The Inventor and the Tycoon

by Edward Ball

  The Clinton Institute, Stanford’s school, had two small buildings, for women and for men, and enrolled just thirty-five students. Lecturers taught that slavery was immoral, and when Stanford arrived, in 1841, this placed the school on the fringe in the national discourse. But in the curious politics of abolition, the school had no black students.

  Leland wrote his father that he was elected to an honor society and that he’d joined a debating group, but money was also on his mind. “Here are the things you would want to know,” he said in a letter home. “We pay for our board 12 shillings and for our bed two shillings more.”5

  Stanford studied at the Clinton Institute, went home to work, chopping wood and shoveling manure, and came back. In 1844, when he was nineteen, he wrote home with a question—“I should like particularly to know about the contract on the R. Road.” The Mohawk & Hudson Railroad was ten years old, one of the earliest tracks in America. It ran just sixteen miles in upstate New York, between Albany and Schenectady, but it passed near the Bull’s Head Tavern. Leland’s father, Josiah, had gotten the job of digging ditches along the track and grading an extension of the roadbed, and his son wanted details. “The settlement … is full as equitable as I expected,” he wrote two weeks later, after someone had answered. “I have an idea that there will be a store built on the premises in consequence, the advantages of which you will readily perceive.”6

  A short time later Stanford left the Clinton Academy and enrolled in a third school, thirty miles further west in the town of Cazenovia—the eponymous Cazenovia Seminary. (None of Stanford’s several schools were colleges or universities—all were academies, advanced high schools designed as endpoints of middle-class aspiration.) An engraving from the period shows Cazenovia to possess a physical plant of three brick buildings, each three stories tall, joined end to end. Founded by the Methodist Episcopal Church, the school had 160 students and enrolled women and men together, making it yet another progressive school that pressured Leland’s hesitant mind.7

  He wrote home about women. “If I should get lonesome, I will solace myself with visiting some two or three pretty girls who live in the village, and with whom I am on pretty good terms; or at least might be. But I am almost afraid of them for they are not only the prettiest girls that attend the school but also the most intelligent.” He mentioned a woman he was interested in. “She took a notion to go riding with me because I suppose she knew nothing bad of me.” And fortunately, he added, “I am not encumbered by a very horrible face.”8

  While riding around with girlfriends, Leland complained he was falling behind the other students in Latin. He wrote home to say he wanted to delay his pleasures until after his youth. “With that ambition which the whole family of us have naturally,” he said, “I am in hopes it will prevent me from being contented with a mediocrity or rather from not striving after something higher.”

  Another time he put it more plainly, writing home with a joke about his hopes for money. The school held frequent revival campaigns, and Stanford saw that these ran headlong into his desire to get rich. “They are holding a protracted meeting here,” he told his brother DeWitt, “and I think I must go over this evening to see if I cannot be made to set a less value upon this world’s goods.” He tipped his hand, slightly, showing that making money was his reason for going to school.9

  Gradually the progressive trend of Leland’s teachers had an impact on him. In October, he wrote his brother Philip with some excitement about Cassius Clay, the antislavery politician from Kentucky, whom Leland had gone to hear speak. Cassius Clay was born to a slaveholding family and rebelled against it, and when he won a seat in the Kentucky legislature, his constituents quickly voted him out because he called for a general emancipation. While still a lawmaker, he came to the Cazenovia Seminary to speak in favor of his cousin, Henry Clay, who was running on the Whig ticket for U.S. president. Leland went to listen and was moved.

  “Clay is known throughout the world for having liberated his own slaves and for having given up all political hopes on account of his humanity in ardently advocating the cause of the slave,” Leland told his brother. “His position is truly an envious one. Clay forms a glorious example for all to imitate and if he continues in the path in which he now trips his name will descend to posterity.” Stanford’s leanings toward freedom and a clear path to class advancement for black people seem to date from this time. A dozen years later, in California, Leland would join the Republican Party, which rose up in opposition to slavery.10

  Stanford’s pain at public speaking can be seen in his teens, when he complained about rehearsals in oratory that his teachers demanded. One class required him to speak “in public and in the church,” and he told his brothers that he was afraid of the experiment. “I shall have to address an assembled multitude,” he said. “Sympathise with me. My heart flutters now when I think of it.”11 Leland may have admired Cassius Clay, but to imagine himself in front of a crowd was too much. His fear of speeches never left him. He never addressed a room extemporaneously, always carrying his text, always reading from it.

  Stanford went home at the end of 1844, age twenty, his schooling finished. Thirty years later, using a droplet of his fortune, he sent Cazenovia Seminary a life-size portrait of himself. He asked that it be hung in the school chapel. It must have seemed a strange request, coming as it did from an agnostic who was frightened of the pulpit.

  As the favored son chosen for a white collar, Leland wanted to practice law, but there were only a few law schools in the country. The commoner’s path to a career in law was apprenticeship in a law firm, not school. In 1845 he enlisted at the law office of Wheaton, Doolittle and Hadley, in Albany. He would work at the firm for three years, until he learned his trade. During this time, Stanford lived at 42 Washington Avenue in Albany—and after the requisite three years, the Wheaton firm asked him to join its practice.12

  In 1848, a new migrant arrived in the town of Port Washington, Wisconsin, the twenty-four-year-old lawyer Leland Stanford. Wisconsin had just become the thirtieth of the United States: America pushed on into the continent, picking up colonies, calling them territories, then renaming them states. Stanford had taken a train west from New York, joining a labor stream that was fleeing the East by the thousands. Something had led him to trade the sure thing of a city law firm in Albany for the random grab of a move out. Wisconsin was growing fast. Many immigrants from Germany picked up their things and made directly for the Great Lakes. Perhaps it was merely the moment. Had it been ten years before, Stanford might have gone to Ohio, the previous destination for twentysomethings from New York.

  He took a train to Chicago and then a ferry north on Lake Michigan. The town called Port Washington, Wisconsin, sometimes used the name Ozaukee, the label applied by Algonquin natives who lived in the dense forests along Lake Michigan. Ozaukee would have liked to rival Milwaukee and Chicago, small but growing cities that shared the same western bank of the lake, but Ozaukee had only 1,500 people, and it was not growing. It lacked something, perhaps the appetites that those other places possessed. Stanford didn’t see this yet, not when he first arrived.13

  In his adopted town, Stanford partnered with another lawyer already in practice, Wesley Pierce, and the two opened for business as Pierce & Stanford. Leland was the new attorney in Port Washington, the one with no clients. But he brought at least one thing Pierce did not have—a shelf of leather-bound law books bought for him by his parents.

  While he waited to join the Wisconsin bar, Stanford did the office work. He joined the Ozaukee Lodge of the Masons. In a year, he passed the bar, after which he broke up the partnership with Pierce and went into business on his own. It turned out to be a thin living—some real estate deals, some petty crime, a few lawsuits. He felt irritated about the number of German immigrants, complaining in a letter to his parents (maybe half jokingly) that he would do better in the law if only he spoke German.

  Stanford had five brothers. After the Gold Rush in 1849, one at a tim
e they moved to California. The brothers were rough—Leland was the only one with any education beyond the age of sixteen, the only one with a job that gave him a desk and not a shovel. Josiah Stanford Jr., the oldest, went to California first, followed by the middle brother, Charles, and then the other three. Leland stayed in Wisconsin and traded letters with all of them. (Think of the parents. They raised six boys, and then all of them left.)

  From California the brothers wrote Leland that gold could be had, the money was good if not great, and if you did not want to swing a pickax you could make money by selling supplies to miners. Leland preferred the prestige and comfort of the desk to the sluices of a mining camp, and as his brothers went to the frontier to gamble their lives, he stood fast for a while with his barrister’s fantasy.

  He kept trying to rise in his little town. In 1850 Stanford got on the ballot for district attorney of Washington County, the entity that wrapped around Port Washington. He ran as a Whig, the liberal party of the day, but the more conservative Democrats outnumbered Whigs three to one, and he lost.

  Stanford wanted to make money straight, with a profession. The next step of the climb, he thought, would be to marry. In summer 1850 Stanford took a train back to Albany, a thousand miles east, and started visiting a woman there named Jane Lathrop. They had known each other during his apprenticeship at the Wheaton firm. Twenty-six, like Stanford, Jane Lathrop lived with her parents on the same street where the young lawyer had rented a room as a legal apprentice three years before. They had met when Stanford pressured Jane’s brother to have him over for tea so he could talk to the sister. The Lathrop family had more money and education than the Stanfords. Leland’s people were woodcutters and ditchdiggers and farmers, while the Lathrops had accountants in the current generation and ministers in their past. From their dating days he called her Jenny.

  In the end, Stanford married up. He and Jenny Lathrop married on September 30, 1850, at North Pearl Baptist Church in Albany, and left soon after for Wisconsin.

  In a photograph of the couple made for the wedding, Jenny Lathrop appears tall and big-boned. She wears a black satin dress with a white lace collar. She has an oval face and shining black hair, parted in the middle and pulled behind, and appears to have a drifting eye—her left eye stares at the camera, while her right turns away. A flaw to add to her husband’s halting speech. She would complain, years later, that she had trouble reading for any length of time, because of her “weak eyes.”

  The couple rented a one-room apartment over a saloon in Port Washington. When Stanford’s fees came in more reliably, they moved to a one-and-a-half-story cottage next to a stream, furnished with things sent from their parents. Years later, when she and her husband were supremely rich, and with the nostalgia felt by a woman thronged with servants, Jenny remembered the years in Wisconsin as the time when she did her happiest homemaking. But even then, the couple liked it when others did the work. They hired a black woman to come once a week for a twelve-hour day. (Although Jenny Stanford remembered her, no one seems to have written down her name.) The woman did the housecleaning, the laundry and ironing for the week, the firewood cutting, and half of the cooking, including stews and pies that would keep for the week. When Jenny reminisced, it was sometimes about her first, unnamed servant.

  Jane Lathrop and Leland Stanford, newly married, in 1850 (Illustration Credit c13.2)

  The town did not grow, the small change from Stanford’s clients did not turn into big fees. Meanwhile, his brothers wrote a stream of letters about the high days in California. In January 1852 Leland felt aroused by the golden stories. He wrote his brother Thomas: “Judging from what you have written home I expect to see you in California in the spring.”

  Two months later, in March 1852, a fire destroyed the frame building on Franklin Street where Stanford had his office. It started in the grocery store, below him, and continued up to the second floor to consume the office, his records, his law books. No one was hurt but all was cinders. Stanford wrote his parents, “I hope you are in good spirits, for I am afraid mine approach very near the blues.” He was already a man who did not take possession of his emotions: to say he was “near the blues” might have meant he felt a wretched depression.

  After the fire, his brothers’ stories about the munificence of the Golden State sounded better. In California, even farm boys who had shoveled manure could now dig out gold, or more reliably—the thing the brothers were doing—they could flip a profit by selling pickaxes and boots and oil lamps to gold diggers. Leland wrote his mother and father, who did not want to lose their last son to the far West, “You speak in your letters somewhat it seems to me as if you would prefer that I should not go to California. Now that my library is burned I make no doubt that you would say to me go though I had said nothing upon the subject.”14

  Stanford estimated his clients owed him $2,000 in fees, but he guessed he could collect only a tenth of it. He owned twenty acres of land and some town lots, neither worth much. “The recent fire together with the fact of the passage of a law removing the county seat has put a perfect damper upon real estate here,” he told his parents. “I shall probably be able to settle up everything here and have something upwards of $200.”

  At age twenty-eight and married, Stanford lowered his gaze and asked his parents for money. “You have kindly offered to furnish me with the means necessary to take me to California,” he wrote. “It will be with great reluctance that I can receive assistance from you.” He took the money.

  Of Leland’s brothers in California, three were younger than thirty, two older. Like everyone, they had tried digging for gold, choosing a place on the American River called Mormon Island, twenty-five miles east of Sacramento. Coming up with some gold, but not enough, the five brothers decided instead to sell provisions and tools to other miners. In spring 1851, Charles and Josiah Stanford opened a general store in Sacramento. “We made a great deal of money,” Josiah later remembered, “$2000 clear every month.”15

  Leland Stanford and his wife initially went home to Albany. It was May 1852. There, Stanford deposited Jenny with her parents, with the excuse that they were getting old. (Jenny Stanford always regretted having been stabled, like a horse, while her husband had his first western adventure.) Stanford got on a boat down the Hudson River to New York City, and from there on June 5 he boarded a steamship, the Northern Light. He arrived in Nicaragua and traveled over the mountains to the Pacific side of the isthmus, boarded a steamer called the Independence, and reached San Francisco on July 12. The trip from New York to San Francisco took thirty-seven days.

  “He came out here without a dollar,” his brother Josiah remembered. Stanford’s brothers loaned him, at interest, some goods to sell. Leland took the groceries and dry goods and hardware and fuel to a mining camp called Cold Springs, a muddy settlement of six hundred men in tents and shanties near a big gold strike at the town of Placerville, fifty miles east of Sacramento. He opened a store in a tent. Like all frontier stores of the time, it had canvas for the roof and walls, except for one wooden wall, which faced the street. There shoppers passed through a genuine wooden door, which made the storefront look like a building. Stanford joined with a partner who knew the area, Nicholas Smith, and put up the shop sign, SMITH & STANFORD.

  There had been a lynching at Placerville—two Frenchmen and a Mexican, accused of stealing, were killed by other miners—thus the nickname of the area was “Hangtown.”16 One of the locals, a man called George Mull, had brought several slaves with him from the South and put them to work on his claims. Lynching and slaves—for Stanford, it was a cold introduction to the frontier. As a teenager Stanford had attended a school in upstate New York with abolitionist leanings, and he detested slavery, but with his caution about things, there is no evidence he tried to help black workers in the hills. In 1852, the California census recorded a new arrival in Hangtown, a “laborer” called Leland Stanford. In fact, he was a lawyer who had given up the law and now tried to make his way as a s
hopkeeper, a grocer.

  Miners drifted off when the mines did not pay, and Hangtown thinned out. After ten months Stanford and Smith took down their store and followed the prospecting herd, moving thirty miles north to a new mining camp, Michigan Bluff. The slapdash cluster of tents and cabins stood half a mile from a fork in the Sacramento River and 1,500 feet up the side of a gorge. Gold came strong from the sluices, but Stanford kept away from the roulette of claims and strikes because he preferred the dull money in dry goods. At least as a start.

  Late in life Stanford remembered that for two years, as a trader on the frontier, he had slept on the countertop of his store, blankets beneath and on top of him, his arms wrapped around the cash box. (Although he never mentioned it, he might have had a gun in the bundle, too.) His brother Josiah, who ran the bigger Stanford Brothers store in Sacramento, said that he and his siblings used to man their shops wearing a full apron down to the ankles. Leland probably did the same, measuring pounds of rice in the hollow of his apron, taking an I.O.U. for potatoes or for a shovel. There is a photograph from about 1854 that shows the store in Michigan Bluff, a rickety shack next to a ditch, with two big signs hanging above. The smaller reads SMITH & STANFORD. The larger sign lists the contents of the store, in Cantonese. About a quarter of the miners came from China, and Stanford wanted their business.