The Wizard Of Wall Street And His Wealth; Or, The Life And Deeds Of Jay Gould

THE Wizard of Wall Street AND HIS WEALTH,

OR THE LIFE AND DEEDS OF JAY GOULD BY TRUMBULL WHITE. JOHN C. YORSTON &amp; CO., PHILADELPHIA, PA. 1893. Copyright, 1892 , By MID-CONTINENT PUBLISHING CO....

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PREFACE.

The history of any man who had been able to distinguish himself by acquiring in his lifetime the greatest amount of wealth ever accumulated by one man, would necessarily be of interest, even if his success had been won by the most ordinary of methods or the most marvelous succession of good fortune. But when that man is one whose career was full of the most dramatic incidents; when he won his wealth by feats of financial daring which astounded the world; when, in short, that man is Jay Gould, “T

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CHAPTER I. JAY GOULD A GREAT MAN.

In every walk of human life, in every imaginable human occupation, that man who stands at the very top, who is superior to all others in that particular occupation, is of necessity a great man. No matter how humble that occupation may be, absolute superiority in it, in itself means greatness. The time once was when commercial eminence was considered to belong rather to the lower classes, and was, indeed, despised by those who thought themselves to be of knightlier blood than their fellows. The C

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CHAPTER II. YOUTH AND ANCESTRY OF JAY GOULD.

Many who knew Mr. Gould intimately are in the habit of asserting that his origin must have been Hebraic. No one pretends to say how many generations back the Jewish blood was in the family, or that Mr. Gould was aware of its existence in him. But both his names, Jason, or Jay, and Gould, served to strengthen this belief in those who held it. The twisted form, “Gould,” was suspected of being changed from “Gold,” which is a common prefix in the names of inanimate and natural objects which certain

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CHAPTER III. GOULD AS SURVEYOR AND HISTORIAN.

The tin shop was profitable but slow, and with an outcropping of the avidity which he afterward showed, he sought for something more lucrative. In 1852 he transferred his interest to his father and arranged to take charge of a surveying party at twenty dollars a month. Gould had heard of a man in Ulster county who was looking for an assistant. He was making a map of that county and Gould wrote to him. When he left home to take the position, his father offered him money, but he left all his capit

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CHAPTER IV. GOULD AND THE TANNERY WAR.

From the mildly humdrum life of school boy, tinker, surveyor and bookseller, Gould’s career now changes to an intensely dramatic period. While pursuing his avocation as a surveyor, he made the acquaintance of Zadock Pratt, a local celebrity who lived at Prattsville not far from Roxbury, for whom he had done some surveying. Pratt is described as an ignorant man who had amassed what at that time and in that section was considered an immense fortune. He was worth a hundred thousand dollars, and had

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CHAPTER V. GOULD’S ROMANTIC MARRIAGE AND HIS FIRST RAILROAD.

When Jay Gould reached New York in 1860, after the tannery war, he was almost impoverished. He settled down at the Everett House, a comfortable hotel, and there he lived for a little time while waiting for something to turn up. Gould was not very busy just then and used to wander around the city, up town and down town, through Wall street and Lower Broadway, where in later years he became such a power; maybe, even then, wondering if he would ever reach the point in wealth and influence that belo

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CHAPTER VI. GOULD’S ASSAULT UPON ERIE.

The most thrilling, the most discreditable portion of Gould’s career, is contained in the ten years following the close of the war of the rebellion. The blackest pages in the history of American railways comprise the chapter relating to the Erie and the most shameful efforts to wreck the fortunes of a thousand men for the aggrandizement of the fortunes of a few, were made in connection with the schemes that resulted in “Black Friday.” Nothing in the Credit Mobilier and the history of the rise of

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CHAPTER VII. GOULD’S VICTORY AND FINAL DEFEAT IN ERIE.

During these years of Erie conflicts, Gould not only fought his enemies most bitterly, but hardly appreciated the usual feelings of men to be true to their friends. Gould and Fisk now had practical control of Erie. They saw the October election coming, and they were nervous. But the crops were good and Erie’s traffic brought in good returns. Englishmen had become strangely fascinated with the stock, and had bought over 100,000 shares. On August 19th the stock had dropped to 44, and then to the a

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CHAPTER VIII. THE GOLD CONSPIRACY.

“Black Friday,” that darkest day in the financial history of America, was not the creation of sudden circumstance, but the culmination of a plan conceived by Gould and his associates, with all its details arranged for weeks before. Whether the whole truth has ever been written about Mr. Gould’s gold operations is open to doubt. The explanation given by Henry Clews, in his noted work, “Twenty-eight years in Wall Street,” seems a trifle naive to those who are not so deeply initiated in Wall street

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CHAPTER IX. CULMINATION OF CONSPIRACY—BLACK FRIDAY.

September is the memorable month of the gold conspiracy in Wall street. Between the 20th of August and the first of September, Gould, in company with Woodward and Kimber, two large speculators, made a pool to raise the premium on gold, and some ten or fifteen millions were bought, but with very little effect on the price. An event now took place which would have seemed to justify the implicit belief of an Erie treasurer in the corruptibility of all mankind. The unsuspicious President again passe

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CHAPTER X. GOULD AND THE WESTERN RAILWAY SYSTEMS.

After Mr. Gould was ousted from Erie, he entered into that career of acquisition which made him the master of several of the most important railroads in the United States, of the Yale system of telegraph and of the chief line of transportation in New York city. In nearly all his railroad operations he repeated, to a greater or less extent, his career in Erie. His scheme was to buy up cheap and bankrupt roads, reorganize them, issue new stock and bonds, unload on some other road, or else, by the

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CHAPTER XI. GOULD AND THE TELEGRAPH MONOPOLY.

The manipulation of values and the methods of running the railroad and telegraph systems of the United States effect more nearly the personal interests of every individual than do any of the other great enterprises of the country. It is for that reason that Jay Gould’s actions in his railroad properties and his telegraph companies are such an important factor of interest in the events of his life. Mr. Gould’s connection with the Western Union Telegraph Company began in the early part of 1881. Fo

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CHAPTER XII. GOULD AND THE MANHATTAN ELEVATED.

Jay Gould was not an originator of systems. Others with ideas secured charters, began railroads and other schemes, and then, when money was needed, Gould would step in and profit by their energies by purchase at low figures. This was never more forcibly illustrated than by his connection with the elevated railroad system of New York City. He had nothing to do with their construction. In fact, Gould’s name is unidentified with any great public undertaking original with himself. Other men planned

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CHAPTER XIII. THE LIFE OF A WALL STREET KING.

While it is true that the story of Jay Gould’s career in Wall street is closely allied with his outside operations, a full account of which has already been given, there still remain many other incidents connected directly with his work on the street of unusual interest. Out of this mass of material but two or three incidents of the most commanding interest can be used. The most dramatic of these was the pommeling of Jay Gould by Major A. A. Selover in August, 1877. Selover was a Californian, a

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CHAPTER XIV. THE KING IS DEAD.

Enormous wealth, power in the world of finance, every luxury that is at the command of man except health, that Jay Gould possessed. On Friday morning, December 3, 1892, at 9:15 o’clock, his wonderful career was ended. It was a perfect December morning when the soul of the magnate went to the undiscovered country, whither it had been trending for so many months. He died, not as he had feared to die, by the hand of the assassin or the dynamite crank, but as peacefully as any babe whose lamp of lif

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CHAPTER XV. GOULD LAID TO REST.

The first intention, after the death of Jay Gould, was that the funeral services over his remains should be as public as the limited accommodations of the house would permit. Ex-Judge John T. Dillon, who had been one of the legal advisers of Mr. Gould, and Dr. Munn, Mr. Gould’s personal and private physician, met nearly all of the members of the family and agreed upon funeral arrangements with that understanding. But it was soon discovered that the probable result of a public funeral would be a

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CHAPTER XVI. PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF JAY GOULD.

Much of the interest in the life and career of Mr. Gould is in regard to his personal characteristics and qualifications, and much that is to be learned from his life is to be gained from the study of the same circumstances. The varying opinions regarding him are perhaps more widely different than those concerning any other great financier. As has been said, there are those who see in him all that was ideal in the character of a powerful money monarch. There are more whose criticisms can not be

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CHAPTER XVII. THE FAMILY OF GOULD.

Jay Gould had no social ambition whatever. He was the most domestic of men, and his affection and attention to his own immediate family was so deep as to apparently leave no place for outside social influences. Mr. Gould was greatly stricken by the death of his wife, which occurred January 13, 1889, after a long and painful illness. When she died there were present besides her husband and Mr. and Mrs. George Gould, her sons, Howard and Edwin; her daughters, Helen and Anna, and her sisters, Mrs.

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CHAPTER XVIII. THE GREAT FORTUNE AND ITS INHERITORS.

Five days after the death of Jay Gould, the contents of his will, or at least the substance of it, were made public in the press. The will itself remained under lock and key in the safe of ex-Judge John F. Dillon, counsel for the executors. “The original will,” said ex-Judge Dillon, in giving out the summary, “is dated December 24, 1885, during the lifetime of Mr. Gould’s wife. It made various provisions for her benefit which failed of effect by reason of her death before the death of her husban

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CHAPTER XIX. JAY GOULD’S RELATIONS WITH THE PUBLIC.

There are interesting features of the life of Jay Gould regarding his relations with the public, the church, the press and the people whom he met. Jay Gould was not what is called a religious man. He was a pewholder in the Presbyterian church at Irvington and in the Rev. Dr. Paxton’s church on West Forty-second street, but not a communicant. If he ever expressed any religious views it was to the Rev. Dr. Paxton. Certainly he did not to the Rev. Dr. Henry M. MacCracken, chancellor of the Universi

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CHAPTER XX. A CHAPTER OF ANECDOTES.

While it is true that Gould loved to envelope his transactions in mystery, and was a master of the art of keeping silence, and though during most of his life he was engaged in financial intrigues and occult speculations, yet the main facts of his life can be found in the official records of law cases and the numerous legislative and congressional investigations that were held on many of his transactions. The facts of this volume are not to be understood as doing Mr. Gould an injustice, for almos

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