In response, the defendants produced numerous witnesses who swore that the signature was a forgery. Of all their experts, the most elaborate testimony came from Benjamin Peirce, the Harvard mathematician, and his son, Charles, who spat out numbers like a whale spouting water. After numerous hours of statistical exploration, they had concluded that such a coincidence could have happened “once in 2,666 millions of millions of millions of times,” he declared. “This number far transcends human experience. So vast an improbability is practically an impossibility.” Without doubt, both Peirces concluded, the signature was forged.
As the seemingly endless lawsuit continued, trailing headlines in its wake, Hetty and Edward traveled back and forth to Massachusetts until, finally, they settled in New York. Although Edward was still connected to Russell Sturgis & Company, they spent time together on her investments.
The outlook for the country was confusing. With the Civil War now ended, some investors believed the country’s future looked rosy. Miners were uncovering vast deposits of copper, gold, and silver in the West, while huge numbers of people were taking advantage of the Homestead Act and settling the new land. In the East manufacturing was booming, more railroad tracks were being laid, and the transcontinental railroad would soon be hauling freight between the two coasts. It was a buoyant scene.
But as with the canvas of an artist who has changed his mind, a reverse image could be seen on the other side. The devastation of the South, the high debt caused by the war, and the disarray of the Union created a stormy picture. Many people viewed the country’s economy as doubtful. Seeing chaos around the corner, they worried about the stability of the government and refused to pay face value for its greenbacks. Instead, they rushed to gold.
The rules of the marketplace state that for every seller there must be a buyer. The more the public discounted paper money, pushing it down as low as fifty cents on the dollar, the more Hetty bought. This was the start of the contrary investing she followed for the rest of her life: buying when everyone else was selling; selling when everyone else was buying. “I buy when things are low and nobody wants them. I keep them until they go up and people are crazy to get them. That is, I believe, the secret of all successful business,” she said.
Her philosophy reverberates today in the transactions of Warren Buffett. After a tumultuous period in the stock market, he told his shareholders in 2010: “We’ve put a lot of money to work during the chaos of the last two years. It’s been an ideal period for investors: a climate of fear is their best friend.”
The American government was also finding bargains, paying $7 million to Russia for the vast and vacant territory of Alaska. The deal was arranged by the Russian ambassador, Baron Stoeckel, whose wife had chaperoned Hetty in Saratoga. “What can the country gain by ownership of that desolate, dreary, starved region?” asked George T. Strong. But even if, as he suggested, “the disquisition of territories endears administrations to the people,” the government refused the offer from Spain to purchase Cuba and Puerto Rico for $150 million.
The appeal of America reached well beyond its shores. To those who were optimistic, huge opportunities could be seen in western mining, eastern manufacturing, and the prospect of railroads crisscrossing the country. In 1866, Edward Green traveled abroad to explore the possibility of attracting European investors seeking a place to put their money.
Hetty was having doubts about the forthcoming marriage. Edward’s travels, the interminable court case, apprehension over matrimony, the clash of their strong personalities, all undoubtedly contributed to tension in their relationship. But a rare and newly discovered note that Hetty sent in 1866 may reveal more. On January 19, 1866, she wrote to the treasurer of the Boston & Providence Railroad: “Please pay Mr. E. H. Green any dividend now due on my stock in your road. Hetty H. Robinson.” Edward was rich, but he had a reputation as a speculator and a gambler. Did he need money? Had he asked his fiancée for a loan? And did he do this more than once? The friction was so great that they broke their engagement several times. And this foretold troubles to come.
But Edward was the one person who had stood by her side through the deaths, the funerals, and the lawsuits. He was the one person whom she could count on for moral support. He was the one man her father felt would provide for her and their future family and would advise her well on financial pursuits. And he was the one man she cared for. After a round of lovers’ quarrels and heated feuds, they settled their disagreements, and on Thursday, July 11, 1867, with the court case still hanging over them, they married.
The wedding took place at the home of Henry and Sarah Grinnell. As Hetty’s guests rode in their carriages toward Bond Street, they saw shabby buildings and boardinghouses that had grown like patches of weed around what had been one of the most elegant blocks in New York. But like her cousin Henry, whose simple Quaker beliefs betrayed his high-toned Episcopal ties, Hetty cared not a whit for society’s whims and its promenade uptown. The solid brick house where she had first been introduced as a debutante was the perfect place to celebrate her marriage.
Dressed in a Victorian gown, thirty-four-year-old Hetty wore a hooped skirt and a fitted, boned top that showed off her soft white shoulders; two pink roses and a profusion of curls set off her dark blond hair. Seen in a photograph, she looked “astonishingly beautiful,” said a reporter later on. Edward, thirteen years older, wore his shock of blond hair parted in the middle and waved back, his thick mustache curled nattily. His large frame was draped in a well-cut suit, a red rose pinned on his lapel. They made a stunning couple.
Hetty invited Annie Leary to be her bridesmaid, and among the other guests were the children of Henry and Sarah Grinnell, her cousin Moses Grinnell and his family, and her friend Catherine Lorillard Wolfe. Edward’s sister Henrianna and her husband, Reverend John Jay Elmendorf, who had established an Episcopal church and choir on Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street, no doubt attended, and so, possibly, did Edward’s mother, who resided in Bellows Falls.
In the parlor, the wedding party looked on as the minister stood before the couple and asked for their vows. The bride and groom declared “I do,” swearing to walk together down life’s path. But Hetty had already set a course for her own life: her aunt had been the richest woman in New Bedford; now she was on the way to becoming the richest woman in America.
Chapter 8
A New Life
It took several months to put their papers in order and make the proper arrangements, but in October 1867, with newspaper headlines still screaming about the Howland Will Case, Mr. and Mrs. Edward H. Green packed their trunks, ferried to Jersey City, and boarded the steamship Russia. Its maiden voyage just behind her, the sleek boat was the latest addition to Cunard’s fleet. One of the fastest liners of the day, and one of the most graceful ships at sea, it carried mail back and forth across the Atlantic, brought cotton, cheese, grains, and leather to Europe, and yarn, textiles, and “articles de Paris” to America. The proud Russia steamed across the ocean with its figurehead preening from its bow and its red smokestack gleaming among its three white masts.
With the reliable Captain T. Cook at the helm, the daily regime began as the passengers awoke each morning to find their shoes polished and waiting at their door and their stewards waiting, at the call of a bell, to help them dress. They found breakfast ready in the huge dining room and stewards in blue uniforms ready to serve them generous portions of baked ham, Irish stew, mutton chops, broiled salmon, smoked salmon, cold tongue, veal cutlets, cooked eggs, tea, coffee, chocolate, hot rolls, and toast offered at the morning meal.
After they changed for their promenades, they held tight on the polished rails as the North Sea waves thrashed against the hull and the ship held against the roiling sea. Then, with blankets wrapped around them, they reclined on wooden chaises and breathed in the salty air. Lulled by the maritime monotony, they sat with books borrowed from the ship’s library, covers unopened or pages unread, while their main activities consisted of idle gossip
or a fleeting gaze at a flying porpoise or a giant whale.
Later, attired in their dinner clothes, the newly married Mr. and Mrs. Green, the merchant shippers the Aspinwalls, the Basses, and other members of society in the first-class saloon toasted one another with Heidsieck or with Wachter’s extra cuvée, the champagne preferred by the Queen Mother and the Prince of Wales. Attended by a surfeit of dining room stewards, their hunger increased by the bracing air, they shunned the foul-smelling water, chose from a menu that featured turtle soup and filet de boeuf, and washed down their food with a bevy of good red wines. Later, they played conundrums, charades, or chess, held spelling bees or history contests.
After tea in the main saloon, the men wandered into the paneled smoking room, where they played cards and puffed on pipes and cigars, while the women edged onto tufted chairs in the ladies’ cabin and caught up on the latest shipboard romances. At the end of the exhausting day, they bid one another good night and, retreating to their staterooms, where the stewardesses had placed oranges and other goodies under their pillows, they tucked themselves under the eiderdown and let the waves rock them to sleep.
Two days out everything changed as the ocean opened up, the waves grew higher, the wind harder, the fog deeper, and the ship bounced like a toy tossed on the high seas. Fewer and fewer passengers appeared in the dining saloon and more and more the talk turned to remedies for mal de mer: everything from mustard plaster to pickles mixed with potatoes was suggested, but none of it worked. Instead, as Harriet Beecher Stowe described it, “You lie disconsolate in your berth, only desiring to be let alone to die.”
And then, in nearly record time, little over a week, they made landfall at Liverpool. Their stay may not have been as extensive as the grand tour, but it lasted far longer than the typical honeymoon on the Continent; for the next seven years the Greens made their home in England.
Arriving in London, they found the city still in a swirl over the visit of the sultan of Turkey. Abdülaziz was the first sultan from Constantinople to make a peaceful visit to the West. His richly embroidered clothes, exotic harem, and intriguing eunuchs dazzled the British, who welcomed him with a festoon of flowers and flags, brilliant dinners, and a grand ball that drew fifteen thousand guests. The sultan reigned over one of the largest empires in the world, reaching from the Danube to the Persian Gulf.
It was the British Empire, however, that stretched around the globe. Its merchant ships sailed the high seas, bringing its businessmen to India and Australia, Canada and the United States, procuring the raw materials to manufacture at home and selling them back to the rest of the world, all at considerable profit. As the British navy ruled the seas, so Queen Victoria ruled the parlors, from royalty to peasantry. Save for a group of suffragists who fought for their rights from an office on Langham Place, women’s lives were dominated by domestic skills and procreation, while the men strove to enrich the empire.
The Prince of Wales symbolized the glory of that empire, and when he snipped the ribbon on the new Langham Hotel, he opened the way for Americans to experience London at its most opulent. This was the place where Edward and Hetty resided. True to Edward’s taste and paid for from his pocket, the Langham was the largest and most luxurious hotel in the city, with an elaborate ballroom with gilded columns and chandeliers, its own artesian well, hot and cold running water, and a bathroom in each bedroom.
As Hetty and Edward walked across the thick Oriental carpets and stepped into the elevator that lifted them to their floor, they were in the company of the rich, the titled, and the celebrated. In the course of the Greens’ stay, distinguished poets and writers such as Samuel Clemens, William Cullen Bryant, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, along with the artist Albert Bierstadt, the entrepreneur Andrew Carnegie, and the explorer Sir Henry Stanley, could be seen at one time or another reading the Times, snoozing by the fire, or sipping a brandy in the lounge.
Once they settled in at the hotel on fashionable Portland Place, Edward attended to business in the City: at one end stood the Bank of England, stretched across Threadneedle Street, a Temple of Fortune for the here and now; at the other end rose St. Paul’s Cathedral, a Temple of Fortune for the hereafter. The portly Mr. Green weaved his way through the narrow sidewalks of the world’s financial capital, passing the speculators and financiers, the nail-chewing clerks, plump promoters, and dapper entrepreneurs who all hoped for blessings at both ends.
Based in his office in Gresham House on Old Broad Street, Edward represented his firm, Russell Sturgis & Company, on the board of a California bank. Like the financial houses of Jay Cooke and the Morgans, or the Seligmans and the newly established Kuhn Loeb, which had links to the rich but insular Jewish communities, the London and San Francisco Bank sought European money to invest in the United States. Founded by Milton Latham, a former governor and senator from California, the L&SF Bank’s aim, in particular, was to entice British investment to the state. Along with Edward Green, the small board of directors included Junius S. Morgan, father of J. P. Morgan; two bankers, Henry Bischoffsheim, a prominent German investor, and Baron Herman Stern, nephew of N. M. Rothschild, who gave them access to Jewish financiers they ordinarily could not reach; and a handful of other distinguished men. They were “impressed with the promising prospects of California and its immense agricultural and mining resources,” said the Times of London. They were also impressed with railroads and their impact on America.
During the Civil War, railroads were vital for transportation. With southern lines and waterways cut off, the Union government encouraged the consolidation of existing northern routes, enabling soldiers to travel to the battlefronts and facilitating the shipment of food from the Midwest to the East. But while the railroads were heavily utilized, most work on them had come to a halt. Promoters abandoned plans for new track and cars, and the existing equipment was overused and abused, hauling hordes of soldiers and tons of supplies, including mules, horses, guns, and gunpowder, to battle points and beyond. Some lines, like the Louisville and Nashville, profited from the transport; others were ruined, run into the ground.
By the end of the war, optimistic entrepreneurs focused on the railroads once again, knowing they were the fastest and cheapest way to ship the greatest amount of goods, bringing fresh meat and fresh grains back to the East, and bringing newly manufactured goods and a fresh supply of immigrants to farm the new land in the West. Improved railroads would lead to increased production of iron, steel, coal, and cotton. They could fuel factories and provide jobs, enrich the earnings of average men, allow families to purchase houses, and enhance everyone’s lives.
The engineer John Roebling, who went on to build the Brooklyn Bridge, called railroads “a magic wand that could open slumbering resources and long hidden treasures of the earth; convert stone, and iron into gold.” The railroads were the great locomotive leading America’s future. For Walt Whitman they were the “modern engine of motion and power/pulse of the continent.” But financiers were needed to fuel that engine, to supply fresh money to replace the broken rails and rolling stock, and to begin the vital work on a line that linked the entire country east to west. “As yet, no portion of the world except a few narrow stretches of western Europe had ever been tolerably provided with the essentials of comfort and convenience,” said Henry Adams. “To fit out an entire continent with roads and the decencies of life would exhaust the credit of the entire planet.”
The U.S. government provided vast amounts of tax-free land around the tracks in the West and gave rights to the minerals in the ground; but in order to finance the projects, the railroad builders borrowed money, using the land as collateral. American bankers eagerly loaned them the money for construction, and then, to soften their own risk and increase their profits, they issued bonds. Seeking money for the bonds in London, Paris, and Frankfurt, they were welcomed with open arms. The Bank of England was paying interest rates of 3 to 6 percent, while the Americans were offering as much as 18 percent to lenders. Pleased to find such an at
tractive place for their funds, the Europeans quadrupled their investments to over $200 million in railroads and $1 billion in American stocks and bonds.
While Edward engaged in business for the bank, Hetty had her own business to attend to, concentrating on investing the interest from her father’s trust fund. Like Andrew Carnegie, who cried, “Eureka! Here’s the goose that lays the golden egg” when he discovered the power of dividends, Hetty had already learned the magic of compound interest. As a child she used her allowance to earn interest in the savings bank and saw it grow. Now she used her money to earn a high yield, paid in gold, on Civil War bonds. Even better, she could reinvest those dividends to earn more. And all the time she was compounding her return.
Abigail Adams, who had bought “State Notes” after the Revolutionary War when there was little confidence in the new government, found out the value of depreciated bonds. Against the objections of her husband, John, who put his money in land, Abigail used her pin money to buy the bonds, which increased far more in value than her husband’s real estate. With Edward’s knowledge of railroads and banking, with American industry booming, and with inflation soaring, Hetty increased her share of railroad stocks and U.S. Treasury bonds. The bonds would prove to be an outstanding investment.
“I started out by buying government bonds and Rock Island stock,” Hetty said, describing her first year in London. Using the gold she received as interest, she bought the bonds at a discount and earned a solid dividend. Bonds yielding 6 percent that had sold in 1866 for a market price of $75 in gold were selling in 1868 for $82 in gold, and in 1869 for $90. “In one day of that year I added a clean $200,000 to my bank account. That’s the most I ever made in one day,” she boasted. By the end of a year in London, her profits reached $1.25 million.
The Richest Woman in America Page 9