Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [268]
As a hub of speculation too, New York was now far ahead of its rivals. While the pace of activity on the Tontine exchange was glacial by modern standards, rarely exceeding a hundred shares a day, and few businesses as yet relied on issues of stock to raise money, New York brokers nonetheless offered more than stocks to wager on—elections, sporting events, international affairs, even the weather—and siphoned cash from all over the country. As one envious Philadelphia merchant said in the mid-nineties, the “immense capital” pouring into the city lubricated every aspect of trade and commerce and explained why New York “now far exceeds us in her exports and imports.”
The upshot was the renowned “Cotton Triangle,” in which New York brokered the exchange of southern cotton—and, more important, the money from sales of southern cotton—for British manufactures. New York ships ran cotton from Charleston or Mobile or Savannah to Europe, returned to New York with manufactured goods (and immigrants), then worked down the coast again to exchange their goods for more cotton—ringing up, at every turn, substantial profits in sales, freight charges, and commissions. By 1798 cotton already accounted for half of the city’s domestic exports; a decade later one-fourth of the cotton reaching Liverpool from the United States came through the East River waterfront. Eventually, New York superintended so great a share of the South’s output that forty cents of every dollar paid for southern cotton allegedly wound up in the pockets of city merchants.
Once again, New York had hitched its economic well-being to the institution of slavery.
RIDING THE WAVE
The quickened tempo of local commerce drew throngs of aspiring businessmen to Manhattan, and their lean and hungry willingness to take entrepreneurial risks further accelerated the velocity of trade. In 1790 the city directory listed 248 merchants; by 1800 there were over eleven hundred—a fourfold increase.
A large body of newcomers came down from New England, bringing new expertise, capital, and connections—the urban wing, as it were, of the great exodus populating upstate New York and the Ohio country. The brothers Nathaniel and George Griswold arrived from Old Lyme in 1794 and established the firm of N. L. and G. Griswold, whose blue-and-white checkered house flag was known in the West Indies, South America, and China. (Local wags liked to say that a cargo stamped “N.L. & G.G.” meant “No Loss and Great Gain.”) They were joined by Lows from Salem, Grinnells from New Bedford, Goodhues from Salem, and a host of other Connecticut Yankees, including Anson G. Phelps, Elisha Peck, and William E. Dodge—more than enough, all in all, to warrant formation in 1805 of the New England Society in the City of New York. At their annual dinner, the members drank toasts to “the Universal Yankee nation!”
With the New Englanders came additional numbers of Scots, English, Irish, and French immigrants eager to make their fortunes in the city’s surging economy—none more successfully, as it happened, than young John Jacob Astor. Since his arrival in New York shortly after Evacuation Day, Astor had developed a keen interest in the fur trade. He began buying furs in Manhattan and shipping them back to London, soon accumulating enough capital to open his own warehouse in Montreal (still the center of the North American fur trade) as well as to purchase a lot and building on Little Dock Street, in the heart of the business district, for an office and residence. By 1793 he had become the most important fur merchant in the United States. When Britain agreed to abandon