Many who knew Mr. Gould intimately are in the habit of asserting that his origin must have been Hebraic. No one pretends to say how many generations back the Jewish blood was in the family, or that Mr. Gould was aware of its existence in him. But both his names, Jason, or Jay, and Gould, served to strengthen this belief in those who held it. The twisted form, “Gould,” was suspected of being changed from “Gold,” which is a common prefix in the names of inanimate and natural objects which certain Jews in Europe were compelled to adopt as surnames in one period of their history. His habits of thought and his extraordinary intellect were both Jewish, these people assert, with how much or how little basis in the actual fact of his origin, no one can ever decide.
Mr. Gould was certainly American in the character and extent of his self-creation and success. Born of poor parents, on a poorer farm, he began to make money to pay his way through school, and he was a partner in business enterprises while yet a lad.
YOUNG GOULD IN HIS FATHER’S DAIRY.
But so far as Mr. Gould himself has been able to decide, he came of Puritan stock than which none is more diametrically removed from the Hebraic. He was born on May 27, 1836, in the little post-village of Roxbury, Delaware county, New York state. Nearly half a century before, while Delaware, Ulster and Otsego counties were yet one, his grandfather came with half a dozen Puritan families from Fairfield county, Connecticut, and took up land near the land which became Jay Gould’s birth-place. This grandfather was Captain Abram Gould. He had been a Revolutionary soldier and was described as a “grim, earnest, honest man.” To him was born in 1792, a son who was named John B. Gould, the first male child born in the new settlement. John B. grew to manhood, was three times married, and Jay was his son by his first wife. The boy’s mother was a pious woman, a regular attendant of the Methodist services held in the “yaller meetin’ house,” where Jay also imbibed such religious notions as found a foothold in a nature not much given to the contemplation of spiritual things. The father was a small farmer and kept a dairy of twenty cows.
Until he was fourteen years old Jay lived on the farm, picking up such a meager education as attendance from four to five years at a district school, which was closed during the greater part of the year, afforded. This school was finally closed altogether by the breaking out of the “Anti-rent War,” as it was called, an uprising of the farmers against the efforts of persons who claimed to have bought the land from the Indians to collect an annual rental. Jay was dissatisfied with farm life, which indeed offered nothing, under the circumstances, to satisfy his boyish ambitions. The reasons of his dissatisfaction he once set forth as follows:
“As I was the boy of the family I generally brought the cows in the morning and assisted my sister to milk them and drove them back, and went for them again at night. I went barefooted and I used to get thistles in my feet, and I did not like farming in that way. So I said one day to my father that I would like to go to a select school that was some twelve or fifteen miles from there. He said all right, but that I was too young. I said to him that if he would give me my time, I would try my fortune. He said all right, that I was not worth much at home and I might go ahead. So next day I started off. I showed myself up at this school, and finally I found a blacksmith who consented to board me, as I wrote a pretty good hand, if I could write up his books at night. In that way I worked myself through this school.”
During these years of the embryo financier, he was a pale, slender, delicate little fellow, studiously inclined and disliking the customary sports as much as the toil of the people around him. It is remembered of him that he was different from the other boys with whom he associated in school. He was not what is generally termed a manly boy. He kept out of the rough good-natured games. He preferred to remain indoors, and at noontime cuddled up in some remote corner of the school-house, busy about nobody knew what. When approached by the others with invitations to come and join them, he would refuse. If in banter the boys attempted to force him to join them, he would make a great outcry, and breaking away from them, would sit and mope until the school was called to order. Then he would go to the master’s chair and enter a tearful complaint against his enemies. The master would thrash the other fellows, and little Gould would be tickled.
It was because his father became unpopular in the village by opposing the anti-rent movement at that time, that young Gould was obliged to leave the school nearest his home. He waited until he was fourteen years old. Then, after pondering over his prospects, he formed a resolution, and at once put it into practice by asking his father’s permission to leave home, saying that he was confident in his ability to take care of himself. His father was inclined to be amused at the boy’s request, which was made with much earnestness, and thinking that it was a mere passing whim, returned a careless affirmative. The family were astounded, however, the next morning, when little Jay entered the breakfast room equipped for his journey out into the world. He ate his breakfast quietly and, arising from the table, held out his hand to his father with a hearty “good-bye, father.” His father was amazed at his determination, and his stepmother and sisters entreated him tearfully to remain at home. Unshaken in purpose, however, the future “Wizard of Wall Street” hastily caught up his little bundle and left his parent’s house. His bundle contained a spare suit of clothes, and he had fifty cents in his pocket.
Young Jay trudged hopefully through the mountainous road between Roxbury and Hobart, where there was an academy that he had long desired to enter. He went directly to the principal of the academy and told him of his anxiety to obtain an education and his desire to get employment that he might earn money to pay the tuition fees. The principal became interested in the boy and secured for him the position of bookkeeper in a store kept by the village blacksmith. This school was kept by Mr. Oliver, and Jay’s course there was completed in 1851. During this year, however, he must have made considerable progress in mathematics, in spite of the fact that it used to be related of him in the neighborhood that he grew tired once of going to school, and was locked up one morning in the cellar by his father as a measure of correction, and forgotten until his non-return in the evening caused comment. The taste for mathematics it was that opened up to him the first steadily lucrative employment in which he became engaged, and also led him, by easy steps, into the career which destiny seemed to have marked out for him.