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By Root 889 0

of unemployed soldiers into crowded and already mature cities. But the American landscape was ample and open enough to absorb hundreds of thousands of ex-soldiers looking for work and opportunity, in addition to hundreds of thousands of immigrants who came each year to work in factories or to till fields that stretched beyond the horizon. Alexander Noyes, in his classic volume Forty Years of American Finance, wrote: “Almost at the moment when a million citizens were turned from organized destruction to pursuit of peaceful industry, the avenues of American employment and production were widened in a degree unprecedented in the history of trade.”

The pace of growth and production was staggering. Every industry, from manufacturing to agriculture, boomed. American farmers, who in 1867 planted just over 64 million acres of wheat, corn, oats, rye, and barley planted 100 million by 1878. The combined yield increased to 2.3 billion bushels. Moving those vast supplies of grain, as well as a restless people, required a new and extensive transportation network. The transcontinental railroad was rightly hailed as a monumental construction feat when the two sides were linked in Utah in the spring of 1869. But those 1,800 miles were a drop in the bucket of overall railroad development. In the eight years after the end of the Civil War, crews laid some 30,000 miles of track across the United States. Russia, also aggressively building its rail infrastructure, put down just 11,000 miles during the same period.

And every new mile of railroad required steel for rails, timber for ties, and capitalists for cash. If the potential rewards of investing in railroads were great, so were the risks. For every strong, healthy railroad with sound management there were many more that failed for mismanagement, natural obstructions, or outright fraud. Corrupt politics, frequent panics, and a shaky money supply unsettled on the issue of whether gold, silver, or paper ought to be the standard, left a financial landscape strewn with the corpses of would-be tycoons. One of them was Edward Green.

Hetty Green holds the considerable distinction of being the only woman to make her mark in the financial markets during the Gilded Age. But if repressive and constricting attitudes toward women presented serious obstacles for Hetty, the Gilded Age in almost every other regard was tailor-made for a financial genius looking to get rich. A roster of financiers and industrialists of Hetty’s generation, whose fortunes flowered along with hers during this remarkable period, reads like a who’s who of American capitalism. Jim Fisk, whose notorious financial schemes made him the embodiment for the term “robber baron,” was born in 1834, seven months before Hetty. Fisk’s partner, Jay Gould, was born in 1836. Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie was born in Scotland in 1835. J. P. Morgan, the financier and banker who would buy Carnegie’s company (over a golf game) to form the colossus U.S. Steel, was born in 1837. John D. Rockefeller, the muscle and brains behind Standard Oil, was born in 1839. Henry M. Flagler, Rockefeller’s onetime partner who later became a real estate developer who invented Palm Beach, had been born in 1830. For the shrewd and lucky, this Darwinian environment, before regulation, labor unions, and income tax, presented opportunities almost without limit.

Most of these men and their wives and families lived on a scale unprecedented in the history of the world. New York’s Fifth Avenue, laid out in 1811 and completed in 1824, drew Wall Street swells away from their downtown mansions in the postwar years and became the wealthiest and most fashionable address in the United States, if not the world. The stretch of Fifth Avenue in the vicinity of Central Park became known as Millionaire’s Row. Testimonies to wealth and privilege rose in block after block of French manor houses and royal palaces and opulent châteaux, each built by and for some industrial captain whose family a generation or two earlier had been trapping furs, butchering meat, tilling soil, or keeping