Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival (2 page)
Authors: Peter Stark
[Y]our name will be handed down with that of Columbus & Raleigh, as the father of the establishment and the founder of such an empire.
—T
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON TO
J
OHN
J
ACOB
A
STOR
A
FTER AN EARLY DINNER
, J
OHN
J
ACOB
A
STOR LIKED TO
play a game of solitaire in the outdoor portico—or in winter, in front of the fire in one of the sitting rooms—of his brick row house on New York City’s Lower Broadway. He smoked his pipe, sipped from a glass of beer, and slowly turned over the cards from the rows dealt on the table, reordering them to try to make the hands. In his native Germany, where the game originated and was known as “Patience,” it was said that when your luck ran well in the card game, the time was right to make life’s important decisions. When it ran poorly at Patience, you should avoid them.
Astor definitely believed in runs of luck. He also believed in meticulous planning, bold vision, huge risk, and relentless focus on his bottom line. As the game’s name implied, he was willing to wait many years for his risk, vision, and planning to reach fruition. He treated money—and men—as something to be invested for the long term, and he knew that along the way there were sure to be some heavy losses, whether measured in dollars or in human lives.
The game of Patience, likewise, demanded astute calculation of risk, constant rearrangement of cards into proper order, and suffering of losses in pursuit of a grander vision. One might say that John Jacob Astor turned over his first card when he left a difficult home and a narrow future in the small German town of Walldorf, one of seven “forest villages” near Heidelberg, to follow his three older brothers’ footsteps out into a far wider world. The eldest Astor brother, George, had already emigrated to London and joined a musical instrument maker. Another worked on a prince’s estate elsewhere in Germany. A third brother, Henry, had sailed to America during the Revolutionary War. Following the family trade, he had become a butcher, selling meat from a wheelbarrow in the streets of New York, then a small port city. The youngest brother, John Jacob, had remained behind as a Walldorf schoolboy.
Home was a deeply unhappy place for John Jacob. He was five years old when his mother died giving birth to a daughter. His father was a Huguenot, descended from the French Protestants who, under persecution from the French Crown, had fled to other countries such as Germany in the late 1600s. Known as a friendly and upright butcher who enjoyed the cheer of local taverns, the senior Astor promptly remarried after his first wife’s death and fathered several more children with his second wife. According to Walldorf stories told years later by those who knew the family, his stepmother “loved not . . . John Jacob.” Nor would his father pay, or perhaps couldn’t afford, to apprentice John Jacob to a clockmaker or master carpenter or other “higher” profession. Rather, he wanted his remaining and youngest son to help run his Walldorf butcher shop.
The teenage Astor started planning his escape from Walldorf long before he made the break.
“I’m not afraid of John Jacob; he’ll get through the world,” the village schoolteacher, Valentine Jeune, also descended from French Huguenots, was said to have remarked. “He has a clear head and everything right behind the ears.”
In 1779, after laboring as a butcher’s assistant to his father for two years, John Jacob left Walldorf at age sixteen, as the old stories put it, “with a bundle over his shoulder . . . to walk to the Rhine.” Working his way downriver as deckhand on a lumber boat, he then spent a few years in England with his older brother, George, in the musical instrument business. There he formulated a plan: work to earn his passage across the Atlantic, learn English well enough to get along, and wait for the War of Independence to end in the American British colonies. Already, at this young age, John Jacob displayed the talent and discipline to look to the future—and to plan for it to his utmost advantage—that would serve him well in later life.
Straw-blond, stocky, exuding energy and alertness, the young Astor was endlessly inquisitive. At age twenty-one, in March 1784, the butcher’s son from Walldorf climbed down from his passenger ship onto the frozen surface of Chesapeake Bay. The winter had been an especially severe one in North America. While the ship attempted to make landfall, the Chesapeake had frozen and locked the ship in ice for three months. Along with his fellow passengers, Astor walked to shore toting a sack of seven finely crafted flutes and a few other imported goods—his initial capital to start life in, as the Germans called it, the New Land.
Making his way to New York City, Astor quickly turned down his older brother Henry’s offer for a job in his Manhattan meat stall, having heard of more promising ways to make money in America. While on his Atlantic passage, he’d met aboard the ship a friendly fellow German passenger who traded furs. From him John Jacob learned that substantial profits could be made by starting with just a few trinkets to trade for individual pelts, especially if the trader developed good London contacts.
Years later, Astor liked to tell the story of his days as a struggling immigrant in the mid-1780s when he was a young man and the United States only a few years old. One day he walked through Lower Broadway in Manhattan where big, new houses were under construction for the prosperous merchants in the fast-growing city, then with a population of twenty-three thousand, and reaching no farther north than Cortlandt Street, but soon to triple in size.
“I’ll build . . . a grander house than any of these,” he pledged to himself, “and in this very street.”
When Astor arrived in Manhattan and made his pledge, the United States was still very much an inchoate nation a mere six years old. Its thirteen colonies had united and declared themselves separate from Great Britain and had recently fought and won a War of Independence against the mother country, but many of the basic workings of its government were still being settled. When Astor walked Lower Broadway envying the solid houses, the U.S. Constitution hadn’t been adopted, nor had the Bill of Rights. The United States didn’t have its own workable form of money. Taxation remained in a state of confusion. George Washington still hadn’t been chosen president, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison worked on what would become the Federalist Papers, and a youngish and recently widowed Thomas Jefferson held the post of U.S. diplomat in Paris.
The economy likewise was only a tiny fraction of what it would one day become. Slaves worked large plantations in the southeastern states that grew tobacco and cotton, while small-scale farming, fishing, and the beginnings of manufacturing supported the economies of northeastern states. But almost all this economic activity and population clustered on the eastern seaboard within a few hundred miles of the Atlantic Ocean. European settlement had barely crossed the Appalachian Mountains. In interior North America lay an expanse of wilderness, inhabited by Indian tribes, that extended an almost unimaginable distance, much of it unknown and unexplored by Europeans.
But the unformed nature of the young United States also opened up tremendous possibility, economic and otherwise. Upon his arrival in New York, young Astor found a ready market for his fine European musical instruments in a fledgling city hungry for culture. Taking his German shipmate’s advice, he also hung about the New York docks to seek out travelers who had picked up a few individual furs—beaver, bear, fox, whatever—from frontier settlers or Indians in the interior wilds. Within a year or so, he’d accumulated enough furs to make a voyage back to London, where he learned the incredible markups that fashion-conscious patrons would pay for elegant, scarce luxury goods.
Astor showed a precocious grasp of international markets, understanding that America lacked refined manufactories while Europe lacked large expanses of wilderness. Selling the fruits of one to the hungry markets of the other yielded steep profits. Thus the immigrant John Jacob Astor set himself up in the mid-1780s in the small city of Manhattan as the purveyor of an unlikely combination of goods—fine musical instruments and wild-animal pelts. While Astor’s chosen markets might have seemed haphazard, in reality he had identified two powerful economic veins in the young North American economy.
“Jacob Astor [has] just imported an elegant assortment of Piano Fortes,” read one 1788 ad in the New York
Packet;
“he also buys and sells for Cash all kinds of furs.”
Astor’s competitive nature blossomed early, a trait his own siblings may have inadvertently fostered by displaying both an affectionate and yet also dismissive quality in their dealings with their younger brother. When he first arrived in New York, he worked for a time selling bread and cakes from a basket in the streets. “Jacob was nothing but a baker’s boy,” his older sister would later remark. Later, needing to raise capital to expand his trading of furs and instruments, John Jacob approached his older brother Henry, who virtually controlled retail selling prices in the Manhattan meat stalls by reaching outside the city to buy cheaper meat and using aggressive selling tactics. John Jacob asked his flush older sibling for a loan of two hundred dollars.
“I will give you $100 if you will agree never to ask me to loan you any money,” Henry replied.
It’s easy to imagine John Jacob pledging to out-succeed Henry, as well as outbuild the prosperous merchants with their big houses on Lower Broadway.
Only a year and a half after arriving in America, John Jacob married his landlady’s daughter, Sarah Todd, whose widowed mother ran a boardinghouse at 81 Queen Street. Deeply religious, Sarah Todd displayed a shrewdness for business matters in her own right (Astor called her the best judge of furs he ever knew), and brought to their marriage a dowry of three hundred dollars, which he badly needed for capital, as well as talents that complemented his own. Related to one of New York’s oldest Dutch families, the Brevoorts, Sarah urged the awkward young immigrant with the thick German accent to befriend the city’s prominent traders who hung out at merchants’ coffeehouses like the Tontine at Wall and Water streets, a kind of precursor to the New York Stock Exchange when the city was a small but growing Atlantic port.
Mutually ambitious, both lovers of good music and fond of family life, the couple took two upstairs rooms in Mrs. Todd’s boardinghouse—a room in front for their music-and-fur shop and one in back to sleep. Children soon arrived in this warm and busy household. Sarah’s family had lived in Manhattan for decades and had witnessed the little settlement’s creeping growth northward from the tip of the island. Perhaps it was Sarah who suggested that she and John Jacob invest surplus fur profits in purchasing building lots and bare land farther north up Manhattan Island, beyond the leading edge of the town. Eventually they bought a parcel of largely rural land known—as it still is today—as Greenwich Village, and another property called Eden Farm, which would one day be the site of Times Square and much of Midtown.
J
OHN
J
ACOB AND
S
ARAH
A
STOR
both viscerally understood that, in those early days, the great riches of interior North America were in furs. Furs and land. Where the Spanish conquistadores captured troves of gold and silver far to the south, the early French and British in the cold forests of the north instead had discovered a wealth of mammals growing luxurious coats—beaver, lynx, mink, fox—that fetched staggeringly high prices among Europe’s status-conscious aristocrats. Men killed each other staking claims to fur territory. It was the raison d’être for the great trading companies of the Canadian north, such as the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company.
By the time Astor arrived in North America in the late 1700s, French traders, intermixing with Native Americans, had been gathering furs from the continent’s interior wilds, largely centering on the Great Lakes, for two centuries. Still farther to the north, British merchants had organized the Hudson’s Bay Company, acquiring a royal British monopoly to furs from lands draining into Hudson Bay. The French and British fur traders, guided by Indians, had discovered canoe routes not only through the Great Lakes and Hudson Bay regions, but deep into the continent’s northern and western interior as far as Lake Athabasca, another five hundred miles beyond Hudson Bay. But a great deal of the North American interior, especially to the west, remained unexplored by Europeans.
As Astor delved into the business of buying and selling furs in the 1780s and 1790s, his own travels took him farther from the docks of America’s Atlantic seaports and deeper into the interior. With Sarah’s blessing, the stocky, energetic, young family man John Jacob left their lively household full of young children and boarded sailing sloops on long journeys up the Hudson River to visit the Indian tribes of upstate New York. He walked the forest paths with a backpack of trinkets, or drove a wagon that bogged down on the muddy tracks. He slept in front of the big kitchen fireplaces in settlers’ wilderness homes. He learned how to barter with Indians, who had been trading goods between tribes for untold centuries and were highly astute bargainers. The conscientious young trader picked up enough of their languages and techniques to close his deals in Seneca, Mohawk, or Oneida.
“Many times,” reminisced an old resident of Schenectady, New York, “I have seen John Jacob Astor with his coat off, unpacking in a vacant yard near my residence a lot of furs he had bought dog-cheap off the Indians. . . .”
Soon Astor’s fur-buying trips took him to Montreal—then the continent’s center of the fur trade, and the portal to the great interior wildernesses where the Canadian companies captured their furs. In Montreal, Astor was wined and dined by the partners of Canada’s North West Company, the more southerly counterpart to the Hudson’s Bay Company, at their luxurious Beaver House. One summer in the mid-1790s the company’s Scottish fur traders invited their valued New York customer, who bought pelts in volume, to accompany them as their guest in a huge voyageur canoe all the way to the key North West Company post at Grand Portage, on the western shore of Lake Superior. This served as the jumping-off point to the waterways of the western interior. Astor thus became one of the few white men in the late 1700s, except for the traders themselves, to travel so deeply into North America’s wild heart.
