What a contrast to such contemptible men was John Jacob Astor, who, at the age of twenty, left his German home, resolving to seek a fortune in the New World. He was a poor uneducated boy, and he trudged on foot from his home to the seaport whence he was to sail. He was educated by his mother. His school-books were his Bible and Prayer-book, and these he read and pondered over to the last hour of his life. When he left home, a small bundle contained all his worldly possessions. He had money enough, for a common steerage passage—that was all. He landed penniless on American soil. As he left his native village, he paused and cast a lingering, loving look behind. As he stood under the linden tree he said, “I will be honest; I will be industrious; I will never gamble.” He kept these resolutions till the day of his death. He sailed from London for America in 1783. In the steerage he made the acquaintance of a furrier, which was the means of his introduction to a business by which he made millions. All sorts of stories are circulated about the early career of Mr. Astor. It was said that he commenced by trading in apples and pea-nuts. He took with him seven flutes, from his brother’s manufactory in London; these he sold, and invented the proceeds in furs. He went steadily to work to learn the trade for himself: he was frugal, industrious, and early exhibited great tact in trade. He was accustomed to say, later in life, that the only hard step in making his fortune was in the accumulation of the first thousand dollars. He possessed marked executive ability. He was quick in his perceptions. He came rapidly to his conclusions. He made a bargain, or rejected it at once. In his very earliest transactions he displayed the same characteristics which marked him in maturer life. He made distinct contracts, and adhered to them with inflexible purpose. He founded the American Fur Company, in which he had shares, and by means of which he amassed a fortune of over 50,000 dollars. His son succeeded in his father’s business, and in his father’s ability for acquiring money. His habits were very simple, and mode of life uniform.
Next to Astor, perhaps, in America, we are most familiar with the name of Commodore Vanderbilt, one of the self-made millionaires of the city of New York. He began life a penniless boy, and took to the water early. His first adventure was rowing a boat from Staten Island to the city. He took command of a North River steamboat when quite young, and was distinguished at the start for his resolute, indomitable, and daring will. He began his moneyed success by chartering steamboats, and running opposition to all the old lines up the North River, up the East River, up the Connecticut—everywhere. Making a little money, he invested it in stocks which were available in cash, and always ready for a bargain. Honourable in trade, prompt, firm, and reliable, he was decided in his business, and could drive as hard a bargain as any man in the city. His custom was to conduct his business on cash principles, and never to allow a Saturday night to close without every man in his employ getting his money. If anybody was about to fail, wanted money, had a bargain to offer, he knew where to call. Nothing came amiss—a load of timber, coal, or cordage, a cargo of a ship, or a stock of goods in a factory, glass-ware, merchandise, or clothing—the commodore was sure to find a use for them. A writer, in 1868, thus describes him:—“From nine to eleven the commodore is in his up-town office; at one in his down-town office. Between these hours he visits the Harlem and Hudson River stations. He is now nearly eighty years of age. He it as erect as a warrior; he is tall, very slim, genteel in his make-up, with a fine presence, hair white as the driven snow, and comes up to one’s idea of a fine merchant of the olden time. He is one of the shrewdest merchants, prompt and decided. In one of the down-town mansions, where the aristocracy used to reside, he has his place of business. He drives down through Broadway in his buggy, drawn by his favourite horse, celebrated for his white feet, one of the fleetest in the city, and which no money can buy. His office consists of a single room, quite large, well-furnished, and adorned with pictures of favourite steamers and ferry-boats. The entrance to the office is through a narrow hall-way, which is made an outer room for his confidential clerk. He sees personally all who call, rising to greet the comer, and seldom sits till the business is discharged, and the visitor gone. But for this he would be overrun and bored to death. His long connection with steamboats and shipping brings to him men from all parts of the world who have patents, inventions, and improvements, and who wish his endorsement. II a man has anything to sell he settles the contract in a very few words. The visitor addresses the commodore, and says. ‘I have a stock of goods for sale; what will you give?’ A half-dozen sharp inquiries are made, and a price named. The seller demurs, announcing that such a price would ruin him. ‘I don’t want your goods. What did you come here for if you did not want to sell? If you can get more for your goods, go and get it.’ Not a moment of time will be lost, not a cent more be offered; and if the man leaves, with the hope of getting a better price, and returns to take the first offer, he will probably not sell the goods at all.”
Turning from steamboats, Mr. Vanderbilt long ago became interested in railroads. In this line, so great was his success that he could control the market. “An attempt,” says an American writer, “was made some time since to break him down by cornering the stock.” He wanted to consolidate the Harlem Road with the Hudson. Enough of the legislature was supposed to have been secured to carry the measure. The parties who had agreed to pass the bill intended to play foul. Besides this, they thought they would indulge in a little railroad speculation. They sold Harlem, to be delivered at a future day, right and left. These men let their friends into the secret, and allowed them to speculate. Clear on to Chicago, there was hardly a railroad man who was not selling Harlem short. The expected consolidation ran the stock up; the failure of the project would, of course, run it down. A few days before the vote was taken some friends called upon Commodore Vanderbilt, and gave him proof that a conspiracy existed to ruin him, if possible, in the matter of consolidation. He took all the funds he could command, and, with the aid of his friends, bought all the Harlem stock that could be found, and locked it up safe in his desk. True to the report, the bill was rejected. The men who had pledged themselves to vote for it, openly and unblushingly voted against it. They waited anxiously for the next morning, when they expected their fortunes would be made by the fall of Harlem. But it did not fall. To the surprise of everybody, the first day it remained stationary; then it began to rise steadily, to the consternation and terror of speculators. There was no stock to be had at any price. Men were ruined on the right hand and on the left. Fortunes were swept away, and the cry of the wounded was heard up and down the Central Road. An eminent railway man, near Albany, worth quite a pretty fortune, who confidently expected to make 50,000 dollars by the operation, became penniless. One of the sharpest and most successful operators in New York lost over 200,000 dollars, which he refused to pay on the ground of conspiracy. His name was immediately stricken from the Stock board, which brought him to his senses. He subsequently settled, but thousands were ruined. Vanderbilt, however, made enough money out of this attempt to ruin him, to pay for all the stock he owned in the Harlem Road. Not satisfied with his achievements on the land and on the American rivers, Mr. Vanderbilt resolved to try the ocean. He built a fine steamer at his own cost, and equipped her completely. The Collins line was then in its glory. Mr. Collins, with his fine fleet of steamers, and his subsidy from the government, was greatly elated, and very imperious. It was quite difficult to approach him. Any day, on the arrival of a steamer, he could be seen pacing the deck, the crowd falling back and making space for the head of the important personage. One of his ships was lost; Vanderbilt applied to Collins to allow his steamer to take the place vacant on the line for a time; he promised to make no claim for the subsidy, and to take off his ship as soon as Collins built one to take her place. Collins refused to do this: he felt afraid if Vanderbilt got his foot into this ocean business, he would get in his whole body; if Vanderbilt could run an ocean-steamer without subsidy, government would require Collins to do it; he saw only mischief any way. He not only refused, but refused very curtly. In the sharp Doric way that Vanderbilt had of speaking when he is angry, he told Collins that he would run his line off the ocean, if it took all of his own fortune and the years of his life to do it. He commenced his opposition in a manner that made it irresistible, and a work of short duration. He offered the government to carry the mails, for a term of years, without a dollar’s cost to the nation; he offered to bind himself, under the heaviest bonds the government could exact, to perform this service for a term of years, more promptly and faithfully than it had been ever done before. His well-known business tact and energy were conceded. His ability to do what he said, nobody could deny; his proposition was not only laid before the members of Congress, but pressed home by a hundred agencies that he employed. The subsidy was withdrawn; Collins became a bankrupt; his splendid fleet of steamers, the finest the world had ever seen, were moored at the wharves, where they laid rotting. Had Collins conceded to Vanderbilt’s wishes, or divided with him the business on the ocean, the Collins’ line not only would have been a fact to-day, but would have been as prosperous as the Cunard line.
When the rebellion broke out, the navy was in a feeble condition; every ship in the south was pressed into the rebel service. The men-of-war at Norfolk were burned. At Annapolis they were mutilated and made unfit for service. The efficient portion of the navy was cruising in foreign seas, beyond recall. The need of ships of war and gun-boats was painfully apparent. The steam-ship Vanderbilt was the finest and fleetest vessel that ever floated in American waters. Her owner fitted her up as a man-of-war at his own expense, and fully equipped her. He then offered her for sale to government at a reasonable price. Mr. Vanderbilt found that there were certain men, standing between the government and the purchase, who insisted on a profit on every vessel that the government bought. He refused to pay the black-mail that was exacted of him if his vessel became the property of the nation. He was told that, unless he acceded to these demands, he could not sell his ship. Detesting the conduct of the men, who, pretending to be patriots, were making money out of the necessities of the nation, he proceeded at once to Washington, and presented the Vanderbilt, with all her equipments, as a free gift to the nation.
There were few men who attended more closely to business than the late Mr. Vanderbilt; and, as an American writer remarked of him a few years before his death, “financially he was ready for the last great change.” At that time his property was estimated at about thirty millions of dollars. He was very liberal where he took an interest; but very fitful in his charities. He often not only subscribed liberally, but compelled all his friends to do the same. He was prompt, sharp, decisive in his manner of doing business; he was punctual in his engagements to the minute; he was very intelligent and well-informed, and, in commercial and national affairs, had no rival in shrewdness and good judgment. He was affable, assumed no airs, and was pleasant and genial as a companion; and when time began to tell on his iron frame, and he began to feel the decrepitude of age, he was not unmindful of its admonitions, and entered into no new speculations; for he wished to leave no unfinished business to his children, amongst whom his large property—the results of favourable endeavour and successful financial operations—was divided.
In the great cities of America—in such centres as Chicago and New York—the men who make the most show of wealth, who live in the finest houses, drive the best horses, give the grandest parties, were many of them grooms, coachmen, hotel porters, boot-blacks, news-boys, printers’ devils, porters, and coal-heavers, who have risen from the lower walks of life, and who left their respective homes, a few years ago, with all their worldly wealth in the crown of their hat, or tied up in a pocket-handkerchief. They did the hard work of the office, swept out the stores, made the fires, used the marking-pot, were kicked and cuffed about, and suffered every hardship. The men who made New York what it was were men of the old school; they were celebrated for their courtesy and integrity; they came from the humblest walks of life—from the plough and anvil, from the lapstone and printing-case, from the farm and quarry. They worked their way up, as Daniel worked his, from the position of a slave to Prime Minister of Babylon. Some of them went from their stores to compete with the ablest statesmen in the world; they were the fathers and founders of the American nation. These old schoolmen ate not a bit of idle bread; they were content with their small store and pine-desk; they owned their own goods, and were their own cashiers, salesmen, clerks, and porters; they worked sixteen hours a day, and so became millionaires. They would as soon have committed forgery as be mean and unjust in trade; they made their wealth in business, and not in fraudulent failures; they secured their fortunes out of their customers, and not out of their creditors.—Not so, Young America! An American writer says:—“He must make a dash. He begins with a brown-stone store, filled with goods, for which he has paid nothing; marries a dashing belle; delegates all the business that he can to others; lives in style, and spends his money before he gets it; keeps his fast horse, and other appendages equally fast; is much at the club-room, and in billiard or kindred saloons; speaks of his father as ‘the old governor,’ and of his mother as ‘the old woman;’ and, finally, becomes porter to his clerk, and lackey to his salesman. Beginning where his father left off, he leaves off where his father began.”
Let us give a few more American illustrations of the way to wealth, Boston has the honour of originating the express companies of America. One morning a man took the East Boston ferry, bound for Salem, over the Eastern Railroad. He held in his hand a small trunk, trimmed with red morocco, and fastened with red nails. The trunk contained a few notes which the person was to collect; a small sum of money he was to pay; and a few commissions he was to execute. “These,” says an American newspaper, “were the tangible things in the trunk. Besides these notes, money, and orders, that little trunk, which a child might have carried, contained the germ of the express business of the land, whose agencies, untiring as the sun, are almost as regular.” Alvin Adams—for that is and was the name of the individual referred to—commenced the express business, as an experiment, between New York and Boston in 1840. He had no business, no customers, and no money. He shrewdly saw the coming greatness of his calling, though for one year it was carried on in the smallest possible way. He had indomitable energy; his integrity was without a question; he gained slowly on the confidence of the community, and closed the year with a future of success before him. In 1854, the business was transformed into a joint-stock company, and it now stretches out its arms to all the towns and villages in the land. It is an express company for merchandise, from a bundle to a ship-load. The amount of money received and disbursed every day exceeds that of any bank in the nation. It collects and pays out the smallest sum, and from that to a large waggon loaded with money, and drawn by three horses. During the war, the company rendered efficient service to the government: in time of peril or panic, when the property of the army was abandoned or sacrificed, it bore away cart-loads of money by its coolness and courage, and saved millions to the Treasury. The company opened a department expressly to carry money from the private soldiers to their families. For a very small sum, funds were taken from the soldier and delivered to his friends in any part of the land. On several occasions, the transport department in the army being in utter confusion, application was made to the Adams’ Express Company for relief.
Jacob Little originated the dashing, daring style of business in stocks, by which fortunes are made and lost in a single day. In 1817, he came to New York, and entered the store of Jacob Barker, who was at that time the shrewdest merchant in the city. In 1822, he opened an office in a small basement in Wall Street. Caution, self-reliance, integrity, and a far-sightedness beyond his years, marked his early career. For twelve years he worked in his little den as few men work. His ambition was to hold the foremost place in Wall Street. Eighteen hours a day he devoted to business; twelve hours to his office. His evenings he spent in visiting retail houses, to purchase uncurrent money; he executed all orders committed to him with fidelity; he opened a correspondence with leading bankers in all the principal cities from New York to New Orleans. For twelve years Mr. Little was at the head of his business; he was the Great Bear of Wall Street; his mode of business enabled him to accumulate an enormous fortune; and he held on to his system till it beat him down, as it had done many a strong man before.
“For more than a quarter of a century,” writes the author of “Sunshine and Shadow,” in New York, “Mr. Little’s office, in the Old Exchange Buildings, was the centre of daring gigantic speculations. On ’Change his tread was that of a king. He could sway and disturb the street when he pleased. He was rapid and prompt in his dealings, and his purchases were usually made with great judgment. He had unusual foresight, which, at times, seemed to amount to defiance. He controlled so large an amount of stock, that he was called the Napoleon of the Board. When capitalists regarded railways with distrust, he put himself at the head of the railroad movement. He comprehended the profit to be derived from their construction. In this way he rolled up an immense fortune, and was known everywhere as the railway king. He was the first to discover when the business was overdone, and immediately changed his course. At the time the Erie was a favourite stock, and selling at par, Mr. Little threw himself against the street. He contracted to sell a large amount of this stock, to be delivered at a future day. His rivals in Wall Street, anxious to floor him, formed a combination. They took all the contracts he offered; bought up all the new stock, and placed everything out of Mr. Little’s reach, making it, as they thought, impossible for him to carry out his contracts. His ruin seemed inevitable, as his rivals had both his contracts and his stock. If Mr. Little saw the way out of his trouble, he kept his own secrets; asked no advice; solicited no accommodation. The morning dawned when the stock would have to be delivered, or the Great Bear of Wall Street would have to break. He came down to his office that morning, self-reliant and calm, as usual. He said nothing about his business or his prospects. At one o’clock he entered the office of the Erie Company. He presented certain certificates of indebtedness which had been issued by the corporation. By those certificates the company had covenanted to issue stock in exchange. That stock Mr. Little demanded. Nothing could be done but to comply. With that stock he met his contract, floored the conspirators, and triumphed.”
Reverses, so common to all who attempt the treacherous sea of speculation, at length overtook Mr. Little. Walking from Wall Street with a friend one day, they passed through Union Square, then the abode of the wealthiest people of New York. Looking at the rows of elegant houses, Mr. Little remarked—“I have lost money enough to-day to buy the whole square. Yes,” he added, “and half the people in it.” Three times he became bankrupt; and what was then regarded as a colossal fortune, was, in each instance, swept away. From each failure he recovered, and paid his debts in full. It was a common remark among the capitalists, that “Jacob Little’s suspended papers were better than the cheques of most men.” The whole man inspired confidence. He was retiring in his manner, and quite diffident, except in business. He was generous as a creditor. If a man could not meet his contracts, and Mr. Little was satisfied that he was honest, he never pressed him. After his first suspension, though legally free, he paid every creditor in full, though it took nearly a million of dollars. His charities were large and unostentatious. The Southern rebellion, alas! swept away his remaining fortune, and he died poor and resigned in the bosom of his family. His last words were—“I am going up. Who will go with me?”