o methods which bore no open trace of the brutal and
sanguinary. He had to become the insidious and devious schemer, acting
through sharp lawyers instead of by an armed force. Hence in his Eastern
operations he made deception a science and used every instrument of
cunning at his command. The result was precisely the same as in the
West, except that the consequences were not so overt, and the
perpetration could not be so easily distinguished. In the West, death
marched step by step with Astor's accumulating fortune; so did it in the
East, but it was not open and bloody as in the fur country. 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. During the Revolution, a tract consisting of 51,012 acres held by
Roger Morris and Mary his wife, Tories, had been confiscated by New York
State. This land, it is worth recalling, was part of the estate of
Adolphus Phillips, the son of Frederick who, as has been set forth,
financed and protected the pirate Captain Samuel Burgess in his
buccaneer expeditions, and whose share of the Burgess' booty was
extremely large.[101] Mary Morris was a descendant of Adolph Phillips
and came into that part of the property by inheritance. The Morris
estate comprised nearly one-third of Putnam County. After confiscation,
the State sold the area in parts to various farmers. By 1809 seven
hundred families were settled on the property, and not a shadow of a
doubt had ever been cast on their title. They had long regarded it as
secure, especially as it was guaranteed by the State.

A NOTED LAND TRANSACTION.

In 1809 a browsing lawyer informed Astor that those seven hundred
families had no legal title whatever; that the State had had no legal
right to confiscate the Morris property, inasmuch as the Morrises held a
life lease only, and no State could ever confiscate a life lease. The
property, Astor was informed, was really owned by the children of the
Morris couple, to whom it was to revert after the lease of their parents
was extinguished. Legally, he was told, they were as much the owners as
ever. Astor satisfied himself that this point would hold in the courts.
Then he assiduously hunted up the heirs, and by a series