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In the course of this work it has already been shown in specific detail how Peter Goelet in conjunction with John Jacob Astor, the Rhinelander brothers, the Schermerhorns, the Lorillards and other founders of multimillionaire dynasties, fraudulently secured great tracts of land, during the early and middle parts of the last century, in either what was then, or what is now, in the heart of New York City.
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.
Our people, it is true, were of humble origin, yet some of them had attained wealth and social standing. The Van Buskirks, the Grims, the Beekmans, the Wilmerdings and the Lorillards were men of affairs and influence in the growing town of 30,000 that had begun to extend northward as far as Canal Street and even beyond.
When an old and reliable house like Lorillard goes into the give-a-prize-away-with-every- package business, it only goes to show to what an extent this matter is carried on. The Lorillards are now introducing a tobacco called 'Splendid. They say it is a 'splendid' thing, makes one feel 'splendid, etc.
In this procedure he was but doing what a number of other contemporaries such as Peter Goelet, the Rhinelanders, the Lorillards, the Schermerhorns and other men who then began to found powerful landed families, were doing at the same time.
The pamphlet showed that there were at that time perhaps twenty-five men in New York City who were ranked as millionaires. The most prominent of these were Peter Cooper with an accredited fortune of $1,000,000; the Goelets, $2,000,000; the Lorillards, $1,000,000; Moses Taylor, $1,000,000; A. T. Stewart, $2,000,000; Cornelius Vanderbilt, $1,500,000, and William B. Crosby, $1,500,000.
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