ROBBER BARONS

WHAT THE YOUNG MEN DREAM

THE young men who were to form the new nobility of industry and banking had, most of them, reached their prime of youth or manhood when Lincoln issued his first call for volunteers.  Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, J.P. Morgan, Philip Armour, Andrew Carnegie, James Hill and John Rockefeller were all in their early twenties :  Collis Huntington and Leland Stanford were over thirty ;  while Jay Cooke was not yet forty.  In the ensuing years all of the members of this band of youth would have met with their first “windfalls”;  sure-footed, they would take their part, they would take their posts in the economic revolution which rose to a climax in the war ;  and the end of the war would see them masters of money, capitalists equipped to increase their capital.  In the hour of danger and confusion it was as if they alone were prepared.  It was as if the Second American Revolution were fought for them.

Most of these young men, whose fortunes will be the special subject of this history, were drawn from the aggressive Yankee race which had thrived in New England.  Collis Huntington and J.P. Morgan were literally Connecticut Yankees by birth, Gould and Cooke by descent ;  Jim Fisk was the son of a Vermont peddler.  Carnegie and Hill were Scotch, of the race called “the Florentines of the north,” instinctively apt and shrewd in trade.  In general, they were puritanical and pious, with the exception of Carnegie, a child of radical Scotch weavers.  Only one of them, Fisk, was given to free living, drinking and fleshpots in youth ;  in private life they were generally discreet, sober, well-controlled, their strongest lust being the pecuniary appetite.  The poverty which darkened the childhood of all of them save Morgan, son of a banker, lent them sobriety, and the Protestant teachings they received disciplined their will and guaranteed them rewards in this world for their self-denial.  Even when they drifted to the frontier they remained cool-headed and continent.  For instance, James Hill, migrating to the Northwest territory in the 1850s, seems prudent and methodical in the extreme among the first rough settlers of St. Paul.  At least one of their number, involved in the gold rush to the Comstock Lode on the pacific Slope, incurred the displeasure of his companions because he never drank !  Not to drink, to forego the gaming tables and red-lit bordelloes of the frontier camps, to be calculating forever, silently, furtively poring over books and accounts, scheming projects all night—while others drank, laughed, danced, brawled and died—this was the method and principle of the young men who were to conquer both the wild frontier and the pioneers alike.

But if they grew up in poverty, for the most part, they also absorbed thoroughly the restless hope which pervaded the very air they breathed.  They listened to all the cheerful, hammering sounds of the booming world around them ;  saw the settlement of new lands, the opening of new resources, the planning of new towns, each a future “metropolis” of the wilderness, a Paris of the interior plain, a London of the Great Lakes.  They saw the new machines and processes taking shape, and with the continued advance of the “level of technical culture” acquired the fixed idea that everything, towns, ships, locomotives, mills, must grow bigger—an idea that like an infantile obsession rooted itself deeply in the American mind.  But those whose vision then “projected” the populous cities, the mountains of coal and iron, were not wrong ;  and there was nothing illusory about their quick rewards.

It is noteworthy also that most of these young men left the paternal shelter early in youth, to wander alone and make their own way.  Some of them had been taught close trading in infancy, like Jim Fisk, who traveled all the roads of Vermont in the wagon of his father, the tin-peddler.  They showed promising signs of shiftiness and self-reliance in boyhood, as did Collis Huntington, who “secured his freedom from his father when fourteen years old by promising to support himself” and then, as a peddler of watch findings, wandered about the world for ten years learning to survive violent conditions, or to best wild and lawless companions.  Marooned for three months while en route to San Francisco with a band of Forty-niners at the Isthmus of Panama, Collis Huntington as a youth outtraded all his fellow voyagers, until he had multiplied his little capital over threefold to some $4,000.  Verily the gold in the Sierras must have trembled at the distant approach of this tall, crooked-nosed Yankee.  But he, like his fellows, Stanford and Armour, would be too wise to dig the wide, mysterious earth with his own hands.  Believing with Simon Suggs that “it’s good to be shifty in a new country,” they would choose rather to pit their nimble brains, their power of calculation against the gold-dust bags of the lucky prospectors.

But there were many other illuminating traits besides strength of will, ruse and violence in the young men of ’61 which are yielded by a more detailed examination of the leading members of their company, those upon whose early life we have most information.  With varying accents and voices they sound a common refrain ;  from different corners of the country, each in his own devious, particular manner, each one expresses the same aspirations, approaches the same goal.

2

“Arise, ye men of Sandusky !  Shake off your apathy !  Risk all for her, and I trust she will yet reward you for your care.”  Thus in stirring tones did Jay Cooke as a boy of sixteen appeal to his fellows—not to save their frontier village from menacing Chippewas or Wyandottes but, as the historian Oberholtzer tells us, to boom her real estate.  It was in 1837, and the first Iron Horse, running over the twelve-mile length of the Lake Erie & Mad River line had at last reached Sandusky amid the jubilation of her settlers.  Jay Cooke, who was born as the first or nearly the first baby-boy in this outpost of civilization, shared almost from birth all the speculative enthusiasm of the frontiersmen, and would never quite outgrow it.

He was the son of Eleutheros Cooke, who was something of a lawyer as well as a settler, eventually a Congressman, noted for his rodomontades on behalf of “the material interests of Sandusky.”  His father, a man who long eschewed tobacco and a leader of temperance societies, reared Jay strictly according to the precepts of his New England ancestors.  The boy at the age of sixteen was fated to leave Sandusky (overshadowed by the rival town of Cleveland), penetrating as far as St. Louis in order to learn to trade there with the pioneers and trappers.  But wherever he went he would continue to be abstemious and prudent.

In the pioneering city of St. Louis, the young man of sixteen complains because there “is but few respectable persons” there ;  he is happy over the “splendid assortment of goods” (dry goods) he trades in, regretting only the dullness of business in the winter season.  Within a year he has saved a little capital of $200, and goes to the Eastern metropolis of Philadelphia to join relatives of his family in the shipping and transport business, giving his “solemn oath to keep clear of vicious habits . . . not to associate with any of the young rakes of the city until I am certain of their good character.”

Here all is “business and bustle”;  but this boy who had wished no other schooling except that of trade made himself remarked for his cool resourcefulness as well as his industry.  Violence does not shake him ;  even in Philadelphia of 1838, “fires and mobs and abolition squabbles” are to him “everyday occurrences.”  As a ticket agent, shipping immigrants and goods by wagon, canal boat and railroad toward Pittsburgh, he comes in conflict every day with the agents of rival lines, whom he must outmaneuver or balk.  In the course of his business he runs the risk of being thrown into the Delaware River.  But undiscouraged he hews to his line steadfastly ;  the business is immensely lucrative, and the young clerk reports with delight :  “We shall clear 50 per cent. . . .”

A year later and Cooke has become a clerk in the large banking house of Clark & Dodge.  It is a promising, a “most enviable position.”  Pleasing of person, zestful in business, he makes an apt pupil of money-changing.  His clients remembered long afterward how the notes used to pass through his delicate fingers as a smoothly flowing stream of noiseless water, “the wilde-cats and all, just as equally and uninterruptedly counted.”  He soon boasted of knowing the counterfeits at sight, all the broken banks in America ;  an education which, in those days of hazardous currencies, he candidly reckoned was “worth a mint to him.”  Advanced to posts of responsibility, and appointed a junior partner after a few years, when only twenty-one, he began to build castles in the air for himself, castles filled with money, of course, such as he stared at wistfully along the banks of the Schuylkill.

In the meantime, a quality of iron enters the soul of this young man ;  we feel that, like his contemporaries, he acquires a philosophy suited to opportunities.  The crush of Yankees, Quakers, Southerners, Spanish noblemen with their servants and slaves, who pass in an endless line before his money-changing counter, he views now with the cold scrutiny of the banker, in which as Balzac has said, “there is something of the vulture, something of the attorney, at once covetous and cold, clear and inscrutable, somber and ablaze with light.”  Cooke, at an early stage of his experience, commented shrewdly, in the picturesque letters which Oberholtzer has gathered, “Through all the grades I see the same all-pervading, all-engrossing anxiety to grow rich.  This is the only thing for which men live here.”  Money, as Cooke wrote, was “chiefly the object for which all men contend,” and he no less than the others, but with a better knowledge of “its true worth and character.”  He lived in “funny times” he wrote home and, “we nearly double our capital in a year.”  His firm discounted checks and commercial paper at from 9 to 18 per cent !  Or it dealt in gold, and by its especially intimate knowledge of the affairs of the United States Bank (then of Pennsylvania) realized a premium of above 20 per cent.  Or at other times, as in the period of the Mexican War, when the annexation of Texas was being agitated, Cooke and his associates worked in collusion with politicians who knew in advance what disposition would be made of the existing Texas bonds after annexation by the federal government.  “Large sums were realized,” Cooke relates candidly, “by those who were directly and indirectly interested in obtaining the legislation for final settlement” of the bondholders’ claims.  Now, as in after years, Cooke would have, by his own principles, not the slightest doubt or scruple in combining forces with the statesmen to pursue that one “object for which all men contend.”  It was the early knowledge of such tactics, which he utilized more extensively than any other man, that gave Cooke the boundless optimism, the serene confidence that accounts for his smooth progress in accumulation.  His were among the many hands busy in ministering to the growing banking machinery of the country by financing packers, millers, speculators in grains and produce, all of which was affecting the flow of trade and seasonal movements of goods as visibly as the new canals and railways ;  that is, increasing its tempo and hastening its circulation.  This tall young man, handsome, with clear, ruddy complexion and keen blue eyes, saw himself living in “palaces and castles which kings might own.”  He said to himself :  “I shall be rich.  Go into business myself. . . .”

3

The early formative period of Jay Gould’s life was passed in a kind of naked poverty, which he remembered afterward with horror.  He was born in 1836, in the village of Roxbury, Delaware County, New York, the son of a poor farmer of Yankee stock—and not of Jewish race, as Henry Adams supposed when he called Gould “the complex Jew.”  As a boy he was compelled to wake up before dawn to tend the cows.  Frail and undersized, he dreaded the cold darkness ;  he would recall, thirty years later, in defending his character publicly, how the thistles hurt his bare feet ;  he spoke with vibrant bitterness of his boyhood.  He had had to plead with his father to be permitted even to attend the village school ;  and he had been enabled to enter the near-by Hobart academy only by living with the village blacksmith and keeping his books for him.

He would be no farmer.  At twelve or thirteen he studied geometry and logarithms, prepared himself to be a surveyor or engineer.  In 1849, he was thinking, his sister relates, of building a railroad across the continent “so that California might be nearer to us.”

“If you give me time,” he once cried to his father, “I’ll make my fortune.”  This outcry is symptomatic ;  one after another of the young men of ’61 voiced the same dream.  At the center of the stirring, shifting drama of material progress toward new railroads or gold fields, was the notion of individual fortune and change of station.  No longer to remain fixed in an inherited calling or estate, an eternal part of the eternal social organism, that had come down from feudal times, but to be “a-doin’,” to be on the alert for new opportunity.  Hence the young Gould instinctively sought information that would arm him for the struggle.  An old letter of his boyhood gives us clearly his notion of education ;  it is a means of “placing one where he is capable of speaking and acting for himself without being bargained away and deceived by his more enlightened brothers.”  What could be more illuminating ?  As a schoolboy Gould actually wrote-though posterity will scarcely believe it—a composition entitled :  “Honesty Is the Best Policy.”

But such axioms had been learned by rote, and must soon have seemed as meaningless as they proved to be.  For at the very same time the young Jay Gould consummated his first important business “deal,” an operation of the most promising artfulness which could not have succeeded without the collaboration of his father.  While employed as a clerk by the village storekeeper, he had learned that his master was negotiating for a good property in the neighborhood which happened to be in chancery, and had offered $2,000 for it.  The boy of sixteen quickly made some investigations of his own, then went to his father and by the most urgent pleading got a loan of $2,500 toward purchasing the property himself.  In two weeks, thanks to the connivance of his parent, he had been able to sell it out for $4,000.  But his employer, it appears, was highly incensed at what he saw as trickery or duplicity in his assistant and summarily dismissed him.  It is to this incident perhaps that another early letter of Gould’s refers, when he speaks further of continuing his interrupted education, and voices the hope that “a kind Providence that has thus far sheltered me under her wing will crown my, at least, honest exertions with a sphere of usefulness.”

However that might be, Jay Gould, small, dark, of a somewhat furtive and melancholy cast, left home and set to wandering about from place to place, after the age of sixteen, upon his own, making “noon-marks” for farmers, surveys and maps, and living frugally by one fertile device after another.  In these obscure years of struggle this gifted youth would be trained in cunning rather than direct aggression ;  he would learn to use the rapier rather than the bludgeon.  Promptness of action, speed in flight, would make him immune even to the more violent hazards among which he thrived.

His mind teemed with “projects” by which he hoped to win his fortune quickly.  Once he came to New York with a most curious invention for which he had the fondest hopes.  “I was ambitious,” he related, “and had brought a little thing with me which I was sure was to make my fortune and revolutionize the world, and you will smile when I tell you it was a mousetrap.”  Arriving in the great city, he boarded a street car, and every now and then ran out to the rear platform to stare at the buildings six or seven stories high, leaving the mahogany case containing his mousetrap on his seat.  A thief stole it but Gould, noticing his loss quickly, was soon hot on the heels of the criminal, raised the alarm, and retrieved his precious invention.  By means of mousetraps and other schemes or projects he was able to accumulate a substantial capital, some $5,000 by his own statement, at the age of twenty.¹

New York, with its crowd of merchants and “projectors” and its seven-story buildings, allured Gould.  It was here that he plunged into the speculations of the “swamp,” the leather market of New York, and so made the acquaintance of the aged Zadoc Pratt, a highly esteemed and wealthy tanner who was prominent in the politics of the time.  Pratt was so impressed with the acuteness of the young man that he furnished him with nearly all the capital necessary (about $120,000) to found a large tannery, which was set up in the woods outside of Lehigh, Pennsylvania, at a place ambitiously named “Gouldsboro,” after the entrepreneur of twenty.

Gould remained in sole charge, while Mr. Pratt, a septuagenarian, stayed in New York.  The tannery did a lively trade, but no profits ensued.  Its chief owner, seized with suspicions, descended upon Gouldsboro one day and found the books of his firm in strange disorder, noting large speculative commitments by Gould through a bank in the near-by town of Stroudsburg.  In alarm, believing the affairs of the company beyond repair, Pratt offered to sell his business to Gould for half of the sum he had invested.  Gould, who now had wide acquaintance in New York ;  found a new patron, a Mr. Charles Leupp, of an old New York family and a member of the leading leather firm of Leupp & Lee.

Leupp too, after a brief season, found the Gouldsboro tannery strangely mismanaged, as if with design.  Its capital was completely exhausted by the ambitious Gould during 1857 in an attempt to create a “corner” in hides.  The panic of that year brought them to swift ruin, and Leupp, brooding in the parlor of his rich mansion on Madison Avenue, killed himself with a pistol-shot.  For him, the involvements of the tannery had been part of a chain of misfortunes, and Jay Gould’s unhappy ventures with Leupp’s money were the final blow which determined him to shorten his life.  A dozen years later, the mobs of Black Friday, 1869, surging through Wall Street, shouted :  “Who killed Leupp ?  Jay Gould !”

In the months and years that followed, Could’s negotiations with Leupp’s heirs and with his partner, Lee, for control of the defunct tannery, failed of peaceful settlement ;  and Lee, representing the heirs, moved to take possession of the plant in behalf of its chief owners.  But Jay Gould resisted expulsion with a fiendish energy ;  he labored even to stir up the local population, addressing public gatherings in the streets of Lehigh, asserting to all who would hear that he was the true owner of the establishment and longed only to preserve it, while his adversaries intended to dismantle it and dismiss its workingmen.  Gathering up a mixed crowd of trusting laborers and idle thugs, and stimulating them, as it is related, by liberal gifts of oysters and whiskey, to a high pitch of martial spirit, the young captain of industry marched them like a Napoleon upon Gouldsboro’s tannery, which was attacked, stormed and captured in a moderately bloody clash, of a kind which was neither unusual nor alarming in those times.  The New York Herald of March 16, 1860, noticed the episode quietly, under the heading :

TANNERY INSURRECTION IN PA.

Battle between the forces of the Swamp leather dealers-The Leupp & Lee Tannery in Gouldsboro attacked and defended-Sides of leather used for breastworks—Insurgents 200 strong—The tannery taken—Flight of the defenders—Wounded four.

Ultimately, after long delays, the forces of the law ousted Jay Gould.  But he had learned much from his first armed struggle for money.  He was no longer without means or weapons of offense ;  he had resources of deception, of speculation—and some, though it is not certain, even hold, the art of embezzlement.  He was now hardened to violence as well as ruse, and his contemporaries no doubt esteemed him the more in accordance with the widely, if tacitly accepted views of such proceedings.  By the law of “survival of the fittest” which an Andrew Carnegie at the very same moment was learning to respect in Pittsburgh, men like Jay Gould would go far.

4

In 1848 Andrew Carnegie, the child of poor and rebellious Scottish weavers, came with his family to Allegheny, near Pittsburgh.  The upheavals of the industrial revolution had ravaged the lowlands of Scotland ;  and the hungry and too numerous hand-workers of Carnegie’s country had migrated in a great swarm to the new continent of plenty.  The newly arrived Germans, Scots and Ulstermen filled up Western Pennsylvania ;  here there was work for many hands, after the mass starvation of Europe ;  they brimmed with hope from the moment they set foot on the dock in Philadelphia or New York.  If Carnegie as a child of thirteen lived here again in a misery no less disheartening than that to be seen along the Firth of Forth then it was also true that there was infinitely more opportunity here for the young and strong among the seekers of fortune, owing to the new country’s earlier stage of industrial development.  Though Carnegie from the age of fourteen was set to work as a bobbin-boy in a cloth mill, and spent twelve hours a day in a dank cellar, he was soon imbued with the optimism of his new country.  There was no doubt in his mind, as he wrote in his first letters to relatives abroad, that the conditions of equality, universal suffrage, free land and practical invention all nurtured the “spirit of Progress,” which as a boy of sixteen he saluted fervently.  With delight he reported :

We will soon be surrounded by Rail Roads here [at Pittsburgh].  There are two different ones now laying tracks in the city, one from the Far West [i.e., Ohio] and the other from Philadelphia.  We will also have another telegraph line.

The new elements, railroad and telegraph, aroused his unending wonder.  Escaping from the cloth-factory cellar, he found work as a telegraph clerk a year later.  He adjusted himself to a miraculously new industry, a new tempo, a new world of which he writes repeatedly with rapture to his Scotch friends :

Our public lands of almost unlimited extent are becoming settled with an enterprising people.  Our dense forests are falling under the ax of the hardy woodsman.  The Wolf and the Buffalo are startled by the shrill scream of the Iron Horse where a few years ago they roamed undisturbed.  Towns and cities spring up as if by magic. . . . Our railroads extend 13,000 miles.  You cannot supply iron fast enough to keep us going.  This country is completely cut up with Railroad Tracks, Telegraphs, and Canals. . . . Pauperism is unknown.  Hundreds of labor-saving devices are patented yearly. … Everything around us is in motion.

Carnegie at seventeen exuded the same quenchless optimism concerning material progress that he expounded everywhere as an old man, fifty years later.  Everything was literally in motion before 1861, and the young men were in full motion toward their chances, their tasks, their fortunes :  a whole continent to plunder, “teeming with treasure,” a vast network of railways to be built. . . .

As a boy he was taught less piety than the native Yankees were as a rule, but he learned much of “holy economy” in his frugal home.  And as swiftly as any other contestant in the race, he learned to follow the line of Progress ;  he was consumed with the immigrant’s hope and certainty of improving his lot in a society whose resources were unplumbed, whose social compartments were ill-defined and shifting, whose values were indeterminate and only dimly grasped.  At seventeen Andrew Carnegie, the telegraph clerk, saw himself an Agent of Progress, sending and receiving in an instant messages which only yesterday had taken weeks to communicate.  But quick, alert, intelligent and very “self-assertive,” according to his official biographer, the boy soon enough widened the scope of his ambitions at every stage of the advance.  He had conflicting motives ;  he read books avidly ;  hoped to be a figure in politics and journalism, but most of all he desired, as he wrote at the time, “to become independent and then enjoy the luxuries which wealth can (and should) procure.”  He admired intensely the large, dignified, close-fisted, silk-hatted gentlemen who passed him in the street, who loomed large already over Pittsburgh :  Judge Thomas Mellon, the money-lender, J. Edgar Thomson, the railroad man, and the redoubtable Thomas Scott, with whom he sought to ingratiate himself.

Asserting that there was no “future” in telegraphy, though he earned the comparatively large wages of $800 a year, he had one day quickly accepted the offer to serve as telegraphist and secretary to Scott, who was superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad at Pittsburgh.  Under Scott he profited from the tutelage of one of the shrewdest intriguers among the new railroad captains, a man who knew as well as anyone else how “to get something for nothing.”  Scott, who was soon to be president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was impressed with the youth of eighteen, and named him his “white-haired Scotch devil.”  Railroading was new-fashioned and somewhat frontier in its nature, attracting “sailors from the sea, disappointed gold-seekers from the West, immigrants from the crowded cities.”  Carnegie advanced himself by breaking rules at opportune moments, and boldly assuming responsibility in emergencies.  Small of frame, but hardy and pugnacious, he soon became a division superintendent and ruled over his rough-and-tumble crews with as firm a hand as anyone who thrived in those high-hearted days.

The great persons among whom he moved did notice the young Carnegie, and when they chose to help him on his road he traveled swiftly, without looking to right or left.  From Scott he received his first lessons in finance.  It was Thomas Scott who one day gave young Carnegie a tip to buy the stock of the American Express Company ;  and to make his first successful speculation Carnegie borrowed a small sum by mortgaging his mother’s home.  Some time later he fell in with a gentleman who was busy devising sleeping cars for railroads.  This invention, Woodruff’s Palace Car, he had helped to promote in his spare time both by force of argument and by an initial outlay of $217.50, which he borrowed—the remaining small payments being retired out of dividends.  “Thus Andrew Carnegie’s first considerable investment was made without the outlay of a dollar of his own,” observes his biographer, Burton Hendrick ;  and this was “a scheme of investment that became almost the invariable rule in all subsequent enterprises.”  In two years the Woodruff Palace Car stock alone brought him an income of $5,000 a year !  Those were flowing times.

In Western Pennsylvania, the discovery of oil in 1859 had caused a boom and a rush like that of California, and yielded even greater quantities of gold.  Carnegie’s “flyer” in some oil acreage netted a “gusher” which added many thousands to his expanding “reservoir.”  A variety of smartly placed speculations soon engrossed the young railroader’s whole mind.  He gained in confidence and a sense of power as he learned to purchase properties or projects for “a song,” and accumulated rapidly without excessively hard work.  On a vacation visit to his native town in Scotland he said, not without arrogance, to his laborious kin :  “You over here are playing with toys !”

It was at this time that he exclaimed to himself with delight :  “Oh, I’m rich !  I’m rich !”

5

Of all these young men only one had had what might pass for a traditional education.  Pierpont Morgan, of Hartford, Connecticut, was carefully reared by his father, given the opportunity of foreign travel and several years at the University of Gottingen, where he showed some proficiency in mathematics.  As a young man he was morose, reserved, abrupt, and had almost no friends ;  his sluggish exterior suggested no talent whatsoever, and besides he was not without waywardness.

There is in his early life the account of a youthful romance.  In quite sentimental fashion he had become infatuated with a young woman named Amelia Sturges, who was consumptive and declined his offer of marriage for the reason of her health.  But single-minded he had pursued her, forsaking his first small business ventures to live in Paris, where he wooed Miss Sturges passionately in the face of death.

“I don’t know what in the world I’m going to do with Pierpont,” his father complained.  Pierpont however stubbornly insisted on marrying Miss Sturges, and saw her extinguished within three months.  With this tragic experience the wayward, romantic appetites in him had subsided for a long time, and he had returned to pursue the “education” which had been marked out for him by his “grim mouthed” father.

In his apprentice years Morgan worked at the famous London banking house of George Peabody & Co., of which his father was a partner.  This American banking firm had made London its base of operations so that it might take a part in directing the capital which flowed from Europe to pioneering America.  Here young Morgan at nineteen was being initiated into the technical mysteries of his trade.  “He was learning what bills at 60 days on Paris or Amsterdam or Hamburg were worth in francs, guilders, the marc banco . . .” as his biographer comments with satisfaction.  He was also learning to speculate :  hearing that coffee was “going up,” he had borrowed a sum of money (against the advice of his mentors) and purchased a shipload of Brazilian coffee.  After helping thus to make that article scarce and dear, he had sold it quickly at a handsome profit, his first considerable “deal.”  Pierpont Morgan at nineteen, haughty and self-assured and brief-spoken, was learning many things ;  and it was with his education well advanced that he arrived in the rising financial center of New York in 1857, a year later, to establish himself there upon his own, as his father’s banking representative, to engage in many more lucrative “deals.”

The progress of a young man like Pierpont Morgan seems painfully slow compared to that of the Jay Goulds and the John Rockefellers who were not like Morgan hampered by having received an education comparable to that of men of letters such as Motley, Emerson, and Bancroft.  Much sooner than the academically instructed, without doubts or heart-burnings they directed themselves toward the one “career open to talent.”

John Rockefeller who grew up in Western New York and later near Cleveland, as one of a struggling family of five children, recalls with satisfaction the excellent practical training he had received and how quickly he put it to use.  His childhood seemed to have been darkened by the misdeeds of his father, a wandering vendor of quack medicine who rarely supported his family, and was sometimes a fugitive from the law ;  yet the son invariably spoke of his parent’s instructions with gratitude.  He said :

. . He himself trained me in practical ways.  He was engaged in different enterprises ;  he used to tell one about these things . . . and he taught me the principles and methods of business. . . . I knew what a cord of good solid beech and maple wood was.  My father told me to select only solid wood . . . and not to put any limbs in it or any punky wood.  That was a good training for me.

But the elder Rockefeller went further than this in his sage instructions, according to John T. Flynn, who attributes to him the statement :

I cheat my boys every chance I get, I want to make ’em sharp.  I trade with the boys and skin ’em and I just beat ’em every time I can.  I want to make ’em sharp.

If at times the young Rockefeller absorbed a certain shiftiness and trading sharpness from his restless father, it was also true that his father was absent so often and so long as to cast shame and poverty upon his home.  Thus he must have been subject far more often to the stern supervision of his mother, whom he has recalled in several stories.  His mother would punish him, as he related, with a birch switch to “uphold the standard of the family when it showed a tendency to deteriorate.”  Once when she found out that she was punishing him for a misdeed at school of which he was innocent, she said, “Never mind, we have started in on this whipping and it will do for the next time.”  The normal outcome of such disciplinary cruelty would be deception and stealthiness in the boy, as a defense.

But his mother, who reared her children with the rigid piety of an Evangelist, also started him in his first business enterprise.  When he was seven years old she encouraged him to raise turkeys, and gave him for this purpose the family’s surplus mills curds.  There are legends of Rockefeller as a boy stalking a turkey with the most patient stealth in order to seize her eggs.

This harshly disciplined boy, quiet, shy, reserved, serious, received but a few years’ poor schooling, and worked for neighboring farmers in all his spare time.  His whole youth suggests only abstinence, prudence and the growth of parsimony in his soul.  The pennies he earned he would save steadily in a blue bowl that stood on a chest in his room, and accumulated until there was a small heap of gold coins.  He would work, by his own account, hoeing potatoes for a neighboring farmer from morning to night for 37 cents a day.  At a time when he was still very young he had fifty dollars saved, which upon invitation he one day loaned to the farmer who employed him.

“And as I was saving those little sums,” he relates, “I soon learned that I could get as much interest for $50 loaned at seven per cent—then the legal rate of interest—as I could earn by digging potatoes for ten days.”  Thereafter, he tells us, he resolved that it was better “to let the money be my slave than to be the slave of money.”

In Cleveland whither the family removed in 1854, Rockefeller went to the Central High School and studied bookkeeping for a year.  This delighted him.  Most of the conquering types in the coming order were to be men trained early in life in the calculations of the bookkeeper, Cooke, Huntington, Gould, Henry Frisk and especially Rockefeller of whom it was said afterward :  “He had the soul of a bookkeeper.”

In his first position as bookkeeper to a produce merchant at the Cleveland docks, when he was sixteen, he distinguished himself by his composed orderly habits.  Very carefully he examined each item on each bill before he approved it for payment.  Out of a salary which began at $15 a month and advanced ultimately to $50 a month, he saved $800 in three years, the lion’s share of his total earnings !  This was fantastic parsimony.

He spent little money for clothing, though he was always neat ;  he never went to the theater, had no amusements, and few friends.  But he attended his Baptist Church in Cleveland as devoutly as he attended to his accounts.  And to the cause of the church alone, to its parish fund and mission funds, he demonstrated his only generosity by gifts that were large for him then—first of ten cents, then later of twenty-five cents at a time.

In the young Rockefeller the traits which his mother had bred in him, of piety and the economic virtue—worship of the “lean goddess of Abstinence”—were of one cloth.  The pale, bony, small-eyed young Baptist served the Lord and pursued his own business unremittingly.  His composed manner, which had a certain languor, hid a feverish calculation, a sleepy strength, cruel, intense, terribly alert.

As a schoolboy John Rockefeller had once announced to a companion, as they walked by a rich man’s ample house along their way :  “When I grow up I want to be worth $100,000.  And I’m going to be too.”  In almost the same words, Rockefeller in Cleveland, Cooke in Philadelphia, Carnegie in Pittsburgh, or a James Hill in the Northwestern frontier could be found voicing the same hope.  And Rockefeller, the bookkeeper, “not slothful in business . . . serving the Lord,” as John T. Flynn describes him, watched his chances closely, learned every detail of the produce business which engaged him, until finally in 1858 he made bold to open a business of his own in partnership with a young Englishman named Clark (who was destined to be left far behind).  Rockefeller’s grimly accumulated savings of $800, in addition to a loan from his father at the usurious rate of 10 per cent, yielded the capital which launched him, and he was soon “gathering gear” quietly.  He knew the art of using loan credit to expand his operations.  His first bank loan against warehouse receipts gave him a thrill of pleasure.  He now bought grain and produce of all kinds in carload lots rather than in small consignments.  Prosperous, he said nothing, but began to dress his part, wearing a high silk hat, frock coat and striped trousers like other merchants of the time.  His head was handsome, his eyes small, birdlike ;  on his pale bony cheeks were the proverbial side-whiskers, reddish in color.

At night, in his room, he read the Bible, and retiring had the queer habit of talking to his pillow about his business adventures.  In his autobiography he says that “these intimate conversations with myself had a great influence upon my life.”  He told himself “not to get puffed up with any foolish notions” and never to be deceived about actual conditions.  “Look out or you will lose your head—go steady.”

He was given to secrecy ;  he loathed all display.  When he married, a few years afterward, he lost not a day from his business.  His wife, Laura Spelman, proved an excellent mate.  She encouraged his furtiveness, he relates, advising him always to be silent, to say as little as possible.  His composure, his self-possession was excessive.  Those Clevelanders to whom Miss Ida Tarbell addressed herself in her investigations of Rockefeller, told her that he was a hard man to best in a trade, that he rarely smiled, and almost never laughed, save when he struck a good bargain.  Then he might clap his hands with delight, or he might even, if the occasion warranted, throw up his hat, kick his heels and hug his informer.  One time he was so overjoyed at a favorable piece of news that he burst out :  “I’m bound to be rich !  Bound to be rich !”

¹ What is a projector, is asked in the play of Ben Jonson, “The Devil Is an Ass.”

“Why, one, sir, that projects
Ways to enrich men, or to make them great
By suits, by marriages, by undertakings.”—Act I, Scene iii.

      The art of living by one’s wits, “the art and mystery of projecting” began “to creep into the world“ probably long before the year 1680, which Daniel Defoe selects as the beginning of the Projecting Age.  He defines the new class harshly as men who, “being masters of more cunning than their neighbors, turn their thoughts to private methods of trick and cheat, a modern way of thieving ... by which honest men are gulled with fair pretenses to part from their money. . . . Others, yet, urged by the same necessity, turn their thoughts to honest invention, founded upon the platform of ingenuity and integrity. ... A mere projector is then a contemptible thing, driven by his own fortune desperate to such a strait that he must be delivered by a miracle or starve.  And when he has beat his brain for some such miracle in vain, he finds no remedy but to paint up some bauble or other, as players make puppets talk big, to show like a strange thing, and then cry it up for a new invention, gets a patent for it, divides it into shares and they must be sold.  Ways and means are not wanting to swell the new whim to a vast magnitude ;  thousands and hundreds of thousands are the least of his discourse, and sometimes millions :  till the ambition of some honest coxcomb is wheedled to part with his money for it, and then nascitur ridiculus mus.”  (“On Projectors.”)

      Defoe who was an excellent tradesman, and for a time a buyer of wines, shared all the prejudices of the pre-capitalist or mercantile age against the extravagant Cagliostros of the day.  Yet as Werner Sombart comments, though these fantastic, early projectors lacked a definite sphere of activity, “theirs were the ideas that were to generate capitalism.”