Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival Read Free

friendly fellow German passenger who traded furs. From him John Jacob learned that substantial profits could be made by starting with just a few trinkets to trade for individual pelts, especially if the trader developed good London contacts.
    Years later, Astor liked to tell the story of his days as a struggling immigrant in the mid-1780s when he was a young man and the United States only a few years old. One day he walked through Lower Broadway in Manhattan where big, new houses were under construction for the prosperous merchants in the fast-growing city, then with a population of twenty-three thousand, and reaching no farther north than Cortlandt Street, but soon to triple in size.
    “I’ll build . . . a grander house than any of these,” he pledged to himself, “and in this very street.”
    When Astor arrived in Manhattan and made his pledge, the United States was still very much an inchoate nation a mere six years old. Its thirteen colonies had united and declared themselves separate from Great Britain and had recently fought and won a War of Independence against the mother country, but many of the basic workings of its government were still being settled. When Astor walked Lower Broadway envying the solid houses, the U.S. Constitution hadn’t been adopted, nor had the Bill of Rights. The United States didn’t have its own workable form of money. Taxation remained in a state of confusion. George Washington still hadn’t been chosen president, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison worked on what would become the Federalist Papers, and a youngish and recently widowed Thomas Jefferson held the post of U.S. diplomat in Paris.
    The economy likewise was only a tiny fraction of what it would one day become. Slaves worked large plantations in the southeastern states that grew tobacco and cotton, while small-scale farming, fishing, and the beginnings of manufacturing supported the economies of northeastern states. But almost all this economic activity and population clustered on the eastern seaboard within a few hundred miles of the Atlantic Ocean. European settlement had barely crossed the Appalachian Mountains. In interior North America lay an expanse of wilderness, inhabited by Indian tribes, that extended an almost unimaginable distance, much of it unknown and unexplored by Europeans.
    But the unformed nature of the young United States also opened up tremendous possibility, economic and otherwise. Upon his arrival in New York, young Astor found a ready market for his fine European musical instruments in a fledgling city hungry for culture. Taking his German shipmate’s advice, he also hung about the New York docks to seek out travelers who had picked up a few individual furs—beaver, bear, fox, whatever—from frontier settlers or Indians in the interior wilds. Within a year or so, he’d accumulated enough furs to make a voyage back to London, where he learned the incredible markups that fashion-conscious patrons would pay for elegant, scarce luxury goods.
    Astor showed a precocious grasp of international markets, understanding that America lacked refined manufactories while Europe lacked large expanses of wilderness. Selling the fruits of one to the hungry markets of the other yielded steep profits. Thus the immigrant John Jacob Astor set himself up in the mid-1780s in the small city of Manhattan as the purveyor of an unlikely combination of goods—fine musical instruments and wild-animal pelts. While Astor’s chosen markets might have seemed haphazard, in reality he had identified two powerful economic veins in the young North American economy.
    “Jacob Astor [has] just imported an elegant assortment of Piano Fortes,” read one 1788 ad in the New York Packet; “he also buys and sells for Cash all kinds of furs.”
    Astor’s competitive nature blossomed early, a trait his own siblings may have inadvertently fostered by displaying both an affectionate and yet also dismissive quality in their dealings with