Sunday, November 24, 2013

Legend of the Yankee Trader

 

Born of poor Dutch immigrants, Cornelius Vanderbilt rose from an untutored Staten Island ferry boy who could not spell correctly into a modern captain of industry – he had known no other school than that of the dock and “Possessed of a sharp wharf-rat’s tongue and a rough wit . . . [and] Wherever his keen eye detected a line that was making a large profit . . . he swooped down and drove it to the wall . . . Then when the opposition was driven out, he would raise his rates without pity, to the lasting misery of his clients.”  The war-party of Lincoln in 1861 hastened a massive transfer of power to these captains of industry and large-scale capitalism.   
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
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Legend of the Yankee Trader

“In the 1850’s [one of the kings of the marketplace] was Daniel Drew, sometimes an associate, sometimes rival of [Cornelius] Vanderbilt . . . Timid and mistrustful, he always believed the worst of men and their business ventures. He said: “Never tell nobody what yer goin’ to do, till ye do it.” [As] Henry Clews relates, “no hardships or privations could deter him from the pursuit of money.”

[Drew] . . . became a character of renown, possessing a fortune of many millions, a model for a rising generation. His sayings were repeated everywhere and his more famous tricks were rehearsed by younger disciples.  According to Clews he cared not a fig what people thought of him, or what newspapers said.  “He holds the honest people of the world to be a pack of fools . . . .when he has been unusually lucky in his trade of fleecing other men, he settles accounts with his conscience by subscribing toward a new chapel or attending a prayer meeting.”

For Drew was devoutly religious . . . Had he not given the immense sum of $250,000 to found a Methodist theological seminary in New Jersey? But in truth, it turned out in the end that he had given only his note, which after many years, in the shifting fortunes of new times, was never to be honored . . .  
The legend of the Yankee Trader . . . formed a significant part of the composite national portrait, in which the mellow features of [Benjamin] Franklin are prominent . . . He was Uncle Jonathan, or Jonathan Slick or Sam Slick, as Miss Constance Rourke describes him in her recent inquiries into American folklore.  He was long and lean and weather-beaten; never passive, he was “noticeably out in the world; it was a prime part of his character to be “a-doin.” 

He pulled strings, he made shrewd and caustic comments; he ridiculed old values; “the persistent contrast with the British showed part of his intention.” And to the British especially he always appeared homely and “rapacious,” but never slow-witted. If you met him in a tavern and he drew you into trade, he soon quietly stripped you of everything you had.

In the South, superstitious colored folks and even white folks, according to tradition, locked their doors piously at the approach of the long, flapping peddler’s figure. 

This ingenious Yankee, quick to adapt himself everywhere, easily extricating himself from situations, and by religion and training profoundly rational, his passions under control, his reason dominated by his natural inclinations, “plain and pawky,” overassertive, self-assured, moving everywhere, had left his mark upon the society and leavened it. But in the give and take of the frontier he was at home naturally; he easily bested all others.”  

(The Robber Barons, The Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901, Matthew Josephson, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934, pp. 17-21)

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