THE SCHERMERHORNS.
The factors entering into the building up of the Schermerhorn fortune were almost identical with those of the Astor, the Goelet and the Rhinelander fortunes. The founder, Peter Schermerhorn, was a ship chandler during the Revolution. Parts of his land and other possessions he bought with the profits from his business; other portions, as has been brought out, he obtained from corrupt city administrations. His two sons continued the business of ship chandlers; one of them—"Peter the Younger"—was especially active in extending his real estate possessions, both by corrupt favors of the city officials and by purchase. One tract of land, extending from Third avenue to the East River and from Sixty-fourth to Seventy-fifth street, which he secured in the early part of the nineteenth century, became worth a colossal fortune in itself. It is now covered with stores, buildings and densely populated tenement houses. "Peter the Younger" quickly gravitated into the profitable and fashionable business of the day—the banking business, with its succession of frauds, many of which have been described in the preceding chapters. He was a director of the Bank of New York from 1814 until his death in 1852.
It seems quite superfluous to enlarge further upon the origin of the great landed fortunes of New York City; the typical examples given doubtless serve as expositions of how, in various and similar ways, others were acquired. We shall advert to some of the great fortunes in the West based wholly or largely upon city real estate.
While the Astors, the Goelets, the Rhinelanders and others, or rather the entire number of inhabitants, were transmuting their land into vast and increasing wealth expressed in terms of hundreds of millions in money, Nicholas Longworth was aggrandizing himself likewise in Cincinnati.
HOW LONGWORTH BEGAN.
Longworth had been born in Newark, N. J., in 1782, and at the age of twenty-one had migrated to Cincinnati, then a mere outpost, with a population of eight hundred sundry adventurers. There he studied law and was admitted to practice. The story of how Longworth became a landowner is given by Houghton as follows: His first client was a man accused of horse stealing. In those frontier days, a horse represented one of the most valuable forms of property; and, as under a system wherein human life was inconsequential compared to the preservation of property, the penalty for stealing a horse was usually death. No term of reproach was more invested with cutting contempt and cruel hatred than that of a horse thief. The case looked black. But Longworth somehow contrived to get the accused off with acquittal. The man—so the story further runs—had no money to pay Longworth's fee and no property except two second-hand copper stills. These also were high in the appraisement of property values, for they could be used to make whisky, and whisky could be in turn used to debauch the Indian tribes and swindle them of furs and land. These stills Longworth took and traded them off to Joel Williams, a tavern-keeper who was setting up a distillery. In exchange, Longworth received thirty-three acres of what was then considered unpromising land in the town.[167] From time to time he bought more land with the money made in law; this land lay on what were then the outskirts of the place. Some of the lots cost him but ten dollars each.
As immigration swarmed West and Cincinnati grew, his land consequently took on enhanced value. By 1830 the population was 24,831; twenty years later it had reached 118,761, and in 1860, 171,293 inhabitants. For a Western city this was a very considerable population for the period. The growth of the city kept on increasingly. His land lay in the very center of the expanding city, in the busiest part of the business section and in the best portion of the residential districts. Indeed, so rapidly did its value grow soon after he got it, that it was no longer necessary for him to practice law or in any wise crook to others. In 1819 he gave up law, and thenceforth gave his entire attention to managing his property. An extensive vineyard, which he laid out in Ohio, added to his wealth. Here he cultivated the Catawba grape and produced about 150,000 bottles a year.
All available accounts agree in describing him as merciless. He foreclosed mortgages with pitiless promptitude, and his adroit knowledge of the law, approaching if not reaching, that of an unscrupulous pettifogger, enabled him to get the upper hand in every transaction. His personal habits were considered repulsive by the conventional and fastidious. "He was dry and caustic in his remarks," says Houghton, "and very rarely spared the object of his satire. He was plain and careless in his dress, looking more a beggar than a millionaire."
HIS VAGARIES—SO CALLED.
There were certain other conventional respects in which he was woefully deficient, and he had certain singularities which severely taxed the comprehension of routine minds. None who had the appearance of respectable charity seekers could get anything else from him than contemptuous rebuffs. For respectability in any form he had no use; he scouted and scoffed at it and pulverized it with biting and grinding sarcasm. But once any man or woman passed over the line of respectability into the besmeared realm of sheer disrepute, and that person would find Longworth not only accessible but genuinely sympathetic. The drunkard, the thief, the prostitute, the veriest wrecks of humanity could always tell their stories to him and get relief. This was his grim way of striking back at a commercial society whose lies and shams and hypocrisies he hated; he knew them all; he had practiced them himself. There is good reason to believe that alongside of his one personality, that of a rapacious miser, there lived another personality, that of a philosopher.