The Richest Woman in America (6 page)

Merchants, lawyers, and real estate tycoons ordinarily seen in tall hats, high pointed shirt collars, shapeless black waistcoats, and black broadcloth frock coats—“a fearful sight,” according to Walt Whitman—became Louis XV or his courtiers for the night. Their heads covered in powdered wigs nipped at the nape with velvet bows, they waltzed in with long panniered coats and frilly shirts, lace cravats and lace cuffs spilling out from under their embroidered coat sleeves. On their limbs they showed off silk stockings and satin breeches; on their hips some carried sheathed swords.

The rich businessmen’s wives and daughters, transformed into aristocrats, dazzled with their diamonds and colored jewels. Hairdressers
had worked for hours arranging their huge wigs, curled and powdered to perfection, and on their faces they had carefully painted beauty marks. Fluttering their fans, bending this way and that to show off their swelling breasts, they pirouetted in their broad panniers and ruffled satin gowns, each a perfect Madame Pompadour.

To make the occasion more memorable, the costumed musicians played the German cotillion, and guests arranged in small circles followed the intricate calls as they paired, flirted, parted, and paired with someone else. Two hours of the German cotillion: unheard of! Supper offered an extravagance of crystal and silver gleaming on crisp white damask: a banquet table laden with creamed soups, plump oysters, jellied fish, roasted meats, citrus sorbets, sweetmeats, rich cakes, and spun sugar confections. Everyone pronounced the Schermerhorn ball a triumph. It would be remembered for years to come.

While Mrs. Schermerhorn drew accolades for her party, one of the guests,
her husband’s cousin Caroline, was beginning to stir some interest of her own. Four years older than Hetty Robinson, Caroline Schermerhorn grew up just a few doors down from the Grinnells in a family of wealth and lineage. With a childhood that was the polar opposite of Hetty’s, “Lina” enjoyed the role of family pet. The youngest of eight, she was fussed over as an infant by a slew of nurses and nannies, was schooled by a French tutor, spent weeks every year in Europe, and was introduced to society at a ball in her parents’ stately home. Then, only a few months before Mrs. Schermerhorn’s ball, at the age of twenty-four, the plain-faced and pudgy Lina married William Backhouse Astor Jr., heir to the vast fur and real estate fortune. Their posh wedding at Grace Church raised more than a few eyebrows. Did she do it for money? gossipers asked. And why did he marry her?

In a prenuptial agreement, it was later revealed that William received a trust fund from his parents with $185,000 in securities plus income from property at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, site of the future Empire State Building; the agreement stipulated that after his death, Caroline would receive $75,000 a year for life.

Descended from two of the earliest Dutch families in New York—a seventh-generation Van Cortland on her mother’s side and fourth-generation Schermerhorn on her father’s side—Lina knew the old Knickerbocker maxim “Live handsomely but not lavishly.” But she felt
otherwise. She was developing a taste for Parisian gowns by designers such as Worth, precious jewels with aristocratic provenance, a box at the opera, and parties on a lavish scale. Her husband could provide it all. And she could provide him with a pedigree.

William Astor grew up in a family obsessed with making money. His grandfather John Jacob Astor, a coarse-spoken man with crude manners, felt it was his mission in life to amass a fortune and pass it on to his heirs. Like Edward Mott Robinson, he lived to accumulate dollars and loved enlarging the pile. He expected his son William Backhouse to do the same.

In the course of his life, William Backhouse doubled his father’s fortune. He developed rows of tenements and crammed the toiletless firetraps with hordes of the Irish, Jewish, and German immigrants flooding New York. He knew every piece of property he owned, was familiar with all the details in his leases, and had an aptitude for increasing the value of his real estate holdings. But as rich as he was, he held his money as tightly as a beggar clutching a tossed coin. He bought coal for his house in the middle of summer when prices were at their lowest, refused to ride in a carriage, and walked wherever he could. Waste was wicked; frugality was his watchword.

His son William joined the family business, married Caroline Schermerhorn, and would father several children and retreat from the New York world. He would seek investments in other cities and women in other ports. But he would provide his wife, Caroline, who had huge social ambitions, with the vast wealth to carry them out.

While Caroline thrived on New York’s social whirl, Hetty sought escape from the city’s commotion. While Caroline gushed with friends over the latest fashions, Hetty cocked an ear toward the men conversing on finance. While Caroline was intent on enhancing her position, Hetty was focused on expanding her fortune. The debutantes’ world held little attraction for her: she may have enjoyed dancing, and she may have indulged in gossip, but she had no taste for frothy teas, no craving for fussy clothes, no liking for luxuries that money could buy. Hetty hungered for money itself.

Money served as a substitute for her family’s love, a sweetener that satisfied her gnawing need for affection. She knew that money pleased her father; what she yearned for more than anything else was that her
father be pleased with her. An astuteness for money might win his respect. Writing to him from her cousins’ house, she told him she had had a gay time in New York, but she was tired of the round of parties and balls. Could she have his permission to return to New Bedford? She was soon on the steamer headed for Massachusetts.

“My father was as pleased to see me as I was to be back,” she said later, though she admitted he was surprised that she cut her trip short. When he asked her why she still had money in her New York bank account, she told him that with the $1,200 he had given her, she had bought $200 worth of clothes. The rest, she proudly announced, she had invested in bonds that had already grown in value. “That investment turned out so well that I soon made others,” she told an acquaintance. Her lack of interest in clothes may have dismayed her aunt, who enjoyed dressing up even with nowhere to go; she accused her niece of looking “like one of the orphans of some sailor lost at sea.” Hetty may not have won her aunt’s admiration, but by pursuing her father’s interests she not only won his praise, she shared his pleasure in making money. She was not alone.

M
oney was on everyone’s mind. Ever since President Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the country in 1803, Easterners lusted after wealth in the remote new areas in the West. After the Mexican-American War in 1848, when the United States won control over Texas and the area that would comprise Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming, the desire for land increased.

After the first successful gold strikes in the Sierra foothills that year, tens of thousands more hankered to go out west. Factory men in New England, immigrants in New York, farmers in the South left their homes and families to seek their fortunes with picks and shovels. They may have left for paradise, but they went through hell to get there.

If the deepest reaches of the earth coursed with golden veins, the surface of the country was clotted with rugged routes. Many crammed into ships, determined to make their way west on the two-ocean, months-long journey that brought illness and queasy stomachs for long stretches on rough seas. Some went overland from the Midwest along the Oregon Trail in stagecoaches or covered wagons, bouncing along through parching droughts, drenching rain, blistering heat, and freezing snow.

A fortunate few took trains, the most efficient form of travel. With heated cars, upholstered seats with spring cushions, oil lamps for light, and even toilet rooms, trains made travel easier and lowered the cost
and time of transporting goods and people. At the start of the gold rush, however, most rail lines ran only in the Northeast, and few lines existed west of Chicago; no tracks ran for longer than 250 miles; and no railroad crossed the continent.

From the 1840s, small rail lines reached north from New York to Maine and south from New York to Atlanta. Trains carried cotton grown in Georgia all the way to New Bedford, where the Wamsutta Mills turned out finished textiles that were transported back to New York. After its opening in 1851, the Erie Canal connected the Hudson River with Lake Erie and short rail lines linked New York with the Midwest; other lines joined Pennsylvania with Ohio, and Chicago with the Mississippi River. But no lines ran to the Pacific Ocean.

The only long-haul carriers that reached the Far West were sailing packets and steamer ships conveying goods, passengers, and the mail down one coast, across the Isthmus of Panama, and up the other side. But the ships that plied these seas took several months at best; at worst they were waylaid by weather and sank in storms. In the rush to open up the West, better transport was needed, and better transport required men to make it.

Thousands of workers were hired to mine the iron ore used to build new railroad tracks, and tens of thousands of workers were employed to construct them. New tracks required new towns where the lines met and workers and travelers could stay; new towns, such as Dallas, Denver, and Oklahoma City, needed people to settle them and goods and services to provide for the settlers.

Entrepreneurs willing to build the rail lines prodded the federal government to grant them land along which they could lay the tracks. But even though the land was free, they needed money for payrolls and equipment. Smart investors and shrewd speculators could see the future whizzing before them. Tempted by the possibility of huge returns from railroads and from the development of the land surrounding them into towns, mining centers, and manufacturing hubs, they poured money into New York banks. A flood of new funds arrived from Boston and New Bedford, from Chicago and St. Louis, and from London, Paris, and Frankfurt. Awash in capital, the banks loaned money at easy interest rates to railroad promoters, mining prospectors, land speculators, merchants, and farmers.

The nation was bursting with new inventions and new markets and hungry for better transportation. Technology such as the steam engine quickened the pace of manufacturing and railroads. Samuel Morse’s new telegraph put cities in touch with one another and spurred a surge in communications. The discovery of metal ore in the West led to the invention of new tools and instruments like sewing machines and steam irons that were produced in the East. The newly improved cotton gin in the South meant more cotton for more goods that could be made better and faster in the North or exported overseas to England.

Factories sprouted everywhere: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, manufactured iron, glass, and textiles; Lowell, Massachusetts, made textiles and leather goods; New Haven, Connecticut, produced hardware, guns, and clocks; New York produced books, newspapers and magazines, chemicals, and clothing of all kinds. As a meeting point in the Midwest, Chicago grew at a furious rate, its rail lines stretching west and its population tripling, while New York became the country’s manufacturing center, its financial core, and its transportation hub.

Even a war in Europe benefited the nation. Grain from the Midwest, already in demand in the East, found new markets across the ocean when the Crimean War broke out at the end of 1853. The conflict, which pitted Russia against the Ottomans, the British, and the French, caused the czar to cut off wheat exports and forced Europeans to turn to America for their grain. Trains carried wheat and corn from Chicago to New York, where dockworkers on the Hudson River piers hurled the foodstuffs onto steamer ships bound for Europe.

Packet ships continued to carry goods and people and mail to California, and when the ships returned from the West, they brought back stacks of gold bars. But new trains sped hundreds of thousands of travelers westward faster and cheaper, and hauled more manufactured goods out from the East and more grain and food supplies back from the Midwest. The country was growing by the hour, proving almost daily its divinely ordained Manifest Destiny.