Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
a child would accept gifts from a fairy godmother. He had had enough
of skimping meanness; with his generation he wanted to slough off the
drabness of the frontier; he wanted the good things of life that had
so long been denied him, and he was not scrupulous about looking a
gift horse in the mouth. He sought out the company of rich men. He was
never happier than when enjoying the luxury of Jay Cooke’s mansion in
Philadelphia or riding with A. T. Stewart in Central Park. As he grew
fat and stodgy the vulgar side of his plebeian nature was thrown into
sharper relief. He accepted gifts with both hands, and he seems never
to have suspected the price that would be exacted of the President
for the presents to the General. He never realized how great a bill
was sent to the American people for the wine he drank or the cigars
he smoked with his wealthy hosts; yet if the wine had been molten
gold and the cigars platinum they would have been far cheaper. In
return for a few boxes of choice Havanas, Jay Cooke laid his hands on
millions of western lands for the Northern Pacific Railway. It was the
way of the Gilded Age, and Grant was only doing what all his friends
and associates were doing. If he accepted a fifty-thousand-dollar
house in Philadelphia, his comrade General Sherman accepted a
hundred-thousand-dollar house at Washington. Such gifts were not
bribes; they were open and aboveboard; it was the free and easy way of
the times. What the age was careless about is the fact that it is hard
to refuse a reasonable request from one’s fairy godmother, and what the
General never understood is that if one is President such a godmother
is certain to be a very dangerous member of the family.
There was far too much of that sort of thing all about him for Grant to
serve as President with credit to himself or profit to the country.
Honest himself, he was the source of more dishonesty in others than
any other American President. His eight years in the White House
marked the lowest depths--in domestic affairs at least--to which any
American administration has fallen. They were little better than a
national disgrace. All the festering evils of post-war times came to a
head and pock-marked the body politic from head to foot. Scandal and
corruption whispered all about him, the hands of his closest advisers
were dirty; yet he stubbornly refused to hear the whispers or see the
dirt. In judging men and policies he was no more than a child. He could
never distinguish between an honest man and a rascal. He was loyal to
his friends and open-handedness he regarded as a mark of friendship.
In the end it turned out that like the thieves of Jericho his blatant
followers despoiled him of pretty nearly everything.
In what must pass for his political views Grant was as naïvely
uninformed as a Wyoming cowboy. Utterly wanting in knowledge of
political principles, he was a fit leader for the organized mob
that called itself the Republican party, whose chief objective was
the raiding of the treasure-box of which it was the responsible
guardian. He had been nominally a Democrat and the first vote he cast
for President he cast for Buchanan. After Lincoln’s death he turned
naturally to President Johnson and was one of his supporters till the
wily Radical group got his ear and carried him over to the rival camp.
They wanted his reputation to hide under, and they took possession of
it with no great credit to the General’s reputation. Thereafter he
was a Republican of the Whig wing. It was where he belonged. He was
swayed politically by his emotional reactions and it was natural for
him to drift into the opulent camp of money and power. His frontier
democracy sloughed away and with his generation he went over easily
to a buccaneer capitalism. No social conscience obtruded itself to
give him trouble. His millionaire friends were Whig Republicans and
with his respect for rich men, his admiration for material success,
he found himself in congenial company amongst the Whig group. About
the only political policy he ever interested himself in was the policy
of a protective tariff, and his Whig associates took care that his
interest did not wane. Yet so completely did the naïve General reflect
the spirit of the Gilded Age that his noisy followers, conspiring to
confuse in the public mind southern reconstruction and capitalistic
expansion, and hiding a precious set of rascals in the folds of the
bloody flag, came near to making him President for a third term. The
General was bitterly disappointed at their failure, and the General’s
wife, who liked to live in the White House, was even more disappointed.
To millions of Americans Grant was an authentic hero, to Mark Twain he
was a very great man, and to Jay Cooke he was a pawn to be used in the
noble strategy of fortune-seeking. What a comedy it all seems now--yet
one that leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth.
Yet to dismiss the stolid General thus is scarcely to do justice to
the substantial core of the man. There remains the work written in
pain during his last days, the two volumes of _Memoirs_ that in their
plain directness--as uninspired, says a late biographer, as “a bale
of hay”--laid bare his honest simplicity and rugged meagerness. No
blackguard and no charlatan could have written such pages. If General
Grant was not the great man so many thought, he was a native growth
from American soil, endowed like his age with a dogged will and a
plodding energy, and he gave his country what he had. Though the
branches of the tree were ungainly and offered too hospitable shelter
to unseemly birds of the night, the gnarly trunk was sound at the heart.
2 • Jay Cooke
Another hero of the times likewise was flung up as it were casually out
of obscurity and reaped an amazing harvest from the gigantic struggle.
In those difficult years the name of Jay Cooke--“the financier of the
Civil War,” as his biographer calls him--became as familiar to the
people of the North as the names of Grant and Lincoln, and was often
joined with theirs as that of one of the saviors of the Union. He was
the first great American banker, and good fortune sent him into the
world at a moment when his skill in brokerage found opportunity for
free play. The war was as great a godsend to Jay Cooke as it was to
Grant, for alone amongst our money-lenders he realized the problems
and foresaw the profits in a popular system of war financing. He was
a pioneer in exploring all the potentialities of the banker’s trade,
and in his dramatic exploitation of salesmanship and his skillful
manipulation of money and credit he marked out the highway our later
financiers have traveled. Jay Cooke occupies too significant a place in
the history of American capitalism to be overlooked in casting up the
accounts of the Gilded Age.
Of Yankee-Puritan stock, he was born in the frontier hamlet of
Sandusky, Ohio, when the Western Reserve was at the beginning of
its development. His father was a country lawyer of Federalist-Whig
affinities, proficient in high-flown western oratory, who liked to
be much in the neighborhood eye. He was a pushing, self-confident
fellow, highly patriotic, soberly moral, fearing God and loving
his country, who felt that the government he supported so heartily
should serve him and his town with equal heartiness. His readiness
in florid speech won him a single term in Congress, and he used his
position as a heaven-sent opportunity to promote a government road
from Sandusky--which it seems was not prospering as its inhabitants
had expected it would--deep into the Indian country. It was a good
Clay-Whig scheme of internal improvement; it would open up a rich
timber country, and be highly profitable to the real-estate promoters
of Sandusky. Cradled thus in speculation and faith in a benevolent
government, his three sons grew up native Whigs, with vigorous
Puritan-Yankee minds, who found no difficulty in reconciling the
interests of God and Mammon. Eager to get on “the right side of
fortune,” they went into the three professions of banking, journalism,
and the law. The eldest, Pitt, found the law little to his liking;
the youngest, Henry, labored diligently at journalism, at Sandusky
and later at Columbus, where he was part owner of the _Ohio State
Journal_ and “boss” of young William Dean Howells, who was likewise
seeking to rise through the medium of journalism. It was the family
itch for politics that took him to Columbus, and although the venture
was financially unsuccessful it brought him influential connections.
He was useful to Governor Salmon P. Chase, afterwards to be Lincoln’s
Secretary of the Treasury, and to John Sherman, who was later to become
a great influence on financial policies at Washington. His reward came
in the shape of an appointment to do the government binding, reputed to
be worth $25,000--a commission that allowed him to unload his paper on
some investors who speedily lost the $20,000 they put into it.
Henry Cooke’s Whiggery was justifying itself, yet to both Pitt and
Henry it soon became clear that Jay had hit upon the true road
to wealth. At twelve years of age he had begun his career in his
father’s store at Sandusky, and with characteristic enterprise he
put in some side lines and became “quite a capitalist.” At fourteen
he ventured so far as St. Louis to help in a general store, and at
the age of seventeen he went to Philadelphia and took a place in a
broker-banker’s office. That was in 1839, a golden time for brokers,
when every business man must keep a sharp eye on the table of banknote
discounts and see to it that bad paper was worked off. Into this world
of discounts and premiums the young clerk plunged with immense zest.
“The business I am engaged in is of the most respectable kind and the
house is the first in the city,”[507] he wrote to Pitt Cooke. “He
was ambitious, industrious, and faithful to each day’s duties,” his
biographer reports of him. His quick mind ran to calculations and his
slender sensitive fingers seemed made for telling money. He was soon
the admiration of the office, an expert in detecting counterfeits,
a walking table of “wild-cat” currency, with a genius for smelling
out possible commissions. Every art of extracting profits from
note-shaving, gold-juggling, delayed payments, and other devices known
to the world of brokerage, he speedily made himself master of. When he
reached his majority he was entered a member of the firm, and before
he was thirty he aided his partners--“noble” fellows he called them,
of honest Puritan extraction--in squeezing huge commissions out of the
financing of the Mexican War. “It was a grand time for brokers and
private banking,” he remarked; and late in life he wrote glowingly of
his cleverness in twice overreaching the Secretary of the Treasury. It
was quite legal and the patriotic banker was vastly pleased to report,
“So we victimized him again.”[508] He was the brains of the company
and under his guidance the business piled up profits at an astonishing
rate. During the panic of 1854 he wrote: “We use our money at 1½ to 3
per cent. per month from day to day and frequently it pays ⅛ to ¼ a
day. We have done a noble business since 1st of January; profits up
to 1st July $135,000.”[509] On the reorganization of the firm in 1858
he withdrew, and three years later, on January 1, 1861, he opened the
doors of what was soon to become the greatest banking-house in America,
Jay Cooke and Company of Philadelphia.
He was then in his fortieth year and his private fortune he reckoned at
$150,000. But with the breaking-out of the war, opportunity knocked at
the door of the new bank. Ardently patriotic, Jay Cooke was anxious to
do his bit for the cause, but he seems never to have thought of going