Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune

The Astor fortune began with beavers. These remarkable animals, like humans, reshape the environment in which they live. Trappers lured beavers, using proprietary scent mixtures, to hidden steel traps whose two halves sprang together like jaws on the animal’s foot, holding them until they drowned. Their warm furs were a staple in European clothing, particularly hats. Europeans hunted their own beaver populations to extinction and now eagerly sought American beaver pelts. Beaver pelts became the frontier’s standard currency. When shipped back to Europe, the pelts could sell for 600% or even 900% of what was originally paid to trappers.

Johann Jakob Astor (later anglicized as John Jacob) was born into the butcher’s trade in Walldorf, Germany, in 1763 and continued to profit from the killing of animals after immigrating to New York. He left home at 16 and first moved to England, where he worked for his uncle selling flutes and pianos. At age 21, he journeyed to New York with flutes to sell and the hope of starting a new life in this growing city, where his older brother had recently settled. On the journey, he heard of the immense profits one could make in the fur trade. After working in a trapper’s warehouse and learning all he could, he returned to England with a load of furs to see if they were really as profitable as rumors held. It was. He returned to New York with a shipment of pianos and a resolution to pursue the fur trade.

Using a $100 gift of seed money from his brother, John Jacob journeyed into the frontier regions. He became successful by embracing the hardships of wilderness travel that other traders shunned and using his natural gift for language to learn enough of the region’s Indigenous languages (Seneca, Mohawk, and Oneida) to negotiate effectively with Indigenous American trappers. He traded cloth and luxuries like liquor, tobacco, and jewelry to them in return for beaver pelts. He married Sarah Todd, the hardworking daughter of a widow who ran a boardinghouse. Using Sarah’s dowry, he opened a storefront to sell furs as well as pianos and flutes. Together they had eight children. John Jacob Jr., the eldest son, had a disability, so the next son, William Backhouse Astor (born in 1792), became the heir apparent.

By 1798, at age 35, John Jacob was worth a quarter of a million dollars at a time when a $750 annual income made for a comfortable living. He no longer had to journey up the Hudson River himself. Then, he drastically expanded his fortune when changing international treaties let him strike a deal with the British East India Company to use their treaty ports to sell furs to China. He soon made a huge profit exporting furs and importing luxuries from the Far East.

After the Louisiana Purchase opened the promise of vast natural riches in the West, John Jacob Astor began to dream of creating a sister country to the US based on an immense trading city on the West Coast that would funnel US furs across the Pacific to China, Japan, and Russia and import Asian products far more cheaply than competitors who had to sail around the tip of South America or Africa. This country would be named for himself: Astoria. As a first step toward this vision, he founded the American Fur Company in 1808, though he hid the extent to which he controlled it. Its first goal was to organize trade from New York to the Missouri River. Two years later, he used it to found a subsidiary, the Pacific Fur Company, to create a string of trading posts up the Missouri and then down the Columbia River to the Pacific coast. Astor’s company would monopolize trading, supplies, and fur.

The US government backed Astor to head off a Canadian rival interested in the same region. One expedition would set off up the Missouri River to create trading posts, while the other would sail in the Tonquin around South America and up to the Columbia River. However, the overseas expedition encountered problems immediately. The ship’s commander, Lt. Jonathan Thorn, asserted authority over all on board. The Pacific Fur passengers, led by company partner Alexander McKay, refused to submit to Thorn or help the sailors with their work. While resupplying in the Falklands, Thorn set sail without McKay and another passenger when they failed to return to the ship in time, though they caught up with the ship through a stroke of luck. The Tonquin expedition arrived at the Columbia River on March 22, 1811. Several men died while the ship struggled to find safe passage through the breakers. Finally, the ship anchored safely, and McKay began building the company’s new headquarters, Fort Astoria. The Tonquin then sailed upriver to trade. During negotiations, the imperious Thorn struck a local chief. The enraged locals returned a few days later and killed the crew, including Thorn and McKay. One of the last crew members ignited the ship’s magazine, blowing the ship to smithereens. The overland expedition experienced difficulty too, and only a handful made it to Fort Astoria. Despite these setbacks, however, the survivors continued to establish trading posts until the War of 1812, when the British captured Fort Astoria and the Pacific Fur Company had to be liquidated.

Astor refocused his attention on the American Fur Company, resolutely working to undermine government trading posts. These posts generally treated Indigenous Americans fairly but refused to sell them alcohol. Astor made this his central tool, moving forward “with a pitiless willingness to supply liquor at hugely inflated prices to addicted Indigenous people” (32). He took full advantage of having a monopoly on selling a highly addictive product. As Astor outcompeted other trading posts, he used his monopolistic power to squeeze profits out of independent traders reliant on his stores and to push his Indigenous trading partners into debt to him.

After making some $2 million, Astor decided to leave the fur trade in 1834 and focus on Manhattan real estate. He bought up vacant lots and rented them to tenants who improved them. He acquired almost all of what became Greenwich Village and Times Square. In 1836, he opened a magnificent hotel called the Astor House. As he aged, though, he became a notorious skinflint, always paranoid about designs on his wealth. As his physical health deteriorated, he had to be fed by a nurse. The authors quote with apparent approval the ageist comment of one guest who, after describing Astor’s health problems with Gothic melodrama, opines that this elderly man “had lived long enough” (37). Astor inevitably did as the guest wished and died in 1848 at age 85. In his will, he supported only one charity—the Astor Library, later the New York Public Library—on the urging of the man who read to him when his eyesight began to fail.

William Backhouse Astor, the richest man in America after his father’s death (according to one of his friends), “sat in his office as if it were a prison to which his father had condemned him for life” (39). John Jacob had groomed him to take over the business from his youth and dictated his life. William’s only brief period of freedom came when John Jacob determined that US universities lacked the rigor of their older European counterparts and sent his son to Germany to attend university. There, the young man soaked in European culture outside his father’s sphere of influence. However, John Jacob recalled him to New York during the War of 1812 and made him a partner in the family business despite William’s initial lack of enthusiasm for business. He was boring, plain looking, and shy.

In 1818, William married Margaret Alida Rebecca Armstrong, a simple woman from an old blueblood New York family, though a secret romantic and lover of Gothic fiction. Her father agreed that she would renounce her rights to inherit part of the Astor fortune in return for a lump-sum payment upon marriage. She and William fell into a steady routine until his death. He followed his father’s dictates on the business even when they clashed with his own principles, such as his religious unease at the centrality of alcohol to their fur business. He did his work quietly but well, without fanfare or innovation. Perhaps his apparent willingness to go into the office every day without change signified that he was truly content with his life. William and his wife, whom he called Peachy, had several children; the eldest was a girl named Emily. The family moved north to mansions they built on what became Astor Place, near Washington Square. They summered in the cool Catskills at Rokeby, an estate they purchased from Margaret’s father.

Meanwhile, under William’s plodding stewardship, the Astor real estate fortune grew. As New York boomed, thousands of immigrants flooded into the city looking for housing, especially after the 1845 Irish Potato Famine. William, following John Jacob’s model, bought unimproved land and offered long-term leases to sub-landlords, who then built houses or apartments to rent. When the leases ended, the improved property reverted to the Astors to rent out again. In the meantime, the sub-landlords packed as many tenants as possible into shoddy housing to make a profit before the land went back to the Astor family. William felt no responsibility for the economically disadvantaged people living in his tenements, viewing continued poverty as evidence of laziness.

The simmering tension between the classes in New York finally broke out into violence in 1849 via the Astor Place Riot, named for the street rather than William himself, who had no direct involvement in the affair. William Charles Macready, a famed British actor, had come to the Astor Opera House (also named for the street, not the Astor family) to perform the lead role in Macbeth. Meanwhile, a few blocks away in a working-class theater, Edwin Forrest, an American actor from a modest background, also was scheduled to play Macbeth. Supporters of Forrest, incensed at aristocratic privilege and invoking patriotic disdain for British foreigners, threatened Macready and the Astor Opera House. Anticipating trouble, the authorities assembled New York’s police force and the military. More than 10,000 New Yorkers descended on Astor Place, some to halt Macready’s performance and some merely to gawk. When the crowd began attacking the police with paving stones and tried to seize muskets from the soldiers, the authorities gave the order to open fire. Twenty-two people died, and more than 30 were injured. The authors blame the elites, sympathetically reproducing an editorial remark from the time that saw the confrontation as a symptom of an unjust system that allowed a few to become rich at the expense of others. That writer urged immediate changes. The authors agree, noting that “we are all still waiting” (63) for a change to society that would end exploitation of the economically disadvantaged by the rich.