Fifty years in Wall Street

by Henry Clews

It was this feeling that kept him in Wall Street after his money power and his prestige of success, as well as his health, had passed away. He was out of debt, but without money in any considerable amount. He was a mere shadow of what he had been, a name and nothing more. Nevertheless, he risked his small operations with zest. But his health gave way more and more, and he fainted one morning in the board room, in Lord’s Court, and his end came not long afterwards.

He said, “I die poor!” But from the ashes of his estate and unsettled accounts his family succeeded in collecting about $150,000, which he had neglected to look after, for he had always been careless and easy-going in money matters, and attached little value to money except for its use in speculation. He was the very reverse of a miser, for he had never cared to hoard.

It was Anthony W. Morse who gave the finishing stroke to the career of Jacob Little, for, while Little was operating for a decline in the early sixties, Morse sprang into the speculative ring as a rampant bull, and bid prices up on the Stock Exchange, while it was still in Lord’s Court, in a way that astonished him and the other fossils of the board. They considered him utterly reckless. But Morse foresaw that the great war issues of United States currency—greenbacks as they were called—then being made would inflate the prices of stocks largely, and he accordingly, metaphorically speaking, rushed in where angels feared to tread.

He became the storm center, the hub, the pivotal point, in the wildest riot of stock speculation this country has ever known, or probably ever will know again; and who was he? A slight, fair-complexioned country lad, he came to New York without a dollar, and became a clerk in a stockbroker’s office. Then he married a woman with some money, and induced her to let him speculate a little for her, and was successful in making something for her, and enough for himself to buy a seat at the Stock Exchange, which then cost only $500, the initiation fee.

That was in 1862, up to which time he was both insignificant and unknown. But the bold, dashing style in which he immediately began to astonish the natives and rattle the dry bones of the fossils, by his rapidly advancing bids for railway stocks, showed that he was a man of the time, fully up to date. Had he not proved to be right on the market he would have been ruined at the start, but the market went with him, and it went with a rush that made the old fogies of the board say: “Well, well! this young fellow got the start of us—we are not in it!”

He first put up Cleveland & Pittsburg with the ease and celerity of a man who thought it a mere trifle to handle. Then he successfully took hold of Ohio & Mississippi, Rock Island, Erie, and Fort Wayne, and put them up in the same pyrotechnical and flamboyant way. He, in one day, marked Fort Wayne up from 118 to 152. He had unlimited confidence in himself, because he saw that he was on the right track, and the Street and the public followed him. He ran Pittsburg up from 65 to 108 amid great excitement, and bid 100 for the whole capital stock, “seller one year.” He then sold all his Pittsburg between 96 and 108. His firm, Morse & Co., were overrun with commission business at their large ground-floor office in William Street. By the early part of 1863 he had punished the bears badly, and made, it was estimated, at least $1,250,000, and his career of riotous success ran for just two years, during which he was supposed to have made enormously. There was a rush to join every pool he formed, so great was his prestige. Men crowded the sidewalk in front of his office trying to find out what he said, or what he was doing, so that they might do likewise; and if he gave a “bull” point on any stock, nearly all who heard of it acted upon it, feeling confident that it was a dead certainty. His fellow-brokers in the board largely followed him, like the rank and file, and rag, tag, and bobtail of the Wall Street crowd, because he had been always right. Never indeed was a Wall Street leader, before or since, more blindly followed than Morse. The whole country joined in the mad speculation there, and he was on the crest of the wave.

One night at the Evening Exchange Morse bid 112 for 10,000 shares of Erie stock, and Daniel Drew sold them. Then he bid the same price for 20,000 more, and Drew sold them. A day or two later Drew “covered” at a heavy loss. When Morse took hold of Ohio & Mississippi he jumped it from 49 to 69 in a couple of days.

Money was cheap and abundant, owing to the currency inflation, and speculation so active that many stock houses kept a relay of clerks for night work. Meanwhile speculation in gold was as rampant as in stocks, and hundreds of new mining and petroleum companies were launched, and the stocks of these were actively traded in at high and rapidly rising prices, while old and worthless stocks, like Bucks County Lead, were resuscitated and boomed with the rest.

Clergymen and women were drawn into this whirlpool of speculation, and any stock with “gold” in its name went off “like hot cakes.” One stock was considered about as good as another to buy, as all were going up. Morse led the crazy multitude in everything, and, among his other achievements, he put Rock Island up from 106 to 149, and, in doing so, bought the whole capital stock, which was then only 56,000 shares.

Morse’s doom was sealed by Mr. Salmon P. Chase, who as Secretary of the Treasury sought to stop the wild inflation, and particularly the tremendous bull speculation in gold, by selling gold for currency, and locking the currency up in the Sub-treasury, so as to make a tight money market. This had the desired effect, for it made money so scarce and dear that it forced the large speculative holders of stocks to sell, through the banks calling in their loans, and brought on a panic, just at the time when Morse was more heavily loaded with stocks than he had ever been before.