—New York Times
April 16, 1882
Six years after Henry Hilton had gained control of A. T. Stewart & Co., liquidation of the once prosperous retail empire was announced. While Hilton refused to accept any blame for the company’s demise, refused to acknowledge that the closing was predicated by a series of his business and public blunders, it is quite clear that the fall of the A. T. Stewart empire can be placed squarely at the feet of Hilton, based on five distinct and interlocking catastrophic mistakes.
The first of Hilton’s mistakes was opening a Chicago-based wholesale branch in 1876, following Stewart’s death. It was one of his first acts as the head of the Stewart empire, and it proved fatal. During his lifetime, A. T. Stewart had eyed the Chicago market with caution. Although the city was blossoming into a leading dry-goods market, it already had a predominant dry-goods impresario in Marshall Field as well as other up-and-coming dry-goods merchants. Stewart would be an interloper in the Chicago market and would face stiff if not insurmountable competition. Although Stewart established a small sales office in Chicago, merely carrying samples and not fully stocked, he did not open a full-scale branch in the bustling city. Hilton went full steam ahead. He leased three large buildings on the corner of Washington Street and Wabash Avenue in 1876 and opened a fully stocked wholesale outlet. A price war ensued, and Hilton got the worst of it. Although the Chicago branch managed to stay afloat until the liquidation in 1882, its overall income declined year after year, and its impact in the Chicago marketplace all but vanished.
According to Robert Twyman in The History of Marshall Field and Company (1954), “From the spring of 1877 on the competition of Stewart’s was to perturb Field, Leiter & Co. and the other Western Firms but little.”
“There was no clearer recognition of the decline of the once-great firm of A.T. Stewart & Co., and the rise in the world esteem of Field’s,” Twyman wrote.
Hilton’s Chicago blunder was followed in 1877 by the catastrophic public relations gaffe in Saratoga when Hilton refused to allow New York City banker Joseph Seligman and his family admittance to the Grand Union Hotel. His actions were viewed as racially prejudiced and personally malicious. Seligman predicted the company’s demise, writing to Hilton, “I regret you are making no headway in your wholesale departments in New York and Chicago, and that the Ninth Street retail store, so popular and prosperous under the management of the late Mr. Stewart, has lost its best patrons.”
Seligman went on to advise Hilton to sell off the dry-goods business and hotels if he ever wished to save what was left of the Stewart estate. Hilton, however, never admitted his mistake nor did he ever apologize for his actions. Hilton denied that the company had suffered any significant loss.
When asked by a Times reporter whether there was any truth to the rumor that the Stewart company lost a large amount of Hebrew trade after the Seligman incident, Hilton responded curtly, “The firm lost some Jewish customers, but our business was never injured in the slightest degree.”
A third factor contributing to the demise of the Stewart business was Hilton’s downsizing of Stewart’s once grand and far-reaching empire and the move of the wholesale business uptown to Astor Place. According to Hilton, “The down-town wholesale store was given up solely as a matter of business policy. The trade was moving away from there, the tendency being up town, and we thought it best to have our stock where it would best suit the convenience of our customers.”
By 1882, only three of the twelve manufacturing mills established and owned by A. T. Stewart before his death were still in operation, Hilton having sold most of them off. Only one foreign mill was still run by the Stewart Company, and all the plants manufacturing apparel and household goods had been closed. The retail store, which during Stewart’s reign had employed more than two thousand people, had a mere eight hundred employees at the time of the liquidation sale.
The fourth move by Hilton that damaged Stewart’s empire was his sabotaging of the Working Women’s Hotel in New York City. Even following Stewart’s death in 1876, women kept faith in the project and were overjoyed when Hilton announced that plans for establishing the Working Women’s Hotel would go forward under his leadership. They never did, and it was a slap in the face to women throughout New York City, who, in retribution, singled out Stewart’s business for an ongoing boycott.
On May 26, 1878, Hilton announced that the project had not attracted enough renters, making it a failure as a charitable enterprise. He immediately announced that it would reopen as the Park Avenue Hotel, a fully commercial operation. In response, thousands of women from all walks of life, feminist and non-feminist alike, from New York City and beyond, boycotted A. T. Stewart’s retail operations. The women’s boycott, estimated to have lasted some five years, cost the Stewart retail business dearly, cutting off its supply of oxygen. According to the article “The Decline and Fall of the Commercial Empire of A. T. Stewart,” by Harry Resseguie, “In conjunction with the earlier boycott it made it necessary for Hilton and Libbey to liquidate the firm four years later.”
Lastly, but perhaps more so than anything else, it was Hilton’s handling of the theft of A. T. Stewart’s body from St. Mark’s Cemetery that caused the downfall of the Stewart empire. Thousands upon thousands of people read and watched as Hilton played out his role as a greedy, self-important, soulless tyrant.
As reported in the New York Tribune and attributed to one of Cornelia Stewart’s relatives, “One day she was rich, the next day she was poor; while one day Hilton was poor, and the next day he was rich.” While a slight misperception (Mrs. Stewart remained wealthy even though she was stripped of all cash assets and all of her personal expenses were obtained through Hilton, at an interest-bearing rate), the idea that Hilton seemed to get rich on the back of the widow Stewart only made his behavior during the search for Stewart’s remains and their thieves all the more suspicious.
Hilton recklessly charged people with the crime, including the church sextons Hamill and Parker. He refused to offer an effective reward for the return of the body. He spread false rumors that the body had been recovered. He kept the widow Stewart in the dark regarding the ongoing investigations and negotiations associated with the return of her husband’s remains. In 1879, when what appeared to be a bona fide offer from the culprits to return the body for two hundred thousand dollars (a mere pittance compared to what Hilton had inherited as the executor of the Stewart estate), Hilton not only refused to negotiate but once again lashed out rashly. He accused the one person chosen as the go-between, Patrick Jones, a well-known lawyer with an impeccable record of public service, of being in cahoots with the criminals.
“Hilton’s failure to ransom the body at any cost, and the hypocritical attitude which many felt he had taken during the period of active search for the criminals, widened the circle of those who resented or despised him, and hastened the liquidation.”
—Harry Resseguie, “The Decline and Fall of the Commercial Empire of A.T. Stewart,” The Business History Review, 1962
All of Hilton’s actions regarding the return of his former friend and patron’s remains became a public display of his selfish, callous persona. And further, they showed Hilton to be insensitive to the heartache and angst felt by Mrs. Stewart during this trying period.
When asked by reporters if his policies had in any way led to the liquidation of the business, Hilton responded: “It has been also said that I made radical changes in the method of conducting the business. That too is false. I was in Mr. Stewart’s confidence for many years previous to his death, and we were in perfect accord in all business matters, therefore it is not likely that I should have been included to make any radical changes in the system so thoroughly perfected by him.”
Then why exactly was the Stewart company closing? According to Hilton: “I am tired. I have worked hard all of these years and I feel that I am entitled to rest.”
“I am well aware that all sorts of idle stories have been afloat concerning both this business and myself, but few of such stories have the slightest foundation in fact. What has been said about me personally has not disturbed me at all, however. No matter what people may say about the dissolution of this business, I tell you the reason of it is simply I am tired,” he said.
“A.T. Stewart & Company is a very extensive one and to properly attend to all of its details requires a great deal of care, labor and energy. Its exactions upon myself are greater than I can afford to comply with at my time of life and I want to relieve myself honorably and creditably while I have the health and ability to do so.”
The business and financial community in New York City was of a different opinion.
“Judge Hilton was not a practical business man and there was no one to take the place of the late Mr. Stewart.”
—Superintendent Henry White, Bradstreet’s Commercial Agency, New York Times, April 16, 1882
“Their trade had declined for various reasons. One was Judge Hilton’s inability to conduct it as Mr. Stewart would have done.”
—R.G. Dun & Co.’s Commercial Agency, unidentified spokesman, New York Times, April 16, 1882
“The action is no surprise and it can have no effect. The business of the City is too large to have the retirement of any one house, however large, produce, other than a ripple. … The saying was among merchants that with Mr. Stewart’s death the brains of the firm also died. … The methods of the firm’s management was faulty in the extreme.”
—Mr. Bliss, Bliss, Fabian & Co., New York Times, April 16, 1882
“Stewart died at an opportune time so far as the fortunes of the house of which he was the founder were concerned. The house had already attained the zenith of its prosperity when Stewart passed away and would probably never have risen to higher repute in the commercial world.”
—Mr. James M. Constable, Arnold Constable & Co., New York Times, April 16, 1882
“It was the most natural thing in the world that Judge Hilton should find mercantile life irksome and unsuited to his taste. He was not trained for business and no man could take up in detail and manage such vast interests as Stewart controlled who was not bred to business affairs and had not passed his life from boyhood up in the dry goods business.”
—Mr. Samuel Lord, Lord & Taylor, New York Times, April 16, 1882
THE CHICAGO TRADE BRANCH
CHICAGO, April 15—The manager of A.T. Stewart’s establishment here said this morning that all he knew of the New York firm’s determination to wind up affairs was that he had received an advertisement, with instructions to insert it in the newspapers of this city, setting forth that A.T. Stewart & Co., having decided to discontinue their dry goods business offer for sale their stocks of merchandise and mill properties.
—New York Times, April 16, 1882
THE OLD STEWART BUILDING
The fate of the Stewart Building at Broadway, Chambers and Reade streets in which the wholesale business of A.T. Stewart & Co. has been transacted for so many years has at last been settled. It is not to be converted into a hotel as has so often been rumored of late, but is to be transformed into a large number of offices for business purposes. … The necessary changes will be made and these were filed by Judge Hilton, as attorney for Mrs. C.M. Stewart in the Bureau of Buildings last Friday.
—New York Times, September 20, 1882
A.T. STEWART & CO.’S SUCCESSOR
Former patrons of the great retail store of the late firm of A.T. Stewart & Co. need have no hesitancy in continuing their patronage at the same establishment. Mr. E.J. Denning, the present proprietor, has adopted most of the judicious methods of his successful predecessors and he has retained in his employ such of Stewart & Co.’s clerks as chose to remain with him. … The numerous departments are fully stocked with the latest styles of goods of all varieties and colors and low prices.
—New York Times, October 26, 1882
“It makes me sad, very sad to think of breaking up a business like this. Here are men who have grown up from boyhood in the employ of this concern and to sever relations between employer and employees which are almost paternal is really too bad. … I cannot express the sentiment of sincere regret which arises when I think of breaking up all these old associations. … For 30 years Mr. A.T. Stewart and myself were just like brothers and the interest that I took in this business was second only to his … The mere thinking of it kept me awake a good part of last night.”
—Henry Hilton, New York Times, April 16, 1882
And so it comes about that the enterprises upon which the rich man depended for future fame have all been more or less blighted. The source of all his wealth, his dry goods business, has disappeared a few years after him; his city may preserve his name, but the principle it represented is gone.
—Brooklyn Eagle, April 15, 1882
The closing of A. T. Stewart & Co. was deeply felt in Garden City, Long Island, the town Stewart had founded as one of the first planned communities for working men and women in the country. Designing and establishing it for his employees to rent homes there, Stewart had built schools, churches, a hotel, and a gas and water works, and had supplied a train route to and from the community. And it was the site where Mrs. Stewart had embarked on her endeavor to build her lasting monument to her husband, the Episcopal Cathedral of the Incarnation. News of the demise of the company left the people of Garden City bewildered. Although Stewart and his wife, Cornelia, had taken great pride and interest in the establishment and growth of the city, residents questioned Hilton’s continued commitment to its development given the circumstances surrounding the closing of the Stewart business. According to an April 17, 1882, article in the New York Times, “Some in and about the place believe that Garden City will never be what was intended to be by its founder and doubt of its being a success under the management of the estate. Instead of being a working man’s paradise its residents are well-to-do people and it is believed by some that the estate will eventually determine upon individual ownership. Many arrive at this conclusion from the fact of the abandonment of a number of Mr. Stewart’s enterprises and the fast closing up of the affairs of the vast estate.”
GARDEN CITY
The closing of the great house of A.T. Stewart & Co., or, in other words, the withdrawal from business of Judge HILTON has already produced some speculations in the public mind as to the future of Garden City. … Before his death Mr. STEWART had decided to make Garden City a sort of American Oxford—a place where all possible educational facilities, from primary school to the fully equipped university, could be provided. … Garden City is now a town of modest and attractive cottages, occupied to a very large extent by people who have been drawn to the place by the educational opportunities offered to their children. … The town and the houses and railroads therein belong to the ESTATE. No man can buy a house or a foot of land from the ESTATE, and whoever lives in Garden City lives under the direct rule of the ESTATE. … The closing of the business of A.T. STEWART & Co. has undeniably alarmed those Garden Citizens whose faith in the ESTATE is not immovable. … Now, if Judge HILTON is determined to rest from his labors in New York, may he not also determine to rest from his labors in Garden City? A.T. STEWART & Co. may vanish from the face of the earth, but the ESTATE will carry out its vast and far-reaching purposes.”
—editorial, New York Times, April 18, 1882
BUSINESS IN STEWART’S STORE
Consolidation Of The Firms Hitherto
Conducting The Trade
By an arrangement perfected during the present week, the firms of Groocock, Sylvester & Hilton and Edwin J. Denning, who succeeded to, and have for some time conducted, respectively, the wholesale and retail business of the late firm of A.T. Stewart and Co. have consolidated their interests. The two departments will continue, nevertheless, to be cond
ucted independently of one another. The wholesale firm will be known as Groocock, Sylvester & Hilton and the retail as E.J. Denning & Co.
—New York TimesNovember 25, 1882
As in all things previous, Cornelia Stewart remained stoic during the liquidation of her husband’s business. The same woman who at first was struck down physically and emotionally in sorrow by the theft of her husband’s remains had by 1882 outwardly appeared to be enjoying her well-appointed lifestyle. Many believed that she had long ago obtained—surreptitiously and without Hilton’s involvement or approval—the remains of her husband’s body from those who had stolen it and had found a sanctified final resting place for him at the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City.
Bag of Bones Page 22