The long romance of the world's commerce is like a picture-gallery. The earlier pictures are oriental, but the gallery leads westward. Here and there, at intervals, there are striking changes in scenery, races, costumes, and merchandise. Instead of being a record of commonplace money-getting, it is full of wonderful stories of dreams which the dreamers undertook to realize. They went out through the Mediterranean in the galleys of Tyre and Carthage, and they sailed down the Red Sea, no one knows how far, in the ships of the merchant king Solomon. The dreamers were mostly mere boys, full of the hot enthusiasms of youth, but few of them ceased from their fascinated gaze into the future, the distant, the new, until age and the end drew the curtain before their eyes.
One of these visionary boys, who could not stay at home nor be contented with surroundings which had satisfied his ancestors, accomplished remarkable things. Among others, John Jacob Astor won a fortune, founded a family, aided in the earlier stages of the growth of a city and a nation, and left behind him ideas which were to be fulfilled in the third generation.
He was the fourth son of the highly respectable village butcher at Waldorf, near Heidelberg, Germany, and several members of the family had already exhibited unusual ability and enterprise. The generation to which he belonged (he was born July 17, 1763) had shown even more than had its predecessors that vigorous vitality which has enabled the old German stock to do so much both for the Old World and the New.
There were schools in Waldorf. German youths of good families were by no means brought up in ignorance. There were facilities for higher education not altogether out of reach; but these were to be sought, as a rule, by those who looked forward to lives of professional scholarship. Most avenues for advancement were shut by caste and privilege, and the old order of things, from aspirants unsustained by wealth or hereditary rank. The Waldorf horizon seemed very limited to the eyes of a boy who felt that he was capable of better things than supplying sausages and the like to a frugal and unambitious neighborhood. It was indeed a quiet place ; but, as the boy grew older, its stillness was continually broken by war news, the reports of battles, stories of the sharp, sanguinary struggles which marked the last quarter of the eighteenth century. There was a beginning of varied activities throughout Europe, and especially in Germany, from which wonderful fruits were to come in the first decades of the next century. There was to be a vastly changed condition of things after the long convulsions of the Napoleonic wars, but very little that was new could as yet be seen in Waldorf.
Young Astor was a thoughtful boy, a reader of books, with literary tastes which were one day to find expression in a form that is enduringly useful. At the same time he was full of a fire of adventure which utterly forbade his contenting himself with the seemingly tame successes of scholarship. It was well for him that against this fire contended an uncommon degree of sturdy German prudence. His phenomenal motive power required, and was provided with, a remarkably heavy balance-wheel.
Remaining in Waldorf was out of the question for such a boy, and, at sixteen years of age, he was on his way to London. There might have seemed something chimerical in the idea of adding one more human atom to the swarms of an already crowded hive; but the mere means of earning a living had been made ready for him. An uncle was a member of the firm of Astor & Broadwood, manufacturers of pianos and other musical instruments, and Henry Astor, an older brother of John Jacob, was already in the employ of that concern. Under the name of Broadwood & Co. it afterward attained wide reputation and importance, but at this early date its business was limited. It could offer no prospect whatever for the future of a very ambitious young adventurer from Waldorf. It could give him something to do, for a while, however, and he could learn lessons in business, acquire the English language, hear all the news that came to London, grow taller, stronger, and make up his mind as to the direction of his next step forward.
The arrival in London was made at a time when the thoughts of all England, and indeed of all Europe, were concentrated upon the changing fortunes of the war for the independence of the British colonies in America. Very little was known, even in England, of the real state of things in these colonies; but before the eyes of the Old World monarchies a young republic;, unlike any that had been seen before, was fighting its way into life and a place among nations. All the young men on that side of the Atlantic were taking sides for or against the western phenomenon, and the fact that they did so changed the future of the world.
Nevertheless, if any youthful resident of London had in his mind a dream of adventure in the New World, he was compelled to wait for the day of its realization, since all the seas were held by the vigilant cruisers of Great Britain. At last, and almost unexpectedly, the long war came to a close, and commercial communication with America was imperfectly opened in 1782. It was by no means safe or regular until long after the formal declaration of peace, in September, 1783; but in the summer of the latter year it was understood that emigrants from England would have a fair prospect of landing in America. It was only a decent probability as compared with the Atlantic ferry service of the present day, and not a large number were found with sufficient courage to take the risk.
Among those who were ready was young Astor, now a stalwart young man of twenty. The ship which carried him sailed for Baltimore at a date when the British fleet and army still lingered in possession of the city and harbor of New York. As to definite plans or purposes, he could fairly have said that he did not have any. He had left London behind him, and there was a new hope thrilling him as he looked westward, but that was all. England, exhausted by long wars and all but crushed by taxation, was having exceedingly hard times, and there was nothing lost by getting away from her. It was said that the colonies also were in a bad condition; but they seemed to offer a continent, not a mere island, for a boy to become of age in.
It was a long, slow, tedious sailing voyage, but it had better fortune than many another that was undertaken during the perilous summer of 1783. The ship suffered no molestation from cruisers, nor from privateers, and her passengers saw nothing of the pirates which were then the grisly terror of the high seas. The passage was not even notably stormy, but it was nevertheless eventful for John Jacob Astor. On board the ship was a furrier from America, with whom an acquaintance was formed during the dull days of tacking westward. His previous experiences had made him well acquainted with all the ins and outs of the adventurous calling which supplied his stock in trade. The whale-fishery itself could not supply more materials for quarter-deck yarns than did the winter tramps of the trappers among the red men of the American wilderness. He could tell, too, of the haunts and ways of fur-bearing animals, and he knew the prices paid for raw furs and the profits to be made in preparing these for European markets. Much information was also given, incidentally, concerning the claims and exactions of the British Hudson's Bay Company and the probable changes which would follow the establishment of the independence of the United States, with a boundary along the old Canadian and great lakes line. It was evident that New York City, as soon as its British garrison should leave it, would hold a very excellent position with reference to the fur trade of the future, and a new idea of the life before him grew in the fervid imagination of the young German.
It was true that he had no capital with which to start in the fur business. He knew nothing at all about handling furs. Slowly and with difficulty he had hoarde'd the money which had paid his passage, and he now had with him on the ship nothing but a small invoice of flutes and other musical instruments, which he hoped to sell in America on commission. This business he still proposed to do, but only as a stepping-stone, for he saw that his other enterprise would require both patience and a kind of technical education. As soon as possible, after landing in Baltimore, he worked his way, economically, to New York, and it was a pretty long journey then. Good care was taken for making honest returns to his principals in London, so that they were afterward glad to continue. business relations with their American correspondent. Exceedingly distinct, indeed, was his idea that he was now an American, and that he had come to build up with the expansion of the new republic.
On reaching New York he found all that the war had left of the young city still suffering under the long palsies of a semi-besieged garrison town cut off from trade, year after year, and destitute of manufactures. It was a forlorn place, excepting for its evident natural advantages. As for the country at large, the old colonies were now States, but not yet a Union, and the new government was anything but firmly settled. There was almost no money in circulation, and trade was reduced, mainly, to its primitive form of barter.
The interior of New York State, very recently redeemed from the savage domination of the Iroquois, was an exceedingly rich fur-bearing region, and its red hunters and trappers were no longer the allies or agents of the Hudson's Bay Company, however diligently that corporation might thenceforward compete for their peltry. It had by no means consented to give up its hold upon its old channels of supply from within the American frontier, however. All along the border and the lakes, to the fort it had built at the foot of Lake Michigan, it maintained strong posts, garrisoned by British troops, which it refused to surrender until thirty years later, and at the end of another war.
Astor found a furrier in New York, a Quaker, to whom he hired himself for such wages as he could get, that he might earn a livelihood while
picking up the trade. He was serving a hard apprenticeship, with a fixed determination of becoming a master and something more. He worked on, patiently, all the while acquiring stores of general information concerning the fur geography of the American interior, its Indian tribes, its trappers and traders and their ways. By rigid economy and by some small trading of his own he made out to lay up a little money while learning how to buy and handle furs. He had very moderate help, too, from his intermittent relations with the musical-instrument business, although there was little enough to be done in that line in New York during the first years of its poverty after the War of Independence.
The business and finances of the entire country were still in a terribly unsettled condition when John Jacob Astor was at last able to open a little shop, on Water Street, begin to buy furs on his own account, put them into marketable shape, and dispose of them as occasion might offer. The national government itself seemed still upon a doubtful basis. There was no banking system, State or national. The flag of the republic with difficulty, maintained its uncertain position on the seas. Commerce could be carried on only at great risks, for the Old World itself was in an uproar, with only occasional spasms of treacherous peace.
Means of transportation and communication with the interior were slow and insecure. The best types of conveyance were furnished by a North River sloop, a Mohawk Valley wagon, and a train of ponies connecting, when obtain, able, at the western end of the route. Beyond the ponies were the red men. With these, tribe after tribe, there was a kind of peace which any man venturing among them could maintain and trust according to his own personal qualifications for dealing with them. Traders whose lack of courage, integrity, or knowledge of Indian nature, unfitted them for dealing with the awful uncertainties of forest traffic, were now and then seen to enter the woods, never to return. Mr. Astor was not lacking in either respect, and, during successive years after his small beginning, the shop on Water Street was at times shut up, or only occupied by an assistant able to inform inquirers that its master was away in the western wilderness or the northern mountains.
Wherever his daring and arduous ventures carried him, he continually found his operations hindered, hampered, often defeated, by the open competition or the secret and dangerous machinations of the agents of the Hudson's Bay Company. He learned, as the nation itself was learning, that the first treaty of peace with England had not secured a definite frontier on the north, nor a trustworthy opening to the commerce of the great lakes, the West and the Northwest. Through all he was forming ideas of his country's political future, the breadth and soundness and forecast of which indicated the mind of a statesman rather than the keenness of a mere trader.
Concerning all the great regions beyond what was still regarded as the hunting-grounds of the Iroquois, Hurons, and a few other tribes, little was known. The men, of all sorts, with whom Mr. Astor was dealing, were as yet the only explorers; but from them he gathered information with which he was able to put into shape, gradually, his dreams of future enterprises. It was seen that these must wait, for the greater part; but money enough had now been accumulated for another step forward as a merchant. This was a voyage to England, to form better business connections. The most important of these were to be made with houses in the fur trade, but he did not, even now, surrender the very first connection he had formed after setting out from Waldorf. It is an interesting exhibition of the peculiar tenacity of his character that, while in England, he arranged with Astor & Broadwood to become their agent in America, besides receiving consignments of similar goods from other concerns. On his return he opened a suitable salesroom and became the first regular dealer in musical instruments in the United States. He did not on this account give any less attention to his other undertakings, and these were reaching out, in several directions, beyond the fur business. An exceedingly important part of them was growing the more rapidly because of the expansion of one of the peculiar national industries. Nowhere else could wooden sailing-vessels be built so cheaply, and American shipwrights were earning the highest reputation for the speed and stanchness of the craft they were launching. The prize to be won was the carrying trade of the ocean, and Mr. Astor was one of the pioneers of the American shipping interest. He not only bought or chartered vessels to carry his own furs, with whatever additional freights could be obtained, but the character of the return cargoes, and his management of them, speedily entitled him to a high rank among the successful mer. chants of New York.
While keeping fully abreast of the swift march of progress in this direction, there was yet another field in which he was presenting a different phase of his business capacity. The willingness to take risks which startled other men, and the enthusiastic faith in the future which seemed to spur him forward, seemed in him entirely consistent not only with habits of personal economy, but with the most sagacious keenness in the employment of surplus funds. He was singularly well acquainted with the character and resources of every noteworthy resident of Manhattan Island. He was therefore better prepared than other men to do a great deal of the only kind of banking business which, for a time, the condition of affairs permitted. In so doing he became an important helper of many other business men, and it was said that he rarely lost money by lending it. If his profits were considerable, that is one of the well understood results of judicious bankingMr. Astor was now a married man, and he was fond of saying that although Sarah Todd brought him only three hundred dollars of dowry, she brought him also the best business partner that any man ever had. He was, however, the possessor of large wealth, for those days, before he and his wife thought it needful to take a dwelling separate from their place of business. Mere display or ostentation formed no part of their ideal of earthly happiness, then or afterward, and there was even something of political principle in his own leaning toward republican simplicity. It was inevitable that such a man should exercise a wide influence, socially as well as financially, and he was vigorously patriotic.
In the year 1800 there was no other business man in New York who was rated at the huge sum of a quarter of a million of dollars. It was truly a tremendous capital with which to begin the business of the nineteenth century, and it was a good time for taking a long look ahead. The politics of the day, and any forecast of the great events which might be expected by such a man, but not yet by the mass, were in close relation to the business plans of America's foremost merchant. Upon the sea, American ships were as yet by no means secure, for the maritime laws of nations were but loosely interpreted and American commerce had outgrown any efficient watchcare of the infant navy of the United States. On land, our entire northern frontier was dominated by British posts and forces, no less than five considerable forts within the American lines being still held by British garrisons, in hardly concealed alliance with the Indian tribes. These constituted a barrier not only to the fur trade but to the general settlement of the country.
The Mississippi was our western boundary, and all beyond was French territory. The southeastern boundary was in doubt, but Florida was Spanish, if the border could be ascertained. An unknown vastness on the Pacific coast and in the middle of the continent was also Spanish. We were a power of the Atlantic slope only, as yet, but American settlers were pushing rapidly into the Ohio country, and there were vague rumors of mighty changes soon to come. In 1803 all men were startled by the sudden success of President Jefferson's daring plan for the purchase of the Louisiana territory. It was Napoleon's blow at England, given almost in desperation, but it at once extended the northern frontier of the United States across the continent to a much disputed point on the shore of the. Pacific Ocean. It was somewhere away north of the mouth of the Columbia River, but there were only vague ideas extant of the course and character of that exceedingly distant stream. There was said to be but one good seaport south of the Columbia, and the bay of San Francisco was Spanish, as it was afterward to be Mexican.
Mr. Astor's dream of his country's future had long since been busy with the addition which had thus been made. He knew more than other men concerning the wilderness beyond the Mississippi and of the great northwest country. It was rich in furs now, but it was to become a settled country and be cut up into States, and across it was yet to be a highway which would realize the wild ambition that led Columbus across the Atlantic. The new path to Asia was to be by way of the United States and the Pacific. The time was not yet ripe, but, during several years which followed, Mr. Astor was the head and front of the growing opposition to British encroachments on our northern front1er. At the same time, his commercial interests were increasing and brought him into frequent collisions with another phase of the overbearing policy of England. Her course with reference to the rights of American ships and seamen became more and more difficult to endure as the keels laid in her lost colonies multiplied upon every sea and took from her a larger and larger share of the carrying trade of the world.
Mr. Astor's forecast was shrewdly manifested in another direction. New York had not yet, by any means, established her position as the greatest commercial centre of the New World. Other cities were proposing to rival or surpass her. Only a part of the lower end of Manhattan Island was as yet required for business purposes, and most men seemed to believe that the remainder might be occupied as villas and farms for generations. Not so did Mr. Astor. Whatever capital could be spared from other operations, he continually invested in real estate, a little outside, for the greater part, of the ideas of other buyers. Some, indeed, was for immediate improvement and he built upon it, but more belonged to the city of the future which his prophetic eyes were looking at. In this as in other parts of his widening plans, there was no haste, nothing which he himself considered speculative, but only the onward march of a settled policy based upon his perceptions of the sure development of the town he lived in. It was a policy so clearly outlined and so firmly fixed that it became a recognized part of the inheritance which he at last handed over to his children.
The merchant-statesman had fully developed his ideas concerning the new West, by the year 1809, and he warmly urged them upon the government of the United States. The old frontier, he said, must now be made thoroughly American, and must be guarded by American forts and lake-cruisers, as far as the foot of Lake Michigan. From that point, by a route ascertained by actual survey, there should be a chain of posts, protecting traffic and immigration, all the way across the continent, to the mouth of the Columbia River. From thence an American line of ships should connect with Asia, one of the Sandwich Islands being secured as a half-way station. He himself, at once and single-handed, set out to found the new seaport town at the mouth of the Columbia River. Read in the light of subsequent achievements, Mr. Astor's project offers something like a measure of the luminous brain in which it was originated. So does the courage with which he undertook to carry it out, under the most discouraging circumstances. Long before the overland stages ran, or the railway and telegraph were thought of, the work they were to do had been laid out for them. The Pacific Mail steamships of to-day make precisely the use of the Sandwich Islands that was assigned to them in Mr. Astor's Asiatic line, but they sail from a port which was not then American.
The “ War of 1812 ” broke rudely in upon the efforts, begun the previous year, to carry out the Columbia River scheme. It was a war in the direct line of Mr. Astor's entire policy, but compelled its temporary abandonment. It was also a war singularly marked by civil and milita; y blunders, but which, nevertheless, accomplished the purposes for which it was begun. At the end of it, American ships and sailors were free, and the northern frontier was forever clear of encroachments, with the great lakes opened to the future of American commerce. While hos. tilities were still going on, the country suffered unduly. It was not yet of age, in years, it was very poor in purse, and it had very little credit. Mr. Astor, however, had entire faith in the securities of the United States and invested in them heavily. The subsequent advance in price of all the purchases he made at war-time rates, much more than reimbursed him for his many losses occasioned by the war, in a kind of political financial justice.
After the return of peace the Northwestern scheme was not at once taken up again. It could not be, without direct and liberal co-operation by the national government, and some of its topographical and other difficulties were better understood than at an earlier day. Mr. Astor's interest in Asiatic commerce continued, however, and his commercial operations expanded after the war. The growth of New York City was already more than justifying his earlier purchases, and he was now reaching out yet further and was buying land which had been mere pasture when he opened his first shop on Water Street. He was a builder as well as a buyer, with a very clear conception of the kind of structure required for immediate occupation in any given locality.
As the first quarter of the nineteenth century drew to a close, Mr. Astor began to feel that his time for new enterprises and daring adventures had naturally passed away. While still maintaining a keen supervision of his affairs and directing all things with a steady hand and almost unerring business judgment, there were many things which could now be safely left to others. The very nature of his investments made them easier of administration. Without prejudice to any financial interest, therefore, more time could be given to books, to literary friends, and to a watchful study of the manner in which events were fulfilling the most extravagant dream of his youth. It was a rarely exceptional accomplishment of a penniless boy's ambition, but there had been in it very little of the element Which takes the name of chance or fortune. There had been exhibited, on the other hand, great personal courage and endurance, accompanied by long patience. It is not easy, now, to couple the idea of youthful dash and daring with even the earlier days of such a career as his, but it was there, in a degree only surpassed by the sagacity and the known integrity which enabled him to deal equally well with red Iroquois, New York business men, or the mercantile houses of Europe and Asia. The result accomplished was led up to along plainly marked lines, by the working of distinctly readable forces. Especially is it notable that the ever-present spirit of adventure, ready for taking risks, was at no time changed into the spirit of gambling, the feverish rashness which so often sacrifices the future to the present.
Mr. Astor's benefactions were many, but he said no more about them than about his other business affairs. Those that are known evince his characteristic of building thoughtfully upon matured plans. One of them was an asylum for poor children in his native village of Waldorf, which he endowed with $50,000. It was a kind of memorial of his own boyhood, given to the children poorer than himself with whose needs he had been acquainted.
For the city to which he had been led, after leaving Waldorf, by way of London and Baltimore, Mr. Astor provided something altogether new. There were already public libraries, here and there, in America, better or worse, and none of them of a high order of merit. The literature of the country was in its infancy, but it gave promise of fruitfulness. Americans might yet write readable books, some said, but Mr. Astor's habitual forecast began to deal with the needs of the men and women who were to write. There was a long and careful study of the subject, and there were many consultations with eminent scholars and literary men, including near personal friends like Irving and Halleck. The idea that grew was that of a library for literary workers especially, and for all readers incidentally. It should be a perpetual servant of American bookmaking, for even Mr. Astor could hardly have foreseen its usefulness to a periodical literature yet to be created. It was, however, for a condition of things not yet existing, but clearly foreseen, that he invented the library bearing his name.
The very locality selected for it was well uptown. It was among the dwellings of the rich, as became the dignity of its intended character, although these were before long to drift up the island, northward, like ships carried by an irresistible current.
For the fulfilment of his well-matured library plan, Mr. Astor made a cash devise of $400,000. Of more than equal value was the fact that its future usefulness was made one of the inherited ideas of the Astor family, for another of the dreams of the Waldorf boy had been realized, and he had founded a “ family.” At his demise, March 29, 1848, his estate was estimated at a then present valuation of only twenty millions; but its nature was such that its future was inseparably bound up with that of the city. Its subsequent history tallies closely with that of the country with whose birth it began, and whose first stages of growth Mr. Astor served so well, as a pioneermerchant-statesman. In studying the record of his career it becomes easier to separate the idea of statesmanship from that of office-holding, and to perceive that some of the greatest, most farreaching public services may be all the while performed by lives which have apparently been given to the accomplishment of success in business.