wards. Nevertheless, it
should not be overlooked that the shippers played their distinct and
useful part in their time and age, the spirit of which was intensely
ultra-competitive and individualistic in the most sordid sense.

FOOTNOTES:

[40] "Hunt's Merchant's Magazine," 11:516-517.

[41] Allen's "Biographical Dictionary," Edition of 1857:791.

[42] Hunt's "Lives of American Merchants":382.

[43] Allen's "Biographical Dictionary," Edit. of 1857:227.

[44] Stryker's "American Register" for 1849:241.

[45] "The American Almanac" for 1850:324.

[46] "An Economic and Social History of New England," 11:825.

[47] Hunt's "Lives of American Merchants":139.

[48] Life of Eli Whitney, "Our Great Benefactors":567.

CHAPTER V

THE SHIPPERS AND THEIR TIMES

Unfortunately only the most general and eulogistic accounts of the
careers of most of the rich shippers have appeared in such biographies
as have been published.

Scarcely any details are preserved of the underlying methods and
circumstances by which these fortunes were amassed. Sixty years ago,
when it was the unqualified fashion to extol the men of wealth as great
public benefactors and truckle to them, and when sociological inquiry
was in an undeveloped stage, there might have been some excuse for this.
But it is extremely unsatisfactory to find pretentious writers of the
present day glossing over essential facts or not taking the trouble to
get them. A "popular writer," who has pretended to deal with the origin
of one of the great present fortunes, the Astor fortune, and has given
facts, although conventionally interpreted, as to one or two of Astor's
land transactions,[49] passes over with a sentence the fundamental facts
as to Astor's shipping activities, and entirely ignores the peculiar
special privileges, worth millions of dollars, that Astor, in
conjunction with other merchants, had as a free gift from the
Government. This omission is characteristic, inasmuch as it leaves the
reader in complete ignorance of the kind of methods Astor used in
heaping up millions from the shipping trade--millions that enabled him
to embark in the buying of land in a large and ambitious way. Certainly
there is no lack of data regarding the two foremost millionaires of the
first decades of the nineteenth century--Stephen Girard and John Jacob
Astor. The very names of nearly all of the other powerful merchants of
the age have receded into the densest obscurity. But