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Million Dollars
Competition was the order of the day: the industrial warfare of the sixties was
a free-for-all. A mere reference to the status of manufactures in which the
trust is now the all-prevailing fact will make the contrast clear. In 1865
thousands of independent companies were drilling oil in Pennsylvania and there
were more than two hundred which were refining the product. Nearly four hundred
and fifty operators were mining coal, not even dimly foreseeing the day when
their business would become a great railroad monopoly. The two hundred companies
that were making mowers and reapers, seventy-five of them located in New York
State, had formed no mental picture of the future International Harvester
Company. One of our first large industrial combinations was that which in the
early seventies absorbed the manufacturers of salt; yet the close of the Civil
War found fifty competing companies making salt in the Saginaw Valley of
Michigan. In the same State, about fifty distinct ownerships controlled the
copper mines, while in Nevada the Comstock Lode had more than one hundred
proprietors. The modern trust movement has now absorbed even our lumber and
mineral lands, but in 1865 these rich resources were parceled out among a
multiplicity of owners: No business has offered greater opportunities to the
modern promoter of combinations than our street railways. In 1865 most of our
large cities had their leisurely horse-car systems, yet practically every avenue
had its independent line. New York had thirty separate companies engaged in the
business of local transportation. Indeed the Civil War period developed only one
corporation that could be described as a "trust" in the modern sense. This was
the Western Union Telegraph Company. Incredible as it may seem, more than fifty
companies, ten years before the Civil War, were engaged in the business of
transmitting telegraphic messages. These companies had built their telegraph
lines precisely as the railroads had laid their tracks; that is, independent
lines were constructed connecting two given points. It was inevitable, of
course, that all these scattered lines should come under a single control, for
the public convenience could not be served otherwise. This combination was
effected a few years before the War, when the Western Union Telegraph Company,
after a long and fierce contest, succeeded in absorbing all its competitors.
Similar forces were bringing together certain continuous lines of railways, but
the creation of huge trunk systems had not yet taken place. How far our
industrial era is removed from that of fifty years ago is apparent when we
recall that the proposed capitalization of $15,000,000, caused by the merging of
the Boston and Worcester and the Western railroads, was widely denounced as
"monstrous" and as a corrupting force that would destroy our Republican
institutions. Naturally this small-scale ownership was reflected in the
distribution of wealth. The "swollen fortunes" of that period rested upon the
same foundation that had given stability for centuries to the aristocracies of
Europe. Social preeminence in large cities rested almost entirely upon the
ownership of land. The Astors, the Goelets, the Rhinelanders, the Beekmans, the
Brevoorts, and practically all the mighty families that ruled the old
Knickerbocker aristocracy in New York were huge land proprietors. Their fortunes
thus had precisely the same foundation as that of the Prussian Junkers today.
But their accumulations compared only faintly with the fortunes that are
commonplace now. How many "millionaires" there were fifty years ago we do not
precisely know. The only definite information we have is a pamphlet published in
1855 by Moses Yale Beach, proprietor of the New York Sun, on the "Wealthy Men of
New York." This records the names of nineteen citizens who, in the estimation of
well-qualified judges, possessed more than a million dollars each. The richest
man in the list was William B. Astor, whose estate is estimated at $6,000,000.
The next richest man was Stephen Whitney, also a large landowner, whose fortune
is listed at $5,000,000. Then comes James Lenox, again a land proprietor, with
$3,000,000. The man who was to accumulate the first monstrous American fortune,
Cornelius Vanderbilt, is accredited with a paltry $1,500,000. Mr. Beach's little
pamphlet sheds the utmost light upon the economic era preceding the Civil War.
It really pictures an industrial organization that belongs as much to ancient
history as the empire of the Caesars. His study lists about one thousand of New
York's "wealthy citizens." Yet the fact that a man qualified for entrance into
this Valhalla who had $100,000 to his credit and that nine-tenths of those so
chosen possessed only that amount shows the progress concentrated riches have
made in sixty years. How many New Yorkers of today would look upon a man with
$100,000 as "wealthy"?
The sources of these fortunes also show the economic changes our country has
undergone. Today, when we think of our much exploited millionaires, the phrase
"captains of industry" is the accepted description; in Mr. Beach's time the
popular designation was "merchant prince." His catalogue contains no "oil
magnates" or "steel kings" or "railroad manipulators"; nearly all the industrial
giants of ante-bellum times--as distinguished from the socially prominent whose
wealth was inherited--had heaped together their accumulations in humdrum trade.
Perhaps Peter Cooper, who had made a million dollars in the manufacture of
isinglass and glue, and George Law, whose gains, equally large, represented
fortunate speculations in street railroads, faintly suggest the approaching era;
yet the fortunes which are really typical are those of William Aspinwall, who
made $4,000,000 in the shipping business, of A. T. Stewart, whose $2,000,000
represented his earnings as a retail and wholesale dry goods merchant, and of
Peter Harmony, whose $1,000,000 had been derived from happy trade ventures in
Cuba and Spain. Many of the reservoirs of this ante-bellum wealth sound
strangely in our modern ears. John Haggerty had made $1,000,000 as an
auctioneer; William L. Coggeswell had made half as much as a wine importer;
Japhet Bishop had rounded out an honest $600,000 from the profits of a hardware
store; while Phineas T. Barnum ranks high in the list by virtue of $800,000
accumulated in a business which it is hardly necessary to specify. Indeed his
name and that of the great landlords are almost the only ones in this list that
have descended to posterity. Yet they were the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the
Harrimans, the Fricks, and the Henry Fords of their day. |
