosine farm, extending on Broadway from Fifty-third to Fifty-seventh streets and westward to the Hudson River. This property, which he got for $23,000 by foreclosing a mortgage, is now in the very heart of the city, filled with many business, and every variety of residential, buildings, and is rated as worth $6,000,000. By much the same means he acquired ownership of the Eden farm in the same vicinity, coursing along Broadway north from Forty-second street and slanting over to the Hudson River. This farm lay under pledges for debt and attachments for loans. Suddenly Astor turned up with a third interest in an outstanding mortgage, foreclosed, and for a total payment of $25,000 obtained a sweep of property now covered densely with huge hotels, theaters, office buildings, stores and long vistas of residences and tenements—a property worth at the very least $25,000,000. Any one with sufficient security in land who sought to borrow money would find Astor extremely accommodating. But woe betide the hapless borrower, whoever he was, if he failed in his obligations to the extent of even a fraction of the requirements covered by law! Neither personal friendship, religious considerations nor the slightest feelings of sympathy availed.
But where law was insufficient or non-existent, new laws were created either to aggrandize the powers of landlordship, or to seize hold of land or enchance its value, or to get extraordinary special privileges in the form of banking charters. And here it is necessary to digress from the narrative of Astor's land transactions and advert to his banking activities, for it was by reason of these subordinately, as well as by his greater trade revenues, that he was enabled so successfully to pursue his career of wealth-gathering. The circumstances as to the origin of certain powerful banks in which he and other landholders and traders were large stockholders, the methods and powers of those banks, and their effect upon the great body of the people, are component parts of the analytic account of his operations. Not a single one of Astor's biographers has mentioned his banking connections. Yet it is of the greatest importance to describe them, inasmuch as they were closely intertwined with his trade, on the one hand, and with his land acquisitions, on the other.
CHAPTER IV
THE RAMIFICATIONS OF THE ASTOR FORTUNE
Astor flourished at that precise time when the traders and landowners, flushed with revenues, reached out for the creation and control of the highly important business of professionally dealing in money, and of dictating, personally and directly, what the supply of the people's money should be.