Although not seeing much of them, Gould remained on close terms with all his siblings, writing often. A few months after George’s birth, when the Reverend Asahel Hough received word that he’d been appointed superintendent of Methodist missions for the Montana Territory, Jay arranged new accommodations for Abram that would allow him to finish his commercial studies in Poughkeepsie. At the same time, he did his best to help Anna as she prepared to depart for the Montana wilderness. “In 1864, the day before we started on our long trip to Montana,” she remembered years later, “I received a long letter from him bidding me ‘good-bye’ and, fearing our slender purse would not furnish us all the comfort we needed on such a long hard journey, he enclosed a $100 bill. Dear kind brother. How many times in all his busy life he took time to write me a few lines to remind me I was not forgotten and with it sent a generous gift.”13
George Jay Gould, aged fourteen months in April 1865, was a toddler on a sunny day, stumbling along between his two parents whose hands he held. After a block Jay picked the child up and carried him. The date was the 25th, and the parents, if not the happy little boy, were unusually somber as they emerged from the Miller home and strolled three blocks south to view history. Standing at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Broadway, just outside C.V.S. Roosevelt’s opulent mansion, the family watched as Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession moved up Broadway and then swung west on Fourteenth. “Georgie rode on my shoulders and giggled,” Jay told his sister Bettie, whose first child–a daughter, Anna–was just three weeks older than Jay’s boy. “He talked his darling gibberish to all the horses and all the stone-faced drummers, obviously with no idea of the solemness of the occasion. God bless him. Of course, the whole sight was quite profoundly moving for everyone old enough to realize. The papers call Mr. Lincoln the final casualty of the war, and the papers are not wrong. Therein lies the only good news. We are all, north and south, well-quit of this futile fight. Now is the time to bury our animosities with our dead, and get on with constructive business. Enough good meat has been wasted on the dogs of war. This is the moment for new enterprise.”14
The sister to whom Jay wrote was about to embark upon a new enterprise herself–leaving Canadensis with her husband, Gilbert Palen, for a place some fifty-seven miles to the west: Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania. Here the Palen brothers–without George Northrop, who remained focused on the Canadensis operation–were planning to build yet another tannery. Family correspondence suggests that Gould may have put a small amount of capital into this new venture, but only on condition–readily agreed to by the Palens, who were well aware of Gould’s damaged reputation in the Swamp–that his involvement as silent partner remain strictly confidential.15 The Palens’ Tunkhannock tannery, unlike Northrop’s Canadensis concern, would remain a going business for decades, closing only in 1931.
While publicly keeping his distance from the Palens’ tannery, Gould remained energetically hands-on when it came to the Rutland & Washington Railroad. During May 1865, he sold control of the R&W to William T. Hart, a Hudson River steamboat entrepreneur who, like those other old steamboatmen Drew and Vanderbilt, saw the future and was now interested in railroads. (Hart already controlled the Rensselaer & Saratoga, the line that connected the R&W to the Hudson.) Jay realized more than $100,000 on this one transaction–his first truly enormous payday. But he was not done. A week later, as had previously been agreed, he and Hart incorporated the Troy, Salem & Rutland Railroad, this representing a consolidation of the R&W with the Rensselaer & Saratoga: a new and dynamic rail operation poised to own its market.
“I believe,” the would-be monopolist wrote Hart, “that consolidation will prove both essential and inevitable for a score or more roads in the coming decade. Far better than mere cooperation is tight coordination, close vertical integration, unwatered economy-of-scale, and unchallenged market domination wherever possible. Of particular importance, of course, are routes between major cities; but also vital will be routes linking quarries, forests and other resources with key ports, or water-links connecting to key ports.”16
Ever since boyhood he’d had a fascination with maps. Now the one-time surveyor scrutinized his maps with a freshly engaged eye. Noting commercial hubs and terminuses along with key resource and factory sites, he studied the small railroads dotting the landscape as one would the pieces of a complex jigsaw puzzle, pondering which among the myriad possible combinations might yield maximum economy and profit.
“We are at a moment,” he wrote James Oliver–once his teacher, now his sounding-board–“where there is a particular, inevitable future waiting to be made. I see things very, very clearly. I feel inspired with an artist’s conception. Divine inspiration? I cannot say. But my road is laid out before me in the plainest of ways.” To this he added that he felt as if “all the wheels” had finally been installed on his life. Not only did he have professional focus, “but also the meaning that is family: a wife and child to fight wars and build castles for. Now that I am at this place, it is a puzzlement to me how I endured before. Everything prior seems to have been boxing in the dark, scraping without reason. Now I have my road to walk and my reason for walking it. Now the pieces fit, and this thing ambition is no longer blind but divine, a true and noble and necessary path.”17
Work and family would remain his two hallmarks to the end of his days.
Chapter 12
MUCH TO GET DONE
THROUGHOUT 1865 AND INTO 1866 Jay spent roughly half his time overseeing the consolidation of the Troy, Salem & Rutland Railroad, all the while impressing William Hart with his powers of organization and his capacity for innovation. On several occasions, when legislative help from Albany became necessary, Gould got back in touch with the attorney and lobbyist Hamilton Harris, sixteen years his senior, whom he’d first impressed twelve years earlier as a boy at work on the Shakersville plank road.
Harris held considerable influence in Albany. His older brother Ira had served fourteen years (1846–1860) as one of the thirty-three elected judges constituting New York’s so-called Supreme Court (actually the lowest court in the state). Later, in 1861, the people of New York had elected Ira Harris U.S. senator on the Republican ticket. (Harris’s opponents had been William M. Evarts, with whom Gould still dealt on occasion in their efforts to settle the Gouldsboro tannery’s accounts, and newspaperman Horace Greeley.) Once in Washington, Senator Harris had become a devoted and close friend to Abraham Lincoln. The senator’s daughter Clara, together with her fiancée–and also stepbrother–Major Henry R. Rathbone, shared Abraham and Mary Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theater on the night of the assassination. Rathbone received a knife wound trying to stop Booth from escaping. As for Hamilton Harris, by 1865, when Jay Gould reentered his life, the distinguished former district attorney for Albany County chaired the state’s Republican committee.
The twenty-nine-year-old whom Harris encountered in 1865 hardly resembled the man-child the attorney had met in 1853. Though still short–just barely reaching five feet–Gould now seemed aged beyond his years. Perhaps to compensate for his receding hairline, the mature Jay hid much of his face behind a beard and mustache. His eyes–which flashed with excitement and energy whenever he talked of business–were otherwise sunken and wreathed with bags. If he ever complained at all about anything, it was tiredness. His lack of physical stamina was perhaps a lingering result of his bout with typhoid fever more than a decade earlier. The attorney remembered that his friend’s hands were quite small, almost ladylike, and that Gould nervously rubbed them together, one over the other, while contemplating a problem or enunciating a solution.
“That little exercise,” said Harris, “seemed the only form of hyperactivity his frail form would allow outside the parameter of his energetic mind. Of course, he rarely complained about his health or his obvious tiredness. Jay did not choose to waste conversation on so trivial a topic as his physical well-being. . . . Jay seemed intent on husbanding himself, saving himself, for the battles of the marketplace. H
e suffered neither fools, nor smalltalk, gladly. Although he could be made to chuckle at a well-told joke, he would not, for example, tolerate lengthy, meaningless discussions of the weather. Invariably polite-to and solicitous-of everyone, whether sweeper of the floor or commander of the fleet, he would nevertheless extricate himself quite promptly from any interaction that seemed without point. One got the feeling that he did not believe he had time to waste, that he thought his hours might be short, and that he had much to get done.”1
Friends, relatives, and business associates noted Jay’s economies of action: the way he hoarded his time and his capacity for focus as much as he did his dollars. “We have nothing to spare for subtleties,” he would tell an assistant. “We must look at accomplishing big things in big ways.” Early in his career, during a meeting with subordinates who exasperated him by bickering about whether a particular move might be too audacious, he insisted that they keep their eye on the ball. “The procedure, gentlemen! The procedure! We need not hesitate about dimensions.”2 Just as he demanded prompt and invariable wit from himself–logic that cut to the heart of matters immediately and did not allow itself to get muddled in meaningless detail–so, too, did he respect, admire, and reward the same in others, high and low. “Young Murray, assistant manager of the road from Rutland to Eagle Bridge, surprised me by taking it upon himself to offer limited discount drayage for the corn wholesalers in season,” Gould wrote Hart in September 1865. “In this way we suddenly become competitive with the wagon-haulers, and excess capacity that had gone empty is used. Every discounted dollar is pure profit. There will be something special for Mr. Murray this Christmas, and we will do ourselves a favor if we keep him in mind for other things.”
Gould’s abilities as an entrepreneurial talent scout, selecting the natural leaders from among the naturally led, the innovators from among the drones, would loom large in the making of his fortune. In time he would surround himself with an assortment of lieutenants who had little in common other than their drive, their smarts, their inventiveness, and their humble origins. “The best schools only rarely produce the best men,” he wrote. “The school of the street seems the one that teaches the most important lessons to those who have the capacity for learning them.”3 Hamilton Harris had been raised on a farm some hundred miles to the west of Roxbury, in New York’s Cortland County. In time, Gould’s inner circle would also include a former Vermont peddler, an Italian immigrant whose only formal training was as a deckhand on square-riggers, and a onetime grocery clerk from Upstate New York. Gould’s natural friends and allies would always be self-made men, and his natural enemies would be those with generational financial inertia on their side: men of inherited wealth, old ancestral connections, and vast social pretensions.
During the hours when he was not focused on the affairs of the Troy, Salem & Rutland Railroad, Gould continued to play the games of the Street, harvesting dollars and hoarding his capital to fund future plans. Operating out of Dater & Company, he acted rather like a modern day-trader, but without the Internet and without Securities and Exchange Commission regulation. Jay coordinated his business with other bulls or bears–whatever the day’s opportunity called for–and joined dozens of speculators just like himself in (as Henry Clews put it) “milking the Street from every tit.”4 This metaphor was more than apropos for a onetime dairy boy like Gould. By the time old John Burr Gould died, on the eve of St. Patrick’s Day in 1866, Jay could–if he wished–have purchased the old family farm plus twenty more like it for cash. One wonders if so self-satisfied a thought as this was in Gould’s mind as he and his family traveled back to Roxbury to lay John Burr Gould in the old plot near the Yellow Meeting House. Probably not.
John Burr Gould passed away at Sarah’s house in Canadensis of “the old Gould disease,” tuberculosis. Sarah, George, and their brood came to the Catskills with the corpse, meeting up with the Palens, who came in from Tuckhannock. Anna and Asahel Hough, far off in the west, could not make the trip. Twenty-two-year-old Abram, meanwhile, journeyed to the funeral from Salem, New York, where Jay had recently set him up as a “time-keeper” for the Troy, Salem & Rutland. The large extended clan virtually took over Roxbury’s one hotel. In addition to Howard, Ida, Frank, and Reid, the gaggle of Northrops now also included two more daughters: four-year-old Mary and one-and-a-half-year-old Alice. As well, both Jay and his sister Bettie brought new babes in arms. Ellie Gould had given birth to a boy, Edwin, less than a month earlier, on 25 February, and Bettie Palen had delivered a son, Rufus, on 6 March. Jay’s friend Peter Van Amburgh would remember Jay’s oldest boy, George, and Anna Palen, both toddlers, scampering happily among the headstones during the funeral service.
All told, ten of John’s grandchildren were in attendance. The eldest of them, eleven-year-old Howard Northrop, later joined his uncles Jay and Abram–along with Van Amburgh, Abel Crosby, Hamilton Burhans, and Simon Champion–for a walk to the outskirts of town. There the party stopped to chat with the current residents of the Gould homestead, the George Bouton family. Later on, Jay visited Edward Burhans, with whom he’d buried the hatchet with regard to the Roxbury land speculations several years earlier. Since their last meeting, Burhans had served a term (1858–1859) in the New York State Senate as a Democrat representing the Fourteenth District. He and Jay talked casually about common Albany acquaintances. Jay likewise gossiped with Edward’s daughter Maria, now married to Peter Laurens, the man who had succeeded him as clerk in her father’s store.
The funeral marked the only time Jay’s wife laid eyes on the face of her father-in-law: stiff, cold, and stern in his narrow box, the years of disappointment and dissipation etched clearly on his haggard face. More happily, it also marked Ellie’s first meeting with Jay’s eldest sister, Sarah. These two were destined to become close friends and allies. Bettie Palen would recall Abram sobbing during the evening after the burial, not so much over the loss of his father as over the fact–as he told them all–that never again were so many of their scattered family likely to be gathered together in the same place at the same time.
It was, most certainly, the closing of a chapter: one they must have looked back on with mixed emotions. Jay’s and his siblings’ sorrow at the loss of their father was surely moderated by a sense of relief. Writing many years later, Sarah would make a half-hearted stab at emphasizing the positive about her father, saying that it was from John that Jay had inherited, if not his business skill, then at least “his indomitable will.”5 But the truth was that Jay and John Burr Gould could not have been less alike. In his own eyes, and in the estimation of those who knew him best, John Gould had been a failure on all of life’s most important fronts. He’d let his children down both economically and emotionally; and his subsequent collapse into alcoholism had provided an all-too-bitter coda. “My father met many unconquerable challenges,” Jay commented charitably, long after John Burr Gould was in the ground. “He walked a hard road. The world did not open up for him as it does for some. He was haunted by unfulfilled aspirations, broken dreams, empty hopes. He drank from a bitter cup, and did so more than once. I have tried to make it my business to achieve some of the things that were denied him. In that way, perhaps, I can honor my father with my actions. That has been my philosophy. That has been my best hope. We all give–or should give–the best that is in us; but what he had inside was just not enough. He was not blessed with the stuff of success.”6
By the time he buried his father, Jay Gould had achieved prosperity but not unrivaled wealth. Approaching age thirty, he was, by the standards of his day, quite rich: worth several hundred thousand dollars. But he was by no means a millionaire. He was also not well known beyond his close circle of business associates. But all that would change soon enough. The stage was already being set for Jay Gould’s high-profile career with the Erie Railroad.
Chapter 13
THE ERIE IN CHAINS
EARLY IN 1867–at about the same time his father-in-law Miller retired from Wall Street and sold his inte
rest in Dater & Company–Jay Gould helped found a new trading firm: Smith, Gould & Martin. His partners were Henry N. Smith, a veteran broker, and Henry Martin, a banker hailing originally from Buffalo. In the midst of daily speculations, Martin usually manned the firm’s office while Smith and Gould strode the Street, transacting deals large and small for themselves and a steadily growing list of clients, many of them British investors with large accounts. It was Jay’s connection with Smith, Gould & Martin that would bring him into the Erie Railroad’s murky boardroom.
The Erie had started off in 1832 as the grandest of visions: a mighty and vital rail link between New York harbor and the Great Lakes. But it took nineteen years for the line–completion of which required cooperation from many distinct municipalities and dozens of local commissars–to finally become a reality. Even then, the Erie fell short of its original inspiration. The “completed” road ran not from Manhattan to Buffalo, as originally planned, but from Jersey City (directly across the Hudson from Manhattan) and Piermont (on the Hudson’s western shore some twenty miles above Manhattan) to the small village of Dunkirk on Lake Erie. Worse still, political exigencies related to New York State’s financing of the project forced the Erie’s rail bed onto many miles of poorly graded terrain in southern New York State. The resulting track infrastructure was at once massively expensive to maintain and inappropriately placed for servicing lucrative freight traffic originating in northern Pennsylvania. Additionally, the Erie was a shambles mechanically. More than thirty major accidents occurred on the line in 1852 alone.
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