Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [456]
Twenty-five more such trusts were set up in the 1830s. Some of them competed to boom the value of their respective properties. In 1835-36 a Bronson-led firm built up Cassville, Wisconsin, laid out streets named after its New York investors (Prime, Ward, Arthur), and tried to make it the territorial capital, but a rival consortium, led by John Jacob Astor, succeeding in getting the governmental seat awarded to Green Bay (then called Astor).
New York land speculators were hard at work in the South too, especially after gold was discovered on Indian lands and President Jackson picked up the pace of forced dispossession. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 secured the evacuation of remaining Choctaw and Chickasaw by 1833, and the Cherokee were gone by 1835. In the latter year, the coast now clear, Butler formed the American Land Company. Pooling a million dollars from wealthy men and politicians in New York City, Albany, and Boston, it soon owned about 350,000 acres in eight states, 70 percent in cotton lands. A similar entity, the Colorado and Red River Land Company, had amassed half a million acres by 1835.
Texas proved particularly attractive. Samuel Swartwout, collector of the Port of New York and a close friend of Sam Houston, created the New Washington Association in 1834 to purchase and develop Texas land. Swartwout and his Manhattan associates strongly supported the “Texian” revolt against Mexico, and after Houston’s victory at San Jacinto in 1836, a Swartwout-convened meeting of four to five thousand people in Masonic Hall backed recognition of Texas.
New York’s growing financial, landed, and political involvement in the South and West provoked mixed responses there. Many local merchants, bankers, and agricultural entrepreneurs relied on eastern capital for new infrastructure, long-term mortgages, and credit for land and slaves. They considered the charges for procuring capital and marketing their commodities to be reasonable, or at least unavoidable, costs of doing business.
Others feared the political consequences of financial dependency. Southern planters remembered their subordinate position in the British Empire and worried about falling into a neocolonial relationship with northeastern capital. Some westerners feared they were in one already, pointing to the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company as evidence. Ohio Life was the West’s largest financial institution, but 70 percent of its stock was controlled by easterners, primarily New Yorkers. Branson and Butler had written its charter, selected its officers and stockholders, raised its capital, and won an amazingly nonrestrictive charter from Ohio (in part by liberally dispensing stock to influential Cincinnatians). As the state had bound itself not to repeal or even amend this charter until 1870, one opponent worried that by that time “it will have so wormed itself into the vitals of the land, that nothing short of revolution can put it down.” Outcries appeared regularly in Ohio newspapers against the “Wall St. Gentry of New York,” noting that in 1836, with other easterners, they owned over 70 percent of all bank stock in the state. Such protests were met with blunt rejoinders from New Yorkers, reminding westerners of the stark facts of economic life. Ohio, having rejected public financing of internal improvements, was “an interior state new and without surplus capital [and] could do nothing without the aid of capitalists of the City of New York.”
BANK WAR
For all the grumbling about Wall Street, the country’s most vigorous protests were still directed against “Chestnut Street,” for it was in Philadelphia that the country’s most powerful financial institution—the Second Bank of the United States—made