The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  In 1634, one Don Diego Peixotto and his two brothers—Antonio Mendes Peixotto and Joshua Peixotto—were imprisoned for high treason. They were accused, no less, of “governing an armada which caused the downfall of Pernambuco,” and the motive ascribed to them was vengeance against the Inquisition. The Peixottos also were fond of hyphenated names. When, in the eighteenth century, a Miss Cohen Peixotto married Mr. Levy Maduro, their descendants used the name Maduro-Peixotto, the wife’s name last.

  The Peixottos were noted for their hot tempers and, as happens in any tight-knit family, feuds developed. There are branches of the Peixotto family that have not spoken to each other for generations. At a Peixotto family funeral in the 1830’s, hardly any of the mourners were on speaking terms with the others. Peixottos have been quick to cut their heirs out of their wills for the slightest breach of loyalty, but then so have the Seixases. When Abraham Mendes Seixas, patriarch of the American branch of the family (who, to confuse things somewhat, also used the name Miguel Pacheco da Silva), died in London in 1738, he left a will—written in Portuguese—in which he left the bulk of his considerable estate to his two daughters. To his only son—who later emigrated to New York—he left “only fifty pounds for reasons known to myself.” It was possibly because the young man had reached the advanced age of thirty without marrying to produce an heir. (He eventually succeeded in performing both duties.)

  (Equally testy in his will was Judah Hays. When he died in New York in 1764, he cut off his daughter Rachel with only five shillings for marrying against his wishes, and another daughter, Caty, received her inheritance in an elaborate trust because, as her father put it in his will, he had little opinion of the business ability of her husband, Abraham Sarzedas, with whom she had gone off to live in Georgia. Later, Sarzedas distinguished himself as a Revolutionary officer of the Light Dragoons—too late, however, to redeem himself with his father-in-law.)

  Peixottos were also determinedly civic-minded. When the Shearith Israel congregation lost its pastor of fifty years, Gershom Mendes Seixas, when he died in 1816, there was difficulty finding a rabbi who could fill his place. Moses Levy Maduro-Peixotto, a prosperous merchant, was a Judaic scholar, though not a rabbi, and he offered to fill the vacancy until a permanent replacement could be found. So well did he fill the post that the congregation voted to keep him. He gave up his mercantile career to devote himself to the parish, and continued to do so until his death in 1828. Because he was rich, furthermore, he turned over his salary throughout these years to Rabbi Seixas’ widow.

  All these strains—Seixas, Peixotto, Maduro, Hays, Solis, and a good many others—and, no doubt, their accompanying characteristics, come together in the Hendricks family. Perhaps the quickest way to see how this happened is to realize that when Uriah Hendricks arrived on American shores in 1755, he married, first, Daniel Gomez’ niece Eve Esther Gomez. Widowed a few years later, he married, second, Aaron Lopez’ daughter Rebecca. From then on, the pattern of intramural marriages became so bewilderingly complex that even Dr. Stern slips and stumbles now and then as, under the Hendricks family name, all the old names gather, weaving the whole into an ever tightening bundle.

  The Hendrickses had a knack for making money. Uriah Hendricks opened a small store in Cliff Street, in lower Manhattan, selling dry goods—underwear, suspenders, shoelaces, cheap watches, handkerchiefs—anything that could be stored in a small place, sold quickly and for a little profit. Soon he was prospering, and able to move to a larger store in Mill Street, now South William Street. He embarked upon the creation of a large family. Eventually there were ten children. Uriah may also have been something of a philanderer, if we are to take the implications contained in an early letter to Uriah from his wife’s brother Isaac Gomez, who, in a scolding tone, took Uriah to task over an “infatuation.” Gomez wrote that “To support my character as a gentleman and for no other reason, I would wish you to enquire of the company [you are keeping] who must displease her ladyship [Mrs. Hendricks] as much as I and my family.” The warning may have worked, for subsequent letters contain no mention of the matter.

  Uriah Hendricks supplied the Colonies in the French and Indian wars and laid the groundwork for a fortune. But it was his second-eldest son, Harmon Hendricks, born in New York in 1771, who brought the Hendricks business to success on a national and even international scale. Harmon Hendricks took his father’s business and began expanding it. From undershirts and watches, he moved into spangles, looking glasses, umbrellas, and tablecloths. He sold snuffboxes, gilt frames, ivory combs, beads, and brass kettles. He traded rice for pianos, and pianos for shipments of German glass, gold leaf, knives, forks, and brooches. He dealt in wire, tinplate, Spanish dollars, and lottery tickets—even tickets described in his books as “enemy lottery.” His business correspondence is filled with notations such as: “Bicycle horns are no use in New England,” and “Epaulets too high in price,” and “Large kettles not salable in Hartford.” He established for himself a variety of buying and selling agents in London and Bristol, England; in Kingston, Jamaica; in Boston, Hartford, Newport, Philadelphia, and Charleston. He was, in short, a trader. He could trade with equal ease in any commodity.

  There were, of course, deals that were less profitable than others, as is apparent in a revealing series of letters between Harmon Hendricks and one Abraham Cohen of Philadelphia. Late in 1797, Harmon had sent Mr. Cohen a sizable shipment of cigars, or “segars,” as they are referred to in the correspondence that ensued. In March, 1798, Mr. Hendricks wrote Mr. Cohen a carefully worded letter in which he expressed “surprise” at Mr. Cohen’s “silence of four months without remittance” in payment for the shipment. Mr. Cohen’s reply to this was disturbingly vague. He explained that he had been “every day expecting of making a remittance and thought I would wait [before writing] until then.” No remittance was made, and six months of further silence went by. In November, Mr. Cohen wrote to say that he would pay “when Isaac Pesoa goes to N.Y.,” the plan apparently being to have Mr. Pesoa deliver the money. Cohen added an encouraging note that he had opened a retail-wholesale grocery store at 44 South Fourth Street in Philadelphia, “An excellent place for smoaking segars—no less than 4 tavern [sic] in the neighborhood!” Two weeks later, however, Mr. Cohen wrote to Mr. Hendricks to express his own indignant “surprise” that Hendricks should himself have sent Isaac Pesoa to collect, or try to collect, the owed money. Cohen added that he “cannot sell the segars”—despite the four taverns.

  On December 10, Cohen wrote that he could still not pay for the cigars due to “unforseen circumstances.” A month later, on January 16, 1799, obviously feeling under pressure, Mr. Cohen wrote to Hendricks that a certain John Barnes had collected $52.40 in partial payment for the shipment, but a month later this turned out to be untrue. Mr. Barnes swore that he had received no money at all from Mr. Cohen. By summer of 1799, Harmon Hendricks was clearly losing patience with Cohen and wrote to Isaac Pesoa, saying: “this segar article is so very uncertain on acct. of the many various deceptions,” and added that he would certainly like to collect from Cohen but “will not protest it.” In August, Pesoa replied that there was nothing to be gained, in his opinion, from Hendricks’ suing Cohen for the money. “I have no doubt,” said Pesoa, “that if any of his creditors sue him he will be oblige [sic] to take the benefit of the Act”—that is, for indigents and insolvents. And there the matter ended. Harmon Hendricks was never paid for his “segars.”

  He was, in the meantime, dealing in a more lucrative commodity. Though he continued to trade in combs, snuffboxes, spangles, mirrors, and pianos, he had been steadily focusing more and more of his time and attention on the copper trade. Copper has been called “the poor man’s metal,” and “the ugly duckling of metals,” despised for its very abundance. There are copper deposits in virtually every part of the globe, from Cape Horn to Siberia. Copper is easily mined, cheaply milled. Historically, little value has been attached to it, and it has been used for the cheapest coins, the meane
st utensils, kitchen pots and pans. But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the booming African slave trade created, indirectly, a new and important need for copper. Copper was needed in New England and in the West Indies for the bottoms of the huge stills that turned out the hundreds of thousands of gallons of rum that occupied such an important point of the three-cornered pattern of the slave trade. In 1812, Harmon Hendricks moved westward into the town of Belleville, New Jersey, and built what was the first copper-rolling mill in the United States. Within a few years, most of the rum produced in the Americas was coming from stills made of Hendricks copper.

  Both Harmon and his father had been Tories during the Revolution, but that did not prevent Harmon from doing business with Paul Revere a few years later. In fact, as early as 1805, the two copper titans had reached an informal agreement by which they intended to corner the American copper market and set its price. Let us, Revere proposed, buy “the whole block of copper in our single name”—or in the names of friends and relatives, depending on how sales went—and then, as he put it, “equalize between us the quality and the price.” Both men were firmly against the imposition of an import duty on foreign copper, particularly from Britain, brought into the United States. As Hendricks expressed it in a letter to Revere: “There will be more honor in beating John Bull out of our market by low price and superior quality than by duties which may tempt new manufacturers to operate more to our prejudice.” The two men wanted, in other words, no further domestic competition, and for several years they were able to have the American copper pie fairly evenly divided between them. They were also opposed to the administration of James Madison, whose purchasing agents they frequently accused of supplying fishy figures.

  “We have observed Mr. Smith’s report,” Revere wrote Hendricks early in 1806. “It is all of a piece with the present administration of government. His report has $56,840 worth of sheets, bolts, spikes.… Now we know there is in store in Charlestown more than $120,000 worth.…” Less than half, in other words, of what had been shipped was being acknowledged as received. But apparently the men got their money, for the Revere-Hendricks accounts show more than half a million dollars received in payment for government orders that year.

  In 1803, a young man named Robert Fulton succeeded in demonstrating that a water-going vessel could be propelled by steam. Fulton’s steam boilers were made of copper, and Fulton became another important customer of Harmon Hendricks. Hendricks boilers went into the Fulton—the first steam warship—the Paragon, the Firefly, the Nassau, and the Clermont, which for years plied up and down the Hudson River between New York and Albany. Soon, selling copper for Fulton’s boilers—Fulton had a monopoly on the manufacture of steamboats for thirty years—became more lucrative than selling copper for stills. Harmon Hendricks’ partner (and brother-in-law), Solomon Isaacs, became so identified with boilers that he was nicknamed “Steamboat” Isaacs. In 1819, when Fulton was fitting out the S.S. Savannah to be the first oceangoing steamship, the craft was labeled a “steam coffin” by various nay-sayers in high places, who insisted it would never work. When the ship completed its triumphant voyage across the Atlantic in record time, Harmon Hendricks modestly announced that his copper was in the Savannah’s boilers.

  The Savannah, however, was not one of his firm’s more profitable undertakings. Harmon Hendricks had cousins in the city of Savannah—the Henrys and the Minises—who were important stockholders in the Savannah Steamship Company, and Hendricks had sold them his copper at family prices. One boiler, twenty by eight and a half feet in size, had cost $30,000 for the Fulton five years earlier. For the Savannah’s two larger boilers, each twenty-six by six feet, he charged only $1,237.72. Also, for some reason, Hendricks’ relatives never paid him in full. He received only $1,115.05—$122.67 short.

  Success and riches were, of course, a mixed blessing when, as word of Harmon Hendricks’ wealth reached them, distant kin from all over the globe began writing him for what they felt was their proper share of the bounty.

  It is clear that a good part of each day was taken up dealing with these demands. There were, for instance, some of his stepmother’s Lopez cousins in Newport who continually wrote to declare themselves “destitute,” asking for money in sums small and large. To a typically tearful Lopez note, asking for thirty dollars, Harmon Hendricks would append the curt notation of his own: “Sent her $20.” A few months later, another relative of his stepmother’s Samuel Lopez, wanted two hundred dollars, promising “with the honor of a Mason” to repay it. To a nephew of Gilbert Stuart, Harmon Hendricks loaned $12,000, and when Stuart heard of this he cautioned Hendricks: “If you have patience, he will repay you, but if, like a hard master, you attempt to cast him into prison you may lose all.” At the same time, money was coming into the Hendricks firm at a gratifying rate, from sales of copper as well as from such items as turpentine, pigs, pumpkins, gin, and garden seed. In 1807, Hendricks’ brother-in-law Jacob de Leon noted to Hendricks that he had sold “upward of $70,000 in black birds”—a euphemism for Negro slaves—and would be paid in November. His good luck continued. On July 22, 1814, Harmon bet one Jack Cohen “a beaver hat” that there would be peace within four months—and won the bet, for hostilities of the War of 1812 ended before November.

  But relatives continued to pester him. From England a widowed aunt, Rachel Waag, wrote to him to explain that her late husband’s estate had not yet been settled; until then she needed money. Hendricks appointed one of his London representatives to supply her with cash. A cousin, Benjamin Da Costa, whose wife had died, sent his young son, Moses, to live with the Hendrickses, who already had twelve children of their own, and Da Costa kept Harmon Hendricks busy with instructions as to what sort of an education the boy should receive. Harmon had him studying Spanish and French, but Da Costa preferred that the boy study English, “the Mother Tongue,” and even suggested that Hebrew be dropped from his curriculum, “As I daresay he knows his prayers in that language by now, which is as much as I wish.”

  There was also the painful problem of Harmon Hendricks’ sister Sally, one of those whom Malcolm Stern’s book adjudges to have been “insane.” Insane or not, she was certainly a trial to her family, never content to be where she was, always wanting to be somewhere else. She spent her life being shuttled back and forth among relatives, none of whom was ever particularly overjoyed to see her. She was referred to as “our unfortunate sister,” and described as being “of a very unsettled disposition.” Her condition must have been particularly unsettling to Harmon Hendricks, three of whose children had already shown signs of being, as it was said, “peculiar.” One son, for example, made a fetish of cleanliness, and would eat nothing that had not been scrubbed with hot water and strong soap. He washed his hands as often as a hundred times a day. A daughter was “melancholy,” and lapsed into alarming depressions that lasted for days. Sally Hendricks’ obsession was with her money, which, she insisted, many enemies were determined to take away from her and put to dark uses. Her father had left her a comfortable inheritance but, since she considered the money to be in such a hazardous position, she refused to spend any of it and filled her time moving her accounts—no one but she knew how many she had—from bank to bank. For a while, Sally lived with her brother-in-law Jacob de Leon in Charleston, but she was unhappy there and insisted on returning to New York “to see after her money.” She set sail from Charleston on a ship called the Rose-in-Bloom, and it was an agonizing voyage. She was mistreated at sea, she claimed, by the ship’s captain, was given short rations and bad food, and, instead of a private stateroom, was placed in a cabin with another woman and a child. The woman, Sally complained, was “of a certain character.” In New York, Sally—and her complaints—went to live with Harmon Hendricks and his brood, a large and not entirely happy family.

  There were difficulties of other sorts. By 1793, yellow fever had become an annual blight in both Philadelphia and New York, and, when it made its summer appearance, Harmon Hendricks was forced
to close his copper mill and all business came to a standstill. “It carries off 60 a day,” he wrote in 1805. New Yorkers were baffled by the disease, and a variety of theories as to its cause were advanced. Harmon Hendricks wrote that he believed “trade with the French Islands of the West Indies” was indirectly responsible, and that beef stored in warehouses for this trade had putrefied and somehow made the air contagious and unfit to breathe. He pointed out that people in the neighborhoods of the warehouses—which, of course, were not located in the tidiest parts of town—fell victims first. He was able to make a convincing argument of this, and, that same year, during the height of the plague, five thousand barrels of beef were dumped into the Hudson River. Those New Yorkers who could afford to fled north to the “Village of Greenwich” each year when the fever began to rage and, of course, those who were already infected by the mosquito that caused it took the disease with them.

  But, for all his business and family ups and downs, Harmon Hendricks was able to establish himself as one of the East’s most important merchant-manufacturers. By 1812, he was rich enough to make his celebrated offer of a loan to the government to finance its war with the British. By 1825, he had his own bank and was also a director of the Hartford Bank (which would tactfully ask “for a reply by Sunday mail if not trespassing on your Sabbath”). He also acquired considerable real estate. In addition to the New Jersey plant, he owned from Twentieth to Twenty-second streets between Sixth and Seventh avenues in Manhattan, and also thirty acres along Broadway. He continued to sell copper for the bottoms of stills and the boilers of ships, and to the United States mint for coins, while making loans in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. He also established the Hendricks family socially, and was a member of the elite Union Club. Harmon Hendricks died in 1838. Several years later, Joseph Scoville, in The Old Merchants of New York City, wrote: