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Updated: May 20, 2025
I do not speak it in vanity, but simply record the fact, that I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor; a name which, I admit, I love to repeat; for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion. I will freely add, that I was not insensible to the late John Jacob Astor's good opinion.
The mortality thus accompanying Astor's progress in New York was of that slow and indefinite, but more lingering and agonizing, kind ensuing from want, destitution, disease and starvation. Astor's supreme craft was at no time better shown than by the means by which he acquired possession of an immense estate in Putnam County, New York.
I asked the name of the trading post in the north-west where they had resided, and delighted her by informing her I had once been there myself on business of John Jacob Astor's New York Fur Company, and staid with the Governor, who was the friend and patron of her father's. This was sufficient to establish us at once on something like the footing of old friends.
The Legislature were not yet prepared to compromise. It was not till 1827 that a test case was selected and brought to trial before a jury. The most eminent counsel were employed on the part of the State, Daniel Webster and Martin Van Buren among them. Astor's cause was entrusted to Emmet, Ogden, and others. We believe that Aaron Burr was consulted on the part of Mr.
Two expeditions were dispatched to the mouth of the Columbia, one by land and the other by sea. Many hardships were encountered, but the foundation of a settlement was successfully made on the Columbia. Astor's positive instructions been obeyed.
For once, we get a gleam of the truth, but a gleam only, in the "popular writer's" account when he says: "John Jacob Astor's record is constantly crossed by embarrassed families, prodigal sons, mortgages and foreclosure sales. Many of the victims of his foresight were those highest in church and state.
The Lorillards, the Goelets, William F. Havemeyer, Cornelius Vanderbilt, W. H. Webb, W. H. Kissam, Robert Lenox, Schermerhorn, James Roosevelt, William E. Dodge, Jr. all of these and many others not omitting Astor's American Fur Company at various times down to, and including the period of, the monumentally corrupt Tweed "ring," got grants from corrupt city administrations.
Astor's alertness, willingness, loyalty, and ability to obey, delivered his employer over into his hands. Robert Bowne, the good old Quaker, insisted that Jacob should call him Robert; and from boarding the young man with a near-by war widow who took cheap boarders, Bowne took young Astor to his own house, and raised his pay from two dollars a week to six.
Schemes were in the air with Baranof for the impressment of Siberian exiles as peasant farmers among the icebergs of Prince William Sound, for the remission of one-tenth tribute in furs from the Aleuts on condition of free service as hunters with the company, and for the employment of Astor's ships as purveyors of provisions to Sitka, when there fell a bolt from the blue that well-nigh wiped Russian possession from the face of America.
Many were the hard words and hard names bandied between them on these occasions, according to the captain's account. Each accused the other of endeavoring to assume unwarrantable power, and take the lead; upon which Mr. M'Dougal would vauntingly lay down Mr. Astor's letter, constituting him his representative and proxy, a document not to be disputed.
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