Any student of the history of Mr. Gould’s career in the corporation world will appreciate how again and again he found this quality of patience a prime investment. He never seemed to be in a hurry about anything. One of his enemies has remarked that during the last twenty years Jay Gould spent $1,000,000 hiring lawyers and paying court fees to accomplish nothing except to have lawsuits postponed.
And now the great man is dead. For days after his demise the public press was full of tales of his career. On every editorial page have been resumes of his life, and judgment upon him, either for or against. Much has been found to say of him that was good, and much that was evil. As a fitting close to this biography, it is good to quote from the New York World, which has published much of interest regarding him. The paper indeed was not his friend, but we have had much from his friends, and this opinion probably agrees with that of more persons than does any other:
“Look back upon his wonderful career. As sometimes an assassin is tracked by his footsteps in the snow or by the drops of crimson that have fallen from his fingers, dripping with the life blood of his victim, so the life of Jay Gould can be traced by the dark, deep stains it has left on the records of his time. We see him leaving his father’s farm a penniless but determined lad, clerking in a country store by day and studying mathematics at night. We follow him as he becomes a map-maker and goes forth to survey his own and adjoining counties. We see him hungry and unable to purchase a meal, kneeling down by the roadside and repeating his sister’s prayer. We see him strike his first bargain. We see him win the confidence of Zadock Pratt, the tanner. We follow him into the forests of Pennsylvania and hear the sound of his ax as he fells the first tree for a great tannery. We see him scheming for the control of the property and finally forcing out of the concern the man who had set him up in the business. We follow him in his partnership with Leupp, the old-fashioned and honorable merchant, of New York, and see him again scheming to gain control of the entire business. We see him entering, even at this early day, into wild speculations that involved his partner and threatened him with ruin. We hear the click of the pistol with which Leupp in his despair shot himself. We see Gould still scheming and endeavoring to drive a sharp bargain with Leupp’s daughters and heirs. We see him leading a gang of ruffians to drive out of the tannery the men who were endeavoring to protect it in the interests of Leupp’s daughters. We hear the groans of those who were wounded in that battle. We follow the young adventurer to New York. We see him buy his first railroad on credit and clear a handsome fortune out of the operation. We follow him into Wall street, where for twenty years he was to reign as a king and master. We see him in Erie, first as a follower of Daniel Drew and afterward as president. We see him at Albany bribing senators. We see him in New York purchasing judges, defying the law, issuing millions of securities, not a dollar of which represented legitimate expenditures. We see him plundering the great property of which he was nominally the trustee. We see him and his companion, James Fisk, Jr., the gambler and defaulter in a series of wonderful stock operations, cornering even their former leader, Daniel Drew, and fighting with desperation Commodore Vanderbilt. We see him organizing the greatest and most dastardly financial conspiracy the world has ever seen, laying its foundation in the actual bribery of a member of the President’s family, and in an attempt to involve in the speculation the President himself—America’s greatest captain. We hear the awful crash of Black Friday’s earthquake, from which Gould, the arch conspirator, saved himself, but in which hundreds were involved in ruin and the nation in dishonor. We see him now driven out of Erie by the indignant stockholders, headed by Gen. Sickles, Gen. Dix and Gen. McClellan. We see him arrested for appropriating the property of the company of which he was president, and to save himself we see him make a pretended restitution of the misappropriated millions. We see him cornering Northwest and raking in the wealth of his recent Wall street partner. We can see him now fastening his fingers on the great Union Pacific railroad, which for ten years he controlled. We can see him betraying his trust as trustee for Kansas Pacific mortgages, for which he was obliged years after to plead the statute of limitations in order to save himself from prosecution. We see him securing control of the Pacific Mail, the chief American steamship line. We see him buying for a few million dollars from Commodore Garrison the Missouri Pacific, ‘just as a plaything,’ but which he afterward developed into a great railroad system covering thousands of miles of territory. We see him repeating his old Erie tactics in Wabash and we can hear the stinging words of an unpurchasable judge as he turns his dummy receivers from power. We see him organizing an opposition against Western Union until, the favorable moment arriving, he secures control of the company and by a series of extraordinary consolidations make himself the head of a telegraph monopoly with a system covering the United States and crossing the Atlantic Ocean. We hear the crash of another panic. There are moments when we think the great speculator will fall—when, lo! we see him calmly exhibiting his millions of securities to his friends. Others fail, among them men who had been his partners and agents, but he is safe. We see him living in a palace on the Hudson and ploughing the waters of the river and the ocean with the most splendid yacht ever constructed. We see him at home, the personification of domestic honor and purity, a faithful husband and a kind father, and we see him abroad, hated, feared and detested. Despite his record, we find the power of his millions and of the great properties he controlled felt in every direction. He is a factor in elections. Candidates seek him for favors. He dictates appointments to high offices. Honorable men who would not repeat his methods sit with him in boards of direction and are identified with some of his enterprises. Nothing that the fertile imagination of Balzac, Dumas or Gaboriau ever conceived equals in dramatic incidents and sensational developments the career of this extraordinary man.
“It will be observed that there were two Goulds—Gould the man of affairs and Gould the man of family. In all his domestic relations his life was pure, his nature affectionate. No criticism can touch him in his home life. There he was above reproach. Toward the end of his life his dual nature seemed to blend into one. He became more conservative in business, more solicitous, apparently, of the good will and good opinion of his fellowmen, more careful to keep within the bounds of strict business morality, less audacious in his methods. For should it be forgotten that however much Gould’s public career may be justly subject to criticism, much that he did was indirectly for the public benefit? For instance, he developed properties that enriched wide sections of the country. No review of his career would be complete without this acknowledgement.”
Jay Gould will be remembered not for the good that he has done, not for the happiness he has given, but for the enormity of the fortune that he acquired. If his heirs apply to better ends than he did, the wealth that they have received from him, they may be better remembered. If they should dissipate the fortune, it might then fall into the possession of those who would do good with it. As it has been before, the life and fortune of Jay Gould have been a constant example always in readiness to be brought forward by those who find evil in our financial system. It is to be hoped that better things will now come from it.
FINIS.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, but several remain unbalanced.
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