THE HISTORY OF THE GREAT AMERICAN FORTUNES

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

HISTORY OF THE GREAT AMERICAN FORTUNES

BY

GUSTAVUS MYERS

AUTHOR OF "THE HISTORY OF TAMMANY HALL," "HISTORY OF

PUBLIC FRANCHISES IN NEW YORK CITY," ETC.

VOL. I.

CHICAGO

CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY

1910

Copyright 1907, 1908 and 1909

By GUSTAVUS MYERS

PREFACE

In writing this work my aim has been to give the exact facts as far as the available material allows. Necessarily it is impossible, from the very nature of the case, to obtain all the facts. It is obvious that in both past and present times the chief beneficiaries of our social and industrial system have found it to their interest to represent their accumulations as the rewards of industry and ability, and have likewise had the strongest motives for concealing the circumstances of all those complex and devious methods which have been used in building up great fortunes. In this they have been assisted by a society so constituted that the means by which these great fortunes have been amassed have been generally lauded as legitimate and exemplary.

The possessors of towering fortunes have hitherto been described in two ways. On the one hand, they have been held up as marvels of success, as preëminent examples of thrift, enterprise and extraordinary ability. More recently, however, the tendency in certain quarters has been diametrically the opposite. This latter class of writers, intent upon pandering to a supposed popular appetite for sensation, pile exposure upon exposure, and hold up the objects of their diatribes as monsters of commercial and political crime. Neither of these classes has sought to establish definitely the relation of the great fortunes to the social and industrial system which has propagated them. Consequently, these superficial effusions and tirades—based upon a lack of understanding of the propelling forces of society—have little value other than as reflections of a certain aimless and disordered spirit of the times. With all their volumes of print, they leave us in possession of a scattered array of assertions, bearing some resemblance to facts, which, however, fail to be facts inasmuch as they are either distorted to take shape as fulsome eulogies or as wild, meaningless onslaughts.

They give no explanation of the fundamental laws and movements of the present system, which have resulted in these vast fortunes; nor is there the least glimmering of a scientific interpretation of a succession of states and tendencies from which these men of great wealth have emerged. With an entire absence of comprehension, they portray our multimillionaires as a phenomenal group whose sudden rise to their sinister and overshadowing position is a matter of wonder and surprise. They do not seem to realize for a moment—what is clear to every real student of economics—that the great fortunes are the natural, logical outcome of a system based upon factors the inevitable result of which is the utter despoilment of the many for the benefit of a few.

This being so, our plutocrats rank as nothing more or less than as so many unavoidable creations of a set of processes which must imperatively produce a certain set of results. These results we see in the accelerated concentration of immense wealth running side by side with a propertyless, expropriated and exploited multitude.

The dominant point of these denunciatory emanations, however, is that certain of our men of great fortune have acquired their possessions by dishonest methods. These men are singled out as especial creatures of infamy. Their doings and sayings furnish material for many pages of assault. Here, again, an utter lack of knowledge and perspective is observable. For, while it is true that the methods employed by these very rich men have been, and are, fraudulent, it is also true that they are but the more conspicuous types of a whole class which, in varying degrees, has used precisely the same methods, and the collective fortunes and power of which have been derived from identically the same sources.

In diagnosing an epidemic, it is not enough that we should be content with the symptoms; wisdom and the protection of the community demand that we should seek and eradicate the cause. Both wealth and poverty spring from the same essential cause. Neither, then, should be indiscriminately condemned as such; the all-important consideration is to determine why they exist, and how such an absurd contrast can be abolished.

In taking up a series of types of great fortunes, as I have done in this work, my object has not been the current one of portraying them either as remarkable successes or as unspeakable criminals. My purpose is to present a sufficient number of examples as indicative of the whole character of the vested class and of the methods which have been employed. And in doing this, neither prejudice nor declamation has entered. Such a presentation, I believe, cannot fail to be useful for many reasons.

It will, in the first place, satisfy a spirit of inquiry. As time passes, and the power of the propertied oligarchy becomes greater and greater, more and more of a studied attempt is made to represent the origin of that property as the product of honest toil and great public service. Every searcher for truth is entitled to know whether this is true or not. But what is much more important is for the people to know what have been the cumulative effects of a system which subsists upon the institutions of private property and wage-labor. If it possesses the many virtues that it is said to possess, what are these virtues? If it is a superior order of civilization, in what does this superiority consist?

This work will assist in explaining, for naturally a virtuous and superior order ought to produce virtuous and superior men. The kind and quality of methods and successful ruling men, which this particular civilization forces to the front, are set forth in this exposition. Still more important is the ascertainment of where these stupendous fortunes came from, their particular origin and growth, and what significance the concomitant methods and institutions have to the great body of the people.

I may add that in Part I no attempt has been made to present an exhaustive account of conditions in Settlement and Colonial times. I have merely given what I believe to be a sufficient resumé of conditions leading up to the later economic developments in the United States.

Gustavus Myers.
September 1, 1909.

CONTENTS

PART I

CONDITIONS IN COLONIAL AND SETTLEMENT TIMES

PART II

THE GREAT LAND FORTUNES

PART I

CONDITIONS IN SETTLEMENT AND COLONIAL TIMES

CHAPTER I

THE GREAT PROPRIETARY ESTATES

The noted private fortunes of settlement and colonial times were derived from the ownership of land and the gains of trading. Usually both had a combined influence and were frequently attended by agriculture. Throughout the colonies were scattered lords of the soil who held vast territorial domains over which they exercised an arbitrary and, in some portions of the colonies, a feudal sway.

Nearly all the colonies were settled by chartered companies, organized for purely commercial purposes and the success of which largely depended upon the emigration which they were able to promote. These corporations were vested with enormous powers and privileges which, in effect, constituted them as sovereign rulers, although their charters were subject to revision or amendment. The London Company, thrice chartered to take over to itself the land and resources of Virginia and populate its zone of rule, was endowed with sweeping rights and privileges which made it an absolute monopoly. The impecunious noblemen or gentlemen who transported themselves to Virginia to recoup their dissipated fortunes or seek adventure, encountered no trouble in getting large grants of land especially when after 1614 tobacco became a fashionable article in England and took rank as a valuable commercial commodity.

Over this colony now spread planters who hastened to avail themselves of this new-found means of getting rich. Land and climate alike favored them, but they were confronted with a scarcity of labor. The emergency was promptly met by the buying of white servants in England to be resold in Virginia to the highest bidder. This, however, was not sufficient, and complaints poured over to the English government. As the demands of commerce had to be sustained at any price, a system was at once put into operation of gathering in as many of the poorer English class as could be impressed upon some pretext, and shipping them over to be held as bonded laborers. Penniless and lowly Englishmen, arrested and convicted for any one of the multitude of offenses then provided for severely in law, were transported as criminals or sold into the colonies as slaves for a term of years. The English courts were busy grinding out human material for the Virginia plantations; and, as the objects of commerce were considered paramount, this process of disposing of what was regarded as the scum element was adjudged necessary and justifiable. No voice was raised in protest.

THE INTRODUCTION OF BLACK SLAVES.

But, fast as the English courts might work, they did not supply laborers enough. It was with exultation that in 1619 the plantation owners were made acquainted with a new means of supplying themselves with adequate workers. A Dutch ship arrived at Jamestown with a cargo of negroes from Guinea. The blacks were promptly bought at good prices by the planters. From this time forth the problem of labor was considered sufficiently solved. As chattel slavery harmonized well with the necessities of tobacco growing and gain, it was accepted as a just condition and was continued by the planters, whose interests and standards were the dominant factor.

After 1620, when the London Company was dissolved by royal decree, and the commerce of Virginia made free, the planters were the only factor. Virginia, it was true, was made a royal province and put under deputy rule, but the big planters contrived to get the laws and customs their self-interest called for. There were only two classes—the rich planters, with their gifts of land, their bond-servants and slaves and, on the other hand, the poor whites. A middle class was entirely lacking.

As the supreme staple of commerce and as currency itself, tobacco could buy anything, human, as well as inert, material. The labor question had been sufficiently vanquished, but not so the domestic. Wives were much needed; the officials in London instantly hearkened, and in 1620 sent over sixty young women who were auctioned off and bought at from one hundred and twenty to one hundred and sixty pounds of tobacco each. Tobacco then sold at three shillings a pound. Its cultivation was assiduously carried on. The use of the land mainly for agricultural purposes led to the foundation of numerous settlements along the shores, bays, rivers, and creeks with which Virginia is interspersed and which afforded accessibility to the sea ports. As the years wore on and the means and laborers of the planters increased, their lands became more extensive, so that it was not an unusual thing to find plantations of fifty or sixty thousand acres. But neither in Virginia nor in Maryland, under the almost regal powers of Lord Baltimore who had propriety rights over the whole of his province, were such huge estates to be seen as were being donated in the northern colonies, especially in New Netherlands and in New England.

FEUDAL GRANTS IN THE NORTH.

In its intense aim to settle New Netherlands and make use of its resources, Holland, through the States General, offered extraordinary inducements to promoters of colonization. The prospect of immense estates, with feudal rights and privileges, was held out as the alluring incentive. The bill of Freedoms and Exemptions of 1629 made easy the possibility of becoming a lord of the soil with comprehensive possessions and powers. Any man who should succeed in planting a colony of fifty "souls," each of whom was to be more than fifteen years old, was to become at once a patroon with all the rights of lordship. He was permitted to own sixteen miles along shore or on one side of a navigable river. An alternative was given of the ownership of eight miles on one side of a river and as far into the interior "as the situation of the occupiers will permit." The title was vested in the patroon forever, and he was presented with a monopoly of the resources of his domain except furs and pelts. No patroon or other colonist was allowed to make woolen, linen, cotton or cloth of any material under pain of banishment.[1]

These restrictions were in the interest of the Dutch West India Company, a commercial corporation which had well-nigh dictatorial powers. A complete monopoly throughout the whole of its subject territory, it was armed with sweeping powers, a formidable equipment, and had a great prestige. It was somewhat of a cross between legalized piracy and a body of adroit colonization promoters. Pillage and butchery were often its auxiliaries, although in these respects it in nowise equalled its twin corporation, the Dutch East India Company, whose exploitation of Holland's Asiatic possessions was a long record of horrors.

THE DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY.

The policy of the Dutch West India Company was to offer generous prizes for peopling the land while simultaneously forbidding competition with any of the numerous products or commodities dealt in by itself. This had much to do with determining the basic character of the conspicuous fortunes of a century and two centuries later. It followed that when native industries were forbidden or their output monopolized not only by the Dutch West India Company in New Netherlands, but by other companies elsewhere in the colonies, that ownership of land became the mainstay of large private fortunes with agriculture as an accompanying factor. Subsequently the effects of this continuous policy were more fully seen when England by law after law paralyzed or closed up many forms of colonial manufacture. The feudal character of Dutch colonization, as carried on by the Dutch West India Company, necessarily created great landed estates, the value of which arose not so much from agriculture, as was the case in Virginia, Maryland and later the Carolinas and Georgia, but from the natural resources of the land. The superb primitive timber brought colossal profits in export, and there were also very valuable fishery rights where an estate bounded a shore or river. The pristine rivers were filled with great shoals of fish, to which the river fishing of the present day cannot be compared. As settlement increased, immigration pressed over, and more and more ships carried cargo to and fro, these estates became consecutively more valuable.

To encourage colonization to its colonies still further, the States General in 1635 passed a new decree. It repeated the feudal nature of the rights granted and made strong additions.

Did any aspiring adventurer seek to leap at a bound to the exalted position of patroonship? The terms were easy. All that he had to do was to found a colony of forty-eight adults and he had a liberal six years in which to do it. For his efforts he was allowed even more extensive grants of land than under the act of 1629. So complete were his powers of proprietorship that no one could approach within seven or eight miles of his jurisdiction without his express permission. His was really a principality. Over its bays, rivers, and islands, had it any, as well as over the mainland, he was given command forever. The dispensation of justice was his exclusive right. He and he only was the court with summary powers of "high, low and middle jurisdiction," which were harshly or capriciously exercised. Not only did he impose sentence for violation of laws, but he, himself, ordained those laws and they were laws which were always framed to coincide with his interests and personality. He had full authority to appoint officers and magistrates and enact laws. And finally he had the power of policing his domain and of making use of the titles and arms of his colonies. All these things he could do "according to his will and pleasure." These absolute rights were to descend to his heirs and assigns.[2]

OLD WORLD TRADERS BECOME FEUDAL LORDS.

Thus, at the beginning of settlement times, the basis was laid in law and custom of a landed aristocracy, or rather a group of intrenched autocrats, along the banks of the Hudson, the shores of the ocean and far inland. The theory then prevailed that the territory of the colonies extended westward to the Pacific.

From these patroons and their lineal or collateral descendants issued many of the landed generations of families which, by reason of their wealth and power, proved themselves powerful factors in the economic and political history of the country. The sinister effects of this first great grasping of the land long permeated the whole fabric of society and were prominently seen before and after the Revolution, and especially in the third and fourth decades of the eighteenth century. The results, in fact, are traceable to this very day, even though laws and institutions are so greatly changed. Other colonies reflected the constant changes of government, ruling party or policy of England, and colonial companies chartered by England frequently forfeited their charters. But conditions in New Netherlands remained stable under Dutch rule, and the accumulation of great estates was intensified under English rule. It was in New York that, at that period, the foremost colonial estates and the predominant private fortunes were mostly held.

The extent of some of those early estates was amazingly large. But they were far from being acquired wholly by colonization methods.

Many of the officers and directors of the Dutch West India Company were Amsterdam merchants. Active, scheming, self-important men, they were mighty in the money marts but were made use of, and looked down upon, by the old Dutch aristocracy. Having amassed fortunes, these merchants yearned to be the founders of great estates; to live as virtual princes in the midst of wide possessions, even if these were still comparative solitudes. This aspiration was mixed with the mercenary motive of themselves owning the land from whence came the furs, pelts, timber and the waters yielding the fishes.

One of these directors was Kiliaen van Rensselaer, an Amsterdam pearl merchant. In 1630 his agents bought for him from the Indians a tract of land twenty-four miles long and forty-eight broad on the west bank of the Hudson. It comprised, it was estimated, seven hundred thousand acres and included what are now the counties of Albany, Rensselaer, a part of Columbia County and a strip of what is at present Massachusetts. And what was the price paid for this vast estate? As the deeds showed, the munificent consideration of "certain quantities of duffels, axes, knives and wampum,"[3] which is equal to saying that the pearl merchant got it for almost nothing. Two other directors—Godyn and Bloemart—became owners of great feudal estates. One of these tracts, in what is now New Jersey, extended sixteen miles both in length and breadth, forming a square of sixty-four miles.[4]

So it was that these shrewd directors now combined a double advantage. Their pride was satisfied with the absolute lordship of immense areas, while the ownership of land gave them the manifold benefits and greater profits of trading with the Indians at first hand. From a part of the proceeds they later built manors which were contemplated as wonderful and magnificent. Surrounded and served by their retainers, agents, vassal tenants and slaves, they lived in princely and licentious style, knowing no law in most matters except their unrestrained will. They beheld themselves as ingenious and memorable founders of a potential landed aristocracy whose possessions were more extended than that of Europe. Wilderness much of it still was, but obviously the time was coming when the population would be fairly abundant. The laws of entail and primogeniture, then in full force, would operate to keep the estates intact and gifted with inherent influence for generations.

Along with their landed estates, these directors had a copious inflowing revenue. The Dutch West India Company was in a thriving condition. By the year 1629 it had more than one hundred full-rigged ships in commission. Most of them were fitted out for war on the commerce of other countries or on pirates. Fifteen thousand seamen and soldiers were on its payroll; in that one year it used more than one hundred thousand pounds of powder—significant of the grim quality of business done. It had more than four hundred cannon and thousands of other destructive weapons.[5] Anything conducive to profit, no matter if indiscriminate murder, was accepted as legitimate and justifiable functions of trade, and was imposed alike upon royalty, which shared in the proceeds, and upon the people at large. The energetic trading class, concentrated in the one effort of getting money, and having no scruples as to the means in an age when ideals were low and vulgar, had already begun to make public opinion in many countries, although this public opinion counted for little among submissive peoples. It was the king and the governing class, either or both, whose favor and declarations counted; and so long as these profited by the devious extortions and villainies of trade the methods were legitimatized, if not royally sanctified.

AN ARISTOCRACY SOLIDLY GROUNDED.

A more potentially robust aristocracy than that which was forming in New Netherlands could hardly be imagined. Resting upon gigantic gifts of land, with feudal accompaniments, it held a monopoly, or nearly one, of the land's resources. The old aristocracy of Holland grew jealous of the power and pretensions of what it frowned upon as an upstart trading clique and tried to curtail the rights and privileges of the patroons. These latter contended that their absolute lordship was indisputable; to put it in modern legal terminology that a contract could not be impaired. They elaborated upon the argument that they had spent a "ton of gold" (amounting to one hundred thousand guilders or forty thousand dollars) upon their colonies.[6] They not only carried their point but their power was confirmed and enlarged.

Now was seen the spectacle of the middle-class men of the Old World, the traders, more than imitating—far exceeding—the customs and pretensions of the aristocracy of their own country which they had inveighed against, and setting themselves up as the original and mighty landed aristocracy of the new country. The patroons encased themselves in an environment of pomp and awe. Like so many petty monarchs each had his distinct flag and insignia; each fortified his domain with fortresses, armed with cannon and manned by his paid soldiery. The colonists were but humble dependants; they were his immediate subjects and were forced to take the oath of fealty and allegiance to him.[7]

In the old country the soil had long since passed into the hands of a powerful few and was made the chief basis for the economic and political enslavement of the people. To escape from this thralldom many of the immigrants had endured hardships and privation to get here. They expected that they could easily get land, the tillage of which would insure them a measure of independence. Upon arriving they found vast available parts of the country, especially the most desirable and accessible portions bordering shores or rivers, preëmpted. An exacting and tyrannous feudal government was in full control. Their only recourse in many instances was to accept the best of unwelcome conditions and become tenants of the great landed functionaries and workers for them.

THE ABASEMENT OF THE WORKERS.

The patroons naturally encouraged immigration. Apart from the additional values created by increased population, it meant a quantity of labor which, in turn, would precipitate wages to the lowest possible scale. At the same time, in order to stifle every aspiring quality in the drudging laborer, and to keep in conformity with the spirit and custom of the age which considered the worker a mere menial undeserving of any rights, the whole force of the law was made use of to bring about sharp discriminations. The laborer was purposely abased to the utmost and he was made to feel in many ways his particular low place in the social organization.

Far above him, vested with enormous personal and legal powers, towered the patroon, while he, the laborer, did not have the ordinary burgher right, that of having a minor voice in public affairs. The burgher right was made entirely dependent upon property, which was a facile method of disfranchising the multitude of poor immigrants and of keeping them down. Purchase was the one and only means of getting this right. To keep it in as small and circumscribed class as possible the price was made abnormally high. It was enacted in New Netherlands in 1659, for instance, that immigrants coming with cargoes had to pay a thousand guilders for the burgher right.[8] As the average laborer got two shillings a day for his long hours of toil, often extending from sunrise to sunset, he had little chance of ever getting this sum together. The consequence was that the merchants became the burgher class; and all the records of the time seem to prove conclusively that the merchants were servile instruments of the patroons whose patronage and favor they assiduously courted. This deliberately pursued policy of degrading and despoiling the laboring class incited bitter hatreds and resentments, the effects of which were permanent.

JEREMIAS VAN RENSSELAERR.
One of the Patroons.
(From an Engraving.)

CHAPTER II

THE SWAY OF THE LANDGRAVES

While this seizure of land was going on in New Netherlands, vast areas in New England were passing suddenly into the hands of a few men. These areas sometimes comprised what are now entire States, and were often palpably obtained by fraud, collusion, trickery or favoritism. The Puritan influx into Massachusetts was an admixture of different occupations. Some were traders or merchants; others were mechanics. By far the largest portion were cultivators of the soil whom economic pressure not less than religious persecution had driven from England. To these land was a paramount consideration.

Describing how the English tiller had been expropriated from the soil Wallace says: "The ingenuity of lawyers and direct landlord legislation steadily increased the powers of great landowners and encroached upon the rights of the people, till at length the monstrous doctrine arose that a landless Englishman has no right whatever to enjoyment even of the unenclosed commons and heaths and the mountain and forest wastes of his native country, but is everywhere in the eye of the law a trespasser whenever he ventures off a public road or pathway."[9] By the sixteenth century the English peasantry had been evicted even from the commons, which were turned into sheep walks by the impoverished barons to make money from the Flemish wool market. The land at home wrenched from them, the poor English immigrants ardently expected that in America land would be plentiful. They were bitterly disappointed. The various English companies, chartered by royal command with all-inclusive powers, despite the frequent opposition of Parliament, held the trade and land of the greater part of the colonies as a rigid monopoly. In the case of the New England Company severe punishment was threatened to all who should encroach upon its rights. It also was freed from payment for twenty-one years and was relieved from taxes forever.

THE COLONIES CARVED INTO GREAT ESTATES.

The New England colonies were carved out into a few colossal private estates. The example of the British nobility was emulated; but the chartered companies did not have to resort to the adroit, disingenuous, subterranean methods which the English land magnates used in perpetuating their seizure, as so graphically described by S. W. Thackery in his work, "The Land and the Community". The land in New England was taken over boldly and arbitrarily by the directors of the Plymouth Company, the most powerful of all the companies which exploited New England. The handful of men who participated in this division, sustained with a high hand their claims and pretensions, and augmented and fortified them by every device. Quite regardless of who the changing monarch was, or what country ruled, these colonial magnates generally contrived to keep the power strong in their own hands. There might be a superficial show of changed conditions, an apparent infusion of democracy, but, in reality, the substance remained the same.

This was nowhere more lucidly or strikingly illustrated than after New Netherlands passed into the control of the English and was renamed New York. Laws were decreed which seemed to bear the impress of justice and democracy. Monopoly was abolished, every man was given the much-prized right of trading in furs and pelts, and the burgher right was extended and its acquisition made easier.

However well-intentioned these altered laws were, they turned out to be shallow delusions. Under English rule, the gifts of vast estates in New York were even greater than under Dutch rule and beyond doubt were granted corruptly or by favoritism. Miles upon miles of land in New York which had not been preëmpted were brazenly given away by the royal Governor Fletcher for bribes; and it was suspected, although not clearly proved, that he trafficked in estates in Pennsylvania during the time when, by royal order, he supplanted William Penn in the government of that province. From the evidence which has come down it would appear that any one who offered Fletcher his price could be transformed into a great vested land owner. But still the people imagined that they had a real democratic government. Had not England established representative assemblies? These, with certain restrictions, alone had the power of law-making for the provinces. These representative bodies were supposed to rest upon the vote of the people, which vote, however, was determined by a strict property qualification.

THE LANDED PROPRIETORS THE POLITICAL RULERS.

What really happened was that, apparently deprived of direct feudal power, the landed interests had no difficulty in retaining their law-making ascendancy by getting control of the various provincial assemblies. Bodies supposedly representative of the whole people were, in fact, composed of great landowners, of a quota of merchants who were subservient to the landowners, and a sprinkling of farmers. In Virginia this state was long-continuing, while in New York province it became such an intolerable abuse and resulted in such oppressions to the body of the people, that on Sept. 20, 1764, Lieutenant-Governor Cadwallader Colden, writing from New York to the Lords of Trade at London, strongly expostulated. He described how the land magnates had devised to set themselves up as the law-making class. Three of the large land grants contained provisions guaranteeing to each owner the privilege of sending a representative to the General Assembly. These landed proprietors, therefore, became hereditary legislators. "The owners of other great Patents," Colden continued, "being men of the greatest opulence in the several American counties where these Tracts are, have sufficient influence to be perpetually elected for those counties. The General Assembly, then, of this Province consists of the owners of these extravagant Grants, the merchants of New York, the principal of them strongly connected with the owners of these Great Tracts by Family interest, and of Common Farmers, which last are men easily deluded and led away with popular arguments of Liberty and Privileges. The Proprietors of the great tracts are not only freed from the quit rents which the other landholders in the Provinces pay, but by their influences in the Assembly are freed from every other public Tax on their lands."[10]

What Colden wrote of the landed class of New York was substantially true of all the other provinces. The small, powerful clique of great landowners had cunningly taken over to themselves the functions of government and diverted them to their own ends. First the land was seized and then it was declared exempt of taxation.

Inevitably there was but one sequel. Everywhere, but especially so in New York and Virginia, the landed proprietors became richer and more arrogant, while poverty, even in new country with extraordinary resources, took root and continued to grow. The burden of taxation fell entirely upon the farming and laboring classes; although the merchants were nominally taxed they easily shifted their obligations upon those two classes by indirect means of trade. Usurious loans and mortgages became prevalent.

It was now seen what meaningless tinsel the unrestricted right to trade in furs was. To get the furs access to the land was necessary; and the land was monopolized. In the South, where tobacco and corn were the important staples, the worker was likewise denied the soil except as a laborer or tenant, and in Massachusetts colony, where fortunes were being made from timber, furs and fisheries, the poor man had practically no chance against the superior advantages of the landed and privileged class. These conditions led to severe reprisals. Several uprisings in New York, Bacon's rebellion in Virginia, after the restoration of Charles II, when that king granted large tracts of land belonging to the colony to his favorites, and subsequently, in 1734, a ferment in Georgia, even under the mild proprietary rule of the philanthropist Oglethorpe, were all really outbursts of popular discontent largely against the oppressive form in which land was held and against discriminative taxation, although each uprising had its local issues differing from those elsewhere.

In this conflict between landed class and people, the only hope of the mass of the people lay in getting the favorable attention of royal governors. At least one of these considered earnestly and conscientiously the grave existing abuses and responded to popular protest which had become bitter.

A CONFLICT BETWEEN LAND MAGNATES AND PEOPLE.

This official was the Earl of Bellomont. Scarcely had he arrived after his appointment as Captain-General and Governor of Massachusetts Bay, New York and other provinces, when he was made acquainted with the widespread discontent. The landed magnates had not only created an abysmal difference between themselves and the masses in possessions and privileges, but also in dress and air, founded upon strict distinctions in law. The landed aristocrat with his laces and ruffles, his silks and his gold and silver ornaments and his expensive tableware, his consciously superior air and tone of grandiose authority, was far removed in established position from the mechanic or the laborer with his coarse clothes and mean habitation. Laws were long in force in various provinces which prohibited the common people from wearing gold and silver lace, silks and ornaments. Bellomont noted the sense of deep injustice smouldering in the minds of the people and set out to confiscate the great estates, particularly, as he set forth, as many of them had been obtained by bribery.

It was with amazement that Bellomont learned that one man, Colonel Samuel Allen, claimed to own the whole of what is now the state of New Hampshire. When, in 1635, the Plymouth Colony was about to surrender its charter, its directors apportioned their territory to themselves individually. New Hampshire went by lot to Captain John Mason who, some years before, had obtained a patent to the same area from the company. Charles I had confirmed the company's action. After Mason's death, his claims were bought up by Allen for about $1,250. Mason, however, left an heir and protracted litigation followed. In the meantime, settlers taking advantage of these conflicting claims, proceeded to spread over New Hampshire and hew the forests for cleared agricultural land. Allen managed to get himself appointed governor of New Hampshire in 1692 and declared the whole province his personal property and threatened to oust the settlers as trespassers unless they came to terms. There was imminent danger of an uprising of the settlers, who failed to see why the land upon which they had spent labor did not belong to them. Bellomont investigated; and in communication, dated June 22, 1700, to the Lords of Trade, denounced Allen's title as defective and insufficient, and brought out the charge that Allen had tried to get his confirmation of his, Allen's, claims by means of a heavy bribe.

ATTEMPTED BRIBERY CHARGED.

"There was an offer made me," Bellomont wrote, "of £10,000 in money, but I thank God I had not the least tempting thought to accept of the offer and I hope nothing in this world will ever be able to attempt me to betray England in the least degree. This offer was made me three or four times." Bellomont added: "I will make it appear that the lands and woods claimed by Colonel Allen are much more valuable than ten of the biggest estates in England, and I will rate those ten estates at £300,000 a piece, one with another, which is three millions. By his own confession to me at Pescattaway last summer, he valued the Quit Rents of his lands (as he calls 'em) at £22,000 per annum at 3d per acre of 6d in the pound of all improv'd Rents; then I leave your lordships to judge what an immense estate the improv'd rents must be, which (if his title be allowed) he has as good a right to the forementioned Quit Rents. And all this besides the Woods which I believe he might very well value at half the worth of the lands. There never was, I believe, since the world began so great a bargain as Allen has had of Mason, if it be allowed to stand good, that all this vast estate I have been naming should be purchased for a poor £250 and that a desperate debt, too, as Col. Allen thought. He pretends to a great part of this province as far Westward as Cape St. Ann, which is said to take in 17 of the best towns in this province next to Boston, the best improved land, and, (I think Col. Allen told me) 8 or 900,000 acres of their land. If Col. Allen shall at any time go about to make a forcible entry on these lands he pretends to (for, to be sure, the people will never turn tenants to him willingly) the present occupants will resist him by any force he shall bring and the Province will be put to a combustion and what may be the course I dread to think."...[11]

But the persistent Allen did not establish his claim. Several times he lost in the litigation, the last time in 1715. His death was followed by his son's death; and after sixty years of fierce animosities and litigation, the whole contention was allowed to lapse. Says Lodge: "His heirs were minors who did not push the controversy, and the claim soon sank out of sight to the great relief of the New Hampshire people, whose right to their homes had so long been in question."[12]

Similarly, another area, the entirety of what is now the State of Maine, went to the individual ownership of Sir Fernandino Gorges, the same who had betrayed Essex to Queen Elizabeth and who had received rich rewards for his treachery.[13] The domain descended to his grandson, Fernando Gorges, who, on March 13, 1677, sold it by deed to John Usher, a Boston merchant, for £1,250. The ominous dissatisfaction of the New Hampshire and other settlers with the monopolization of land was not slighted by the English government; at the very time Usher bought Maine the government was on the point of doing the same thing and opening the land for settlement. Usher at once gave a deed of the province to the governor and company of Massachusetts, of which colony and later, State, it remained a part until its creation as a State in 1820.[14]

These were two notable instances of vast land grants which reverted to the people. In most of the colonies the popular outcry for free access to the land was not so effective. In Pennsylvania, after the government was restored to Penn, and in part of New Jersey conditions were more favorable to the settlers. In those colonies corrupt usurpations of the land were comparatively few, although the proprietary families continued to hold extensive tracts. Penn's sons by his second wife, for instance, became men of great wealth.[15] The pacific and conciliatory Quaker faith operated as a check on any local extraordinary misuse of power. Unfortunately for historical accuracy and penetration, there is an obscurity as to the intimate circumstances under which many of the large private estates in the South were obtained. The general facts as to their grants, of course, are well known, but the same specific, underlying details, such as may be disinterred from Bellomont's correspondence, are lacking. In New York, at least, and presumably during Fletcher's sway of government in Pennsylvania, great land grants went for bribes. This is definitely brought out in Bellomont's official communications.

VAST ESTATES SECURED BY BRIBERY.

Fletcher, it would seem, had carried on a brisk traffic in creating by a stroke of the quill powerfully rich families by simply granting them domains in return for bribes.

Captain John R. N. Evans had been in command of the royal warship Richmond. An estate was his fervent ambition. Fletcher's mandate gave him a grant of land running forty miles one way, and thirty another, on the west bank of the Hudson. Beginning at the south line of the present town of New Paltry, Ulster County, it included the southern tier of the now existing towns in that picturesque county, two-thirds of the fertile undulations of Orange County and a part of the present town of Haverstraw. It is related of this area, that there was "but one house on it, or rather a hut, where a poor man lives." Notwithstanding this lone, solitary subject, Evans saw great trading and seignorial possibilities in his tract. And what did he pay for this immense stretch of territory? A very modest bribe; common report had it that he gave Fletcher £100 for the grant.[16]

Nicholas Bayard, of whom it is told that he was a handy go-between in arranging with the sea pirates the price that they should pay for Fletcher's protection, was another favored personage. Bayard was the recipient of a grant forty miles long and thirty broad on both sides of Schoharie Creek. Col. William Smith's prize was a grant from Fletcher of an estate fifty miles in length on Nassau—now Long Island. According to Bellomont, Smith got this land "arbitrarily and by strong hand." Smith was in collusion with Fletcher, and moreover, was chief justice of the province, "a place of great awe as well as authority." This judicial land wrester forced the town of Southampton to accept the insignificant sum of £10 for the greater part of forty miles of beach—a singularly profitable transaction for Smith, who cleared in one year £500, the proceeds of whales taken there, as he admitted to Bellomont.[17] Henry Beekman, the astute and smooth founder of a rich and powerful family, was made a magnate of the first importance by a grant from Fletcher of a tract sixteen miles in length in Dutchess County, and also of another estate running twenty miles along the Hudson and eight miles inland. This estate he valued at £5,000.[18] Likewise Peter Schuyler, Godfrey Dellius and their associates had conjointly secured by Fletcher's patent, a grant fifty miles long in the romantic Mohawk Valley—a grant which "the Mohawk Indians have often complained of". Upon this estate they placed a value of £25,000. This was a towering fortune for the period; in its actual command of labor, necessities, comforts and luxuries it ranked as a power of transcending importance.

These were some of the big estates created by "Colonel Fletcher's intolerable corrupt selling away the lands of this Province," as Bellomont termed it in his communication to the Lords of Trade of Nov. 28, 1700. Fletcher, it was set forth, profited richly by these corrupt grants. He got in bribes, it was charged, at least £4,000.[19] But Fletcher was not the only corrupt official. In his interesting work on the times,[20] George W. Schuyler presents what is an undoubtedly accurate description of how Robert Livingston, progenitor of a rich and potent family which for generations exercised a profound influence in politics and other public affairs, contrived to get together an estate which soon ranked as the second largest in New York state and as one of the greatest in the colonies.

Livingston was the younger son of a poor exiled clergyman. In currying favor with one official after another he was unscrupulous, dexterous and adaptable. He invariably changed his politics with the change of administration. In less than a year after his arrival he was appointed to an office which yielded him a good income. This office he held for nearly half a century, and simultaneously was the incumbent of other lucrative posts. Offices were created by Governor Dongan apparently for his sole benefit. His passion was to get together an estate which would equal the largest. Extremely penurious, he loaned money at frightfully usurious rates and hounded his victims without a vestige of sympathy.[21] As a trader and government contractor he made enormous profits; such was his cohesive collusion with high officials that competitors found it impossible to outdo him. A current saying of him was that he made a fortune by "pinching the bellies of the soldiers"—that is, as an army contractor who defrauded in quantity and quality of supplies. By a multitude of underhand and ignoble artifices he finally found himself the lord of a manor sixteen miles long and twenty-four broad. On this estate he built flour and saw mills, a bakery and a brewery. In his advanced old age he exhibited great piety but held on grimly to every shilling that he could and as long as he could. When he died about 1728—the exact date is unknown—at the age of 74 years, he left an estate which was considered of such colossal value that its true value was concealed for fear of further enraging the discontented people.

EFFECTS OF THE LAND SEIZURES.

The seizure of these vast estates and the arbitrary exclusion of the many from the land produced a combustible situation. An instantaneous and distinct cleavage of class divisions was the result. Intrenched in their possessions the landed class looked down with haughty disdain upon the farming and laboring classes. On the other hand, the farm laborer with his sixteen hours work a day for a forty-cent wage, the carpenter straining for his fifty-two cents a day, the shoemaker drudging for his seventy-three cents a day and the blacksmith for his seventy cents,[22] thought over this injustice as they bent over their tasks. They could sweat through their lifetime at honest labor, producing something of value and yet be a constant prey to poverty while a few men, by means of bribes, had possessed themselves of estates worth tens of thousands of pounds and had preëmpted great stretches of the available lands.

In consulting extant historical works it is noticeable that they give but the merest shadowy glimpse of this intense bitterness of what were called the lower classes, and of the incessant struggle now raging, now smouldering, between the landed aristocracy and the common people. Contrary to the roseate descriptions often given of the independent position of the settlers at that time, it was a time when the use and misuse of law brought about sharp divisions of class lines which arose from artificially created inequalities, economically and politically. With the great landed estates came tenantry, wage slavery and chattel slavery, the one condition the natural generator of the others.

The rebellious tendency of the poor colonists against becoming tenants, and the usurpation of the land, were clearly brought out by Bellomont in a letter written on Nov. 28, 1700, to the Lords of Trade. He complained that "people are so cramped here for want of land that several families within my own knowledge and observation are remov'd to the new country (a name they give to Pennsylvania and the Jerseys) for, to use Mr. Graham's expression to me, and that often repeated, too, what man will be such a fool as to become a base tenant to Mr. Dellius, Colonel Schuyler, Mr. Livingston (and so he ran through the whole role of our mighty landgraves) when for crossing Hudson's River that man can, for a song, purchase a good freehold in the Jerseys."

If the immigrant happened to be able to muster a sufficient sum he could, indeed, become an independent agriculturist in New Jersey and in parts of Pennsylvania and provide himself with the tools of trade. But many immigrants landed with empty pockets and became laborers dependent upon the favor of the landed proprietors. As for the artisans—the carpenters, masons, tailors, blacksmiths—they either kept to the cities and towns where their trade principally lay, or bonded themselves to the lords of the manors.

ATTEMPT AT CONFISCATION THWARTED.

Bellomont fully understood the serious evils which had been injected into the body politic and strongly applied himself to the task of confiscating the great estates. One of his first proposals was to urge upon the Lords of Trade the restriction of all governors throughout the colonies from granting more than a thousand acres to any man without leave from the king, and putting a quit rent of half a crown on every hundred acres, this sum to go to the royal treasury. This suggestion was not acted upon. He next attacked the assembly of New York and called upon it to annul the great grants. In doing this he found that the most powerful members of the assembly were themselves the great land owners and were putting obstacle after obstacle in his path. After great exertions he finally prevailed upon the assembly to vacate at least two of the grants, those to Evans and Bayard. The assembly did this probably as a sop to Bellomont and to public opinion, and because Evans and Bayard had lesser influence than the other landed functionaries. But the owners of the other estates tenaciously held them intact. The people regarded Bellomont as a sincere and ardent reformer, but the landed men and their following abused him as a meddler and destructionist. Despairing of getting a self-interested assembly to act, Bellomont appealed to the Lords of Trade:

"If your Lordships mean I shall go on to break the rest of the extravagant grants of land by Colonel Fletcher or other governors, by act of assembly, I shall stand in need of a peremptory order from the King so to do."[23] A month later he insisted to his superiors at home that if they intended that the corrupt and extravagant grants should be confiscated—"(which I will be bold to say by all the rules of reason and justice ought to be done) I believe it must be done by act of Parliament in England, for I am a little jealous I shall not have strength enough in the assembly of New York to break them." The majority of this body, he pointed out, were landed men, and when their own interest was touched, they declined to act contrary to it. Unless, added Bellomont, "the power of our Palatines, Smith, Livingston, the Phillips, father and son[24]—and six or seven more were reduced ... the country is ruined."[25]

Despite some occasional breaches in its intrenchments, the landocracy continued to rule everywhere with a high hand, its power, as a whole, unbroken.

HOW THE LORDS OF THE SOIL LIVED.

A glancing picture of one of these landed proprietors will show the manner in which they lived and what was then accounted their luxury. As one of the "foremost men of his day," in the colonies Colonel Smith lived in befitting style. This stern, bushy-eyed man who robbed the community of a vast tract of land and who, as chief justice, was inflexibly severe in dealing punishment to petty criminals and ever vigilant in upholding the rights of property, was lord of the Manor of St. George, Suffolk County. The finest silks and lace covered his judicial person. His embroidered belts, costing £110, at once attested his great wealth and high station. He had the extraordinary number of one hundred and four silver buttons to adorn his clothing. When he walked a heavy silver-headed cane supported him, and he rode on a fancy velvet saddle. His three swords were of the finest make; occasionally he affected a Turkish scimeter. Few watches in the colonies could compare with his massive silver watch. His table was embellished with heavy silver plate, valued at £150, on which his coat-of-arms was engraved. Twelve negro slaves responded to his nod; he had a large corps of bounded apprentices and dependant laborers. His mansion looked down on twenty acres of wheat and twenty of corn; and as for his horses and cattle they were the envy of the country. In his last year thirty horses were his, fourteen oxen, sixty steers, forty-eight cows and two bulls.[26] He lived high, drank, swore, cheated—and administered justice.

One of the best and most intimate descriptions of a somewhat contemporaneous landed magnate in the South is that given of Robert Carter, a Virginia planter, by Philip Vickers Fithian,[27] a tutor in Carter's family. Carter came to his estate from his grandfather, whose land and other possessions were looked upon as so extensive that he was called "King" Carter.

Robert Carter luxuriated in Nomini Hall, a great colonial mansion in Westmoreland County. It was built between 1725 and 1732 of brick covered with strong mortar, which imparted a perfectly white exterior, and was seventy-six feet long and forty wide. The interior was one of unusual splendor for the time, such as only the very rich could afford. There were eight large rooms, one of which was a ball-room thirty feet long. Carter spent most of his leisure hours cultivating the study of law and of music; his library contained 1,500 volumes and he had a varied assortment of musical instruments. He was the owner of 60,000 acres of land spread over almost every county of Virginia, and he was the master of six hundred negro slaves. The greater part of a prosperous iron-works near Baltimore was owned by him, and near his mansion he built a flour mill equipped to turn out 25,000 bushels of wheat a year. Carter was not only one of the big planters but one of the big capitalists of the age; all that he had to do was to exercise a general supervision; his overseers saw to the running of his various industries. Like the other large landholders he was one of the active governing class; as a member of the Provincial Council he had great influence in the making of laws. He was a thorough gentleman, we are told, and took good care of his slaves and of his white laborers who were grouped in workhouses and little cottages within range of his mansion. Within his domain he exercised a sort of benevolent despotism. He was one of the first few to see that chattel slavery could not compete in efficiency with white labor, and he reckoned that more money could be made from the white laborer, for whom no responsibility of shelter, clothing, food and attendance had to be assumed than from the negro slave, whose sickness, disability or death entailed direct financial loss. Before his death he emancipated a number of his slaves. This, in brief, is the rather flattering depiction of one of the conspicuously rich planters of the South.

THE NASCENT TRADING CLASS.

Land continued to be the chief source of the wealth of the rich until after the Revolution. The discriminative laws enacted by England had held down the progress of the trading class; these laws overthrown, the traders rose rapidly from a subordinate position to the supreme class in point of wealth.

No close research into pre-Revolutionary currents and movements is necessary to understand that the Revolution was brought about by the dissatisfied trading class as the only means of securing absolute freedom of trade. Notwithstanding the view often presented that it was an altruistic movement for the freedom of man, it was essentially an economic struggle fathered by the trading class and by a part of the landed interests. Admixed was a sincere aim to establish free political conditions. This, however, was not an aim for the benefit of all classes, but merely one for the better interests of the propertied class. The poverty-stricken soldiers who fought for their cause found after the war that the machinery of government was devised to shut out manhood suffrage and keep the power intact in the hands of the rich. Had it not been for radicals such as Jefferson, Paine and others it is doubtful whether such concessions as were made to the people would have been made. The long struggle in various States for manhood suffrage sufficiently attests the deliberate aim of the propertied interests to concentrate in their own hands, and in that of a following favorable to them, the voting power of the Government and of the States.

With the success of the Revolution, the trading class bounded to the first rank. Entail and primogeniture were abolished and the great estates gradually melted away. For more than a century and a half the landed interests had dominated the social and political arena. As an acknowledged, continuous organization they ceased to exist. Great estates no longer passed unimpaired from generation to generation, surviving as a distinct entity throughout all changes. They perforce were partitioned among all the children; and through the vicissitudes of subsequent years, passed bit by bit into many hands. Altered laws caused a gradual disintegration in the case of individual holdings, but brought no change in instances of corporate ownership. The Trinity Corporation of New York City, for example, has held on to the vast estate which it was given before the Revolution except such parts as it voluntarily has sold.

DISINTEGRATION OF THE GREAT ESTATES.

The individual magnate, however, had no choice. He could no longer entail his estates. Thus, estates which were very large before the Revolution, and which were regarded with astonishment, ceased to exist. The landed interests, however, remained paramount for several decades after the Revolution by reason of the acceleration which long possession and its profits had given them. Washington's fortune, amounting at his death, to $530,000, was one of the largest in the country and consisted mainly of land. He owned 9,744 acres, valued at $10 an acre, on the Ohio River in Virginia, 3,075 acres, worth $200,000, on the Great Kenawa, and also land elsewhere in Virginia and in Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Kentucky, the City of Washington and other places.[28] About half a century later it was only by persistent gatherings of public contributions that his very home was saved to the nation, so had his estate become divided and run down. After a long career, Benjamin Franklin acquired what was considered a large fortune. But it did not come from manufacture or invention, which he did so much to encourage, but from land. His estate in 1788, two years before his death, was estimated to be worth $150,000, mostly in land.[29] By the opening decades of the nineteenth century few of the great estates in New York remained. One of the last of the patroons was Stephen Van Rensselaer, who died at the age of 75 on Jan. 26, 1839, leaving ten children. Up to this time the manor had devolved upon the eldest son. Although it had been diminished somewhat by various cessions, it was still of great extent. The property was divided among the ten children, and, according to Schuyler, "In less than fifty years after his death, the seven hundred thousand acres originally in the manor were in the hands of strangers."[30]

Long before old Van Rensselaer passed away he had seen the rise and growth of the trading and manufacturing class and a new form of landed aristocracy, and he observed with a haughty bitterness how in point of wealth and power they far overshadowed the well-nigh defunct old feudal aristocracy. A few hundred thousand dollars no longer was the summit of a great fortune; the age of the millionaire had come. The lordly, leisurely environment of the old landed class had been supplanted by feverish trading and industrial activity which imposed upon society its own newer standards, doctrines and ideals and made them uppermost factors.

CHAPTER III

THE RISE OF THE TRADING CLASS

The creation of the great landed estates was accompanied by the slow development of the small trader and merchant. Necessarily, they first established themselves in the sea ports where business was concentrated.

Many obstacles long held them down to a narrow sphere. The great chartered companies monopolized the profitable resources. The land magnates exacted tribute for the slightest privilege granted. Drastic laws forbade competition with the companies, and the power of law and the severities of class government were severely felt by the merchants. The chartered corporations and the land dignitaries were often one group with an identity of men and interests. Against their strength and capital the petty trader or merchant could not prevail. Daring and enterprising though he be, he was forced to a certain compressed routine of business. He could sell the goods which the companies sold to him but could not undertake to set up manufacturing. And after the companies had passed away, the landed aristocracy used its power to suppress all undue initiative on his part.

THE MANORIAL LORDS MONOPOLIZE TRADE.

This was especially so in New York, where all power was concentrated in the hands of a few landowners. "To say," says Sabine, "that the political institutions of New York formed a feudal aristocracy is to define them with tolerable accuracy. The soil was owned by a few. The masses were mere retainers or tenants as in the monarchies of Europe."[31] The feudal lord was also the dominant manufacturer and trader. He forced his tenants to sign covenants that they should trade in nothing else than the produce of the manor; that they should trade nowhere else but at his store; that they should grind their flour at his mill, and buy bread at his bakery, lumber at his sawmills and liquor at his brewery. Thus he was not only able to squeeze the last penny from them by exorbitant prices, but it was in his power to keep them everlastingly in debt to him. He claimed, and held, a monopoly in his domain of whatever trade he could seize. These feudal tenures were established in law; woe to the tenant who presumed to infract them! He became a criminal and was punished as a felon. The petty merchant could not, and dared not, compete with the trading monopolies of the manorial lords within these feudal jurisdictions. In such a system the merchant's place for a century and a half was a minor one, although far above that of the drudging laborer. Merchants resorted to sharp and frequently dubious ways of getting money together. They bargained and sold shrewdly, kept their wits ever open, turned sycophant to the aristocracy and a fleecer of the laborer.

It would appear that in New York, at least, the practice of the most audacious usury was an early and favorite means of acquiring the property of others. These others were invariably the mechanic or laborer; the merchant dared not attempt to overreach the aristocrat whose power he had good reason to fear. Money which was taken in by selling rum and by wheedling the unsophisticated Indians into yielding up valuable furs, was loaned at frightfully onerous rates. The loans unpaid, the lender swooped mercilessly upon the property of the unfortunate and gathered it in.

The richest merchant of his period in the province of New York was Cornelius Steenwyck, a liquor merchant, who died in 1686. He left a total estate of £4,382 and a long list of book debts which disclosed that almost every man in New York City owed money to him, partly for rum, in part for loans.[32] The same was true of Peter Jacob Marius, a rich merchant who died in 1706, leaving behind a host of debtors, "which included about all the male population on Manhattan Island."[33] This eminent counter-man was "buried like a gentleman." At his funeral large sums were spent for wine, cookies, pipes and tobacco, beer, spice for burnt wine and sugar—all according to approved and reverent Dutch fashion. The actual currency left by some of these rich men was a curious conglomeration of almost every stamp, showing the results of a mixed assemblage of customers. There were Spanish pistoles, guineas, Arabian coin, bank dollars, Dutch and French money—a motley assortment all carefully heaped together. Without doubt, those enterprising pirate captains, Kidd and Burgess, and their crews, were good customers of these accommodating and undiscriminating merchants. It was a time when money was triply valued, for little of it passed in circulation. To a people who traded largely by barter and whose media of exchange, for a long time, were wampum, peltries and other articles, the touch and clink of gold and silver were extremely precious and fascinating. Buccaneers Kidd and Burgess deserved the credit for introducing into New York much of the variegated gold and silver coin, and it was believed that they long had some of the leading merchants as their allies in disposing of their plundered goods, in giving them information and affording them protection.

THE TRADERS' METHODS.

By one means or another, some of the New York merchants of the period attained a standing in point of wealth equal to not a few of the land magnates. William Lawrence of Flushing, Long Island, was "a man of great wealth and social standing." Like the rest of his class he affected to despise the merchant class. After his death, an inventory showed his estate to be worth £4,032, mostly in land and in slaves, of which he left ten.[34] While the landed men often spent much of their time carousing, hunting, gambling, and dispersing their money, the merchants were hawk-eyed alert for every opportunity to gather in money. They wasted no time in frivolous pursuits, had no use for sentiment or scruples, saved money in infinitesimal ways and thought and dreamed of nothing but business.

Throughout the colonies, not excepting Pennsylvania, it was the general practice of the merchants and traders to take advantage of the Indians by cunning and treacherous methods. The agents of the chartered companies and the land owners first started the trick of getting the Indians drunk, and then obtaining, for almost nothing, the furs that they had gathered—for a couple of bottles of rum, a blanket or an axe. After the charters of the companies were annulled or expired, the landgraves kept up the practice, and the merchants improved on it in various ingenious ways. "The Indians," says Felt,[35] "were ever ready to give up their furs for knives, hatchets, beads, blankets, and especially were anxious to obtain tobacco, guns, powder, shot and strong water; the latter being a powerful instrument enabling the cunning trader to perpetuate the grossest frauds. Immense quantities of furs were shipped to Europe at a great profit."

This description appropriately applied also to New York, New Jersey, and the South. In New York there were severe laws against Indians who got drunk, and in Massachusetts colony an Indian found drunk was subject to a fine of ten shillings or whipping, at the discretion of the magistrate. As to the whites who, for purposes of gain, got the Indians drunk, the law was strangely inactive. Everyone knew that drink might incite the Indians to uprisings and imperil the lives of men, women and children. But the considerations of trade were stronger than even the instinct of self-preservation and the practice went on, not infrequently resulting in the butchery of innocent white victims and in great cost and suspense to the whole community.

Strict laws which pronounced penalties for profaneness and for not attending church, connived at the systematic defrauding and swindling of the Indians of land and furs. Two strong considerations were held to justify this. The first was that the Indians were heathen and must give way to civilization; that they were fair prey. The demands of trade, upon which the colonies flourished was the second. The fact was that the code of the trading class was everywhere gradually becoming the dominant one, even breaking down the austere, almost ascetic, Puritan moral professions. Among the common people—those who were ordinary wage laborers—the methods of the rich were looked upon with suspicion and enmity, and there was a prevalent consciousness that wealth was being amassed by one-sided laws and fraud. Some of the noted sea pirates of the age made this their strong justification for preying upon commerce.[36]

In Virginia the life of the community depended upon agriculture; therefore slavery was thought to be its labor prop and was joyfully welcomed and earnestly defended. In Massachusetts and New York trading was an elemental factor, and whatever swelled the volume and profits was accounted a blessing to the community and was held justified. Laws, the judges who enforced them, and the spirit of the age reflected not so much the morality of the people as their trading necessities. The one was often mistaken for the other.

THE BONDING OF LABORERS.

This condition was shown repeatedly in the trade conflicts of the competing merchants, their system of bonded laborers and in the long contests between the traders of the colonies and those of England, culminating in the Revolution. In the churches the colonists prayed to God as the Father of all men and showed great humility. But in actual practice the propertied men recognized no such thing as equality and dispensed with humility. The merchants imitated in a small way the seignorial pretensions of the land nabobs. Few merchants there were who did not deal in negro slaves, and few also were there who did not have a bonded laborer or two, whose labor they monopolized and whose career was their property for a long term of years. Limited bondage, called apprenticeship, was general.

Penniless boys, girls and adults were impressed by sheer necessity into service. Nicholas Auger, 10 years old, binds himself, in 1694, to Wessell Evertson, a cooper, for a term of nine years, and swears that "he will truly serve the commandments of his master Lawfull, shall do no hurt to his master, nor waste nor purloin his goods, nor lend them to anybody at Dice, or other unlawful game, shall not contract matrimony, nor frequent taverns, shall not absent himself from his master's service day or night." In return Evertson will teach Nicholas the trade of a cooper, give him "apparell, meat, drink and bedding" and at the expiration of the term will supply him with "two good suits of wearing apparell from head to foot." Cornelius Hendricks, a laborer, binds himself in 1695 as an apprentice and servant to John Molet for five years. Hendricks is to get £3 current silver money and two suits of apparell—one for holy days, the other for working days, and also board is to be provided. Elizabeth Morris, a spinster, in consideration of her transportation from England to New York on the barkentine, "Antegun," binds herself in 1696 as a servant to Captain William Kidd for four years for board. When her term is over she is to get two dresses. These are a few specific instances of the bonding system—a system which served its purpose in being highly advantageous to the merchants and traders.

THE FISHERIES OF NEW ENGLAND.

Toward the close of the seventeenth century the merchants of Boston were the richest in the colonies. Trade there was the briskest. By 1687, according to the records of the Massachusetts Historical Society, there were ten to fifteen merchants in Boston whose aggregate property amounted to £50,000, or about £5,000 each, and five hundred persons who were worth £3,000 each. Some of these fortunes came from furs, timber and vending merchandise.

But the great stimuli were the fisheries of the New England coast. Bellomont in 1700 ascribed the superior trade of Massachusetts to the fact that Fletcher had corruptly sold the best lands in New York province and had thus brought on bad conditions. Had it not been for this, he wrote, New York "would outthrive the Massachusetts Province and quickly outdoe them in people and trade." While the people of the South took to agriculture as a main support, and the merchants of New York were contented with the more comfortable method of taking in coin over counters, a large proportion of the 12,000 inhabitants of Boston and those of Salem and Plymouth braved dangers to drag the sea of its spoil. They developed hardy traits of character, a bold adventurousness and a singular independence of movement which in time engendered a bustling race of traders who navigated the world for trade.

It was from shipping that the noted fortunes of the early decades of the eighteenth century came. The origin of the means by which these fortunes were got together lay greatly in the fisheries. The emblem of the codfish in the Massachusetts State House is a survival of the days when the fisheries were the great and most prolific sources of wealth and the chief incentive of all kinds of trade. A tremendous energy was shown in the hazards of the business. So thoroughly were the fisheries recognized as important to the life of the whole New England community that vessels were often built by public subscription, as was instanced in Plymouth, where public subscription on one occasion defrayed the expense.[37]

In response to the general incessant demand for ships, the business of shipbuilding soon sprang up; presently there were nearly thirty ship yards in Boston alone and sixty ships a year were built. It was a lucrative industry. The price of a vessel was dear, while the wages of the carpenters, smiths, caulkers and sparmakers were low. Not a few of the merchants and traders or their sons who made their money by debauching and cheating the Indians went into this highly profitable business and became men of greater wealth. By 1700 Boston was shipping 50,000 quintals of dried codfish every year. The fish was divided into several kinds. The choice quality went to the Catholic countries, where there was a great demand for it, principally to Bilboa, Lisbon and Oporto. The refuse was shipped to the West India Islands for sale to the negro slaves and laborers. The price varied. In 1699 it was eighteen shillings a quintal; the next year, we read, it had fallen to twelve shillings because the French fisheries had glutted the market abroad.[38]

"FORCE AS GOOD AS FORCE."

Along with the fisheries, considerable wealth was extracted in New England, as elsewhere in the colonies, from the shipment of timber. Sharp traders easily got the advantage of Indians and landowners in buying the privilege of cutting timber. In some cases, particularly in New Hampshire, which Allen claimed to own, the timber was simply taken without leave. The word was passed that force was as good as force, fraud as good as fraud. Allen had got the province by force and fraud; let him stop the timber cutters if he dare. Ship timber was eagerly sought in European ports. One Boston merchant is recorded as having taken a cargo of this timber to Lisbon and clearing a profit of £1,600 on an expenditure of £300. "Everybody is excited," wrote Bellomont on June 22, 1700, to the Lords Commissioners for Trades and Plantations. "Some of the merchants of Salem are now loading a ship with 12,000 feet of the noblest ships timber that was ever seen."[39]

The whale fishery sprang up about this time and brought in great profits. The original method was to sight the whale from a lookout on shore, push out in a boat, capture him and return to the shore with the carcass. The oil was extracted from the blubber and readily sold. As whales became scarce around the New England islands the whalers pushed off into the ocean in small vessels. Within fifty years at least sixty craft were engaged in the venture. By degrees larger and larger vessels were built until they began to double Cape Horn, and were sometimes absent from a year and a half to three years. The labors of the cruise were often richly rewarded with a thousand barrels of sperm oil and two hundred and fifty barrels of whale oil.

BRITISH TRADERS' TACTICS.

By the middle of the seventeenth century the colonial merchants were in a position to establish manufactures to compete with the British. A seafaring race and a mercantile fleet had come into a militant existence; and ambitious designs were meditated of conquering a part of the import and export trade held by the British. The colonial shipowner, sending tobacco, corn, timber or fish to Europe did not see why he should not load his ship with commodities on the return trip and make a double profit. It was now that the British trading class peremptorily stepped in and used the power of government to suppress in its infancy a competition that alarmed them.

Heavy export duties were now declared on every colonial article which would interfere with the monopoly which the British trading class held, and aimed to hold, while the most exacting duties were put on non-British imports. Colonial factories were killed off by summary legislation. In 1699 Parliament enacted that no wool yarn or woolen manufactures of the American colonies should be exported to any place whatever. This was a destructive bit of legislation, as nearly every colonial rural family kept sheep and raised flax and were getting expert at the making of coarse linen and woolen cloths. No sooner had the colonists begun to make paper than that industry was likewise choked. With hats it was the same. The colonists had scarcely begun to export hats to Spain, Portugal and the West Indies before the British Company of Hatters called upon the Government to put a stop to this colonial interference with their trade. An act was thereupon passed by Parliament forbidding the exportation of hats from any American colony, and the selling in one colony of hats made in another. Colonial iron mills began to blast; they were promptly declared a nuisance, and Parliament ordered that no mill or engine for slitting or rolling iron be used, but graciously allowed pig and bar iron to be imported from England into the colonies. Distilleries were common; molasses was extensively used in the making of rum and also by the fishermen; a heavy duty was put upon molasses and sugar as also on tea, nails, glass and paints. Smuggling became general; a narrative of the adroit devices resorted to would make an interesting tale.

These restrictive acts brought about various momentous results. They not only arrayed the whole trading class against Great Britain, and in turn the great body of the colonists, but they operated to keep down in size and latitude the private fortunes by limiting the ways in which the wealth of individuals could be employed. Much money was withdrawn from active business and invested in land and mortgages. Still, despite the crushing laws with which colonial capitalists had to contend, the fisheries were an incessant source of profit. By 1765 they employed 4,000 seamen and had 28,000 tons of shipping and did a business estimated at somewhat more than a million dollars.

CHAPTER IV

THE SHIPPING FORTUNES

Thus it was that at the time of the Revolution many of the consequential fortunes were those of shipowners and were principally concentrated in New England. Some of these dealt in merchandise only, while others made large sums of money by exporting fish, tobacco, corn, rice and timber and lading their ships on the return with negro slaves, for which they found a responsive market in the South. Many of the members of the Continental Congress were ship merchants, or inherited their fortunes from rich shippers, as, for instance, Samuel Adams, Robert Morris, Henry Laurens of Charleston, S. C., John Hancock, whose fortune of $350,000 came from his uncle Thomas, Francis Lewis of New York and Joseph Hewes of North Carolina. Others were members of various Constitutional conventions or became high officials in the Federal or State governments. The Revolution disrupted and almost destroyed the colonial shipping, and trade remained stagnant.

FORTUNES FROM PRIVATEERING.

Not wholly so, for the hazardous venture of privateering offered great returns. George Cabot of Boston was the son of an opulent shipowner. During the Revolution, George, with his brother swept the coast with twenty privateers carrying from sixteen to twenty guns each. For four or five years their booty was rich and heavy, but toward the end of the war, British gun-boats swooped on most of their craft and the brothers lost heavily. George subsequently became a United States Senator. Israel Thorndike, who began life as a cooper's apprentice and died in 1832 at the age of 75, leaving a fortune, "the greatest that has ever been left in New England,"[40] made large sums of money as part owner and commander of a privateer which made many successful cruises. With this money he went into fisheries, foreign commerce and real estate, and later into manufacturing establishments. One of the towering rich men of the day, we are told that "his investments in real estate, shipping or factories were wonderfully judicious and hundreds watched his movements, believing his pathway was safe." The fortune he bequeathed was ranked as immense. To each of his three sons he left about $500,000 each, and other sums to another son, and to his widow and daughters. In all, the legacies to the surviving members of his family amounted to about $1,800,000.[41]

Another "distinguished merchant," as he was styled, to take up privateering was Nathaniel Tracy, the son of a Newburyport merchant. College bred, as were most of the sons of rich merchants, he started out at the age of 25 with a number of privateers, and for many years returned flushed with prizes. To quote his appreciative biographer: "He lived in a most magnificent style, having several country seats or large farms with elegant summer houses and fine fish ponds, and all those matters of convenience or taste that a British nobleman might think necessary to his rank and happiness. His horses were of the choicest kind and his coaches of the most splendid make." But alas! this gorgeous career was abruptly dispelled when unfeeling British frigates and gun-boats hooked in his saucy privateers and Tracy stood quite ruined.

Much more fortunate was Joseph Peabody. As a young man Peabody enlisted as an officer on Derby's privateer "Bunker Hill." His second cruise was on Cabot's privateer "Pilgrim" which captured a richly cargoed British merchantman. Returning to shore he studied for an education, later resuming the privateer deck. Some of his exploits, as narrated by George Atkinson Ward in "Hunt's Lives of American Merchants," published in 1856, were thrilling enough to have found a deserved place in a gory novel. With the money made as his share of the various prizes, he bought a vessel which he commanded himself, and he personally made sundry voyages to Europe and the West Indies. By 1791 he had amassed a large fortune. There was no further need of his going to sea; he was now a great merchant and could pay others to take charge of his ships. These increased to such an extent that he built in Salem and owned eighty-three ships which he freighted and dispatched to every known part of the world. Seven thousand seamen were in his employ. His vessels were known in Calcutta, Canton, Sumatra, St. Petersburg and dozens of other ports. They came back with cargoes which were distributed by coasting vessels among the various American ports. It was with wonderment that his contemporaries spoke of his paying an aggregate of about $200,000 in State, county and city taxes in Salem, where he lived.[42] He died on Jan. 5, 1844, aged 84 years.

Asa Clapp, who at his death in 1848, at the age of 85 years, was credited with being the richest man in Maine,[43] began his career during the Revolution as an officer on a privateer. After the war he commanded various trading vessels, and in 1796 established a shipping business of his own, with headquarters at Portland. His vessels traded with Europe, the East and West Indies and South America. In his later years he went into banking. Of the size of his fortune we are left in ignorance.

A GLANCE AT OTHER SHIPPING FORTUNES.

These are instances of rich men whose original capital came from privateering, which was recognized as a legitimate method of reprisal. As to the inception of the fortunes of other prominent capitalists of the period, few details are extant in the cases of most of them. Of the antecedents and life of Thomas Russell, a Boston shipper, who died in 1796, "supposedly leaving the largest amount of property which up to that time had been accumulated in New England," little is known. The extent of his fortune cannot be learned. Russell was one of the first, after the Revolution, to engage in trade with Russia, and drove many a hard bargain. He built a stately mansion in Charleston and daily traveled to Boston in a coach drawn by four black horses. In business he was inflexible; trade considerations aside he was an alms-giver. Of Cyrus Butler, another shipowner and trader, who, according to one authority, was probably the richest man in New England[44]—and who, according to the statement of another publication[45]—left a fortune estimated at from three to four millions of dollars, few details likewise are known. He was the son of Samuel Butler, a shoemaker who removed from Edgartown, Mass., to Providence about 1750 and became a merchant and shipowner. Cyrus followed in his steps. When this millionaire died at the age of 82 in 1849, the size of his fortune excited wonderment throughout New England. It may be here noted as a fact worthy of comment that of the group of hale rich shipowners there were few who did not live to be octogenarians.

The rapidity with which large fortunes were made was not a riddle. Labor was cheap and unorganized, and the profits of trade were enormous. According to Weeden the customary profits at the close of the eighteenth century on muslins and calicoes were one hundred per cent. Cargoes of coffee sometimes yielded three or four times that amount. Weeden instances one shipment of plain glass tumblers costing less than $1,000 which sold for $12,000 in the Isle of France.[46]

The prospects of a dazzling fortune, speedily reaped, instigated owners of capital to take the most perilous chances. Decayed ships, superficially patched up, were often sent out on the chance that luck and skill would get them through the voyage and yield fortunes. Crew after crew was sacrificed to this frenzied rush for money, but nothing was thought of it. Again, there were examples of almost incredible temerity. In his biography of Peter Charndon Brooks, one of the principal merchants of the day, and his father-in-law, Edward Everett tells of a ship sailing from Calcutta to Boston with a youth of nineteen in command. Why or how this boy was placed in charge is not explained. This juvenile captain had nothing in the way of a chart on board except a small map of the world in Guthrie's Geography. He made the trip successfully. Later, when he became a rich Boston banker, the tale of this feat was one of the proud annals of his life and, if true, deservedly so.[47]

Whitney's notable invention of the cotton gin in 1793 had given a stupendous impetus to cotton growing in the Southern States. As the shipowners were chiefly centered in New England the export of this staple vastly increased their trade and fortunes. It might be thought, parenthetically, that Whitney himself should have made a surpassing fortune from an invention which brought millions of dollars to planters and traders. But his inventive ability and perseverance, at least in his creation of the cotton gin, brought him little more than a multitude of infringements upon his patent, refusals to pay him, and vexatious and expensive litigation to sustain his rights.[48] In despair, he turned, in 1808, to the manufacture in New Haven of fire-arms for the Government, and from this business managed to get a fortune. From the Canton and Calcutta trade Thomas Handasyd Perkins, a Boston shipper, extracted a fortune of $2,000,000. His ships made thirty voyages around the world. This merchant peer lived to the venerable age of 90; when he passed away in 1854 his fortune, although intact, had shrunken to modest proportions compared with a few others which had sprung up. James Lloyd, a partner of Perkins', likewise profited; in 1808 he was elected a United States Senator and later reëlected.

William Gray, described as "one of the most successful of American merchants," and as one who was considered and taxed in Salem "as one of the wealthiest men in the place, where there were several of the largest fortunes that could be found in the United States," owned, in his heyday, more than sixty sail of vessels. Some scant details are obtainable as to the career and personality of this moneyed colossus of his day. He began as an apprenticed mechanic. For more than fifty years he rose at dawn and was shaved and dressed. His letters and papers were then spread before him and the day's business was begun. At his death in 1825 no inventory of his estate was taken. The present millions of the Brown fortune of Rhode Island came largely from the trading activities of Nicholas Brown and the accretions of which increased population and values have brought. Nicholas Brown was born in Providence in 1760, of a well-to-do father. He went to Rhode Island College (later named in his honor by reason of his gifts) and greatly increased his fortune in the shipping trade.

It is quite needless, however, to give further instances in support of the statement that nearly all the large active fortunes of the latter part of the eighteenth and the early period of the nineteenth century, came from the shipping trade and were mainly concentrated in New England. The proceeds of these fortunes frequently were put into factories, canals, turnpikes and later into railroads, telegraph lines and express companies. Seldom, however, has the money thus employed really gone to the descendants of the men who amassed it, but has since passed over to men who, by superior cunning, have contrived to get the wealth into their own hands. This statement is an anticipation of facts that will be more cognate in subsequent chapters, but may be appropriately referred to here. There were some exceptions to the general condition of the large fortunes from shipping being compactly held in New England. Thomas Pym Cope, a Philadelphia Quaker, did a brisk shipping trade, and founded the first regular line of packets between Philadelphia and Baltimore; with the money thus made he went into canal and railroad enterprises. And in New York and other ports there were a number of shippers who made fortunes of several millions each.

THE WORKERS' MEAGER SHARE.

Obviously these millionaires created nothing except the enterprise of distributing products made by the toil and skill of millions of workers the world over. But while the workers made these products their sole share was meager wages, barely sufficient to sustain the ordinary demands of life. Moreover, the workers of one country were compelled to pay exorbitant prices for the goods turned out by the workers of other countries. The shippers who stood as middlemen between the workers of the different countries reaped the great rewards. Nevertheless, it should not be overlooked that the shippers played their distinct and useful part in their time and age, the spirit of which was intensely ultra-competitive and individualistic in the most sordid sense.

CHAPTER V

THE SHIPPERS AND THEIR TIMES

Unfortunately only the most general and eulogistic accounts of the careers of most of the rich shippers have appeared in such biographies as have been published.

Scarcely any details are preserved of the underlying methods and circumstances by which these fortunes were amassed. Sixty years ago, when it was the unqualified fashion to extol the men of wealth as great public benefactors and truckle to them, and when sociological inquiry was in an undeveloped stage, there might have been some excuse for this. But it is extremely unsatisfactory to find pretentious writers of the present day glossing over essential facts or not taking the trouble to get them. A "popular writer," who has pretended to deal with the origin of one of the great present fortunes, the Astor fortune, and has given facts, although conventionally interpreted, as to one or two of Astor's land transactions,[49] passes over with a sentence the fundamental facts as to Astor's shipping activities, and entirely ignores the peculiar special privileges, worth millions of dollars, that Astor, in conjunction with other merchants, had as a free gift from the Government. This omission is characteristic, inasmuch as it leaves the reader in complete ignorance of the kind of methods Astor used in heaping up millions from the shipping trade—millions that enabled him to embark in the buying of land in a large and ambitious way. Certainly there is no lack of data regarding the two foremost millionaires of the first decades of the nineteenth century—Stephen Girard and John Jacob Astor. The very names of nearly all of the other powerful merchants of the age have receded into the densest obscurity. But both those of Girard and Astor live vivifyingly, the first by virtue of a memorable benefaction, the second as the founder of one of the greatest fortunes in the world.

COMMERCE SURCHARGED WITH FRAUD.

Because of their unexcelled success, these two were the targets for the bitter invective or the envy of their competitors on the one hand, and, on the other, of the laudation of their friends and beneficiaries. Harsh statements were made as to the methods of both, but, in reality, if we but knew the truth, they were no worse than the other millionaires of the time except in degree. The whole trading system was founded upon a combination of superior executive ability and superior cunning—not ability in creating, but in being able to get hold of, and distribute, the products of others' creation.

Fraudulent substitution was an active factor in many, if not all, of the shipping fortunes. The shippers and merchants practiced the grossest frauds upon the unsophisticated people. Walter Barrett, that pseudonymic merchant, who took part in them himself, and who writes glibly of them as fine tricks of trade, gives many instances in his volumes dealing with the merchants of that time.

The firm of F. & G. Carnes, he relates, was one of the many which made a large fortune in the China trade. This firm found that Chinese yellow-dog wood, when cut into proper sizes, bore a strong superficial resemblance to real Turkey rhubarb. The Carnes brothers proceeded to have the wood packed in China in boxes counterfeiting those of the Turkey product. They then made a regular traffic importing this spurious and deleterious stuff and selling it as the genuine Turkey article at several times the cost. It entirely superseded the real product. This firm also sent to China samples of Italian, French and English silks; the Chinese imitated them closely, and the bogus wares were imported into the United States where they were sold as the genuine European goods. The Carneses were but a type of their class. Writing of the trade carried on by the shipping class, Barrett says that the shippers sent to China samples of the most noted Paris and London products in sauces, condiments, preserves, sweetmeats, syrups and other goods. The Chinese imitated them even to fac-similies of printed Paris and London labels. The fraudulent substitutions were then brought in cargoes to the United States where they were sold at fancy prices.

MERCHANTS THE PILLARS OF SOCIETY.

This was the prevalent commercial system. The most infamous frauds were carried on; and so dominant were the traders' standards that these frauds passed as legitimate business methods. The very men who profited by them were the mainstays of churches, and not only that, but they were the very same men who formed the various self-constituted committees which demanded severe laws against paupers and petty criminals. A study of the names of the men, for instance, who comprised the New York Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, 1818-1823, shows that nearly all of them were shippers or merchants who participated in the current commercial frauds. Yet this was the class that sat in judgment upon the poverty of the people and the acts of poor criminals and which dictated laws to legislatures and to Congress.

Girard and Astor were the superfine products of this system; they did in a greater way what others did in a lesser way. As a consequence, their careers were fairly well illumined. The envious attacks of their competitors ascribed their success to hard-hearted and ignoble qualities, while their admirers heaped upon them tributes of praise for their extraordinary genius. Both sets exaggerated. Their success in garnering millions was merely an abnormal manifestation of an ambition prevalent among the trading class. Their methods were an adroit refinement of methods which were common. The game was one in which, while fortunes were being amassed, masses of people were thrown into the direst poverty and their lives were attended by injustice and suffering. In this game a large company of eminent merchants played; Girard and Astor were peers in the playing and got away with the greater share of the stakes.

POST-REVOLUTIONARY CONDITIONS.

Before describing Girard's career, it is well to cast a retrospective fleeting glance into conditions following the Revolution.

Despite the lofty sentiments of the Declaration of Independence—sentiments which were submerged by the propertied class when the cause was won—the gravity of law bore wholly in favor of the propertied interests. The propertyless had no place or recognition. The common man was good enough to shoulder a musket in the stress of war but that he should have rights after the war, was deemed absurd. In the whole scheme of government neither the feelings nor the interests of the worker were thought of.

The Revolution brought no immediate betterment to his conditions; such slight amelioration as came later was the result of years of agitation. No sooner was the Revolution over than in stepped the propertied interests and assumed control of government functions. They were intelligent enough to know the value of class government—a lesson learned from the tactics of the British trading class. They knew the tremendous impact of law and how, directly and indirectly, it worked great transformations in the body social. While the worker was unorganized, unconscious of what his interests demanded, deluded by slogans and rallying-cries which really meant nothing to him, the propertied class was alert in its own interests.

PROPERTY'S RULE INTRENCHED.

It proceeded to intrench itself in political as well as in financial power. The Constitution of the United States was so drafted as to take as much direct power from the people as the landed and trading interests dared. Most of the State Constitutions were more pronounced in rigid property discriminations. In Massachusetts, no man could be governor unless he were a Christian worth a clear £1,000; in North Carolina if he failed of owning the required £1,000 in freehold estate; nor in Georgia if he did not own five hundred acres of land and £4,000, nor in New Hampshire if he lacked owning £500 in property. In South Carolina he had to own £1,500 in property clear of all debts. In New York by the Constitution of 1777, only actual residents having freeholds to the value of £100 free of all debts, could vote for governor and other State officials. The laws were so arranged as effectually to disfranchise those who had no property. In his "Reminiscenses" Dr. John W. Francis tells of the prevalence for years in New York of a supercilious class which habitually sneered at the demand for political equality of the leather-breeched mechanic with his few shillings a day.

Theoretically, religious standards were the prevailing ones; in actuality the ethics and methods of the propertied class were all powerful. The Church might preach equality, humility and the list of virtues; but nevertheless that did not give the propertyless man a vote. Thus it was, that in communities professing the strongest religious convictions and embodying them in Constitutions and in laws and customs, glaring inconsistencies ran side by side. The explanation lay in the fact that as regarded essential things of property, the standards of the trading class had supplanted the religious. Even the very admonition given by pastors to the poor, "Be content with your lot," was a preachment entirely in harmony with the aims of the trading class which, in order to make money, necessarily had to have a multitude of workers to work for it and from whose labor the money, in its finality, had to come. In the very same breath that they advised the poverty-stricken to reverence their superiors and to expect their reward in heaven, the ministers glorified the aggrandizing merchants as God's chosen men who were called upon to do His work.[50]

Since the laws favored the propertied interests, it was correspondingly easy for them to get direct control of government functions and personally exercise them. In New England rich shipowners rose at once to powerful elective and appointive officers. Likewise in New York rich landowners, and in the South, plantation men were selected for high offices. Law-making bodies, from Congress down, were filled with merchants, landowners, plantation men and lawyers, which last class was trained, as a rule, by association and self-interest to take the views of the propertied class and vote with, and for, it. A puissant politico-commercial aristocracy developed which, at all times, was perfectly conscious of its best interests. The worker was regaled with flattering commendations of the dignity of labor and sonorous generalizations and promises, but the ruling class took care of the laws.

By means of these partial laws, the propertied interests early began to get tremendously valuable special privileges. Banking rights, canal construction, trade privileges, government favors, public franchises all came in succession.

THE RIGORS OF LAW ON THE POOR.

At the same time that laws were enacted or were twisted to suit the will of property, other laws were long in force oppressing the poor to a terrifying degree.

Poor debtors could be thrown in jail indefinitely, no matter how small a sum they owned. In law, the laborer was accorded few rights. It was easy to defraud him of his meager wages, since he had no lien upon the products of his labor. His labor power was all that he had to sell, and the value of this power was not safeguarded by law. But the products created by his labor power in the form of property were fortified by the severest laws. For the laborer to be in debt was equal to a crime, in fact, in its results, worse than a crime. The burglar or pickpocket would get a certain sentence and then go free. The poor debtor, however, was compelled to languish in jail at the will of his creditor.

The report of the Prison Discipline Society for 1829 estimated that fully 75,000 persons were annually imprisoned for debt in the United States and that more than one-half of these owed less than twenty dollars.[51] And such were the appalling conditions of these debtors' prisons that there was no distinction of sex, age or character; all of the unfortunates were indiscriminately herded together. Sometimes, even in the inclement climate of the North, the jails were so poorly constructed, that there was insufficient shelter from the elements. In the newspapers of the period advertisements may be read in which charitable societies or individuals appeal for food, fuel and clothing for the inmates of these prisons. The thief and the murderer had a much more comfortable time of it in prison than the poor debtor.

LAW KIND TO THE TRADERS.

With the law-making mercantile class the situation was very different. The state and national bankruptcy acts, as apply to merchants, bankers, storekeepers—the whole commercial class—were so loosely drafted and so laxly enforced and judicially interpreted, that it was not hard to defraud creditors and escape with the proceeds. A propertied bankrupt could conceal his assets and hire adroit lawyers to get him off scot-free on quibbling technicalities—a condition which has survived to the present time, though in a lesser degree.[52]

But imprisonment for debt was not the only fate that befell the propertyless. According to the "Annual Report of the Managers of the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism in New York City," there were 12,000 paupers in New York City in 1820.[53] Many of these were destitute Irish who, after having been plundered and dispossessed by the absentee landlords and the capitalists of their own country, were induced to pay their last farthing to the shippers for passage to America. There were laws providing that ship masters must report to the Mayors of cities and give a bond that the destitutes that they brought over should not become public charges. These laws were systematically and successfully evaded; poor immigrants were dumped unceremoniously at obscure places along the coast from whence they had to make their way, carrying their baggage and beds, to the cities the best that they could. Cadwallader D. Colden, mayor of New York for some years, tells, in his reports, of harrowing cases of death after death resulting from exposure due to this horrible form of exploitation.

Now when the immigrant or native found himself in a state of near, or complete, destitution and resorted to the pawnbrokers's or to theft, what happened? The law restricted pawnbrokers from charging more than seven per cent on amounts more than $25, but on amounts below that they were allowed to charge twenty-five per cent. which, as the wage value of money then went, was oppressively high. Of course, the poor with their cheap possessions seldom owned anything on which they could get more than $25; consequently they were the victims of the most grinding legalized usury. Occasionally some legislative committee recognized, although in a dim and unanalytic way, this onerous discrimination of law against the propertyless. "Their [the pawnbrokers'] rates of interest," an Aldermanic committee reported in 1832, "have always been exorbitant and exceedingly oppressive. It has from time to time been regulated by law, and its sanctions have (as is usual upon most occasions when oppression has been legalized) been made to fall most heavily upon the poor." The committee continued with the following comments which were naïve in the extreme considering that for generations all law had been made by and for the propertied interests: "It is a singular fact that the smallest sums advanced have always been chargeable with the highest rates of interest.... It is a fact worthy of consideration that by far the greater number of loans effected at these establishments are less than one dollar, and of the whole twelve-fifteenths are in sums less than one dollar and a half."[54]

On the other hand, the propertied class not only was able to raise money at a fairly low rate of interest, but, as will appear, had the free use of the people's money, through the power of government, to the extent of tens of millions of dollars.

THE PENALTIES OF POVERTY.

If a man were absolutely destitute and took to theft as the only means of warding off starvation for himself or his family, the whole force of law at once descended heavily upon him. In New York State the law decreed it grand larceny to steal to the value of $25, and in other States the statutes were equally severe. For stealing $25 worth of anything the penalty was three years in prison at hard labor. The unfortunate was usually put in the convict chain-gang and forced to work along the roads. Street-begging was prohibited by drastic laws; poverty was substantially a crime. The moment a propertyless person stole, the assumption at once was that he was prima facie a criminal; but let the powerful propertied man steal and government at once refused to see the criminal intent; if he were prosecuted, the usual outcome was that he never went to jail. Hundreds of specific instances could be given to prove this. One of the most noted of these was that of Samuel Swartwout, who was Collector of the Port of New York for a considerable period and who, at the same time, was a financier and large land-speculation promoter. It came out in 1838 that he had stolen the enormous sum of $1,222,705.69 from the Government,[55] which money he had used in his schemes. He was a fugitive from justice for a time, but upon his return was looked upon extenuatingly as the "victim of circumstances" and he never languished in jail.

Money was the standard of everything. The propertied person could commit any kind of crime, short of murder, and could at once get free on bail. But what happened to the accused who was poor? Here is a contemporaneous description of one of the prisons of the period:

"In Bridewell, white females of every grade of character, from the innocent who is in the end acquitted, down to the basest wretch that ever disgraced the refuges of prostitution, are crowded into the same abandoned abode. With the white male prisons, the case is little altered.... And so it is with the colored prisoners of both sexes. Hundreds are taken up and sent to these places, who, after remaining frequently several weeks, are found to be innocent of the crime alleged and are then let loose upon the community."[56]

"Let loose upon the community." Does not this clause in itself convey volumes of significance of the attitude of the propertied interests, even when banded together in a pseudo "charitable" enterprise, toward the poverty-stricken? While thus the charitable societies were holding up the destitute to scorn and contumely as outcasts and were loftily lecturing down to the poor on the evils of intemperance and gambling—practices which were astoundingly prevalent among the rich—at no time did they make any attempt to alter laws so glaringly unjust that they practically made poverty a distinct crime, subject to long terms of imprisonment.

For instance, if a rich man were assaulted and made a complaint, all that he had to do was to give bail to insure his appearance as a witness. But if a poor man or woman were cheated or assaulted and could not give bail to insure his or her appearance at the trial as a complaining witness, the law compelled the authorities to lock up that man or woman in prison. In the debates in the New York Constitutional Convention of 1846, numerous cases were cited of this continuing barbarity in New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania and other states. In Maryland a young woman was assaulted and preferred criminal charges. As she could not give bail she was locked up for eighteen months as a detained witness. This was but one instance in thousands of similar cases.

MASTER AND BONDED MAN.

For an apprenticed laborer to quit his master and job was a crime in law; once caught he was forthwith bundled off to jail, there to await the dispensation of his master. No matter how cruelly his master ill-treated him, however dissatisfied he was, the apprenticed laborer in law had no rights. Almost every day the newspapers of the eighteenth, and the early part of the nineteenth, century contained offers of rewards for the apprehension of fugitive apprentice laborers; from a survey of the Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts and other colonial and state newspapers it is clear that thousands of these apprentices had to resort to flight to escape their bondage. This is a specimen advertisement:

TWENTY DOLLARS REWARD.

RAN away from the subscriber, an Apprentice Boy, named William Rustes, about 18 years and 3 months old, by trade a house carpenter, of a dark complexion, dark eye brows, black eyes and black hair, about 5 feet, 8 inches high, his dress unknown as he took with him different kinds of clothes. The above reward will be paid to any person that will secure him in gaol or return him to his master.

GEORGE LORD,
No. 12 First Street.[57]

In contradistinction to the scorpion-like laws which worked such injustice to the poor and which made a mockery of doctrines of equality before the law, the propertied interests endowed themselves, by their control of government, with invaluable exemptions and peculiarly profitable special privileges.

Even where, in civil cases, all men, theoretically, had an equal chance in courts of equity, litigation was made so expensive, whether purposely or not, that justice was really a one-sided pastime, in which the rich man could easily wear out the poor contestant. This, however, is not the place for a dissertation on that most remarkable of noteworthy sorcerer's arts, the making of justice an expensive luxury, while still deluding the people with the notion that the law knows no preferences. The preferences which are more to the point at present are those in which government force is used to enrich the already rich and impoverish the impoverished still further. At the very time that property was bitterly resisting enlightened pleas for the abolition of imprisonment for debt, for the enactment of a mechanic's lien law, and for the extension of the suffrage franchise it was using the public money of the whole people for its personal and private enterprises. In works dealing with those times it is not often that we get penetration into the underlying methods of the trading class. But a lucid insight is inadvertently given by Walter Barrett (who, for sixty years, was in the mercantile trade), in his smug and conventional, but quaintly entertaining, volumes, "The Merchants of Old New York." This strong instance shows like a flashlight that while the success of the shippers was attributed to a fine category of energetic qualities, the benevolent assistance of the United States Government was, in a large measure, responsible for part of their accumulations.

THE SHIPPERS' HUGE GRAFT.

The Griswolds of New York owned the ship, "Panama." She carried spelter, lead, iron and other products to China and returned with tea, false cinnamon and various other Chinese goods. The duty on these was extremely high. But the Government was far more lenient to the trading class than the trader was to the poor debtor. It generously extended credit for nine, twelve and eighteen months before it demanded the payment of the tariff duties. What happened under this system? As soon as the ship arrived, the cargo was sold at a profit of fifty per cent. The Griswolds, for example, would pocket their profits and instead of using their own capital in further ventures, they would have the gratuitous use of Government money, that is to say, the people's money, for periods of from six months to a year and a half. Thus the endless chain was kept up. According to Barrett, this was the customary attitude of the Government toward merchants: it was anything but unusual for a merchant to have the free use of Government money to the sum of four or five hundred thousand dollars.[58]

"John Jacob Astor," says Barrett in a view of admiration, "at one period of his life had several vessels operating in this way. They would go to the Pacific and carry furs from thence to Canton. These would be sold at large profits. Then the cargoes of tea would pay enormous duties which Astor did not have to pay to the United States for a year and a half. His tea cargoes would be sold for good four and six months paper, or perhaps cash; so that for eighteen or twenty years John Jacob Astor had what was actually a free-of-interest loan from the Government of over five millions of dollars."[59]

"One house," continues Barrett, "was Thomas H. Smith & Sons. This firm went enormously into the Canton trade, and, although possessing originally but a few thousand dollars, Smith imported to such an extent that when he failed he owed the United States three millions and not a cent has ever been paid." Was Smith imprisoned for debt? Not at all.

It is such revelations as these that indicate how it was possible for the shippers to pile up great fortunes at a time when "a house that could raise $260,000 in specie had an uncommon capital." They showed how the same functions of government which were used as an engine of such oppressive power against the poor, were perverted into highly efficient auxiliary of trading class aims and ambitions. By multifarious subtle workings, these class laws inevitably had a double effect. They poured wealth into the coffers of the merchant-class and simultaneously tended to drive the masses into poverty. The gigantic profits taken in by merchants had to be borne by the worker, perhaps not superficially, but in reality so. They came from his slender wages, from the tea and cotton and woolen goods that he used, the sugar and the coffee and so on. In this indirect way the shippers absorbed a great part of the products of his labor; what they did not expropriate the landlord did. Then when the laborer fell in debt to the middleman tradesman to jail he went.[60]

UNITE AGAINST THE WORKER.

The worker denounced these discriminations as barbarous and unjust. But he could do nothing. The propertied class, with its keen understanding of what was best for its interests, acted and voted, and usually dragooned the masses of enfranchised into voting, for men and measures entirely favorable to its designs. Sometimes these interests conflicted as they did when a part of New England became manufacturing centers and favored a high protective tariff in opposition to the importing trades, the plantation owners and the agricultural class in general. Then the vested class would divide, and each side would appeal with passionate and patriotic exhortations to the voting elements of the people to sustain it, or the country would go to ruin. But when the working class made demands for better laws, the propertied class, as a whole, united to oppose the workers bitterly. However it differed on the tariff, or the question of state or national banks, substantially the whole trading class solidly combated the principle of manhood suffrage and the movements for the wiping out of laws for imprisonment for debt, for mechanic's liens and for the establishment of shorter hours of work.

Political institutions and their offspring in the form of laws being generally in the control of the trading class, the conditions were extraordinarily favorable for the accumulation of large fortunes, especially on the part of the shipowners, the dominant class. The grand climax of the galaxy of American fortunes during the period from 1800 to 1831—the greatest of all the fortunes up to the beginning of the third decade of that century—was that of Girard. He built up what was looked up to as the gigantic fortune of about ten millions of dollars and far overtopped every other strainer for money except Astor, who survived him seventeen years, and whose wealth increased during that time to double the amount that Girard left.

CHAPTER VI

GIRARD—THE RICHEST OF THE SHIPPERS

STEPHEN GIRARD.
(From an Engraving.)

Girard was born at Bordeaux, France, on May 21, 1750, and was the eldest of five children of Captain Pierre Girard, a mariner. When eight years old he became blind in one eye, a loss and deformity which subjected his sensibilities to severe trials and which had the effect of rendering him morose and sour. It was his lament in later life that while his brothers had been sent to college, he was the ugly duckling of the family and came in for his father's neglect and a shrewish step-mother's waspishness. At about fourteen years of age he relieved himself of these home troubles and ran away to sea. During the nine years that he sailed between Bordeaux and the West Indies, he rose from cabin-boy to mate. Evading the French law which required that no man should be made master of a ship unless he had sailed two cruises in the royal navy and was twenty-five years old, Girard got the command of a trading vessel when about twenty-two years old. While in this service he clandestinely carried cargoes of his own which he sold at considerable profit. In May, 1776, while en route from New Orleans to a Canadian port, he became enshrouded in a fog off the Delaware Capes, signaled for aid, and when the fog had cleared away sufficiently for an American ship, near by, to come to his assistance, learned that war was on. He thereupon scurried for Philadelphia, where he sold vessel and cargo, of which latter only a part belonged to him, and with the proceeds opened up a cider and wine bottling and grocery business in a small store on Water street.

Girard made money fast; and in July, 1777, married Mary Lum, a woman of his own class. She is usually described as a servant girl of great beauty and as one whose temper was of quite tempestuous violence. This unfortunate woman subsequently lost her reason; undoubtedly her husband's meannesses and his forbidding qualities contributed to the process. One of his most favorable biographers thus describes him: "In person he was short and stout, with a dull repulsive countenance, which his bushy eyebrows and solitary eye almost made hideous. He was cold and reserved in manner, and was disliked by his neighbors, the most of whom were afraid of him."[61]

During the British occupation of Philadelphia he was charged by the revolutionists with extreme double-dealing and duplicity in pretending to be a patriot, and taking the oath of allegiance to the colonies, while secretly trading with the British. None of his biographers deny this. While merchant after merchant was being bankrupted from disruption of trade, Girard was incessantly making money. By 1780 he was again in the shipping trade, his vessels plying between American ports and New Orleans and San Domingo; not the least of his profits, it was said, came from slave-trading.

HOW HE BUILT HIS SHIPS.

A troublous partnership with his brother, Captain Jean Girard, lasted but a short time; the brothers could not agree. At the dissolution in 1790 Stephen Girard's share of the profits amounted to $30,000. Girard's greatest stroke came from the insurrection of the San Domingo negroes against the French several years later. He had two vessels lying in the harbor of one of the island ports. At the first mutterings of danger, a number of planters took their valuables on board one of these ships and scurried back to get the remainder. The sequel, as commonly narrated, is represented thus: The planters failed to return, evidently falling victims to the fury of the insurrectionists. The vessels were taken to Philadelphia, and Girard persistently advertised for the owners of the valuables. As no owners ever appeared, Girard sold the goods and put the proceeds, $50,000, into his own bank account. "This," says Houghton, "was a great assistance to him, and the next year he began the building of those splendid ships which enabled him to engage so actively in the Chinese and West India trades."

From this time on his profits were colossal. His ships circumnavigated the world many times and each voyage brought him a fortune. He practiced all of those arts of deception which were current among the trading class and which were accepted as shrewdness and were inseparably associated with legitimate business methods. In giving one of his captains instructions he wrote, as was his invariable policy, the most explicit directions to exercise secretiveness and cunning in his purchases of coffee at Batavia. Be cautious and prudent, was his admonition. Keep to yourself the intention of the voyage and the amount of specie that you have on board. To satisfy the curious, throw them off the scent by telling them that the ship will take in molasses, rice and sugar, if the price is very low, adding that the whole will depend upon the success in selling the small Liverpool cargo. If you do this, the cargo of coffee can be bought ten per cent cheaper than it would be if it is publicly known there is a quantity of Spanish dollars on board, besides a valuable cargo of British goods intended to be invested in coffee for Stephen Girard of Philadelphia.

By 1810 we see him ordering the Barings of London to invest in shares of the Bank of the United States half a million dollars which they held for him. When the charter expired, he was the principal creditor of that bank; and he bought, at a great bargain, the bank and the cashier's house for $120,000. On May 12, 1812, he opened the Girard Bank, with a capital of $1,200,000, which he increased the following year by $100,000 more.[62]

A DICTATOR OF FINANCE.

His wealth was now overshadowingly great; his power immense. He was a veritable dictator of the realms of finance; an assiduous, repellent little man, with his devil's eye, who rode roughshod over every obstacle in his path. His every movement bred fear; his veriest word could bring ruin to any one who dared cross his purposes. The war of 1812 brought disaster to many a merchant, but Girard harvested fortune from the depths of misfortune. "He was, it must be said," says Houghton, "hard and illiberal in his bargains, and remorseless in exacting the last cent due him." And after he opened the Girard Bank: "Finding that the salaries which had been paid by the government were higher than those paid elsewhere, he cut them down to the rate given by the other banks. The watchman had always received from the old bank the gift of an overcoat at Christmas, but Girard put a stop to this. He gave no gratuities to any of his employees, but confined them to the compensation for which they had bargained; yet he contrived to get out of them service more devoted than was received by other men who paid higher wages and made presents. Appeals to him for aid were unanswered. No poor man ever came full-handed from his presence. He turned a deaf ear to the entreaties of failing merchants to help them on their feet again. He was neither generous nor charitable. When his faithful cashier died, after long years spent in his service, he manifested the most hardened indifference to the bereavement of the family of that gentleman, and left them to struggle along as best they could."

Further, Houghton unconsciously proceeds to bring out several incidents which show the exorbitant profits Girard made from his various business activities. In the spring of 1813, one of his ships was captured by a British cruiser at the mouth of the Delaware. Fearing that his prize would be recaptured by an American war ship if he sent her into port, the English Admiral notified Girard that he would ransom the ship for $180,000 in coin. Girard paid the money; and, even after paying that sum, the cargo of silks, nankeens and teas yielded him a profit of half a million dollars. His very acts of apparent public spirit were means by which he scooped in large profits. Several times, when the rate of exchange was so high as to be injurious to general business, he drew upon Baring Bros. for sums of money to be transferred to the United States. This was hailed as a public benefaction. But what did Girard do? He disposed of the money to the Bank of the United States and charged ten per cent. for the service.

BRIBERY AND INTIMIDATION.

The reëstablishment and enlarged sway of this bank were greatly due to his efforts and influence; he became its largest stockholder and one of its directors. No business institution in the first three decades of the nineteenth century exercised such a sinister and overshadowing influence as this chartered monopoly. The full tale of its indirect bribery of politicians and newspaper editors, in order to perpetuate its great privileges and keep a hold upon public opinion, has never been set forth. But sufficient facts were brought out when, after years of partizan agitation, Congress was forced to investigate and found that not a few of its own members for years had been on the payrolls of the bank.[63]

In order to get its charter renewed from time to time and retain its extraordinary special privileges, the United States Bank systematically debauched politics and such of the press as was venal; and when a critical time came, as it did in 1832-34, when the mass of the people sided with President Jackson in his aim to overthrow the bank, it instructed the whole press at its command to raise the cry of "the fearful consequences of revolution, anarchy and despotism," which assuredly would ensue if Jackson were reëlected. To give one instance of how for years it had manipulated the press: The "Courier and Enquirer" was a powerful New York newspaper. Its owners, Webb and Noah, suddenly deserted Jackson and began to denounce him. The reason was, as revealed by a Congressional investigation, that they had borrowed $50,000 from the United States Bank which lost no time in giving them the alternative of paying up or supporting the bank.[64]

Girard's share in the United States Bank brought him millions of dollars. With its control of deposits of government funds and by the provisions of its charter, this bank swayed the whole money marts of the United States and could manipulate them at will. It could advance or depress prices as it chose. Many times, Girard with his fellow directors was severely denounced for the arbitrary power he wielded. But—and let the fact be noted—the denunciation came largely from the owners of the State banks who sought to supplant the United States Bank. The struggle was really one between two sets of capitalistic interests.

Shipping and banking were the chief sources of Girard's wealth, with side investments in real estate and other forms of property. He owned large tracts of land in Philadelphia, the value of which increased rapidly with the growth of population; he was a heavy stockholder in river navigation companies and near the end of his life he subscribed $200,000 toward the construction of the Danville & Pottsville Railroad.

THE SOLITARY CRŒSUS.

He was at this time a solitary, crusty old man living in a four-story house on Water street, pursued by the contumely of every one, even of those who flattered him for mercenary purposes. Children he had none, and his wife was long since dead. His great wealth brought him no comfort; the environment with which he surrounded himself was mean and sordid; many of his clerks lived in better style. There, in his dingy habitation, this lone, weazened veteran of commerce immersed himself in the works of Voltaire, Diderot, Paine and Rousseau, of whom he was a profound admirer and after whom some of his best ships were named.

This grim miser had, after all, the one great redeeming quality of being true to himself. He made no pretense to religion and had an abhorrence of hypocrisy. Cant was not in his nature. Out into the world he went, a ferocious shark, cold-eyed for prey, but he never cloaked his motives beneath a calculating exterior of piety or benevolence. Thousands upon thousands he had deceived, for business was business, but himself he never deceived. His bitter scoffs at what he termed theologic absurdities and superstitions and his terrific rebuffs to ministers who appealed to him for money, undoubtedly called forth a considerable share of the odium which was hurled upon him. He defied the anathemas of organized churchdom; he took hold of the commercial world and shook it harshly and emerged laden with spoils. To the last, his volcanic spirit flashed forth, even when, eighty years old, he lay with an ear cut off, his face bruised and his sight entirely destroyed, the result of being felled by a wagon.

In all his eighty-one years charity had no place in his heart. But after, on Dec. 26, 1831, he lay stone dead and his will was opened, what a surprise there was! His relatives all received bequests; his very apprentices each got five hundred dollars, and his old servants annuities. Hospitals, orphan societies and other charitable associations all benefited. Five hundred thousand dollars went to the City of Philadelphia for certain civic improvements; three hundred thousand dollars for the canals of Pennsylvania; a portion of his valuable estate in Louisiana to New Orleans for the improvement of that city. The remainder of the estate, about six millions, was left to trustees for the creation and endowment of a College for Orphans, which was promptly named after him.

A chorus of astonishment and laudation went up. Was there ever such magnificence of public spirit? Did ever so lofty a soul live who was so misunderstood? Here and there a protesting voice was feebly heard that Girard's wealth came from the community and that it was only justice that it should revert to the community; that his methods had resulted in widows and orphans and that his money should be applied to the support of those orphans. These protests were frowned upon as the mouthings of cranks or the ravings of impotent envy. Applause was lavished upon Girard; his very clothes were preserved as immemorial mementoes.[65]

"THE GREAT BENEFACTOR."

All of the benefactions of the other rich men of the period waned into insignificance compared to those of Girard. His competitors and compeers had given to charity, but none on so great a scale as Girard. Distinguished orators vied with one another in extolling his wonderful benefactions,[66] and the press showered encomiums upon him as that of the greatest benefactor of the age. To them this honestly seemed so, for they were trained by the standards of the trading class, by the sophistries of political economists and by the spirit of the age, to concentrate their attention upon the powerful and successful only, while disregarding the condition of the masses of the people.

The pastimes of a king or the foibles of some noted politician or rich man were things of magnitude and were much expatiated upon, while the common man, singly or in mass, was of absolutely no importance. The finely turned rhetoric of the orators, pleasing as it was to that generation, is, judged by modern standards, well nigh meaningless and worthless. In that highflown oratory, with its carefully studied exordiums, periods and perorations can be clearly discerned the reverence given to power as embodied by possession of property. But nowhere do we see any explanation, or even an attempt at explanation, of the basic means by which this property was acquired or of its effect upon the masses of the people. Woefully lacking in facts are the productions of the time as to how the great body of the workers lived and what they did. Facts as to the rich are fairly available, although not abundant, but facts regarding the rest of the population are pitifully few. The patient seeker for truth—the mind which is not content with the presentation of one side—finds, with some impatience, that only a few writers thought it worth while to give even scant attention to the condition of the working class. One of these few was Matthew Carey, an orthodox political economist, who, in a pamphlet issued in 1829[67], gave this picture which forms both a contrast and a sequel to the accumulations of multimillionaires, of which Girard was then the archetype:

A STARK CONTRAST PRESENTED.

"Thousands of our laboring people travel hundreds of miles in quest of employment on canals at 62-1/2 cents to 87-1/2 cents per day, paying $1.50 to $2.00 a week for board, leaving families behind depending upon them for support. They labor frequently in marshy grounds, where they inhale pestiferous miasmata, which destroy their health, often irrevocably. They return to their poor families broken hearted, and with ruined constitutions, with a sorry pittance, most laboriously earned, and take to their beds, sick and unable to work. Hundreds are swept off annually, many of them leaving numerous and helpless families. Notwithstanding their wretched fate, their places are quickly supplied by others, although death stares them in the face. Hundreds are most laboriously employed on turnpikes, working from morning to night at from half a dollar to three-quarters a day, exposed to the broiling sun in summer and all the inclemency of our severe winters. There is always a redundancy of wood-pilers in our cities, whose wages are so low that their utmost efforts do not enable them to earn more than from thirty-five to fifty cents per day.... Finally there is no employment whatever, how disagreeable or loathsome, or deleterious soever it may be, or however reduced the wages, that does not find persons willing to follow it rather than beg or steal."

PART II

THE GREAT LAND FORTUNES

GEN. STEPHEN VAN RENSSLAER.
The Last of the Patroons.
(From an Engraving.)

CHAPTER I

THE ORIGIN OF HUGE CITY ESTATES

In point of succession and importance the next great fortunes came from ownership of land in the cities. They far preceded fortunes from established industries or from the control of modern methods of transportation. Long before Vanderbilt and other of his contemporaries had plucked immense fortunes from steamboat, railroad and street railway enterprises, the Astor, Goelet, and Longworth fortunes were counted in the millions. In the seventy years from 1800 the landowners were the conspicuous fortune possessors; and, although fortunes of millions were extracted from various other lines of business, the land fortunes were preëminent.

At the dawn of the nineteenth century and until about 1850, survivals of the old patroon estates were to be met with. But these gradually disintegrated. Everywhere in the North the tendency was toward the partition of the land into small farms, while in the South the condition was the reverse. The main fact which stood out was that the rich men of the country were no longer those who owned vast tracts of rural land. That powerful kind of landowner had well-nigh vanished.

THE MANORIAL LORDS PASS AWAY.

For more than two centuries the manorial lords had been conspicuous functionaries. Shorn of much power by the alterations of the Revolution they still retained a part of their state and estate. But changing laws and economic conditions drove them down and down in the scale until the very names of many of them were gradually lost sight of. As they descended in the swirl, other classes of rich men jutted into strong view. Chief among these nascent classes were the landowners of the cities, at first grabbling tradesmen and land speculators and finally rising to the crowning position of multimillionaires. Originally, as we have seen, the manorial magnate himself made the laws and decreed justice; but in two centuries great changes had taken place. He now had to fight for his very existence.

Thus, to give one example, the manorial men in New York were confronted in 1839 by a portentous movement. Their tenants were in a state of unrest. On the Van Rensselaer, the Livingston and other of the old feudal estates they rose in revolt. They objected to the continuing system which gave the lords of these manors much the same rights over them as a lord in England exercised over his tenants. Under the leases that the manorial lords compelled their tenants to sign, there were oppressive anachronisms. If he desired to entertain a stranger in his house for twenty-four hours, the tenant was required to get permission in writing. He was forced to obligate himself not to trade in any Commodities except the produce of the manor. He could not get his flour ground anywhere else than at the mill of the manor without violating his lease and facing ejectment, nor could he buy anything at any place except at the store of the manorial magnate. These were the rights reserved to the manorial lords after the Revolution, because theirs were the rights of private property; and as has often been set forth, property absolutely dominated the laws and greatly nullified the spirit of a movement made successful by the blood and lives of the masses in the Revolutionary Army. Tardily, subsequent legislatures had abolished all feudal tenures, but these laws were neither effective nor were enforced by the authorities who reflected and represented the interests of the proprietors of the manors.

On their part the manorial men believed that self-interest, pride and adherence to ancient traditions called for the perpetuation of their arbitrary power of running their domains as they pleased. They refused to acknowledge that law had any right to interfere in the managing of what they considered their private affairs. Eager to avail themselves of the police power of the law in dispossessing any fractious or impecunious tenant and in suppressing protest meetings, they, at the same time, denounced law as tyrannical when it sought to inject more modern and humane conditions in the managing of their estates. They stubbornly insisted upon a tenantry, and as obstinately contested any forfeiture of what they deemed their property rights.

FEUDAL TENURES ABOLISHED.

A long series of reprisals and an intense agitation developed. The Anti-Renters mustered such sympathetic political strength and threw the whole state into such a vortex of radical discussion, that the politicians of the day, fearing the effects of such a movement, practically forced the manorial magnates to compromise by selling their land in small farms,[68] which they did at exorbitant prices. They made large profits on the strength of the very movement which they had so bitterly opposed. Affrighted at the ominous unrest of a large part of the people and hoping to stem it, the New York Constitutional Convention in 1846 adopted a Constitutional inhibition on all feudal tenures, an inhibition so drafted that no legislature could pass a law contravening it.[69]

So, in this final struggle, passed away the last vestiges of the sway of the all-powerful patroons of old. They had become archaic. It was impossible for them to survive in the face of newer conditions, for they represented a bygone economic and social era. Their power was one accruing purely from the extent of their possessions and discriminative laws. When these were wrenched from their grasp, their importance as wielders of wealth and influence ceased. They might still boast of their lineage, their aristocratic enclosure and culture and their social altitude, but these were about the only remnants of consolation left.

The time was unpropitious for the continuation of great wealth based upon rural or small-town land. Many influences conspired to make this land a variable property, while these same influences, or a part of them, fixed upon city land an enhancing and graduating permanency of value. The growth of the shipping trade built up the cities and attracted workers and population generally. The establishment of the factory system in 1790 had a two-fold effect. It began to drain country sections of many of the younger generations and it immediately enlarged the trading activities of the cities. Another and much more considerable part of the farming population in the East was constantly migrating to the West and Southwest with their promising opportunities. Some country districts thinned out; others remained stationary. But whether the rural census increased or not, there were other factors which sent up or down the value of farming lands. The building of a canal would augment the value of land in section and cause stimulation, and depress conditions in another section not so favored. Even this stimulation, however, was often transient. With each fresh settlement of the West and with the construction of each pioneer railroad, new and complex factors turned up which generally had a depreciating effect upon Eastern lands. A country estate worth a large sum in one generation might very well succumb to a mortgage in the next.

THE NEW ARISTOCRACY.

But fortunes based upon land in the cities were indued with a mathematical certainty and a perpetuity. City real estate was not subject to the extreme fluctuating processes which so disordered the value of rural land. All of the tendencies and currents of the times favored the building up of an aristocracy based upon ownership of city property. Compared to their present colossal proportions the cities were then mere villages. There was a nucleus of perhaps a mile or two of houses, beyond which were fields and orchards, meadows and wastes. These could be bought for an insignificant sum. With the progressing growth of commerce and population, with immigration continually going on, every year witnessing a keener pressure for occupation of the land, the value of this latter was certain to increase. There was no chance of its being otherwise.

Up to 1825 it was a mooted question whether the richest landowners would arise in New York, Philadelphia, Boston or Baltimore. For many years Philadelphia had been far in the lead in extent of commerce. But the opening of the Erie Canal at once settled this question. At a bound New York attained the rank of the foremost commercial city in the United States, completely outstripping its competitors. While the trade of these fell off precipitately, the population and trade of New York City nearly doubled in a single decade. The value of land began to increase stupendously. The swamps, rocky wastes and flats and the land under water of a few years before became prolific sources of fortunes. Land which had been worth a paltry sum ten or twenty years before sprang to a considerable value and, in course of time, with the same causes in a more intense ratio of operation, was vested with a value of hundreds of millions of dollars. This being so, it was not surprising that the richest landowners should appear first in New York City and should be able to maintain their supremacy.

The wealth of the landowners soon completely eclipsed that of the shippers. Enormous as were the profits of the shipping business, they were immediate only. In the contest for wealth it was inevitable that the shippers should fall behind. Their business was one of peculiar uncertainties. The hazards of the sea, the fluctuations and vicissitudes of trade, the severe competition of the times, exposed their traffic to many mutations. Many of the rich shipowners well understood this; the surplus wealth derived from commerce on the seas they invested in land, banks, factories, turnpikes, insurance companies, railroads and in some instances, lotteries. Those shipping millionaires who clung exclusively to the sea fell in the scale of the rich class, especially as the time came when foreign shipping largely supplanted the trade hitherto carried in American cutters. Other shippers who applied their surplus capital to investments in other forms of trade and ownership advanced rapidly in wealth.

CITY LAND THE SUPREME FACTOR.

Between land ownership and other forms, however, there was a great difference. Trade was then extremely individualistic; the artificial controlling power called the corporation was in its earliest infantile condition. The heirs of the owner of sixty line of sail might not possess the same astuteness, the same knowledge, adroitness, and cunning—or let us say, unscrupulousness—the same severe application as the founder. Consequently the business would decay or fall into the hands of others shrewder or more fortunate. As to factories the condition was somewhat the same; and, after the organization of labor unions the possibility of strikes was an ever-present danger to the constant flow of profits. Banks were by no means fixed, unchangeable establishments. Like other media of profit-making, the extent of their power and profits depended upon prevailing conditions and very largely upon the favoritism or policy of Government. At any time the party controlling government functions might change and a radically different policy in banking, tariff or other laws be put in force.

These changing laws did not, it is true, vitally benefit the masses of the people, for one set or other of the propertied interests almost invariably benefited. The laws enacted were usually in response to a demand made by contending propertied interests. The trade and political struggles carried on by the commercial interests were a series of incessant wars, in which every individual owner, firm or combination was fiercely resisting competitors or striving for their overthrow.

THE INVULNERABLE LANDOWNER.

But the landowner occupied a superior position which neither political conditions nor the flux of changing circumstances could materially assail. He was ardently individualistic also in that he demanded, and was accorded, the unimpaired right to get land in any way that he legally could, hold a monopoly of as much of it as he pleased, and dispose of it as he willed. In the very act of asserting this individualism he called upon Society, through its machinery of Government, for the enactment of particular laws, to guarantee him the sole possession of his land and uphold his claims and rights by force if necessary. These were all the basic laws that he needed and these laws did not change. From generation to generation they remained fixed, immovable. The interests of all landowners were identical; those of the traders were varying and conflicting. For long periods the landowner could expect the continuance of existing fundamental laws regarding the ownership of land, while the shipper, the factory owner, the banker did not know what different set of laws might be enacted at any time.

Furthermore, the landowner had an efficient and never-failing auxiliary. He yoked society as a partner, but it was a partnership in which the revenue went exclusively to the landowner. The principal factor he depended upon was the work of collective humans in adding greater and greater values to his land. Broadly speaking, his share consisted in merely looking on; he had nothing to do except hold on to his land. His sons, grandsons, his descendants down to remotest posterity need do even less; they could leisurely hold on to their inheritance, enlarge it, hire the necessary ability of superintendence and vast and ever vaster riches would be theirs. Society worked feverishly for the landowner. Every street laid and graded by the city; every park plotted and every other public improvement; every child born and every influx of immigrants; every factory, warehouse and dwelling that went up;—all these and more agencies contributed toward the abnormal swelling of his fortune.

A PROLIFIC BREEDER OF WEALTH.