forthcoming cotton crop, and it was to the interest of the creditor to secure as large a crop as possible in order to safeguard his loans.

Develop

ment of

the South

The credit system of the South was a burden upon its development, but in spite of it a new spirit was visible in the former Confederacy. A Cotton States' Exposition was held at New Orleans in 1884 to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the earliest cotton exports from the South. The exhibits revealed the economic regeneration that was under way. In the next few years the development of the railroad systems induced a more diversified agriculture. The cotton-lands of Texas were brought into use, and their competition reduced the prosperity of the older cotton States, driving these to better agriculture and the cultivation of additional crops.

The social life of the South was still determined by the presence of its negro population. The unwillingness of the white inhabitants to be ruled by the negro vote brought about a practical nullification of the Civil-War amendments to the Constitution. The right of the negro to vote was taken away from him by fraud or force, as home rule was reëstablished in the early seventies. The civil rights conferred upon the freedman by the Fourteenth Amendment and enforced by subsequent acts of Congress were declared by the Supreme Court in the Civil Rights Cases of 1884 not to include the right to equality of social treatment. In 1890 Mississippi adopted an educational test as a qualification for suffrage and as a means of disfranchising the negro without violating the Fifteenth Amendment, and the other Southern States soon followed suit. The South as a whole was recovering its self-confidence, but it had become politically a region of a single party.

The change in business, whether through new inventions or through the reorganization of old industries, gave opportunities for the accumulation of private fortunes Money hitherto unknown in the United States. A kings group of money kings arose, with fortunes whose existence appeared to challenge the success of the existing social

order, and whose personal conduct absorbed public attention to an increasing extent.

The earlier American fortunes were ordinarily the result of commerce or banking. In 1877 Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt died and within a few months he was followed by John Jacob Astor and A. T. Stewart, who with him were regarded as the richest men in America. The three fortunes thus passed on to other hands were typical of different methods of accumulation. Two had been acquired, one had been inherited. The original John Jacob Astor, a German peddler, came to America near the close of the Revolution and was soon identified with the organization of the fur trade in the Northwest. His gains, according to the popular tradition, were invested in New York real estate and became the nucleus of an estate that grew in value as New York City spread up Manhattan Island toward the Bronx. By 1877 it had become the greatest of American inherited properties and was becoming the foundation of a notable family.

The

Stewart and Vanderbilt made their own fortunes. former, an Irish immigrant, became a general merchant, and his New York store was started before his death upon the course of development that produced the great department store of the next decade. Cornelius Vanderbilt earned his honorary title of "commodore" by operating steamboat lines in the waters around New York. About 1867 he turned his savings into railroad securities and soon became the dominating master of the New York Central. His son, William K. Vanderbilt, took on the guidance of the business before his father's death, and later defended the will, in which the Commodore had held most of his wealth together and passed it on to the favorite son. The younger Vanderbilt carried the New York Central lines through the strikes of 1877 with a minimum of interruption, and in 1882 became identified with one of the famous phrases in American business. The Pennsylvania Railroad had just started a new fast train to Chicago and when Vanderbilt was asked what the New York Central would do to meet the public

expectation of a rival train, he replied briefly (so the reporter insisted), "The public be damned." The phrase gained a wide and embarrassing circulation and was given interpretations not intended by its user, but did not misrepresent the practical attitude of most railroads and many other great industrial enterprises of its day.

The newer fortunes, whose owners were now working themselves into the public eye, were often too huge to have been accumulated by the efforts of a single man, and were in many cases the results of successful speculation or of welldirected team-work. Jay Gould and Thomas A. Scott were representative of the railroad group. The latter, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was also identified with many Western roads and was engaged in 1878 in an effort to secure the land subsidy voted to the Texas Pacific Railway in 1871, but forfeited through non-construction. The New York Sun insinuated that the Texas Pacific pool had induced the Southern States to accept Hayes as President without revolt on the promise that Congress would do something for the Texas Pacific. Scott at least was occupied in the construction and operation of railroads. Jay Gould's connection with them was chiefly speculative.

Gould gained his place before the public as one of the gold conspirators who tried in 1869 to corner the market and raise the premium on gold. A decade later he was associated with the reorganization of the Union Pacific and the Kansas Pacific as they struggled to get on their feet after the depression of the seventies, and a little later he put the Wabash system together. In 1880 he was suspected of being the principal financial supporter of James G. Blaine. He died in 1892, turning his whole estate into family channels.

The fortunes of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, becoming notable in this decade, were founded upon team-work and the exploitation of natural resources. Each was believed capable of ruthless competition, but each was the center of a group of associates that added to the resources of the country, Oil and steel were brought into a

new relationship with society as the industrial revolution progressed, and the profits that accrued as the Standard Oil companies and the Carnegie Steel interests rose to national ascendancy were largely the result of a service actually rendered.

The American millionaire became a figure in all the capitals of the world, as well as in American society, and received a full-length portrait in the Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). The ambition to found families was early recognized, and as the great wealth of millionaires made it difficult for poorer persons to associate with them, they flocked by themselves at Saratoga Springs and Newport, and gave the incentive for the development of winter resorts in Florida and southern California. Their social habits were constantly under criticism by a public that regarded them with a mixture of pride and exasperation. In 1886 a group of wealthy New Yorkers opened a residence colony of their own at Tuxedo Park, on the former estate of Pierre Lorillard, where they built a casino, and playgrounds, and cottages, and acquired the distinction without knowing it of bringing the country club into American life.

The plainer Americans, admitting no inferiority and irritated when travelers spoke of the middle and the lower Popular classes, organized recreation of their own as the recreation cities became too congested for comfort. The population of New York City discovered Coney Island in 1876 on an attractive beach that had been unoccupied a few years before, and the drive thither from Brooklyn was crowded with trotting horses and showy carriages, while steamboat lines and special railroads moved the larger crowds. Cape May, famous before the Civil War as a summer resort, was now outclassed by Atlantic City, whose nearness to Philadelphia made it an easy outlet for the city crowd.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Ida M. Tarbell, History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), is the best work of its kind. John D. Rockefeller, Random Reminiscences of Men and Events (1909), is of slight value. E. L. Morse (ed.), Samuel F, B. Morse,

His Letters and Journals (1914), is an invaluable contribution to the history of the telegraph; less substantial are Herbert N. Casson, History of the Telephone (1910), F. T. Cooper, Thomas A. Edison (1914), and F. J. Garbit, The Phonograph and its Inventor, Thomas Alvah Edison (1878). Mrs. Burton Harrison, History of the City of New York (1896), describes the changes in the material structure of that city. Robert P. Brooks, The Agrarian Revolution in Georgia, 1865–1912 (1914), gives a detailed picture of the changes in one Southern State. Burton J. Hendrick, The Age of Big Business (1919), gives entertaining biographical sketches of several of the wealthiest captains of industry.