CHAPTER L.WESTERN AND SOUTHERN FINANCIAL LEADERS.
Alfred Sully, his Origin and Successful Career.—Calvin S. Brice, a Financier of Ability.—General Samuel Thomas, Prominent in the Southern Railroad System.—General Thomas M. Logan, a Successful Man in Railroading and Mining.—Financial Chieftains of Baltimore.—The Garretts.—Their Great Success as Railroad Managers.—Portrait of Robert Garrett.
Alfred Sully, who has become so prominent in the financial world within a year, is tall, rather slightly built, nervous, and energetic. His face, by its long, square contour and thoughtful lines, suggests that of Senator Wm. M. Evarts; the eyes are keen and penetrating but kindly. At heart his tastes are those of a genial literary recluse. Circumstances and unquestioned ability have made him a financial leader. He was born about 46 years ago in Ottawa, Canada, where he received a good academical education. He tried his fortune in the West. He went to Cincinnati, studied law, and was graduated from one of its best schools, whereupon he went to Davenport, Iowa, and formed a co-partnership which became known as the leading law firm of the city. He acquired some means, and in 1872 came to New York, the proper place for men of ability. It is understood that at this time he had some idea of indulging his tastes for authorship, but Austin Corbin put a veto on that. The two had become acquainted in Davenport, where Mr. Corbin was formerly a banker, and the latter, on meeting Mr. Sully in New York, tendered him the position of General Manager of the Corbin Banking Company, which he had established here. He accepted it. But this post, responsible as it was, could not long hold a born financier, and we soon find him obtaining control of the Indiana,Bloomington & Western Road. He next bought the Ohio Southern, of which he is still President, a transaction in which he and his friend nearly doubled their money. Then he made a great deal of money in the Central Iowa and other roads in Illinois. He and Austin Corbin secured control of the Long Island Road, and he gave much time and labor to the Manhattan Beach Road and associated interests at Coney Island. Then he went into the scheme of restoring the financial health of that enfeebled giant among railroads, the Reading, and was one of the prime movers in the reorganizing and consolidation of the Richmond Terminal, the Richmond & Danville, the East Tennessee, Virginia & Georgia, and numerous other Southern roads, which now form one vast system, which will probably yet obtain an entrance into New York.
Calvin S. Brice was Vice-President of the East Tennessee, Virginia & Georgia Road, and is a Director in the Richmond Terminal and numerous other Southern roads. He is now connected with the United States Express Company, in the management of which he will take an active part. He was born in Lima, Ohio, about 48 years ago, and was educated as a lawyer. He is below the medium height, and rather slightly built, but has broad shoulders, a fitting pedestal for a good head, with firm square features and keen bluish gray eyes. He wears a sandy beard, closely trimmed, which tends to heighten the effect of decision of character. He is a financier of ability.
General Samuel Thomas, who is prominent in the Southern railroad system, is now about 50 years of age, is a Western man, and before the war was a civil engineer in the service of an Ohio railroad. After the war he again became a civil engineer, but, drifting after a time to NewYork, engaged in railroad enterprises, and ultimately secured a large interest in Southern railroads. He is now President of the East Tennessee, Virginia & Georgia, and is largely interested in the Richmond & West Point Terminal, the Richmond & Danville, the Memphis & Charleston, and other Southern roads. He is tall, well-built, energetic, and affable. He lives in fine style, and is a member of the Union League. He is worth several millions.
Gen. Thomas M. Logan is President of the Virginia Midland Railroad, Vice-President of the Richmond & Danville and Richmond Terminal, and a Director in all the roads in this system. He was born in Charleston, S. C., about 44 years ago. He served with distinction in the Confederate Army, and rose to be a Brigadier-General, being one of the youngest in the service. He is a graduate of the University of South Carolina, and formerly practiced law in Richmond, Virginia, where he is also engaged in extensive manufacturing and mining enterprises. He resides in Richmond, and is a member of the Westmoreland Club, but often comes to New York on railroad business, in which he has amassed a comfortable fortune.
John W. Garrett’s name will always be associated with that great property, the Baltimore & Ohio, which he rescued from the verge of bankruptcy. He was a man of great force of character, and inherited an aptitude for business. He was a graduate of Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, and engaged in business in Baltimore. He became a Director of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, and in 1858 was elected its President. He was a staunch supporter of the Union in the civil war. Despite a disloyal sentiment plainly noticeable in Baltimore and elsewhere in Maryland, he lent the Government all the assistance in his power in the transportation of hundreds of thousands of Federal soldiers. He was quick to repair burned bridges, and to do anything to facilitate the military operations of the Federal Government. President Lincoln and Secretary Stanton thanked him warmly.His salary as President was $10,000 a year. The Directors repeatedly offered to increase the remuneration, but he declined to accept it. He often refused offers as high as $50,000 a year to become the President of other roads. He was autocratic in his administration. His will was law. He found the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad a weak and struggling underline in the railroad world, and he left it a giant in the American system of railroad transportation.
Robert Garrett, the son of the preceding, and now the President of the Baltimore & Ohio Road, is one of the railroad kings of the United States. He became the President of the Baltimore & Ohio in his thirty-seventh year, after having served as Third Vice-President and First Vice-President under his father’s administration. He is a graduate of Princeton, a man of genial characteristics, and a favorite in society. He has made a study of railroad administration, but is now understood to seek some relief from the burdens unavoidably incident to his position as the head of a great railroad. And he is wise. He is many times a millionaire. Why should he devote his life to unnecessary care and labor? Rich men in this country are apt to work too hard. They do not enjoy life as men of far less wealth do in Europe. Under almost any administration the Baltimore & Ohio Road has a great future before it. The road was built to draw the Western trade to Baltimore. This trade had been diverted from that city by the building of the great canals. New York & Philadelphia were receiving the lion’s share of the traffic. The first stone on the Baltimore & Ohio Road was laid by Charles Carroll, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, in 1828. The road was opened to Wheeling in 1853. The firm of Robert Garrett & Sons was established in 1849, and was originally engaged in the wholesale grocery trade. When the road reached Wheeling its finances were at the lowest ebb. The house founded by the grandfather of the present head of the road bought largely of its bonds at a very low figure,and this marked the first connection of the Garrett family with this great property. The house of Garrett & Sons still exists as a banking establishment under the management of T. Harrison Garrett. In 1853 Baltimore & Ohio stock could be bought for a song. Since then it has sold at as high as $225 a share. The improvement in the property was very largely doe to the efforts of John W. and Robert Garrett.
The recent embarrassing complications of Mr. Garrett in connection with the management of his railroad and telegraph companies, it is hoped, will only be temporary, and I expect to see him again, at no distant day, reinstated at the head of the great corporation over which he and his father presided. His present difficulties are matters of current newspaper record and comment, and I need not, therefore, enlarge upon them here. As shown by the latest report, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad is virtually in a good, prosperous and solvable condition, and I have no doubt that the Drexel-Morgan syndicate which has undertaken to put the property on a still more solid and durable basis with the ten million loan which it has negotiated, will uprightly do its whole duty, and in due time return the trust considerably enhanced in value to Mr. Garrett, his heirs and assigns.
John H. Inman, another member of the Southern railroad circle, was born in Tennessee. He is tall, fine looking and soldierly in appearance. He is one of the shrewdest of the capitalists who have invested large amounts in Southern enterprises. He came to New York from Atlanta, quite poor, after the civil war. In the war he was a quartermaster’s clerk, and his old quartermaster afterwards became one of his brokers on the Cotton Exchange. Young Inman went into the office of an uncle on arriving in New York, and learned the business of a cotton broker. He was clear-headed and successful. After he became a partner in the firm he added very materially to his wealth by carrying cotton for the premiums on the options. He is recognizedas one of the leaders of the Cotton Exchange. In recent years he has become a financier, has made large loans to railroads in the South, and has invested heavily in Atlanta real estate, and in iron enterprises in Birmingham, the rising Southern market. He was prominent in the reorganization of the Richmond & Danville railroad system, in which he is largely interested. He is a director in the Richmond Terminal and associate lines, as well as the Louisville & Nashville and other Southern roads. He invested nearly two millions in the Tennessee Coal & Iron Company. He is now about 50 years of age. He seems to be a man of destiny. He is a man of great force of character and exceptional business skill. He resides in New York, and is possessed of a large fortune.
In this country no one cares about ancestry. The spectacle of Mark Twain weeping at the tomb of Adam is a humorous expression of American opinions on this general subject of ancestry. To save time he paid his devoirs to the fountain head without stopping at the Guelphs, the Tudors, the Bourbons, the Hohenzollerns, the Hapsburgs, or the Romanoffs. There is no time, if there was any wish in this great country—shaking to the tread of gigantic business—to inquire, “Who was his father?” There is only time for such questions as, “What do you know?” “What can you do?” “How have you succeeded?” Integrity and ability stand a man in better stead in America than show of purple veins of Norman blood. Even in the aristocracy (so to speak) of brains, ancestry in one sense, so far from being an advantage, is apt to be precisely the reverse. A son of Henry Clay or Daniel Webster can never hope to attain the lofty pre-eminence of the sire, and suffer by comparison. Great men do not always have great sons. For one Pitt, the son of a great Chatham, there are hundreds of sons who intellectually dishonor great fathers.Brains, intelligence, industry, energy, and pluck; these are the talismanic words which stand for success in America, where no ghost of a dead feudalism hovers over the land, darkening it by its blighting presence. In England the first question, a silly echo of centuries, is, “Who is his father?” But who are the nobility? Have they any title as such to the respect of right-thinking persons? The nobility is running to seed, or rather the once noble tree is withering and dying; it has borne its fruit and its time has passed away. In Scriptural language, Why cumbereth it the ground? How many of the nobility are now worthless roues, habitual seducers, dried up or half consumed by the fires of passion and debauchery! They are dying as the fool dieth, with a drunken leer on their shrunken faces and the stain of dishonor on their escutcheons. The Commons of England will yet redeem the nation from the thraldom of a worthless aristocracy. America is the true field for the human race. It is the hope and the asylum for the oppressed and down-trodden of every clime. It is the inspiring example of America—peerless among the nations of the earth, the brightest star in the political firmament—that is leavening the hard lump of aristocracy and promoting a democratic spirit throughout the world. It is indeed the gem of the ocean to which the world may well offer homage. Here merit is the sole test. Birth is nothing. The fittest survive. Merit is the supreme and only qualification essential to success. Intelligence rules worlds and systems of worlds. It is the dread monarch of illimitable space, and in human society, especially in America, it shines as a diadem on the foreheads of those who stand in the foremost ranks of human enterprise. Here only a natural order of nobility is recognized, and its motto, without coat of arms or boast of heraldry, is “Intelligence and integrity.”