CHAPTER LXVI
.
THE UPS AND DOWNS OF WALL STREET.
ILLUSTRATED BY PERSONAL REMINISCENCES OF ITS LEADERS.
The mutations and vicissitudes, the ups and downs, of Wall Street can be best illustrated by sketches, from life, of the career and experience of its leading operators, who have often, though not generally, gone up like a rocket and come down like a stick.
I will not begin with those now foremost in the Wall Street arena, but go back to Jacob Little, whose name is still a household word on the Stock Exchange.
He died in the sixties, while the war between North and South was raging, and he had gradually ceased to be a power 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 fish—singular in appearance, manner, and business methods, but for more than twenty years he had a great name in Wall Street. To speak colloquially, 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.
[Illustration:
HENRY H. ROGERS. ]
The panic of 1837 made his reputation and his fortune, for, being naturally a bear, he was largely “short” of stocks. That panic swept the whole United States with the besom of destruction, and sent prices down 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 richer 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 and Worcester Railroad stock. He attempted, with a Boston clique, to control it, and personally bound himself to the clique, in the sum of $25,000, not to sell his stock below 90.
He went to work to put it up, but it “bulled hard,” and refused to stay up. So he paid the forfeit, and sold out at the best prices he could get, losing a million, which was looked upon in those days as ten or twenty millions would be now. This was the only large bull operation he ever engaged in, and it confirmed him in his natural bearishness.
He more than recovered from this disaster, however, by breaking the “corner” in Erie stock not long afterwards. He was largely “short” of it, and the cornering clique had bought up all the stock on the market. They put the price higher and higher from day to day, but Jacob Little remained unterrified, and refused to “cover” his contracts. He was the only one “short” who stood out against the cornerers, and made no effort to buy in his stock. The eyes of all Wall Street were watching him, and the prevailing opinion was that he would be forced to “cover” at a ruinous loss, or fail.
But he had “a card up his sleeve” that the cornerers had never suspected, and just when they were expecting his surrender, or failure, at the maturity of his contracts to deliver, he produced a big bundle of new Erie certificates of stock and filled his contracts by delivering them. These had been issued to him in exchange for the company’s convertible bonds, unknown to the clique, the issue of the bonds with the convertible clause being also unknown to them.
Such a surprise and checkmate Wall Street had never known before, and the “corner” was broken, with resulting demoralization and disaster to the cornering clique, and great profit and eclat to Jacob Little. But subsequently he failed several times on the “bear” side, yet always managed to pay in full out of later successes. He was equally generous as a creditor, and compromised on easy terms, so as to give his debtors a chance to recuperate. Hence he was liked and respected notwithstanding his aggressiveness and the havoc he often wrought among speculators on the opposite side of the market.
He was a born speculator. Speculation was his daily bread. He liked it for its own sake. His ambition was to control the stock market, and he was willing to run extra hazardous risks to achieve this end. He once said: “I care more for the game than the results, and, winning or losing, I like to be in it!”
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 afterwards.
He said, “I die poor!” But from the ashes of his estate and unsettled accounts his family succeeded in collecting about $150,000, which he had neglected to look after, for he had always been careless and easy-going in money matters, and attached little value to money except for its use in speculation. He was the very reverse of a miser, for he had never cared to hoard.
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 prices up on the Stock Exchange, while it was still in Lord’s Court, in a way that astonished him and the other fossils 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, metaphorically 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 has ever known, or probably ever will know again; and who was he? A slight, fair-complexioned country lad, he came to New York without a dollar, and became a clerk in a stockbroker’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 $500, the initiation fee.
That was in 1862, 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 bones of 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 be right on the market he would have been ruined at the start, but the market went with him, and it went with 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 first put up Cleveland & Pittsburg with the ease and celerity of a man who thought it a mere trifle to handle. Then he successfully took hold of Ohio & Mississippi, Rock Island, Erie, and Fort Wayne, and put them up in the same pyrotechnical and flamboyant way. He, in one day, marked Fort Wayne up from 118 to 152. He had unlimited confidence in himself, because he saw that he was on the right track, and the Street and the public followed him. He ran Pittsburg up from 65 to 108 amid great excitement, and bid 100 for the whole capital stock, “seller one year.” He then sold all his Pittsburg between 96 and 108. His firm, Morse & Co., were overrun with commission business at their large ground-floor office in William Street. By the early part of 1863 he had punished the bears badly, and made, it was estimated, at least $1,250,000, and his 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 he formed, so great was his prestige. Men crowded the sidewalk in front of his office trying to find out what he said, or what he was doing, so that they might do likewise; and if he gave a “bull” point on any stock, nearly all who heard of it acted upon it, feeling confident that it was a dead certainty. His fellow-brokers in the board largely followed him, like the rank and file, and rag, tag, and bobtail of the Wall Street crowd, because he had been always right. Never indeed was a Wall Street leader, before or since, more blindly followed than Morse. The whole country joined in the mad speculation there, and he was on the crest of the wave.
One night at the Evening Exchange Morse bid 112 for 10,000 shares of Erie stock, and Daniel Drew sold them. Then he bid the same price for 20,000 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 currency 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 Bucks County Lead, were resuscitated and boomed with the rest.
Clergymen and women were drawn into this whirlpool of speculation, and any stock with “gold” in its name went off “like hot cakes.” One stock was considered about as good as another to buy, as all were going up. Morse led the crazy multitude in everything, and, among his other achievements, he put Rock Island up from 106 to 149, and, in doing so, bought the whole capital stock, which was then only 56,000 shares.
Morse’s doom was sealed by Mr. Salmon P. Chase, who as Secretary of the Treasury sought to stop the wild inflation, and particularly the tremendous bull speculation in gold, by selling gold for currency, and locking the currency up in the Sub-treasury, 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 stocks to sell, through the banks calling in their loans, and brought on a panic, just at the time when Morse was more heavily loaded with stocks than he had ever been before.
Broken in health, and looking weary and haggard, he tried to sell, and this set every one of his followers selling like a flock 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, on the 18th of April, 1864, from 153 to 119. Then Morse left the room for the last time, and, going to his office, said to his partner, “The game is up!” Reading had also 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 overloaded with stocks, there and then swept him out of the Stock Exchange, for, knowing that he was hopelessly ruined, he wrote an announcement of the suspension of Morse & Co., and sent it to the board a few minutes after he had left it. The failure proved a very bad one, and the firm was unable to settle or resume. Morse was no longer the leader of Wall Street, and many of his customers, in a semifrantic condition, rushed in upon him and denounced him bitterly. The king had been dethroned, never to regain his crown, nor ever to get a fresh start.
Pandemonium reigned during the rest of the day, and at the Evening Exchange uptown at night Speculation 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 and overflowed into the Fifth Avenue Hotel. There was a night of horror in hundreds of homes. Morse was upbraided and cursed, and many of his customers, as is usual when they lose their money in a broker’s office, blamed him for their losses.
Then for a year Morse disappeared. When he returned he looked more haggard than ever, and he died poor soon afterwards. No one ever accused Morse of being dishonest, therefore his Waterloo defeat gained him widespread sympathy. Few Wall Street magnates had more friends than Anthony W. Morse from start to finish of his career.
John M. Tobin, who had been a ferry gatekeeper for Commodore Vanderbilt on Staten Island, figured largely as a speculator in the gold room, and also as a stock operator, during the two years of the Morse campaign, and saw many ups and downs. He began to loom up still more after Morse sank below the horizon in 1864. He was known to be the agent of Commodore Vanderbilt in cornering Harlem stock, and shone in Vanderbilt’s reflected light, although a large operator on his own account.
The Harlem “corner” was a memorable event. Through the winter of 1863-64 the stock had been selling at about 60, and Vanderbilt was a director and large stockholder, and, moreover, determined to make what he called “a big thing” out of it. The road was, however, generally considered of little account except for carrying milk. So, in connection with his street-railway projects for improving its value, he engineered the stock up to 117. He counted upon getting a charter from the Common Council; but its members tricked him, and after passing a favorable resolution they sold the stock “short” and then rescinded the resolution, and it fell to 72. So they made money at his expense.
[Illustration:
JOHN D. ARCHBOLD. ]
He then applied to the Legislature at Albany for a Harlem franchise to lay rails in Broadway; and the legislators saw there was room for stock speculation in this. They made a favorable report on a bill granting Vanderbilt’s application, and on this Harlem stock rose sharply to 150. Then they and their friends, including the New York Common Councilmen, sold it short largely, thinking they had a sure thing; and Tobin bought for Vanderbilt all that was offered. On March 25, 1864, they voted, by prearrangement, against the bill, and Harlem stock fell to 101.
The sellers of Harlem rejoiced, for they had large profits on paper; but Tobin still continued to buy the stock, and under his purchases it rapidly recovered. The commodore was determined to punish them. Within ten days Harlem was up to 150 again. A week later it touched 185, and thereafter, for ten days, fluctuated between 175 and 200. Daniel Drew sold calls on it for 30,000 shares, thinking it could not stay up long, and the professional speculators, both in and out of the Stock Exchange, took a hand in selling it “short” on the same theory. The Morse panic swept over it in April, but still it stood up, like a pyramid in the desert, and Tobin still continued buying for Vanderbilt.
In May the price of Harlem was put up to 300. It stood at 285 on the day 15,000 shares had to be delivered, and they were settled for at this price. Daniel Drew compromised by paying $1,000,000 to Tobin in settlement of his own Harlem “shorts,” but the claim against him was $1,700,000. He, however, threatened a suit for conspiracy. Tobin’s share of the profits of the corner was about two millions, and this made him worth three.
Commodore Vanderbilt chuckled, and disposed of the Harlem road by leasing it at eight per cent. on the stock to the New York Central & Hudson when he got control of it. So Harlem proved a bonanza to him till the end, and is still one of the splendid assets of his descendants. After the “corner,” Tobin bulled gold on a tremendous scale in the face of the Union victories that terminated the war. He bulled it from 198 to 211 against the “short” interest at the beginning of 1865, and then it broke on him so heavily that he lost more than $1,500,000. After that he met with a succession of disasters in the stock market, and lost every dollar that he had, besides running in debt with his brokers. He then retired to live with his sister on a farm on Staten Island, and was never seen again in Wall Street. He saw ups and downs with a vengeance. So did his contemporary of the open board, E. A. Coray, who made and lost about as much.
Addison G. Jerome had a career in Wall Street more brief than that of Anthony W. Morse, but he is still well remembered there as a shining light. He entered Wall Street as an operator early in 1863, after being a merchant in the dry goods trade, and during the rest of that year was called “the Napoleon of the public board,” so conspicuously active, bold, and successful was he in his operations. He was a friend and broker of John Tobin’s, and coöperated with him in bulling Harlem, with the result that he made a very large amount of money out of it, first by the rise from 60 to 117, when Commodore Vanderbilt was dealing with the New York Common Council, and next when he was punishing the legislators at Albany for going back on him, as he phrased it, in the 1864 “corner.”
He became a brilliant leader, and had a host of followers, and was successful in everything he undertook until he bulled Michigan Southern, and, with a clique that he formed, bought control of it. He put it to high figures, and was sure of his position. But Henry Keep, the treasurer of the company, and a keen operator in stocks, stepped in, and turned Jerome’s success into utter and disastrous failure.
Henry Keep knew something that Jerome was unaware of, namely, that a clause in the Michigan Southern’s charter permitted its directors to increase its capital stock. So he called a secret meeting of the board, and an increase of 14,000 shares was voted. Then, with this increase for future delivery, he sold the stock against it, and borrowed to make his deliveries, which made Jerome think Keep was largely “short” of Michigan Southern. He and his clique, therefore, kept on buying and advancing the price, while Keep kept on selling more and more. The final result was that Jerome called in all his loans of the stock, so as to force the “shorts” to “cover,” and that Keep responded by delivering the 14,000 shares of new stock, which caused a fall of twenty per cent. in Michigan Southern in one day. This involved the loss of nearly all the three millions of money Jerome had so quickly made, and killed him as a leader, although he was respected as an honorable man. He took the loss of his fortune and prestige so much to heart that he sickened and died in the following year of some obscure disease, a virtually ruined man. But, fortunately, during his nine months of phenomenal success he had settled enough on his wife to keep the wolf from the door. His ups and downs were remarkably swift even for Wall Street.
Leonard W. Jerome, a younger brother of Addison’s, was prominent in Wall Street and society, and as the driver of a four-in-hand, long before the latter appeared, and continued in the Street long after Addison passed away. His career was also marked by memorable ups and downs. In 1863 he was a large holder of Hudson River Railroad stock, which the bears had hammered down to 107. So he formed a strong clique to bull it against the “short” interest, and bought all the stock that was offered until he had taken nearly all the capital. Then he bid up the price gradually till it reached 175, and made the stock so scarce that he loaned it to the bears to make their deliveries, at five per cent. a day. The shorts, estimated to represent about 50,000 shares, finding there was no help for them, covered at a very heavy loss, while Jerome made a great deal of money by squeezing them, presumably two or three millions.
His prestige increased with his wealth, and he became a social as well as a financial lion. He had been watching Pacific Mail since it succeeded the Nicaragua Transit Company in 1856. In 1861 its stock fell to 69, but in the next year its earnings were enormous, and 26,000 of its 40,000 shares were bought by a combination of operators, mostly its directors, who transferred it to Brown Brothers & Co., to be held in trust for their benefit for five years; and they selected Leonard Jerome to bull the stock in the open market. Under his manipulation it rose to 160 in thirteen months after he commenced operations for the ring. There was a large “short” interest in it by that time, and, to force the “shorts” to settle, he put it to 200, and kept it there, and they settled.
In 1865 Pacific Mail’s capital was increased from four millions to ten, and yet its stock stood at 240, and it paid twenty per cent. a year in dividends. The year after, it was increased to twenty millions, yet it sold at 180, with Jerome still bulling it. But in 1867 he met his Waterloo in it. To use his own words, he had bitten off more than he could chew. The company’s earnings fell off largely, and its report showed assets reduced from thirty-four to twenty-two millions; the Government paper-money issues were being rapidly contracted, and the flood of “water” injected into the stock was beginning to tell upon it. Moreover, Jerome had agreed to buy the old five-year combination’s stock at 160. Owing to all this, accompanied by a generally weak stock market, Pacific Mail broke, under enormous sales, from 163 to 115 in a few days on his hands, and he lost practically everything he had, except some real estate. After being thus ruined by Pacific Mail, Leonard Jerome ceased to be a power in Wall Street. He had no longer any prestige there, and soon retired from it entirely, and died, at the home of his daughter, Lady Randolph Churchill, in London, a poor man. He had experienced his full share of the ups and downs of Wall Street.
Pacific Mail was nothing to Leonard W. Jerome after he lost his money, nor he to Pacific Mail. The company had seen its most palmy and prosperous days, and its water-logged stock was heavy on the market. It suffered from reduced traffic and bad management, and in 1871-72 its stock had sunk to so low an ebb that the directors felt it was necessary to do something to mend matters. So, having little of the stock, they decided, instead of trying to reëlect themselves, to give up the ship. They retired to make room for a new board in November, 1871, with Alden B. Stockwell at the helm as president. Nominally the new board selected him, but really he selected them to do his bidding.
His name was then very little known in Wall Street, but he was known to have been a steamboat clerk on Lake Erie, and more recently to have married the daughter of Elias Howe, the sewing-machine inventor and manufacturer of Bridgeport, Conn., and thus acquired wealth and become the president of the Howe Sewing Machine Company and the Willcox & Gibbs Company.
He had come to Wall Street to see what he could do, and finding Pacific Mail stock down to the 40’s in 1871, he began to bull it with a vigor that excited some wonder; and the wonder grew when it was found that he had secured stock and proxies enough to elect his own board of directors. He elected them and himself by a vote of 118,000 shares, and became Commodore Stockwell at a bound. His wish was law to his codirectors, and the irreverent called it a dummy board.
With the assets of the Pacific Mail Company under his control, and
## acting for it, he soon managed to get control, and become president, of
the Panama Railway Company. He began, on this acquisition of the Pacific Mail Company, to bull Pacific Mail stock anew by making splendid promises. In October, 1872, while the company’s steamers were foundering and burning with alarming frequency, he claimed that it had increased its property by large purchases, and was earning more than eleven per cent. a year in excess of the Government subsidy. This, he said, would enable it to pay twelve per cent. on its capital stock from January 1, 1872. Then he asked for authority from the Legislature at Albany to reduce its capital stock from twenty millions to ten, which was granted; but the company never availed itself of this authority, and to this day its capital remains at twenty millions.
The stock, that had been as low as 40, responded to his “bull” statements and manipulation, for Wall Street saw that the intention was at least to put the stock up. It rose, after a good deal of see-sawing, to about 107, and Commodore Stockwell was the sensation of the time in Wall Street. He became, like Leonard W. Jerome, what was called a “big swell.” He had one of the largest houses in Madison Avenue and one of the showiest turnouts in the city, and yet he had been commodore for less than a year.
He did not confine himself to Pacific Mail and the other interests mentioned, but took hold of that railway cripple, Boston, Hartford and Erie, and bought 30,000 shares of Atlantic and Pacific Railway preferred at 25, a stock of uncertain legal status, although the certificates had been printed by the company, because there was no legal authority for its issue. But this did not prevent the stock from being made active for a short time in Wall Street at prices a good deal above cost.
Before long, however, it became discredited, and so also did Boston, Hartford and Erie stock, while Pacific Mail suffered under fresh losses and reduced earnings. The stocks of the three companies were vigorously attacked by the bears and they all went down together, Stockwell being unable to support them, and all that he had made was lost. This state of things involved him in a snarl about the 27,000 shares of the Pacific Mail Company’s treasury stock, and a compromise was the result, by which he is said to have given his note to the Pacific Mail Company for $1,140,000, indorsed by the Howe Sewing Machine Company.
Then, at the next election, he ceased to be its president, and a new board of directors was elected. He was also dropped from the Panama Railroad directorate and the Atlantic and Pacific board. He had lost his money and his prestige, and there were none so poor as to do him reverence. He led a precarious existence as a small speculator afterwards, and, not long before his death, failed for a small amount as a member of the Consolidated Exchange.
He was a man of popular manners, and, in describing his change of fortune, he humorously remarked: “When I first came into Wall Street, it was asked, ‘Who is that man Stockwell?’ But I was respectfully spoken of as ‘Mr. Stockwell’ after I had made a good deal of money bulling Pacific Mail; and when I was elected president of Pacific Mail, I was styled ‘Commodore Stockwell’ and ‘a Wall Street leader,’ and a great man generally. But when Pacific Mail broke, and broke me, I became ‘That red-headed cuss Stockwell.’” Thus are the ups and downs of Wall Street, and Wall Street opinion, illustrated in real life.
Of all the great operators of Wall Street, however, Daniel Drew furnishes the most remarkable instance of immense and long-continued success, followed by utter failure and hopeless bankruptcy. His early success as a stock speculator was all the more surprising because he was an illiterate man, who had barely learned to read and to write enough to be able to sign his own name in a sprawling, illegible hand.
He had been a cattle drover, and after that the keeper of the Bull’s Head Tavern, at the New York Cattle Yards, and was without any experience of banking or Stock Exchange affairs when he first came into Wall Street; and he never even read a newspaper. But he succeeded in making money from the start, and then joined others in putting capital into Hudson River steamboats; and his investments in these became large and proved very profitable, although he knew nothing about running steamers himself.
His shrewdness enabled him to make millions by stock speculation, and before long, without knowing anything of the stock brokerage business except as a customer, he entered into a Stock Exchange partnership, his firm being Drew & Robinson. For many years this house was prosperous and prominent, and Drew, after it was dissolved, and when at the summit of his prosperity, said to a friend who rated him at twenty millions, “I guess sixteen will cover it.”
After that Drew’s cunning and sagacity seemed gradually to fail him. He met with a succession of disasters through bad judgment, but was more liberal than before in endowing the Drew Theological Seminary and other Methodist institutions. Yet, instead of giving the endowments in cash, he gave his notes for them, and paid interest on these. The consequence was that when he finally lost every dollar that he had, and was declared a bankrupt, without any assets, the notes were worthless. While in this bankrupt condition and dependent for a home on his son, he died, and his death was as unnoticed as that of any other Wall Street wreck. He had gone out of sight, and out of mind, when his money was gone. Never did anyone go further up or further down in Wall Street as a stock speculator than Daniel Drew.
Charles F. Woerishoffer was a brilliant Stock Exchange operator, who made a large fortune out of nothing and then lost most of it again by overstaying his market as a bear after the panic of 1884.
James R. Keene came to New York with several millions, made out of mining stocks in California at the time of the great Bonanza gold discovery at Gold Hill, when Flood and O’Brien, Mackay, and John P. Jones made their millions. But Keene, after adding to his “pile,” lost all he had through overextending his operations in bulling stocks and grain in the eighties. He, however, got a fresh start through being employed by large interests to manipulate stocks for them, and after several more ups and downs he is rich again.
Henry N. Smith, a former partner of Jay Gould, made five or six millions as an operator in stocks, only to lose them again and die poor. The brief meteoric Wall Street career of Ferdinand Ward, who lured General Grant into forming the firm of Grant & Ward, is well remembered. He went up so high that when he came down he landed in Sing Sing prison. Fish, the president of the Marine Bank, did the same, after being long in good repute.
It is unnecessary to dilate on any of the Vanderbilts, or Goulds, or Russell Sage, or Henry Keep, or Henry Villard, or William E. Travers, because they had no totally overwhelming reverses in their Wall Street career; but John F. Tracy, the president of the Rock Island Railroad in the sixties, was ruined by his stock speculations after being worth more than five millions, and he had to relinquish his presidency, and died in poverty. Cyrus W. Field, too, lost nearly all his large fortune through overloading himself with Manhattan Railway stock; and Addison Cammack, the Ursa Major of Wall Street, died worth little in comparison with what he had once possessed.
How violent the vicissitudes of Wall Street are at times we may easily infer when we recall the tremendous convulsion produced by the gold conspiracy of Black Friday, on September 24, 1869, which involved thousands in enormous losses, and caused both the Stock Exchange and the Gold Clearing House, and Gold Exchange Bank, to be closed; or when we think of the devastating Northern Pacific panic of May 9, 1901, or of the far-reaching and long-continued havoc worked by the panic of 1873.
The memorable failure of Jay Cooke & Co., early in the last-mentioned panic, will be recalled by many as vividly as the collapse of the Ohio Life and Trust Company that started the panic of 1857.
All these reminiscences of the ups and downs of Wall Street will serve to remind my readers that, while it is often easy to make money, it is still easier to lose it. Therefore, boldness should be always tempered with caution in the pursuit of the Almighty Dollar in Wall Street.
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