New-York tribune. [volume], February 19, 1905, Page 5, Image 27

About New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924

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PS AMD DOWNS of WALIL STREET
vc=^/ *— y «s-i»
Great Qpersitoir^ Wlhi© Have (Goime Broke
By HENRY CILEWS
T. mutations and vicissitudes, the
ups and downs, of Wall Street
can be illustrated best by sketches
from life of the career and experience
of its leading operators, who often,
though not generally, have gone up
like a rocket and come down like a
stick.
1 shall not begin with those now
foremost in the Wall Street arena; but
go back to Jacob Little, whose name is
still ■ household word on the Stock
Exchange.
He died in the sixties, while the war
between the North and South was rag
ing, and he gradually had ceased to be a
j>ower in the Street after the panic of
1857. He remained a bear on the rising
tide of currency inflation following the
outbreak of the war, and was submerged and wiped out
He was an odd iish — singular in appearance, manner
and business methods — but for more than twenty years
he had a great name in Wall Street. To speak col
loquially, he was the "cock of the walk" by self
assertion and common consent. He was the successor
of Jacob Barker, who came from Philadelphia, and
was the first great leader Wall Street had known.
He was trained in his office, and began as a stock
operator on his own account in 1835.
The panic of 1537 made his reputation and his for
tune, for naturally l>eing a bear he was largely short
of stocks. That panic swept the whole United States
with the besom of destruction, and sent down prices to
zero. It left him a greater bear than ever, a preacher
of distrust and a prophet of failure. He thrived on
calamity, and grew richer and her during the years
of depression that followed that memorable revulsion.
From 1835 to 1846 he was in his glory and his prime,
and no one disputed his leadership in the world of
Wall Street. But then he met with a great reverse,
not, however, through continuing to bear stocks, but
through a bull operation in Norwich & Worcester
Railroad stock. With a Boston clique, he attempted
to control it, and personally bound himself to this
clique in the sum of twenty-live thousand dollars not
to sell his stock below no.
He • ■ work to pot it up; but it bulled hard,
up. So he paid the forfeit, and
■ • the best prices he could get. losing a million,
. looked upon in those days as ten or twenty
now. This was the only large bull
ed in, and it eonhrmed him in
• j i«.-an>hness.
]{■ ' i from this disaster, however,
ing the corner in Erie stock not long after-
I rgely short of it, and the cornering
. ■ up all the stock on the market.
They put 1 er from day to day;
•named unterrified, and refused to
tracts. He was the only one short who
■ ■ rners. and made no effort to
• I all Wail Street were
him, and the prevailing opinion was that
ver at a ruinous loss, or fail.
ard up his sleeve " that the a
• ted, and just when they were expect
■ r or failure, at the maturity of his con
• r. lie produced a big bundle of new
i filled "ins contracts by
a issued to him in
Cor the company's convertible Ijonds, un
• ■ •: • .. ■• the issue of the bonds with the
dso It-ing unknown to them,
rpi ■ and checkmate Wall Street never
0 ■• re, and the o »rner was broken,
ting demoralisation and disaster to the cor
■ . .•■ ..: profit and eclat to Jacob
B • il ■ bendy lie failed several tin:.-.- on
■ inaged to pay in full out
:: equally generous as a
■ ■ ised on ca.-v tcrn.s, so as to
< to recuperate. Hence he was
:. notwithstanding his aggressive
ten wrought among speculators
.rket.
ulator. Speculation was his daily
• for its own sake. His ambition
r. market, and he was willing
ti . Lzardous risks to achieve tins end. He
■ for the game than the results,
i like to be in it.
SUNDAY MAGAZINE for FEBRUARY 19, 1905
It was this feeling that kept him in Wall Street
after his money power and his prestige of success, as
well as his health, had passed away. He was out of
debt, but without money in any considerable amount.
He was a mere shadow of what he had been, a name
and nothing more. Nevertheless, he risked his small
operations with zest. But his health gave way more
and more, and he fainted one morning in the Board
Room, in Lord's Court, and his end came not long
afterward.
He said: "1 die poor!" But from the ashes of his
estate and unsettled accounts his family succeeded
in collecting about one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars, which he had neglected to look after, for he
always had been careless and easy-going about money,
and attached little value to money except as chips in
the game of speculation.
It was Anthony W. Morse who gave the finishing
stroke to the career of Jacob Little, for while Little
was operating for a decline in the early sixties, Morse
sprang into the speculative ring as a rampant bull,
and bid up prices on the Stock Exchange, while it still
was in Lord's Court, in a way that astonished him and
the other members of the Board. They considered
him utterly reckless. But Morse foresaw that the great
war issues of United States currency — greenbacks as
they were called — then being made would inflate the
prices of stocks largely, and he accordingly, meta
phorically speaking, rushed in where angels feared
to tread.
He became the storm-center, the hub, the pivotal
point, in the wildest riot of stock speculation this
country ever has known, or probably ever will know
again. And who was he? A slight, fair-complexioned,
country la<l who came to New-York without a dollar,
and became a clerk in a stock-broker's office. Then he
married a woman with some money, and induced her
to let him speculate a little for her, and was successful
in making something for her, and enough for himself
to buy a seat at the Stock Exchange, which then cost
only live hundred dollars for the initiation fee.
That was in [862, up to which time he was both
insignificant and unknown. But the bold, dashing
style in which he immediately began to astonish the
natives and rattle the dry txmes oi the fossils, by his
rapidly advancing bids for railway stocks, showed that
he was a man of the time, fully up-to-date. Had he
not proved to l, t ' right on the market, he would have
been ruined at tie start: but the market went with
him, and it went vith a rush that made the old fogies
of the Board say: "Well, well! this young fellow
got the start of us! We are not in it!"
He lirst put up Cleveland & Pittsburg with the ease
and celerity of a man who thought it a mere triile to
'handle Then he successively took hold of Ohio &
Mississippi, Rock Island, Erie and Fort Wayne, and
put them up in the same pyrotechnical and llamboy
ant way. In one day he marked up Port Wayne
from liS to 152. He had unlimited confidence in him
self, because he saw that he was on the right track,
and trie Street and the public followed him. He ran
up Pittsburg from 65 to 10S amid great excitement,
and bid 100 for the whole capital stock, "seller one
year ' He then sold all his Pittsburg at between 96 and
ioB His 6rm, Morse & Company, were overrun with
commission business at their large gr.mnd-iloor office
on William-st.
By the early part of 180.} he had punished the bears
badly, and made-, it was estimated, at least a million
and a quarter, and Ins career of riotous success ran
for just two years, during which he was
supposed to have made enormously
There was a rush to join every pool In.
formed, so great was his prestige. Men
crowded the sidewalk in front of Ins
office, trying to find out what he s;iid
or what he was doing, so that they
might do likewise, and if he gave a bull
point on any stork, nearly all who heard
of it acted upon it. feeling confident that
it was a dead certainty. His fellow
brokers in the Hoard largely follows
him, like the rank ami file, and rag, tag
and bobtail of the Wall Street crowd
because he always had been right
Never indeed was a Wall Street leader
before or since, more blindly follower
than Morse. The whole country joinei
in the mad speculation there, and ht
was on the crest of the wave
One night at the evening Exchange Morse bid
112 for ten thousand shares of Krie stock, and
Daniel Drew sold them. Then he bid the same
price for twenty thousand more, and Drew sold them.
A day or two later. Drew covered at a heavy loss.
When Morse took hold of Ohio & Mississippi, he
jumped it from 49 to 69 in a couple of days.
Money was cheap and abundant, owing to the cur
rency inflation, and speculation so active that many
stock houses kept a relay of clerks for night work.
Meanwhile speculation in gold was as rampant as in
stocks, and hundreds of new mining and petroleum
companies were launched, and the stocks of these
were actively traded in at high and rapidly rising
prices, while old and worthless stocks, like Buck's
Country Lead, were resuscitated ami boomed with the
rest.
Clergymen and women were drawn into this whirl
pool of speculation, and any stock with "Gold ' in its
name went off like hot cakes. One stock was con
sidered about as good as another to buy, as all were
going up. Morse led the crazy multitude in every
thing, and among his other achievements he put up
Rock Island from 100 to 140, and in doing so bought
the whole capital stock, which then was only fifty-six
thousand shares.
Morse's doom was sealed by Salmon P. Chase, who
as Secretary of the Treasury sought to stop the wild
inflation, and particularly the tremendous bull specu
lation in gold, by selling gold for currency, and locking
up the currency in the Subtreasury, so as to make
a tight money market. This had the desired effect,
for it made money so scarce and dear that it forced
the large speculative holders of stock to sell, through
the banks tailing in their loans, and brought on a
panic, just at the time when Morse was more heavily
loaded with stocks than he ever had been
l>efore.
Broken in health, and appearing weary and haggard.
he tried to sell, and this set everyone of his followers
selling like a Hock of sheep, and prices tumbled from
bad to worse under the general rush to realize. Fort
Wayne fell at the morning session of the Board, on
that fatal Monday of the Morse panic, April iS. 1864,
from 153 to in). Then Morse left the room for the
last time, and going to his office said to his partner
"The game is up!'' Reading also had fallen that
morning nineteen per cent.: Pittsburg, seventeen;
Hudson River, twenty-three; and all other active
stocks about as much.
This monetary tornado, that found Morse over
loaded with stocks, there and then swept him out of
the Stock Exchange; for, knowing that he was hope
lessly ruined, he wrote an announcement of the sus
pension of Morse \- Company and sent it to the Board a
few minutes after he had left it. The failure proved to
lie a bad one, and the firm was unable to settle or
resume. Morse n<> longer was the leader of Wall Street,
and many of his customers, in a semi-frantic condition,
rushed in upon him and denounced him bitterly.
The King had been dethroned, never to regain his
crown, or ever to get a fresh start.
Pandemonium reigned during the rest of the day.
and at the evening Exchange up town at night. Specu
lation had been so widespread, and Morse had been so
implicitly trusted as a leader, that the collapse ruined
thousands, including many women, and a raving,
cursing mob crowded into the evening Exchange, anil
overflowed into the Fifth Avenue Hotel. There was
a night of terror in hundreds of homes. Morse was up
braided and cursed to his face, and more than one of his
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