Dark Genius of Wall Street

by Edward J Renehan Jr

  More than one minister that Sunday insisted that Gould–who had passed on 2 December, a Friday–was already burning to a terrible crispness in the eternal fires of hell. “He was the human incarnation of avarice, a thief in the night stalking his fellow man,” declared the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on Madison Avenue.6 The minister’s flock, nearly all of them moneyed aristocrats, had hated Gould as much for his audacious rise from poverty as for his dark cunning in business transactions. They believed that they were all, to a man, better than him, despite his $72 million. “The bane of the social, intellectual and spiritual life of America today is the idolatrous homage to the golden calf,” shouted an editorial in the World. “Nothing else has contributed so much to promote this evil condition as the worldly success of Jay Gould. We must refuse to practice and disseminate the vices of which he was the most conspicuous model in modern times.”7 To this at least one minister is known to have added that little better could have been expected from someone of Gould’s race. It was, they said, an age-old story.

  Gould would have been amused. An unenthusiastic Presbyterian by birth and a perfunctory Episcopalian by marriage, the financier had long encouraged an entirely different view of himself. In an age of fashionable anti-Semitism, Jay ( Jason) Gould routinely remained quiet when characterized in the press as a self-aggrandizing Jew, a Shylock. Joseph Pulitzer–who long before had sought to shed his own Jewish pedigree–complained that “the mysterious, bearded Gould” was “one of the most sinister figures to have ever flitted bat-like across the vision of the American people.”8 At the same time, Henry Adams described his brother Charles Francis Adams’s archrival in railroading as a “complex Jew . . . small and slight in person, dark, sallow, reticent, and stealthy.” 9 Gould himself sardonically welcomed such descriptions, telling associates that his “presumed Hebraic origin” could only enhance his reputation as a force against which resistance would prove fatal.10

  There is no record of what Gould’s only close Jewish friend, Jesse Seligman, had to say about this coldly rational analysis of how common bigotries, however reprehensible, could be used to one’s advantage. Seligman was among those who sat about the crepe-bedecked parlor, silently contemplating that most rare of sights: Jay Gould at rest, Jay Gould without an agenda. Here Gould lay, still and silent in his black walnut casket, surrounded by the small circle of family and associates who understood him far better than all the scribbling journalists of the world put together.

  Nevertheless, the reporters continued to scribble. “Those who assembled . . . never loved the dead man, and the dead man never loved them,” a writer for the New York World declared, as if he had cause to know. “He had never loved any of his kind, save those of his blood; so it is the cold truth that there was no sorrow by his bier. There was decent respect–nothing more.”11 To those present, however, the grief of the moguls seemed genuine enough. Seligman was seen to cry. Whitelaw Reid–publisher of the New York Tribune, the one newspaper that had been conspicuously and consistently friendly to Gould in life–held Jay’s eldest daughter, twenty-three-year-old Helen (Nellie to all who knew her well), in a long, weeping embrace for more than thirty minutes. Rockefeller, Sage, and Villard joined loudly in the hymns.

  Through much of the afternoon, the twenty-eight-year-old George Gould, who lacked not only his father’s slimness but also his rapid mind and personal discipline, knelt and prayed beside the corpse. Whether he prayed for his father’s immortal soul or for the wit necessary to run the complex empire to which he now fell heir, no one knew. Most hoped, however, that George was at least smart enough to pray for wit. Sitting near the sobbing Nellie, the other children–Edwin (twenty-five), Howard (twenty-one), Anna (sixteen), and Frank (who’d just turned fifteen two days after his father’s death)–all seemed quite taken over by grief. They loved the man who was a sphinx to most others. Money aside, none of them knew where they would go from here.

  On the morning of the sixth, at ten precisely–for Gould was always punctual–a somber procession of eight black coaches departed for Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. One hour later the cortege pulled up before a lush, Ionic mausoleum of granite and marble set on a large tract of land overlooking an ornamental lake. Gould had last been to this decorous place of defeat, built at a cost of $125,000, in January 1889. That morning had been similar to this one: stern winds, biting cold, and ice underfoot as pallbearers carried the small, broken body of the first Helen, Jay’s wife of twenty-six years, to the sterile emptiness of the new crypt. As all who knew him realized, Jay’s grief at that time had been profound. In fact, it had been total. “The ordeal has changed him very much,” wrote a reporter for the World. “It has added to the slight stoop in his shoulders and increased the careworn look in his face. Mr. Gould himself is not a well man. . . . His wife’s death is a great blow to him.”12 Now, nearly four years later, Jay returned to his Helen, whom he’d always called Ellie, never again to leave her.

  Once within the immense edifice of the tomb, Chancellor Henry Mitchell MacCracken of the University of the City of New York (destined to be renamed New York University four years later) read a commitment prayer while behind him two workmen prepared for a grim task. Wearing thick insulated gloves, the workers held small pails of smoldering lead. Upon MacCracken’s signal they moved forward and, spoonful by spoonful, applied the liquid to the cracks on all sides of Gould’s coffin before screwing down the lid. “There was something indescribably awful about that act,” Gould’s niece Alice Northrop remembered many years later. “And it was so slow! So unmercifully slow!”13 Then, at last, the men laid the coffin of Jay Gould in place beside that of his wife and set the marble cover on the crypt.

  Gould’s ornate tomb represented something more than just a Gilded Age grasp at pharaohlike immortality. It also represented the final iteration–and logical end–for the luxurious garrison lifestyle to which Gould had become accustomed over the long years. The Times’s coverage of his interment did not fail to note the presence, on the outskirts of the cemetery, of a number of “unwashed, long-haired” men wearing red neckerchiefs.14 These malcontents (anarchists) muttered and cursed and seemed to send forth the promise of violence. Still, as they had always done before, they remained at bay, furtively eyeing the burly Pinkerton detectives who arrived with the Gould party and remained on guard once the family departed. The Pinkertons–a presence at the ummarked Woodlawn tomb for the next decade–and the sealing of the coffin were precautions not just against malcontents but also against grave robbers like those who had stolen and ransomed the body of A. T. Stewart some years before. But of course, a few jaded types down in New York’s financial district offered a different interpretation. Writing in the Herald, Bennett speculated that the guards and the sealed casket were meant to keep Gould from finding his way out and returning to raid Wall Street one last time.

  There was considerably less cynicism in the Catskill Mountains town of Roxbury, some 130 miles northwest of Woodlawn. Here, upon receiving word of Gould’s passing, a ragtag collection of rustics gathered at a small church on a hillside to hymn-sing and say prayers. Many of those assembled were of the More family–kin to Gould’s mother, who had died when Jay was just four years old. Others were old associates who had long ago engaged in friendly wrestling competitions with the boy Gould and who later, in 1856, had congratulated the ambitious twenty-year-old on the appearance of his self-published History of Delaware County and the Border Wars of New York.

  None of these fine Christian people amounted to anything. They were little folks leading unimportant lives. They had not seen much of Jay after he finally, as a young man, decided to seek his fortune beyond the limits of their isolated province. (Unlike most other self-made men, Gould never traded on his humble background. “The fact of my father’s poverty,” he once told a persistent reporter, “is not worth one dime to me.”)15 Only in his last years did Gould–hungry to recapture something of his youth–return to Roxbury for any length of time. He’d been back
for short visits during the summers of 1887 and 1888. Though he did not say so, at the time of the latter trip he was already suffering from the tuberculosis that would kill him. Accompanied by several of his children and a niece during the 1888 excursion, Gould roamed Roxbury’s unpaved streets, dropped in on old friends, and strolled the grounds of the local cemetery. He also fished for trout at Furlow Lake in nearby Arkville. Recent gossip had it that George Jay Gould–the much-talked-about eldest son and heir–was buying land and planned to build a house on Furlow’s shores. Now, at the memorial service, Jay’s friends and cousins shook their heads and said it was a pity what had happened. They’d looked forward to having their bright boy home again.

  Still, not all of Gould’s old Catskills associates felt nostalgic. “Jay Gould will be dead a week tomorrow . . . , ” diarized Julia Ingersoll, daughter of Gould’s first great benefactor in business, Zadock Pratt. “He leaves 72 millions, he still owes my father a few thousands. Will he be sorry now that he owed anything in this world to anyone? Why did my darling Father say once, when someone called Gould such fearful names, ‘hush! do not say it loud.’ Because he suffered ingratitude at the man’s hands uncomplainingly, is that the reason why I feel strangely as if I could never speak unkindly of him? What has he put in the upper treasury to draw on, where he has gone?”16

  Chapter 2

  ANCESTORS

  DOWN WEST SETTLEMENT ROAD about two miles out from the small village of Roxbury, New York–a rural Catskills hamlet more anciently known as Beaverdam and later West Settlement–one comes upon a rough slice of rocky land upon which stands a substantial frame house. The house rests beneath a ridge and looks out over a long, thin valley. Given over to dairying for more than two hundred years, this place, unmarked and anonymous, provided the stage for the early childhood of Jay Gould, who was born here on 27 May 1836. In 1880, a reporter for the New York Sun charged with investigating Gould’s roots described these 150 acres as running “far up a hill back of the house and far down a hill in front . . . on the other side of the highway. The nearest neighbor is a quarter of a mile away. Stone fences run hither and thither, losing themselves in clumps of beech and maple trees. There is an apple orchard, and down at the bottom of the hill the Creek, as it is called, winds its way through the thick dingle.”1

  By the time of Jay’s birth, the Gould family had been on this piece of ground for two generations, but the line of Goulds in North America went back much further. Jay’s great-grandfather, Abraham Gold (born in 1732 in Fairfield, Connecticut, a coastal town on Long Island Sound), served as a lieutenant colonel in the Fifth Regiment of the Fairfield County Militia and died a hero at the Battle of Ridgefield on 27 April 1777.2 This Abraham was in turn the great-grandson of the progenitor of the Gold/Gould line in the United States, one Major Nathan Gold.3 A Puritan and a dynamic, voracious entrepreneur, Nathan emigrated from St. Edmundsbury, England, in 1647. He subsequently amassed enough wealth to be described in contemporary records of the 1670s as Fairfield’s richest resident. During 1674, Gold joined eighteen other colonists in petitioning King Charles II to grant Connecticut its charter. Gold’s fortune, based in land and merchant ships, gave him the leisure to pursue public service as a major in the county militia, a magistrate, and a judge in the colony’s General Court.4

  His only son, Nathan Gold, Jr.–born in 1663–continued the tradition of public service when he spent twenty-two years as Fairfield’s town clerk. Nathan also put in two terms as chief justice of Connecticut’s highest court and subsequently took on the job of lieutenant governor, the office he held at the time of his death in 1723.5 Married first to Hannah Talcott, one of Fairfield’s many Talcotts, Nathan, Jr., later wed Sarah Burr, one of the town’s equally ubiquitous Burrs. (Sarah was an aunt of Aaron Burr, Sr., who would go on to found Princeton University and sire the Aaron Burr destined for infamy.) Throughout his days, Nathan, Jr., remained a steadfast Puritan of the Congregational/Presbyterian stripe, expressing always a fierce intolerance of Episcopalians. At one point Lieutenant Governor Gold asked the General Court to pass a law to restrict the Episcopal clergyman of Stratford to that community and thus keep him out of Fairfield. Nathan, Jr., had several children by his first wife, Hannah, one of whom–Samuel–was born on 27 December 1692, in Fairfield.6 An affluent local businessman, Samuel married Esther Bradley on 7 December 1716.7 The couple had six children, the youngest of whom was Abraham, Jay Gould’s great-grandfather, the man destined to die in the Battle of Ridgefield.8

  Abraham married another of the Fairfield Burrs, Elizabeth, daughter of John Burr, in 1754.9 When Abraham died fighting the British in 1777, he left Elizabeth a widow with nine children. Two years later, Elizabeth and her family wound up homeless after the British systematically torched the town of Fairfield. Undaunted, Elizabeth rebuilt and went on to raise her brood, which consisted of four girls (Abigail, Elizabeth, Deborah, and Anna) and five boys (Hezekiah, John Burr, Abraham, Jr., Jason, and Daniel).10 It was the children of Abraham and Elizabeth who began spelling the family name Gould instead of Gold. According to Anna’s descendants, the reason for the change was simplification. Although written Gold, the name had always been pronounced Gould.

  Three of the sons–Hezekiah, John Burr, and Daniel–took up maritime careers and died at sea.11 As for Jason, he married and spent his life as a man of affairs in Fairfield.12 But it was Jay Gould’s grandfather–Abraham Gould, Jr.–who took the most original and unprecedented path. He was twenty-two when he married Anna Osborne in 1788. Shortly thereafter, when Abraham told his bride he had thoughts of going to sea, she perhaps thought for a moment about his dead brothers and then suggested another plan: a career in farming and a move to a newly opened region in New York’s Catskill Mountains.13 Thus Abraham and Anna joined in migration with a small group of Connecticut families, among them the family of Abraham’s cousin Talcott Gold.

  According to W. H. Munsell’s History of Delaware County, 1757–1880, a party of “land lookers” consisting of some twenty families came into Delaware County from Fairfield in 1789. The group ferried across the Hudson River from Oakhill Landing, below the town of Hudson, to the village of Catskill, in Greene County. Then they traveled over rough trails and unbridged streams, with just a blaze upon a tree here and there to guide them. The pilgrims arrived at the town of Stamford early in the spring, making camp some distance below the mouth of Rose’s Brook–a tributary to the East Branch of the Delaware–from which point a few of their horses wandered off into the woods. Abraham Gould and two others–George Squires and Josiah Patchin–went after the beasts. The trio wound their way up Rose’s Brook, where they discovered that their horses had been taken in hand by Israel Inman, a hunter and one of the earliest settlers in the area. Inman led Gould and his compatriots to his rude house in a nearby valley “and with all the well known hospitality of a pioneer, treated them to a repast of venison steak.” Later on, when Inman learned the men’s intentions, he helped them choose a nearby location for settlement.14

  “They examined the lands in the valley of Fall Brook,” young Jay Gould wrote in his History of Delaware County and the Border Wars of New York. “Having decided upon making a permanent location there, they returned again to the party with the missing horses. They could prevail on but two other persons of the party to join them, Nehemiah Hayes and David Squires, making in all five persons.”15 Thus five families took up leases–pledging rents to a lordly patroon, heir to the Hardenbergh Patent–in what became West Settlement and would later be called Roxbury. The balance of the Connecticut party made homes in adjacent hamlets, most in the areas of Hobart and Stamford, all of them tenants of the Hardenbergh proprietors.16

  A hundred years later, visiting the scenes of his childhood, Jay Gould would wonder out loud what possessed his forebears to settle such “barren and unpromising” terrain.17 The prominent literary naturalist John Burroughs–who grew up side by side with Jay Gould–would eventually romanticize this landscape. In an essay of the 1870s, Burroughs descr
ibed how the East Branch of the Delaware drained “a high pastoral country lifted into long, round-backed hills and rugged, wooded ranges by the subsiding impulse of the Catskill range.” But the terrain Burroughs hailed as “ideal for pasture” was in fact no good for anything else.18 A thin layer of red clay topsoil covered an uncompromising foundation of Devonian rock and shale. The slopes of the mountains were taken over by substantial stands of oak, maple, hickory, cherry, pine, beech, elm, spruce, and chestnut, together with vast clusters of hemlock. Unbreakable by the plow, the few open fields were largely useless for growing anything but grass. For this reason “Captain Abraham Gould”–as grandson Jay called him in his History–and his neighbors embarked upon careers in dairying, producing milk for their own consumption and cheese and butter for shipment to Albany and Manhattan.

  The life here was tough, bearing no resemblance to the relatively affluent Fairfield society in which Abraham had been raised. Patiently and steadfastly over the years, Abraham labored hard to build his herd (which never numbered more than about twenty cows) and master his 150 acres. Prosperity proved elusive; poverty seemed always just a bad season away. Abraham and Anna welcomed a son, John Burr Gould (the first white male child born at West Settlement, and the future father of Jay Gould) on 16 October 1792. A daughter, Elizabeth, had been born two years earlier. Eight more children followed.19 When Captain Abraham died in 1823, John inherited the lease on the unproductive homestead, which he seems for the moment to have viewed as an opportunity rather than a trap. It was in this hopeful mood that he began to shop for a wife.20