Part 41

Of a man like Astor all kinds of stories will be told, some true, some false; some founded upon fact, but exaggerated or distorted. It is said, for example, that when he went into business for himself, he used to go around among the shops and markets with a basket of toys and cakes upon his arm, exchanging those articles for furs. There are certainly old people among us who remember hearing their parents say that they saw him doing this. The story is not improbable, for he had no false pride, and was ready to turn his hand to anything that was honest.

Mr. Astor still traversed the wilderness. The father of the late lamented General Wadsworth used to relate that he met him once in the woods of Western New York in a sad plight. His wagon had broken down in the midst of a swamp. In the mélee all his gold had rolled away through the bottom of the vehicle, and was irrecoverably lost; and Astor was seen emerging from the swamp covered with mud and carrying on his shoulder an axe,--the sole relic of his property. When at length, in 1794, Jay's treaty caused the evacuation of the western forts held by the British, his business so rapidly extended that he was enabled to devolve these laborious journeys upon others, while he remained in New York, controlling a business that now embraced the region of the great lakes, and gave employment to a host of trappers, collectors, and agents. He was soon in a position to purchase a ship, in which his furs were carried to London, and in which he occasionally made a voyage himself. He was still observed to be most assiduous in the pursuit of commercial knowledge. He was never weary of inquiring about the markets of Europe and Asia, the ruling prices and commodities of each, the standing of commercial houses, and all other particulars that could be of use. Hence his directions to his captains and agents were always explicit and minute, and if any enterprise failed to be profitable it could generally be distinctly seen that it was because his orders had not been obeyed. In London, he became most intimately conversant with the operations of the East-India Company and with the China trade. China being the best market in the world for furs, and furnishing commodities which in America had become necessaries of life, he was quick to perceive what an advantage he would have over other merchants by sending his ships to Canton provided with furs as well as dollars. It was about the year 1800 that he sent his first ship to Canton, and he continued to carry on commerce with China for twenty-seven years, sometimes with loss, generally with profit, and occasionally with splendid and bewildering success.

It was not, however, until the year 1800, when he was worth a quarter of a million dollars, and had been in business fifteen years, that he indulged himself in the comfort of living in a house apart from his business. In 1794 he appears in the Directory as "Furrier, 149 Broadway." From 1796 to 1799 he figures as "Fur Merchant, 149 Broadway." In 1800 he had a storehouse at 141 Greenwich Street, and lived at 223 Broadway, on the site of the present Astor House. In 1801, his store was at 71 Liberty Street, and he had removed his residence back to 149 Broadway. The year following we find him again at 223 Broadway, where he continued to reside for a quarter of a century. His house was such as a fifth-rate merchant would now consider much beneath his dignity. Mr. Astor, indeed, had a singular dislike to living in a large house. He had neither expensive tastes nor wasteful vices. His luxuries were a pipe, a glass of beer, a game of draughts, a ride on horseback, and the theatre. Of the theatre he was particularly fond. He seldom missed a good performance in the palmy days of the "Old Park."

It was his instinctive abhorrence of ostentation and waste that enabled him, as it were, to glide into the millionaire without being observed by his neighbors. He used to relate, with a chuckle, that he was worth a million before any one suspected it. A dandy bank-clerk, one day, having expressed a doubt as to the sufficiency of his name to a piece of mercantile paper, Astor asked him how much he thought he was worth. The clerk mentioned a sum ludicrously less than the real amount. Astor then asked him how much he supposed this and that leading merchant, whom he named, was worth. The young man endowed them with generous sum-totals proportioned to their style of living. "Well," said Astor, "I am worth more than any of them. I will not say how much I am worth, but I am worth more than any sum you have mentioned." "Then," said the clerk, "you are even a greater fool than I took you for, to work as hard as you do." The old man would tell this story with great glee, for he always liked a joke.

In the course of his long life he had frequent opportunities of observing what becomes of those gay merchants who live up to the incomes of prosperous years, regardless of the inevitable time of commercial collapse. It must be owned that he held in utter contempt the dashing style of living and doing business which has too often prevailed in New York; and he was very slow to give credit to a house that carried sail out of proportion to its ballast. Nevertheless, he was himself no plodder when plodding had ceased to be necessary. At the time when his affairs were on their greatest scale, he would leave his office at two in the afternoon, go home to an early dinner, then mount his horse and ride about the Island till it was time to go to the theatre. He had a strong aversion to illegitimate speculation, and particularly to gambling in stocks. The note-shaving and stock-jobbing operations of the Rothschilds he despised. It was his pride and boast that he gained his own fortune by legitimate commerce, and by the legitimate investment of his profits. Having an unbounded faith in the destiny of the United States, and in the future commercial supremacy of New York, it was his custom, from about the year 1800, to invest his gains in the purchase of lots and lands on Manhattan Island.

We have all heard much of the closeness, or rather the meanness, of this remarkable man. Truth compels us to admit, as we have before intimated, that he was not generous, except to his own kindred. His liberality began and ended in his own family. Very seldom during his lifetime did he willingly do a generous act outside of the little circle of his relations and descendants. To get all that he could, and to keep nearly all that he got,--those were the laws of his being. He had a vast genius for making money, and that was all that he had.

It is a pleasure to know that sometimes his extreme closeness defeated its own object. He once lost seventy thousand dollars by committing a piece of petty injustice toward his best captain. This gallant sailor, being notified by an insurance office of the necessity of having a chronometer on board his ship, spoke to Mr. Astor on the subject, who advised the captain to buy one.

"But," said the captain, "I have no five hundred dollars to spare for such a purpose; the chronometer should belong to the ship."

"Well," said the merchant, "you need not pay for it now; pay for it at your convenience."

The captain still objecting, Astor, after a prolonged higgling, authorized him to buy a chronometer, and charge it to the ship's account; which was done. Sailing-day was at hand. The ship was hauled into the stream. The captain, as is the custom, handed in his account. Astor, subjecting it to his usual close scrutiny, observed the novel item of five hundred dollars for the chronometer. He objected, averring that it was understood between them that the captain was to pay for the instrument. The worthy sailor recalled the conversation, and firmly held to his recollection of it. Astor insisting on his own view of the matter, the captain was so profoundly disgusted that, important as the command of the ship was to him, he resigned his post. Another captain was soon found, and the ship sailed for China. Another house, which was then engaged in the China trade, knowing the worth of this "king of captains," as Astor himself used to style him, bought him a ship and despatched him to Canton two months after the departure of Astor's vessel. Our captain, put upon his mettle, employed all his skill to accelerate the speed of his ship, and had such success, that he reached New York with a full cargo of tea just seven days after the arrival of Mr. Astor's ship. Astor, not expecting another ship for months, and therefore sure of monopolizing the market, had not yet broken bulk, nor even taken off the hatchways. Our captain arrived on a Saturday. Advertisements and handbills were immediately issued, and on the Wednesday morning following, as the custom then was, the auction sale of the tea began on the wharf,--two barrels of punch contributing to the éclat and hilarity of the occasion. The cargo was sold to good advantage, and the market was glutted. Astor lost in consequence the entire profits of the voyage, not less than the sum named above. Meeting the captain some time after in Broadway, he said,--

"I had better have paid for that chronometer of yours."

Without ever acknowledging that he had been in the wrong, he was glad enough to engage the captain's future services. This anecdote we received from the worthy captain's own lips.

On one occasion the same officer had the opportunity of rendering the great merchant a most signal service. The agent of Mr. Astor in China suddenly died at a time when the property in his charge amounted to about seven hundred thousand dollars. Our captain, who was not then in Astor's employ, was perfectly aware that if this immense property fell into official hands, as the law required, not one dollar of it would ever again find its way to the coffers of its proprietor. By a series of bold, prompt, and skilful measures, he rescued it from the official maw, and made it yield a profit to the owner. Mr. Astor acknowledged the service. He acknowledged it with emphasis and a great show of gratitude. He said many times:--

"If you had not done just as you did, I should never have seen one dollar of my money; no, not one dollar of it."

But he not only did not compensate him for his services, but he did not even reimburse the small sum of money which the captain had expended in performing those services. Astor was then worth ten millions, and the captain had his hundred dollars a month and a family of young children.

Thus the great merchant recompensed great services. He was not more just in rewarding small ones. On one occasion a ship of his arrived from China, which he found necessary to dispatch at once to Amsterdam, the market in New York being depressed by an over-supply of China merchandise. But on board this ship, under a mountain of tea-chests, the owner had two pipes of precious Madeira wine, which had been sent on a voyage for the improvement of its constitution.

"Can you get out that wine," asked the owner, "without discharging the tea?"

The captain thought he could.

"Well, then," said Mr. Astor, "you get it out, and I'll give you a demijohn of it. You'll say it's the best wine you ever tasted."

It required the labor of the whole ship's crew for two days to get out those two pipes of wine. They were sent to the house of Mr. Astor. A year passed. The captain had been to Amsterdam and back, but he had received no tidings of his demijohn of Madeira. One day, when Mr. Astor was on board the ship, the captain ventured to remind the great man, in a jocular manner, that he had not received the wine.

"Ah!" said Astor, "don't you know the reason? It isn't fine yet. Wait till it is fine, and you'll say you never tasted such Madeira." The captain never heard of that wine again.

These traits show the moral weakness of the man. It is only when we regard his mercantile exploits that we can admire him. He was, unquestionably, one of the ablest, boldest, and most successful operators that ever lived. He seldom made a mistake in the conduct of business. Having formed his plan, he carried it out with a nerve and steadiness, with such a firm and easy grasp of all the details, that he seemed rather to be playing an interesting game than transacting business. "He could command an army of five hundred thousand men!" exclaimed one of his admirers. That was an erroneous remark. He could have commanded an army of five hundred thousand tea-chests, with a heavy auxiliary force of otter skins and beaver skins. But a commander of men must be superior morally as well as intellectually. He must be able to win the love and excite the enthusiasm of his followers. Astor would have made a splendid commissary-general to the army of Xerxes, but he could no more have conquered Greece than Xerxes himself.

The reader may be curious to know by what means Mr. Astor became so preposterously rich. Few successful men gain a single million by legitimate commerce. A million dollars is a most enormous sum of money. It requires a considerable effort of the mind to conceive it. But this indomitable little German managed, in the course of sixty years, to accumulate twenty millions; of which, probably, not more than two millions was the fruit of his business as a fur trader and China merchant.

At that day the fur trade was exceedingly profitable, as well as of vast extent. It is estimated that about the year 1800 the number of peltries annually furnished to commerce was about six millions, varying in value from fifteen cents to five hundred dollars. When every respectable man in Europe and America wore a beaver skin upon his head, or a part of one, and when a good beaver skin could be bought in Western New York for a dollar's worth of trash, and could be sold in London for twenty-five English shillings, and when those twenty-five English shillings could be invested in English cloth and cutlery, and sold in New York for forty shillings, it may be imagined that fur-trading was a very good business. Mr. Astor had his share of the cream of it, and that was the foundation of his colossal fortune. Hence, too, the tender love he felt for a fine fur.

In the next place, his ventures to China were sometimes exceedingly fortunate. A fair profit on a voyage to China at that day was thirty thousand dollars. Mr. Astor has been known to gain seventy thousand, and to have his money in his pocket within the year. He was remarkably lucky in the war of 1812. All his ships escaped capture, and arriving at a time when foreign commerce was almost annihilated and tea had doubled in price, his gains were so immense, that the million or more lost in the Astorian enterprise gave him not even a momentary inconvenience.

At that time, too, tea merchants of large capital had an advantage which they do not now enjoy. A writer explains the manner in which the business was done in those days:--

"A house that could raise money enough thirty years ago to send $260,000 in specie, could soon have an uncommon capital, and this was the working of the old system. The Griswolds owned the ship Panama. They started her from New York in the month of May, with a cargo of perhaps $30,000 worth of ginseng, spelter, lead, iron, etc., and $170,000 in Spanish dollars. The ship goes on the voyage, reaches Whampoa in safety (a few miles below Canton). Her supercargo in two months has her loaded with tea, some china ware, a great deal of cassia or false cinnamon, and a few other articles. Suppose the cargo, mainly tea, costing about thirty-seven cents (at that time) per pound on the average.

"The duty was enormous in those days. It was twice the cost of the tea, at least: so that a tea cargo of $200,000, when it had paid duty of seventy-five cents per pound (which would be $400,000), amounted to $600,000. The profit was at least fifty per cent on the original cost, or $100,000, and would make the cargo worth $700,000.