Suddenly a messenger came with news that the ship was in the bay. We can imagine the interest of Mr. and Mrs. Astor as they locked their store and ran to the Battery. Sure enough, it was their ship, riding gently on the tide, snug, strong and safe as when she had left.
The profit on this one voyage was seventy thousand dollars. By Eighteen Hundred and Ten, John Jacob Astor was worth two million dollars. He began to invest all his surplus money in New York real estate. He bought acreage property in the vicinity of Ca.n.a.l Street.
Next he bought Richmond Hill, the estate of Aaron Burr. It consisted of one hundred and sixty acres just above Twenty-third Street. He paid for the land a thousand dollars an acre. People said Astor was crazy.
In ten years he began to sell lots from the Richmond Hill property at the rate of five thousand dollars an acre. Fortunately for his estate he did not sell much of the land at this price, for it is this particular dirt that makes up that vast property known as "The Astor Estate."
During the Revolutionary War, Roger Morris, of Putnam County, New York, made the mistake of siding with the Tories.
A mob collected, and Morris and his family escaped, taking ship to England.
Before leaving, Morris declared his intention of coming back as soon as "the insurrection was quelled."
The British troops, we are reliably informed, failed to quell the insurrection.
Roger Morris never came back.
Roger Morris is known in history as the man who married Mary Philipse.
And this lady lives in history because she had the felicity of having been proposed to by George Washington. It is George himself, tells of this in his Journal, and George you remember could not tell a lie.
George was twenty-five, he was on his way to Boston, and was entertained at the Philipse house, the Plaza not having then been built.
Mary was twenty, pink and lissome. She played the harpsichord.
Immediately after supper George, finding himself alone in the parlor with the girl, proposed.
He was an opportunist.
The lady pleaded for time, which the Father of his Country declined to give. He was a soldier and demanded immediate surrender. A small quarrel followed, and George saddled his horse and rode on his way to fame and fortune.
Mary thought he would come back, but George never proposed to the same lady twice. Yet he thought kindly of Mary and excused her conduct by recording, "I think ye ladye was not in ye moode."
Just twenty-two years after this bout with Cupid, General George Washington, Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, occupied the Roger Morris Mansion as headquarters, the occupants having fled.
Washington had a sly sense of humor, and on the occasion of his moving into the mansion, remarked to Colonel Aaron Burr, his aide, "I move in here for sentimental reasons--I have a small and indirect claim on the place."
It was Washington who formally confiscated the property, and turned it over to the State of New York as contraband of war.
The Morris estate of about fifty thousand acres was parceled out and sold by the State of New York to settlers.
It seems, however, that Roger Morris had only a life interest in the estate and this was a legal point so fine that it was entirely overlooked in the joy of confiscation. Washington was a great soldier, but an indifferent lawyer.
John Jacob Astor accidentally ascertained the facts. He was convinced that the heirs could not be robbed of their rights through the acts of a leaseholder, which, legally was the status of Roger Morris. Astor was a good real estate lawyer himself, but he referred the point to the best counsel he could find. They agreed with him. He next hunted up the heirs and bought their quitclaims for one hundred thousand dollars.
He then notified the parties who had purchased the land, and they in turn made claim upon the State for protection.
After much legal parleying the case was tried according to stipulation with the State of New York, directly, as defendant and Astor and the occupants as plaintiffs. Daniel Webster and Martin Van Buren appeared for the State, and an array of lesser legal lights for Astor.
The case was narrowed down to the plain and simple point that Roger Morris was not the legal owner of the estate, and that the rightful heirs could not be made to suffer for the "treason, contumacy and contravention" of another. Astor won, and as a compromise the State issued him twenty-year bonds bearing six per cent interest, for the neat sum of five hundred thousand dollars--not that Astor needed the money but finance was to him a game, and he had won.
In front of the first A. T. Stewart store there used to be an old woman who sold apples. Regardless of weather, there she sat and mumbled her wares at the pa.s.ser-by. She was a combination beggar and merchant, with a blundering wit, a ready tongue and a vocabulary unfit for publication.
Her commercial genius is shown in the fact that she secured one good paying customer--Alexander T. Stewart. Stewart grew to believe in her as his spirit of good luck. Once when bargains had been offered at the Stewart store and the old woman was not at her place on the curb, the merchant-prince sent his carriage for her in hot haste "lest offense be given." And the day was saved.
When the original store was abandoned for the Stewart "Palace" the old apple woman with her box, basket and umbrella were tenderly taken along, too.
John Jacob Astor had no such belief in luck omens, portents, or mascots as had A. T. Stewart. With him success was a sequence--a result--it was all cause and effect. A. T. Stewart did not trust entirely to luck, for he too, carefully devised and planned. But the difference between the Celtic and Teutonic mind is shown in that Stewart hoped to succeed, while Astor knew that he would. One was a bit anxious; the other exasperatingly placid.
Astor took a deep interest in the Lewis and Clark expedition.
He went to Washington to see Lewis, and questioned him at great length about the Northwest. Legend says that he gave the hardy discoverer a thousand dollars, which was a big amount for him to give away.
Once a committee called on him with a subscription list for some worthy charity. Astor subscribed fifty dollars. One of the disappointed committee remarked, "Oh, Mr. Astor, your son William gave us a hundred dollars."
"Yes," said the old man, "But you must remember that William has a rich father."
Washington Irving has told the story of Astoria at length. It was the one financial plunge taken by John Jacob Astor.
And in spite of the fact that it failed, the whole affair does credit to the prophetic brain of Astor.
"This country will see a chain of growing and prosperous cities straight from New York to Astoria, Oregon," said this man in reply to a doubting questioner.
He laid his plans before Congress, urging a line of army posts, forty miles apart, from the western extremity of Lake Superior to the Pacific. "These forts or army posts will evolve into cities," said Astor, when he called on Thomas Jefferson, who was then President of the United States. Jefferson was interested, but non-committal. Astor exhibited maps of the Great Lakes, and the country beyond. He argued with a prescience then not possessed by any living man that at the western extremity of Lake Superior would grow up a great city. Yet in Eighteen Hundred and Seventy-six, Duluth was ridiculed by the caustic tongue of Proctor Knott, who asked, "What will become of Duluth when the lumber crop is cut?" Astor proceeded to say that another great city would grow up at the southern extremity of Lake Michigan. General Dearborn. Secretary of War under Jefferson had just established Fort Dearborn on the present site of Chicago. Astor commended this, and said: "From a fort you get a trading post, and from a trading post you will get a city."
He pointed out to Jefferson the site, on his map, of the Falls of St.
Anthony. "There you will have a fort some day, for wherever there is water-power, there will grow up mills for grinding grain and sawmills, as well. This place of power will have to be protected, and so you will have there a post which will eventually be replaced by a city."
Yet Fort Snelling was nearly fifty years in the future and St. Paul and Minneapolis were dreams undreamed.
Jefferson took time to think about it and then wrote Astor thus, "Your beginning of a city on the Western Coast is a great acquisition, and I look forward to a time when our population will spread itself up and down along the whole Pacific frontage, unconnected with us, excepting by ties of blood and common interest, and enjoying like us, the rights of self-government."
The Pilgrim Fathers thought land that lay inward from the sea as valueless. The forest was an impa.s.sible barrier. Later, up to the time of George Washington, the Alleghanies were regarded as a natural barrier. Patrick Henry likened the Alleghany Mountains to the Alps that separated Italy from Germany and said, "The mountain ranges are lines that G.o.d has set to separate one people from another."
Later, statesmen have spoken of the ocean in the same way, as proof that a union of all countries under an international capital could never exist.
Great as was Jefferson, he regarded the achievement of Lewis and Clarke as a feat and not an example. He looked upon the Rocky Mountains as a natural separation of peoples "bound by ties of blood and mutual interest" but otherwise unconnected. To pierce these mighty mountains with tunnels, and whisper across them with the human voice, were miracles unguessed. But Astor closed his eyes and saw pack-trains, mules laden with skins, winding across these mountains, and down to tide-water at Astoria. There his ships would be lying at the docks, ready to sail for the Far East. James J. Hill was yet to come.
A company was formed, and two expeditions set out for the mouth of the Columbia River, one by land and the other by sea.
The land expedition barely got through alive--it was a perilous undertaking, with accidents by flood and field and in the imminent deadly breech.
But the route by the water was feasible.
The town was founded and soon became a centre of commercial activity.
Had Astor been on the ground to take personal charge, a city like Seattle would have bloomed and blossomed on the Pacific, fifty years ago. But power at Astoria was subdivided among several little men, who wore themselves out in a struggle for honors, and to see who would be greatest in the kingdom of heaven. John Jacob Astor was too far away to send a current of electricity through the vacuum of their minds, light up the recesses with reason, and shock them into sanity. Like those first settlers at Jamestown, the pioneers at Astoria saw only failure ahead, and that which we fear, we bring to pa.s.s. To settle a continent with men is almost as difficult as Nature"s attempt to form a soil on a rocky surface.
There came a grand grab at Astoria and it was each for himself and the devil take the hindermost--it was a stampede.
System and order went by the board. The strongest stole the most, as usual, but all got a little. And England"s gain in citizens was our loss.