Barons of the Sea Read online

  In an era before international investment banks and multibillion-dollar venture capital funds, no New Yorker was socially loftier than a wealthy merchant. He not only sold goods from abroad and owned fleets of ships but also served as a source of capital, funding all sorts of new enterprises. As one merchant scion declared proudly, “The word merchant did not mean a greengrocer or a haberdasher as it means today, but described a man with large capital who was an exporter of domestic and importer of foreign goods, who owned his own ships and usually their cargos, as well.”6 A merchant was a social leader and arbiter who determined who was in the club and who was out. During this era of growing American confidence, New Yorkers eagerly compared their city to the “Most Serene Republic of Venice,” which derived its wealth from the sea and was ruled by a council of merchants. As one resident said at the time: “[A] New Yorker of no very extended acquaintance could tell the names of all the principal merchants and where they lived.”7

  As a new member of the club, Delano knew and respected the names above the doors on South Street. There was Howland & Aspinwall at 54-55, run by the intensely private and extremely shrewd William Henry Aspinwall, a New Yorker with whaling roots in Delano’s native Fairhaven, Massachusetts. His ships flew a flag marked by a blue-and-white cross. Aspinwall had extensive interests in the Mediterranean and South America. An alluring manifest from an Aspinwall ship landing in New York from Valparaiso, Chile, included “satin, crepe, Florentine shawls, ribbons of all kinds, foulard silks, horse-skin gloves, openwork white silk hose, ladies’ and men’s white kid gloves, Irish linens, Russian sheetings” and much more, worth a very substantial $121,435.8 Full faced, square jawed, and dark haired, Aspinwall, according to one descendant, apparently had a “rare faith in the honesty of his fellow man.” When confronted with someone who could not pay a debt fully, he would supposedly say, “Very well, we will settle on those terms.”9

  South Street was also home to the shipping firm of N. L. and G. Griswold, whose ships flew a blue-and-white checkered flag. Stevedores joked that “N. L. & G. Griswold” really stood for “No Loss and Great Gain.” The shrewd partners, Nathaniel Lynde Griswold and George Griswold, were two imperious six-foot-tall brothers from Old Lyme, Connecticut, who had become major players in the China trade. Their most famous commercial sleight of hand occurred when an especially fine crop of tea arrived from China on their ship Panama, in crates stamped with the ship’s name. In an early example of branding, the Griswolds built two additional ships in succession named Panama so that more of their tea could be sold as “Panama Tea.” Nathaniel was taciturn. The somewhat more outgoing George was known for having a “very speculating turn of mind.”10 The firm had strong social and business ties with the Russell partners: George’s son John N. A. Griswold spent many years in Canton working as a Russell clerk, making him one of the few who had no family ties to the earliest partners—although that would change when his sister Sarah Helen married Russell partner John C. Green.11

  Then there was the shipping firm recently founded by Abiel Abbot Low, Delano’s old Russell colleague and Canton comrade-in-arms. At A. A. Low & Brother, Abbot, the eldest and richest of the Low siblings, was supported not by one “Brother” but four: William Henry II, Josiah, Edward, and Seth Haskell Low. Abbott had started his shipping company to provide expanded service to the several newly opened Chinese ports. Although it was technically separate from Russell & Company, he hoped to benefit hugely from shipping tea and other goods on consignment from his old firm. When Low was a Russell partner, his ships had flown the Russell & Company flag, with its distinctive blue-and-white diagonal quadrants. Now he proudly flew his own new banner: a red-and-gold flag with a white L in the center. In time, the L would be replaced by the first letter of the ship’s name.12

  Finally, there was Grinnell, Minturn & Company, the ships of which flew the company’s red-and-white, swallowtail-shaped pennant. Its busy transatlantic trade between New York and Liverpool had become a worthy rival to the old Black Ball Line. Moses Grinnell of New Bedford had started the firm partnered with a curiously named old salt named Preserved Fish, who had since retired. Another, more-junior partner at the Grinnell firm was Warren Delano’s own brother Franklin. Disgruntled with his position there—exactly why seems lost to history—Franklin was looking for an out, and his complaints seem to have given Warren a useful eye on the competition.

  Grinnell, Minturn & Company and other shipping businesses plying the transatlantic routes carried more than cargo. They were bringing to New York—and through its portal, to all of America—thousands of European immigrants, mostly poor and desperate for opportunity. Men, women, and children stumbled onto the South Street wharves after spending weeks, even months, crammed into the packets’ tween decks: a dark and fetid section of the ship known as steerage.

  To New York mayor, diarist, and social arbiter Philip Hone, the new arrivals from England, Ireland, and Germany were an even greater scourge than the Yankees were to Washington Irving. “All of Europe is coming across the ocean,” Hone complained. “All that part at least who cannot make a living at home. And what shall we do with them? They increase our taxes, eat our bread, and encumber our streets, and not one in twenty is competent to keep himself.”13 Within a few years, the steady tide of immigrants arriving in New York by packet ship would turn into a flood, thanks to the Potato Famine that sent millions of starving Irish across to the New World looking for food and work. British and American shipping companies would profit handsomely from the human tidal wave. Thousands died from disease and malnutrition on the “coffin ships.” Those who did make it to New York alive found themselves shoved into the crowded, noxious Five Point slum, where robbery, prostitution, and murder flourished in the open. Other dangers included attacks by nativist gangs who feared these Roman Catholic newcomers would depress workers’ already low wages, especially in the shipyards that lined the East River.

  In 1843 Delano craved, first and foremost, a wife. After years of all-male carousing in the Factories and the illegal regattas on the Pearl River, he was ready to settle down in New York, even if the bustle and bawdiness of South Street seemed ten times worse to him than the chaos of Canton.14 He had spent nine years without female companionship. By the standards of early-nineteenth-century America, when sixty-five was considered a ripe old age, he was a middle-aged bachelor. Men of relative affluence were usually married off in their early twenties. During Delano’s years abroad, he appears to have been besieged by advice from home, much to his chagrin. “Many thanks to the ‘modus operandi’ of getting married,” Delano had written his brother Franklin from China, “and it shall not be my fault if I do not give you an early opportunity to continuing your practice in the ‘groomsman’ line. The snubbing of noses by the two ‘enamored’ must be an interesting operation, and I suppose a large red nose would produce an effect sooner than a small and cold blue nose—I should in such case have an advantage over some folks.”15

  In a growing and vibrant city, Delano could have chosen from any number of eligible young ladies. Entrée into the world of New York society required an intricate knowledge of etiquette: when to make calls, how to use greeting cards, and what subjects were considered inappropriate for polite conversation. Women bore a special burden. “The eyes must be guarded, lest they mete out too much consideration to those who bear no stamp,” sniffed one lady in Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art. “The neck must be stiffened, lest it bend beyond the haughty angle of self-reservation … The mouth is bound to keep its portcullis ever ready to fall on a word which implies unaffected pleasure or surprise … Subjects of conversation must be any but those which naturally present themselves to the mind.”16

  Commerce could now pay for culture and leisure activities: private libraries, theaters, literary societies, and sporting events. There was even talk of building an opera house, financed by the Astor family, of course. In fact, the Astor Place Opera House would be completed in 1847. It opened with Giuseppe Verdi�
�s Ernani, with hundreds of the city’s richest residents preening in elegantly European-style evening finery.

  There was a special haven for the city’s upper-class men—the “Upper Tens,” as they were called smugly by the National Press (later known as Town & Country) magazine founder Nathaniel Parker Willis, an in-law of the Grinnells. The Union Club, founded in 1836, was located in the former mansion of John Jacob Astor’s son William. A leisured gathering place designed for the city’s “most distinguished citizens,” it was explicitly patterned on “the great clubs of London, which give a tone and character to the society of the British metropolis.”17 The Union Club quickly became New York’s premier social organization. Taverns and coffeehouses had become too public. Yet even the patrician tone of the Union Club was counterbalanced by the social reality that most of the founders were not idle members of a landed gentry as they were in London, but made their livings from the law, medicine, and shipping.18 Even snob founding member Philip Hone was very much “in trade,” having made his fortune as a commodities auctioneer.

  As a member of the Union Club of Canton, Delano’s partner Robert Bennet Forbes would certainly have approved of this establishment. One day Delano and his peers would seek an even greater degree of privacy, not just for themselves and their business but also for their families, in mansions well away from the faintest whiff of commerce or the scrutiny of fellow citizens, who were growing increasingly unhappy with the widening gulf between rich and poor.

  The city could be downright dangerous: after dark, pickpockets and thieves prowled the streets, even around the aristocratic precincts of Bond Street and Washington Square. “This city is infested by gangs of hardened wretches,” sniffed Philip Hone, who “patrol the streets making night hideous and insulting all who are not strong enough to defend themselves.”19 And then there were the prostitutes. Almost ten thousand of them brazenly walked the streets of New York or worked out of brothels, some which were fitted out as luxuriously as a prosperous merchant’s private home. There was little the police could do. Many officers gleefully collected bribes from the madams and gang leaders, or extorted innocent citizens just as wantonly as the Bowery toughs. Flickering lamps fueled by New Bedford whale oil and coal gas did little to dispel the nocturnal gloom or fear.

  There were those in these neighborhoods who resented the wealthy merchant class. Mike Walsh, an Irish-born politician and the publisher of the workingmen’s publication Subterranean, fumed: “Demagogues will tell you that you are freemen. They lie; you are slaves … No working man is free to obtain one-fourth of the proceeds of his own labor; everything he buys, every step he turns, he is robbed indirectly by some worthless wealthy drone.”20

  What constituted being rich in New York, a city rapidly approaching a half million residents? According to New York Sun editor Moses Beach, who published biographies of the city’s most prominent capitalists in 1845, it took a net worth of $100,000.21 This was the minimum competence sought by Delano and his peers, but more was always welcome. Shipping barons such as Moses Grinnell and Robert Minturn had personal fortunes surpassing $200,000, making them extremely rich men by the standards of the 1840s. Some fifty to seventy men in New York City and Brooklyn were actually “millionaires,” a new term coined by the novelist and future British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli.22 To the typical New Yorker tradesman, who scraped by on only a few hundred dollars a year, a million dollars was a fortune of incomprehensible vastness, as distant and forbidden as the czar of Russia’s riches. Among the American magnates were upstarts such as Cornelius Vanderbilt. The semiliterate ferry pilot turned riverboat king didn’t give a hoot about civic virtue, and those in New York’s business world made sure never to cross him. “The Commodore’s word is as good as his bond,” a contemporary wrote. “He is equally exact in fulfilling his threats.”23

  During his visit to New York, even the cool, skeptical Delano could not have been but impressed by the prosperity around him. He almost certainly went clothing shopping on Broadway—perhaps at the new Brooks Brothers store—so he could appear up-to-date and presentable at the many dinner parties, cotillions, and “sociables” that filled his calendar. The latest fashion for men was frock coats and colorful waistcoats, although the growing class of office workers now wore a so-called sack coat, which breathed much better than the stiff formal wear of the past. Women were wearing increasingly billowing petticoats and hoopskirts.24

  The city’s architecture was changing too. Delano, like others, marveled at the new LaGrange Terrace (known as “Colonnade Row”), a row of nine marble-clad townhouses whose procession of gleaming Corinthian columns formed a unified, elegant street front along Lafayette Place in the heart of the prestigious Bond Street neighborhood. A typical member of the Upper Tens group (which Delano’s competence now allowed him to join) lived in a three-story brick townhouse twenty-five-feet wide and two rooms deep; these new five-story homes had an astonishing twenty-six rooms. They also upped the ante in terms of luxurious city living, with central coal heating, hot and cold running water, and indoor toilets.25 The ceilings of the parlors and dining room were delicately molded plaster. Mantels were of solid marble; solid mahogany doors hung on solid silver hinges.26 One day, Delano hoped, he would own one of these Colonnade Row mansions. As fate would have it, his brother Franklin would beat him to it.

  For all that was exciting in the city, Delano did not stay long in New York. Perhaps he agreed with the New York physician’s wife who complained of the ludicrous etiquette and expectations of high society. “I would rather be out of this fashionable society than in it,” she decided.27 Delano had not liked the aristocratic British expatriates in Canton; he may have disliked frivolous Gotham even more. Everyone in New York seemed to be wagering: prizefights and cockfights in the Bowery, whist games at the Union Club, and commodities prices at the Merchants’ Exchange at 55 Wall Street.

  So, after spending only a few weeks catching up on company affairs, Delano hightailed back to his native Massachusetts to pay respects to his parents in Fairhaven. His old hometown had changed along with the country. New business was springing up all along the banks of the Acushnet River, which separated Fairhaven and New Bedford. One of these companies would be run by Joseph Grinnell, younger brother of Moses, his brother Franklin’s business partner. Retired from the family shipping business, Joseph had invested in a venture called the Wamsutta Mills. The long brick structure would house thousands of steam-powered spindles mechanically weaving cloth from southern cotton.

  But manufacturing was never Delano’s interest, and he had no intention of returning to his childhood home for good. Instead, Warren set out on a coach trip through the countryside. He breathed a bit easier at the sight of New England’s farms and woods in the springtime.28 His destination was Milton, Massachusetts, home of the Forbes clan. At a house party there, hosted by John Murray Forbes, he met Forbes cousin Judge Joseph Lyman, his wife, Anne, and their eighteen-year-old daughter. Catherine Lyman was a lovely and sweet-natured girl described by her mother as “never out of temper, and always ready to oblige to any extent that her friends could claim.”29 Yet as the years went by, it turned out that behind Catherine’s placid exterior was a steely resolve to do what was best.

  The Lymans, unlike their rich Forbes relatives, were not plutocrats, but they were prosperous enough, intellectual, and artistic at their core, counting philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson among their friends. Invited to visit them in Northampton, Massachusetts, Delano must have found the Lyman home a welcome respite from the loneliness of Canton and the cutthroat competition of New York. As they gathered in the evening to play popular songs and classics on their parlor piano, Delano not only took to the Lymans, but also to Catherine.

  Catherine’s mother approved of the dashing China trader: “He has such a composed and dignified air for a man of business, and such a quiet, sensible mode of expressing his rational opinions,” Anne wrote. She saw the “warm heart” that he had fought to keep reserved in Canton. To
everyone (“where friendship is admissible,” she qualified), he showed “every sort of kindness,” prompting such reciprocation that “there is nothing but pleasure in his society.”30 Warren proposed to Catherine that summer, and she accepted. They were married on November 1, 1843.31 Warren was now part of the Forbes’s extended family, and his ties to the Russell & Company circle were strengthened further when Catherine’s brother Edward married Abbot Low’s sister Sarah and was taken in as a partner in Low’s shipping firm.32 The Canton brotherhood of siege days was drawing even closer.

  But if the Lymans thought that their daughter was going to settle down with Delano in New York in domestic bliss, they were wrong. After only about six months in the United States, Delano announced that the best place he could serve Russell & Company was back in Canton. There, the company’s vital China trade had effectively been in the control of Warren’s bachelor brother Ned and his old boss Russell Sturgis. But Sturgis was selling out and planning to return to America—creating a vacuum that could jeopardize young Ned’s role. For another Forbes contender had arrived in Canton: cousin Paul Siemen Forbes.

  Months earlier, Warren Delano wrote his brother, with hope, “Mr. Forbes goes out without any great expectations and will of course never become a partner unless it is found for the interest of the House to admit him.” But Delano was wrong. Paul Siemen Forbes was determined to advance himself aggressively, and felt—with some justification—that a fortune gained from the House of Russell was a Forbes family birthright.33 To him, the Delanos were upstarts.