About this book

Fifty years in Wall Street

Henry Clews

Mills Building 5 Parents of Henry Clews 7 Birthplace of Henry Clews 9 Map of U. S. by Henry Clews 11 Jacob Little 13 Salmon P. Chase 39 John Sherman 73 E. G. Spaulding 81 New York Stock Exchange 87 (exterior) New York Stock Exchange 91 (interior) Daniel Drew 117 George I. Seney 175 Henry Villard 209 Georgia State Bond 255 Samuel J. Tilden 337 Commodore Vanderbilt 345 W. H. Vanderbilt 355 Cornelius Vanderbilt 387 W. K. Vanderbilt 389 F. W. Vanderbilt 393 Three Rothschilds 397 Nathan Rothschild 401 W. R. Travers 407 C. P. Huntington 451 Leland Stanford 455 D. O. Mills 457 Charles Crocker 459 John W. Mackay 461 James C. Flood 463 James G. Fair 465 Robert Garrett 553 August Belmont 595 George J. Gould 607 Jay Gould 619 Cyrus W. Field 659 P. D. Armour 661 Levi P. Morton 663 J. A. Stewart 665 A. J. Drexel 667 Leonard W. Jerome 669 Addison Cammack 671 Russell Sage 673 Chauncey M. Depew 675 James M. Brown 677 E. C. Stedman 679 H. Victor Newcombe 681 Moses Taylor 683 Thomas L. James 685 John H. Clews 687 James B. Clews 689 Roswell P. Flower 691 J. Pierpont Morgan 693 John D. Rockefeller 701 William Rockefeller 713 Henry H. Rogers 729 John D. Archbold 735 Edward H. Harriman 793 Wm. H. Moore 821 Daniel G. Reid 843 Thomas F. Ryan 849 John W. Gates 853 Chas. M. Schwab 869 August Belmont 879 Anthony N. Brady 881 Stuyvesant Fish 903 William E. Gladstone 921 _Fac-simile_, Gladstone letter 923 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ DEDICATION TO THE VETERANS OF WALL STREET, MOST OF WHOM I HAVE KNOWN PERSONALLY. -------------- MY DEAR FRIENDS: I have attempted, in the following pages, to relate in a simple and comprehensive manner, without any aim at elaboration, the leading features of the most prominent events that have come within the sphere of my personal knowledge and experience during the twenty-eight years of my busy life in Wall street. I have never kept a diary regularly, but have been occasionally in the habit of preserving certain memoranda in the form of letters, and a few scraps from the newspapers at various times. With these imperfect mementoes, I have revived my recollection to dictate to my stenographer the matter which these pages contain, in a somewhat crude form and unfinished style. In fact, I have not aimed at either finish or effect, not having time for it, but have simply made a collection of important facts in my own experience that may help the future historian of Wall Street to preserve for the use, knowledge and edification of posterity some of the most conspicuous features and events in the history of the place that is yet destined to be the great financial centre of the world. If I can only succeed, out of all the poorly-arranged material I have gathered, in furnishing the historian of the future with a few facts for a portion of one of his chapters, I shall have some claim upon the gratitude of posterity. In my description of Drew, Vanderbilt, Gould, Travers, Keene, Conkling and others, I have followed the advice which Oliver Cromwell gave his portrait painter: “Paint me as I am,” he said. “If you leave out a scar or a wrinkle, I shall not pay you a farthing.” I have given my opinion of men and things also without any superstitious regard for the proverb _de mortuis nil nisi bonum_. I have also endeavored to refrain from setting down aught in malice. Many of those referred to are now dead. When any of those gentlemen of whom I have had occasion to speak, who still survive, shall write a book, they can indulge in the same privilege with my name that I have done with theirs, whether I am living or dead at the time. I shall ask no indulgence for myself that I don’t accord to others. I have expressed my opinions freely from a Wall Street point of view, from the standpoint of the much-abused operator and broker, and “bloated bondholder.” I have endeavored to enlighten the public on the true status of Wall Street, as the very backbone of the country’s progress and prosperity, instead of misrepresenting it as a den of gamblers, according to the ignorant and somewhat popular prejudice of the majority who have attempted to write or speak on the subject. This feeling has been largely fostered by clergymen, on hearsay evidence, as well as by the practices of professional swindlers, who have been smuggled into Wall Street from time to time, but who have no legitimate connection therewith any more than they have with the church, which repudiates them as soon as it discovers them. In fact, the great aim of the book is to place Wall Street in its true light before the eyes of the world, and help to efface the many wrong impressions the community have received regarding the method of doing business in the great financial mart to which the settlement of accounts in all our industry, trade and commerce naturally converges. I have endeavored to correct the utterly erroneous impression that prevails outside Wall Street, in regard to the nature of speculation, showing that it is virtually a great productive force in our political and social economy, and that without it railroad enterprise and other branches of industrial development which have so largely increased the wealth of the nation, would have made but slow progress. To preserve and inculcate these ideas by putting them in what I hope may be a permanent form, is another object of publishing this volume. I know you can sympathize with me in this effort to set public opinion right, as many of you have long been making strenuous endeavors after success in the same direction. To put the whole matter, then, into one short and comprehensive clause, my cardinal object in this book is to give the general public a clearer insight of the reputed mystery and true inwardness of Wall Street affairs. In my relation of certain reminiscences of Wall Street, and in discussing the checkered career of certain brokers, operators and politicians, I have endeavored to be guided by a historic aphorism of Lord Macaulay: “No past event has any intrinsic importance,” says the great essayist, litterateur, historian and statesman. “The knowledge of it is valuable,” he adds, “only as it leads us to form just calculations with respect to the future.” In the samples of my experience which I have given in this book I have aimed, to some extent, at this rendition of the noble purposes of history and biography in their philosophic and scientific application of teaching by example. If I have fallen far short of this high ideal of the British Essayist, as I humbly feel that I have, I must throw myself on the kind indulgence of the readers, and ask them to take the will for the deed. For the presentation of the facts themselves I crave no indulgence. They are gems worthy of preservation in the light of the above definition. I only submit that the setting might be much better. My chapters on politics may be considered foreign to the main issue, but as many of the events therein described were intimately connected with my business career, I think they are not much of a digression. HENRY CLEWS. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ INTRODUCTORY. MY PART IN MARKETING THE UNITED STATES CIVIL WAR LOANS. BY HENRY CLEWS, LL.D. To a very large majority of Americans now living the great Civil War—waged from 1861 to 1865—between the North and the South is only known as a matter of history. But it was the greatest war the world ever witnessed, involving the loss of nearly a million of men, and I have a vivid recollection of it, for I was an actor in it, from its beginning to its end, to the extent of providing some of the sinews of war for the United States Government, without which it could not have defeated the armies of secession, and preserved the Union. From the time that Abraham Lincoln was elected to the Presidency of the United States, in November, 1860, the South began to prepare for secession from the North, peaceably if the North consented, but by war if it resisted. It was bent on this course because it foresaw in a Republican administration at Washington its practical loss of control of Congress and the spoils of office—in fact, of the Government itself—that it had so long enjoyed under Democratic administrations. James Buchanan’s term as President having expired on March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln was then inaugurated as his successor. It angered the South to see a Republican succeed a Democrat in the White House, and it precipitated the tremendous conflict that followed, by seizing Fort Moultrie, in Charleston Harbor, and firing on Fort Sumter. Fort