Both parties received the greater part of their campaign funds from the men of large property and from the vested corporations or other similar interests. Astor, for example, was always a liberal contributor, now to the Whig party and again to the Democratic. In return, the politicians elected by those parties to the legislature, the courts or to administrative offices usually considered themselves under obligations to that element which financed its campaigns and which had the power of defeating their reëlection by the refusal of funds or by supporting the opposite party. The masses of the people were simply pawns in these political contests, yet few of them understood that all the excitement, partisan activity and enthusiasm into which they threw themselves, generally had no other significance than to enchain them still faster to a system whose beneficiaries were continuously getting more and more rights and privileges for themselves at the expense of the people, and whose wealth was consequently increasing by precipitate bounds.
ASTOR BECOMES AMERICA'S RICHEST MAN.
Astor was now the richest man in America. In 1847 his fortune was estimated at fully $20,000,000. In all the length and breadth of the United States there was no man whose fortune was within even approachable distance of his. With wonderment his contemporaries regarded its magnitude. How great it ranked at that period may be seen by a contrast with the wealth of other men who were considered very rich.
In 1847 and 1852 a pamphlet listing the number of rich men in New York was published under the direction of Moses Yale Beach, publisher of the "New York Sun." The contents of this pamphlet were vouched for as strictly accurate.[139] The pamphlet showed that there were at that time perhaps twenty-five men in New York City who were ranked as millionaires. The most prominent of these were Peter Cooper with an accredited fortune of $1,000,000; the Goelets, $2,000,000; the Lorillards, $1,000,000; Moses Taylor, $1,000,000; A. T. Stewart, $2,000,000; Cornelius Vanderbilt, $1,500,000, and William B. Crosby, $1,500,000. There were a few fortunes of $500,000 each, and several hundred ranging from $100,000 to $300,000. The average fortunes graded from $100,000 to $200,000. A similar pamphlet published in Philadelphia showed that that city contained a bevy of nine millionaires, only two of whose individual fortunes exceeded $1,000,000.[140] No facts are available as to the private fortunes in Boston and other cities. Occasionally the briefest mention would appear in the almanacs of the period of the death of this or that rich man. There is a record of the death of Alexander Milne, of New Orleans, in 1838 and of his bequest of $200,000 to charitable institutions, and of the death of M. Kohne, of Charleston, S. C., in the same year with the sole fact that he left $730,000 in charitable bequests. In 1841 there appeared a line that Nicholas Girod, of New Orleans, died leaving $400,000 to "various objects," and a scant notice of the death of William Bartlett, of Newburyport, Mass., coupled with the fact that he left $200,000 to Andover Seminary. It is entirely probable that none of these men were millionaires; otherwise the fact would have been brought out conspicuously. Thus, when Pierre Lorillard, a New York snuff maker, banker, and landholder, died in 1843, his fortune of $1,000,000 or so, was considered so unusual that the word millionaire, newly-coined, was italicized in the rounds of the press. Similarly in the case of Jacob Ridgeway, a Philadelphia millionaire, who died in the same year.
The passing away now of a man worth a mere million, calls forth but a trifling, passing notice. Yet when Henry Brevoort died in New York City in 1848, his demise was accounted an event in the annals of the day. His property was estimated at a valuation of about $1,000,000, the chief source of which came from the ownership of eleven acres of land in the heart of the city. Originally his ancestors cultivated a truck farm and ran a dairy on this land, and daily in the season carried vegetables, butter and milk to market. Brevoort, the newspaper biography read, was a "man of fine taste in painting, literature and intellectual pursuits of every kind. He owned a large property in the fashionable part of the city, where he erected a splendid house, elegantly adorned and furnished in the Italian style; for he was quite a connoisseur in the arts."
It can be at once seen in what transcendent degree Astor's wealth towered far above that of every other rich man in the United States.
ASTOR'S TOWERING WEALTH.
His fortune was the colossus of the times; an object of awe to all wealth-strivers. Necessary as manufactures were in the social and industrial system, they, as yet, occupied a strikingly subordinate and inferior position as an agency in accumulating great fortunes. Statistics issued in 1844 of manufactures in the United States showed a total gross amount of $307,196,844 invested. Astor's wealth, then, was one-fifteenth of the whole amount invested throughout the territory of the United States in cotton and wool, leather, flax and iron, glass, sugar, furniture, hats, silks, ships, paper, soap, candles, wagons—in every kind of goods which the demands of civilization made indispensable.
The last years of this magnate were passed in an atmosphere of luxury, laudation and power. On Broadway, by Prince street, he built a pretentious mansion, and adorned it with works of art which were more costly than artistic. Of medium height, he was still quite stout, but his once full, heavy face and his deep set eyes began to sag from the encroachments of extreme advanced age. He could be seen every weekday poring over business reports at his office on Prince street—a one-story, fireproof brick building, the windows of which were guarded by heavy iron bars. The closing weeks of his life were passed at his country seat at Eighty-eighth street and the East River. Infirm and debilitated, so weak and worn that he was forced to get his nourishment like an infant at a woman's breast, and to have exercise administered by being tossed in a blanket, he yet retained his faculty of vigilantly scrutinizing every arrear on the part of tenants, and he compelled his agent to render daily accounts. Parton relates this story:
One morning this gentleman [the agent] chanced to enter his room while he was enjoying his blanket exercise. The old man cried out from the middle of his blanket: