hose wealth was
inherited--had heaped together their accumulations in humdrum trade.
Perhaps Peter Cooper, who had made a million dollars in the manufacture
of isinglass and glue, and George Law, whose gains, equally large,
represented fortunate speculations in street railroads, faintly suggest
the approaching era; yet the fortunes which are really typical are those
of William Aspinwall, who made $4,000,000 in the shipping business, of
A. T. Stewart, whose $2,000,000 represented his earnings as a retail and
wholesale dry goods merchant, and of Peter Harmony, whose $1,000,000 had
been derived from happy trade ventures in Cuba and Spain. Many of the
reservoirs of this ante-bellum wealth sound strangely in our modern
ears. John Haggerty had made $1,000,000 as an auctioneer; William L.
Coggeswell had made half as much as a wine importer; Japhet Bishop had
rounded out an honest $600,000 from the profits of a hardware store;
while Phineas T. Barnum ranks high in the list by virtue of $800,000
accumulated in a business which it is hardly necessary to specify.
Indeed his name and that of the great landlords are almost the only
ones in this list that have descended to posterity. Yet they were the
Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Harrimans, the Fricks, and the Henry
Fords of their day.

Before the Civil War had ended, however, the transformation of the
United States from a nation of farmers and small-scale manufacturers
to a highly organized industrial state had begun. Probably the most
important single influence was the War itself. Those four years of
bitter conflict illustrate, perhaps more graphically than any similar
event in history, the power which military operations may exercise in
stimulating all the productive forces of a people. In thickly settled
nations, with few dormant resources and with practically no areas of
unoccupied land, a long war usually produces industrial disorganization
and financial exhaustion. The Napoleonic wars had this effect in Europe;
in particular they caused a period of social and industrial distress in
England. The few years immediately following Waterloo marked a period
when starving mobs rioted in the streets of London, setting fire to
the houses of the aristocracy and stoning the Prince Regent whenever he
dared to show his head in public, when cotton spindles ceased to turn,
when collieries closed down, when jails and workhouses were overflowing
with a wretched proletariat, and when gaunt a