Robber Barons And Good Capitalists

4 Pages 972 Words

James Jay Gould was born at Roxbury, N.Y., the son of John Burr and Mary (Moore) Gould, who owned a poor hill farm. On his father's side he was descended from Nathan Gold, of Bury St. Edmunds, England, who moved to Milford, Connecticut, in 1647 and some three years later settled in Fairfield, Conn. On his mother's side he was of Scottish descent. By determined effort, working for a blacksmith and later as clerk in a country store, he obtained some education in an academy and learned the basics of surveying. With this equipment he showed an abundant knack in money-making. Between his eighteenth and twenty-first years he helped prepare maps of Ulster, Albany and Delaware counties in New York, Lake and Geauga counties in Ohio, and Oakland County in Michigan, and in 1856 he published a volume of local history, History of Delaware County, and Border Wars of New York. At twenty-one, an undersized, keen-witted, unscrupulous young man, he had saved $ 5,000. With Zadock Pratt, a New York politician, he opened a large tannery in northern Pennsylvania, and shortly prevailed upon a New york leather merchant, C.M.Leupp, to assist him in obtaining full control of it. His business relations with both men were sharp to the point of deviance, and his enemies always declared that his speculations were partly responsible for Leupp's suicide in 1857. Abandoning the tannery, after a brief career in 1859-60 as leather merchant at 39 Spruce St.,New York, he began speculating in small railways. A profitable deal in bonds of the Rutland & Washington was followed by his managership of the Rensselaer & Saratoga and investments in other lines.
Gould's operations first became spectacular when in October 1867 he and James Fisk joined the directory board of the Erie Railroad, of which Daniel Drew was treasurer and controlling agent. In the titanic and scandalous battle with Cornelius Vanderbilt, which followed, Gould supplied the brilliant imagination wh...