History of the Great American Fortunes Vol. 1 — P. 2 Chapter 3-1

CHAPTER III THE GROWTH OF THE ASTOR FORTUNE

While at the outposts, and in the depths, of the Western wilderness an armed host was working and cheating for Astor, and, in turn, being cheated by their employer; while, for Astor's gain, they were violating all laws, debauching, demoralizing and beggaring entire tribes of Indians, slaying and often being themselves slain in retaliation, what was the beneficiary of this orgy of crime and bloodshed doing in New York?

For a long time he lived at No. 223 Broadway in a large double house, flanked by an imposing open piazza supported by pillars and arches.

In this house he combined the style of the ascending capitalist with the fittings and trappings of the tradesman.

It was at once residence, office and salesroom.

On the ground floor was his store, loaded with furs; and here one of his sons and his chief heir, William B. could be seen, as a lad, assiduously beating the furs to keep out moths.

Astor's disposition was phlegmatic and his habits were extremely simple and methodical.

He had dinner regularly at three o'clock, after which he would limit himself to three games of checkers and a glass of beer.

Most of his long day was taken up with close attention to his many business interests of which no detail escaped him.

However execrated he might be in the Indian territories far in the West, he assumed, and somewhat succeeded in being credited with, the character of a patriotic, respectable and astute man of business in New York.

ASTOR SUPERIOR TO LAW.

During (taking a wide survey) the same series of years that he was directing gross violations of explicit laws in the fur-producing regions--laws upon the observance of which depended the very safety of the life of men, women and children, white and red, and which laws were vested with an importance corresponding with the baneful and bloody results of their infraction--Astor was turning other laws to his distinct advantage in the East.

Pillaging in the West the rightful and legal domain, and the possessions, of a dozen Indian tribes, he, in the East, was causing public money to be turned over to his private treasury and using it as personal capital in his shipping enterprises.

As applied to the business and landowning class, law was notoriously a flexible, convenient, and highly adaptable function.

By either the tacit permission or connivance of Government, this class was virtually, in most instances, its own law-regulator.

It could consistently, and without being seriously interfered with, violate such laws as suited its interests, while calling for the enactment or enforcement of other laws which favored its designs and enhanced its profits.

We see Astor ruthlessly brushing aside, like so many annoying encumbrances, even those very laws which were commonly held indispensable to a modicum of fair treatment of the Indians and to the preservation of human life.

These laws happened to conflict with the amassing of profits; and always in a civilization ruled by the trading class, laws which do this are either unceremoniously trampled upon, evaded or repealed.

For all the long-continued violations of law in the West, and for the horrors which resulted from his exploitation of the Indians, was Astor ever prosecuted?

To repeat, no; nor was he disturbed even by such a triviality as a formal summons.

Yet, to realize the full enormity of acts for which he was responsible, and the complete measure of immunity that he enjoyed, it is necessary to recall that at the time the Government had already begun to assume the role of looking upon the Indians as its wards, and thus of theoretically extending to them the shield of its especial protection.

If Government allowed a people whom it pleased to signify as its wards to be debauched, plundered and slain, what kind of treatment could be expected for the working class as to which there was not even the fiction of Government concern, not to mention wardship?

LAW BREAKERS AND LAW MAKERS.

But when it came to laws which, in the remotest degree, could be used or manipulated to swell profits or to buttress property, Astor and his class were untiring and vociferous in demanding their strict enforcement.

Successfully ignoring or circumventing laws objectionable to them, they, at the same time, insisted upon the passage and exact construction and severe enforcement of laws which were adjusted to their interests.

Law breakers, on the one hand, they were law makers on the other.

They caused to be put in statute, and intensified by judicial precedent, the most rigorous laws in favor of property rights.

They virtually had the extraordinary power of choosing what laws they should observe and what they should not.

This choice was invariably at the expense of the working class.

Law, that much-sanctified product, was really law only when applied to the propertyless.

It confronted the poor at every step, was executed with summary promptitude and filled the prisons with them.

Poverty had no choice in saying what laws it should obey and what it should not.

It, perforce, had to obey or go to prison;

either one or the other, for the laws were expressly drafted to bear heavily upon it.

It is illustrative, in the highest degree, of the character of Government ruled by commercial interests, that Astor was allowed to pillage and plunder, cheat, rob and (by proxy) slaughter in the West, while, in the East, that same Government extended to him, as well as to other shippers, the free use of money which came from the taxation of the whole people--a taxation always weighted upon the shoulders of the worker.

In turn, this favored class, either consciously or unconsciously, voluntarily or involuntarily, cheated the Government of nearly half of the sums advanced.

From the foundation of the Government up to 1837, there were nine distinct commercial crises which brought about terrible hardships to the wage workers.

Did the Government step in and assist them?

At no time.

But during all those years the Government was busy in letting the shippers dig into the public funds and in being extremely generous to them when they failed to pay up.

From 1789 to 1823 the Government lost more than ,000,000 in duties,[90] all of which sum represented what the shippers owed and did not, or could not, pay.

And no criminal proceedings were brought against any of these defaulters.

This, however, was not all that the Government did for the favored, pampered class that it represented.

Laws were severe against labor-union strikes, which were frequently judicially adjudged conspiracies.

Theoretically, law inhibited monopoly, but monopolies existed, because law ceases to be effective law when it is not enforced; and the propertied interests took care that it was not enforced.

Their own class was powerful in every branch of Government.

Furthermore, they had the money to buy political subserviency and legal dexterity.

The ,000 that Astor paid to Cass, the very official who, as Secretary of War, had jurisdiction over the Indian tribes and over the Indian trade, and the sums that Astor paid to Benton, were, it may well be supposed, only the merest parts of the total sums that he disbursed to officials and politicians, high and low.

ASTOR'S MONOPOLIES.

Astor profited richly from his monopolies.

His monopoly of furs in the West was made a basis for the creation of other monopolies.

China was a voracious and highly profitable market for furs.

In exchange for the cargoes of these that he sent there, his ships would be loaded with teas and silks.

These products he sold at exorbitant prices in New York.

His profits from a single voyage sometimes reached ,000; the average profits from a single voyage were ,000. During the War of 1812-15 tea rose to double its usual price.

Astor was invariably lucky in that his ships escaped capture.

At one period he was about the only merchant who had a cargo of tea in the market.

He exacted, and was allowed to exact, his own price.

Meanwhile, Astor was setting about making himself the richest and largest landowner in the country.

His were not the most extensive land possessions in point of extent but in regard to value.

He aimed at being a great city, not a great rural, landlord.

It was estimated that his trade in furs and associated commerce brought him a clear annual revenue of about two million dollars.

This estimate was palpably inadequate.

Not only did he reap enormous profits from the fur trade, but also from banking privileges in which he was a conspicuous factor.

It was on one of his visits to London, so the recital goes, that he first became possessed of the idea of founding an extraordinarily rich landed family.

He admired, it is told, the great landed estates of the British nobility, and observed the prejudice against the caste of the trader and the corresponding exalted position of the landowner.

Whether this story is true or not, it is evident that he was impressed with the increasing power and the stability of a fortune founded upon land, and how it radiated a certain splendid prestige.

The very definition of the word landlord--lord of the soil--signified the awe-compelling and authoritative position of him who owned land--a definition heightened and enforced in a thousand ways by the laws.

The speculative and solid possibilities of New York City real estate held out dazzling opportunities gratifying his acquisitiveness for wealth and power--the wealth that fed his avarice, and the power flowing from the dominion of riches.

ASTOR NOT AN EXCEPTION.

It may here be observed that Astor's methods in trade or in acquiring of land need not be indiscriminately condemned as an exclusive mania.

Nor should they be held up to the curiosity of posterity as a singular and pernicious exhibition, detached from his time and generation, and independent of them.

Again and again the facts disclose that men such as he were merely the representative crests of prevailing commercial and political life.

Substantially the whole propertied class obtained its wealth by methods which, if not the same, had a strong relationship.

His methods differed nowise from those of many cotton planters of the South who stole, on a monstrous scale,[91] Government land and then with the wealth derived from their thefts, bought negro slaves, set themselves up in the glamour of a patriarchal aristocracy and paraded a florid display of chivalry and honor.

And it was this same grandiose class that plundered Whitney of the fruits of his invention of the cotton-gin and shamelessly defrauded him.

[92] Far more flagrant, however, were the means by which other Southern plantation owners and business firms secured landed estates in Alabama, Georgia and in other States.

Their methods in expropriating the reservations of such Indian tribes as the Creeks and Chickasaws were not less fraudulent than those that Astor used elsewhere.

They too, those fine Southern aristocrats, debauched Indian tribes with whisky, and after swindling them of their land, caused the Government to remove them westward.

The frauds were so extensive, and the circumstances so repellant, that President Andrew Jackson, in 1833, ordered an investigation.

From the records of this investigation,--four hundred and twenty-five solid pages of official correspondence--more than enough details can be obtained.

[93] WHERE WAS FRAUD ABSENT?

In Wisconsin the most valuable Government lands, containing rich deposits of lead and other mineral ore, were being boldly appropriated by force and fraud.

The House Committee on Public Lands reported on December 18, 1840, that with the connivance of local land agents, these lands, since 1835, had been sold at private sale before they were even subject to public entry.

[94] "In consequence of which," the Committee stated, "many tracts of land known to be rich and valuable mineral lands for many years, and known to be such at the time of the entry, have been entered by evil-minded persons, who have falsely made, or procured others to make, the oath required by the land offices.

Honest men have been excluded from the purchase of these lands, while the dishonest and unscrupulous have been permitted to enter them by means of false oath and fraud."

[95] These are but the merest glimpses of the widespread frauds in seizing land, whether agricultural, timber or mineral.

What of the mercantile importers, the same class that the Government so greatly favored in allowing it long periods in which to pay its customs duties?

It was defrauding the Government on the very importations on which it was extended long-time credit for customs payments.

The few official reports available clearly indicate this.

Great frauds were continuously going on in the importations of lead.

[96] Large quantities of sugar were imported in the guise of molasses which, it was discovered, after being boiled a few minutes, would produce an almost equal weight in brown sugar.

[97] Doubtless similar frauds were being committed in other lines of importations.

Between the methods of these divisions of the capitalist class, and those of Astor, no basic difference can be discerned.

Neither was there any essential difference between Astor's methods and those of the manufacturing capitalists of the North who remorselessly robbed Charles Goodyear of the benefits of his discovery of vulcanized rubber and who drove him, after protracted litigation, into insolvency, and caused him to die loaded down with worries and debts, a broken-down man, at the age of 60. [98] As for that pretentious body of gentry who professed to spread enlightenment and who set themselves high and solemnly on a pinnacle as dispensers of knowledge and molders of public opinion--the book, periodical and newspaper publishers--their methods at bottom were as fraudulent as any that Astor ever used.

They mercilessly robbed and knew it, while making the most hypocritical professions of lofty motives.

Buried deep in the dusty archives of the United States Senate is a petition whereon appear the signatures of Moore, Carlyle, the two Disraelis, Milman, Hallam, Southey, Thomas Campbell, Sir Charles Lyell, Bulwer Lytton, Samuel Rogers, Maria Edgeworth, Harriet Martineau and other British literary luminaries, great or small.

In this petition these authors, some of them representing the highest and finest in literary, philosophical, historical, and scientific thought and expression, implore Congress to afford them protection against the indiscriminate theft of their works by American booksellers.

Their works, they set forth, are not only appropriated without their consent but even contrary to their expressed desire.

And there is no redress.

Their productions are mutilated and altered, yet their names are retained.

They instance the pathetic case of Sir Walter Scott.

His works have been published and sold from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico, yet not a cent has he received.

"An equitable remuneration," they set forth, "might have saved his life, and would, at least have relieved his closing years from the burdens of debts and destructive toils."

[99] How fares this petition read in the United States Senate on February 2, 1837?

The booksellers, magazine, periodical and newspaper publishers have before succeeded in defeating one copyright bill.

They now bestir themselves again; the United States Senate consigns the petition to the archives; and the piracy goes on as industriously as ever.

LEGALIZED PIRACY IN ALL BRANCHES OF TRADE.

What else could be expected from a Congress which represented the commercial and landholding classes?

No prodding was needed to cause it to give the fullest protection to possessions in commerce, land and negro slaves; these were concrete property.

But thought was not capitalized; it was not a manufactured product like iron or soap.

Nothing can express the pitying contempt or the lofty air of patronization with which the dominant commercial classes looked down upon the writer, the painter, the musician, the philosopher or the sculptor.

Regarding these "sentimentalists" as easy, legitimate and defenseless objects of prey, and as incidental and impractical hangers-on in a world where trade was all in all, the commercial classes at all times affected a certain air of encouragement of the fine arts, which encouragement, however, never attempted to put a stop to piracies of publication or reproduction.

How sordidly commercial that era was, to what extremes its standards went, and how some of the basest forms of theft were carried on and practically legalized, may be seen by the fate of Peter Cardelli's petition to Congress.

Cardelli was a Roman sculptor, residing in the United States for a time.

He prays Congress in 1820 to pass an act protecting him from commercial pirates who make casts and copies of his work and who profit at his expense.

The Senate Committee on Judiciary, to whom the petition is referred, rejects the plea.

On what ground?

Because he "has not discovered any new invention on which he can claim the right."

[100] Could stupidity go further?

All of the confluent facts of the time show conclusively that every stratum of commercial society was permeated with fraud, and that this fraud was accepted generally as a routine fixture of the business of gathering property or profits.

Astor, therefore, was not an isolated phenomenon, but a typically successful representative of his time and of the methods and standards of the trading class of that time.

Whatever in the line of business yielded profits, that act, whether cheating, robbing or slaughtering, was justified by some sophistry or other.

Astor did not debauch, spoliate, and incite slaughter because he took pleasure in doing them.

Perhaps--to extend charitable judgment--he would have preferred to avoid them.

But they were all part of the formulated necessities of business which largely decreed that the exercise of humane and ethical considerations was incompatible with the zealous pursuit of wealth.

In the wilderness of the West, Astor, operating through his agents, could debauch, rob and slay Indians with impunity.

As he was virtually the governing body there, without fear of being hindered, he thus could act in the most high-handed, arbitrary and forcible ways.

In the East, however, where law, or the forms of law, prevailed, he had to have recourse to methods which bore no open trace of the brutal and sanguinary.

He had to become the insidious and devious schemer, acting through sharp lawyers instead of by an armed force.

Hence in his Eastern operations he made deception a science and used every instrument of cunning at his command.

The result was precisely the same as in the West, except that the consequences were not so overt, and the perpetration could not be so easily distinguished.

In the West, death marched step by step with Astor's accumulating fortune; so did it in the East, but it was not open and bloody as in the fur country.

The mortality thus accompanying Astor's progress in New York was of that slow and indefinite, but more lingering and agonizing, kind ensuing from want, destitution, disease and starvation.

Astor's supreme craft was at no time better shown than by the means by which he acquired possession of an immense estate in Putnam County, New York.

During the Revolution, a tract consisting of 51,012 acres held by Roger Morris and Mary his wife, Tories, had been confiscated by New York State.

This land, it is worth recalling, was part of the estate of Adolphus Phillips, the son of Frederick who, as has been set forth, financed and protected the pirate Captain Samuel Burgess in his buccaneer expeditions, and whose share of the Burgess' booty was extremely large.

[101] Mary Morris was a descendant of Adolph Phillips and came into that part of the property by inheritance.

The Morris estate comprised nearly one-third of Putnam County.

After confiscation, the State sold the area in parts to various farmers.

By 1809 seven hundred families were settled on the property, and not a shadow of a doubt had ever been cast on their title.

They had long regarded it as secure, especially as it was guaranteed by the State.