Did he ever, in those years of scheming and fighting for wealth, cast his recollection backward to the old days at Roxbury, when he was but a barefoot farmer’s boy, with nothing more oppressive on his mind than the necessity to go through the rain for the cows, or to find the nest that the blue hen had hidden away some place in the hay-mow?
There was little in the associations that he made during these first Wall street years to remind him of those days. For while many of the men with whom he came in contact had been like himself, the sons of farmers with the first years of their lives spent far from the city, yet from this time, all their “watering” of stock was entirely in the direction of stocks which represented the value of railroads and other properties, and all their knowledge of farm products was devoted to the manipulation of grain markets.
As Gould’s acquaintance grew larger, and his success in ordinary small ventures became assured, his disposition began to demand something of greater magnitude, something with more satisfaction in it for that appetite that was already becoming insatiable. A few small railroad ventures were carried through in a manner bordering upon perfection, and this increased the confidence in him of those speculators who were already his acquaintances. The way opened for him to enter into the manipulations of Erie, and, as before, when opportunity came he recognized and grasped it.
CHAPTER VI.
GOULD’S ASSAULT UPON ERIE.
The most thrilling, the most discreditable portion of Gould’s career, is contained in the ten years following the close of the war of the rebellion. The blackest pages in the history of American railways comprise the chapter relating to the Erie and the most shameful efforts to wreck the fortunes of a thousand men for the aggrandizement of the fortunes of a few, were made in connection with the schemes that resulted in “Black Friday.”
Nothing in the Credit Mobilier and the history of the rise of the Pacific railroads equals in downright violation of sacred trusts, in absolute plunder of vast properties, and in wholesale bribery and corruption, the record of Erie. Even Mr. Gould, in his sworn autobiography in that celebrated investigation before the committee on labor and education, while careful to give minute details about other periods of his history, significantly preserved an entire silence as to Erie and “Black Friday”—two incidents in his career which nothing but an effort to conceal could explain his silence regarding. That this is no exaggeration of language, an examination of the facts will show. There is no intention to speak maliciously of Gould. Beside an open grave, charity and forgetfulness stand guard on either side. But the lesson of Gould’s career would be lost, if even at this time the facts were not plainly and openly told. To say that Gould ruthlessly plundered the Erie railway is to speak the plain truth.
Fortunately the record of Erie, notwithstanding Mr. Gould’s silence, can be told from authoritative testimony. In his famous “Chapter of Erie,” published in the North American Review, in 1869, Charles Francis Adams gives a thrilling account of Erie from the time Daniel Drew engaged in his famous war with Commodore Vanderbilt, to the time when that unfortunate road was in complete control of Jay Gould and James Fisk, Jr. Mr. Adams’ history stopped short in the middle of the story, but the record of Erie, from 1869 till Mr. Gould was driven from power in 1872, is given in the report of the legislative inquiry in 1873, and of the Hepburn investigation of 1879.
It is a curious fact that years after writing this “chapter” Mr. Adams, having become president of the Union Pacific, sat in the same Board of Directors with Gould, but only for a comparatively brief period, and Mr. Adams never repudiated or recalled his early history of Gould in Erie. It is a striking illustration, however, of the power of millions that Gould should live to sit in the same board with the representative of the aristocratic Adams family, which furnished two Presidents to the United States; that after an effort to involve the administration of President Grant in the disgrace of Black Friday, he should, in after years, be joined with him in business enterprises; that after having been publicly branded as an unscrupulous gambler in a Congressional report written by James A. Garfield, he should be sought for to render aid to secure Garfield’s election as president, and that, though not seeking to join the social circles in which the Astors are leaders, he was able to induce John Jacob Astor to sit with him in the Western Union Board of Directors.
Twenty years ago, after Mr. Adams wrote his “Chapter of Erie,” he was himself president of the Union Pacific, and it must have given Mr. Gould the keenest satisfaction to have been the occasion of his retirement from that position. The railway was in a bad way financially—had a big floating debt—and Mr. Gould and his friends stepped in, gained control of the property the second time, retired Mr. Adams from the presidency and secured an adjustment of the floating debt. It was suggested to Mr. Gould at this time that he might write a “Chapter of Union Pacific” covering the history of the Adams administration. But whatever there may have been lacking in administrative vigor in Mr. Adams’ presidency, he retired without any blot on the family escutcheon.