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Updated: May 26, 2025
Scadding "the Astors of Upper Canada" who carried on a large and marvellously successful mercantile business within its walls. It was finally burned down in the winter of 1854-5. Dr. Baldwin applied himself to the practice of his several professions with an energy and assiduity which deserved and secured a full measure of success.
The Astors, A. T. Stewart, Claflin, Vanderbilt, Drew, and hundreds of others who were wise enough to foresee and believe in the future of New York, have made handsome fortunes on the investments made by them a few years ago. In 1860 a gentleman purchased a handsome house in a fashionable neighborhood. It was a corner house, and fronted on Fifth Avenue. He paid fifty thousand dollars for it.
Out of this she saves about three dollars and twenty-five cents because sometimes she gets a dollar extra for doing the washing. And when she goes to Europe for the summer on the same ship with the Astors and the Vanderbilts, it sounds more magnificent than it really is.
The wealth of the Astors hardly exceeds the treasure that is supposed to be secreted here and there about the country, and thousands of dollars have been expended in dredging rivers and shallow seas, and in blasting caves and cellars.
I have eaten with Indian women whose lineage reaches back to names that were mighty before the first Astors and the first Vanderbilts were born. The descendant of a king has hunted me caribou meat at two cents a pound.
In this respect, it cannot be too strongly pointed out, the Astors were in nowise different from the general run of landlords. Is it not murder when, compelled by want, people are forced to fester in squalid, germ-filled tenements, where the sunlight never enters and where disease finds a prolific breeding-place? Untold thousands went to their deaths in these unspeakable places.
The purpose of this work is to point out the circumstances underlying the origin and growth of the great private fortunes; in the case of the Astors this has been done sufficiently, perhaps overdone, although many facts have been intentionally left out of these chapters which might very properly have been included.
Even in the great cities, where the prevailing sentiment in the preceding winter had been for peace and a permanent disruption of the Union, men rallied to the national standards with unexpected enthusiasm. The Astors, Belmonts, and Drexels raised regiments or offered loans to the Administration.
A large part came from the rise in the value of land, which value arose not from the slightest act of the Astors, but from the growth of the population and the labor of the whole body of workers. This value was created by the producers, but far from owning or even sharing in it, they were compelled to pay heavier and heavier tribute in the form of rent for the very values which they had created.
And progressively their rentals from this land increased. Their policy was much the same as that of the Astors constantly increasing their land possessions. This they could easily do for two reasons. One was that almost consecutively they, along with other landholders, corrupted city governments to give them successive grants, and the other was their enormous surplus revenue which kept piling up.
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