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[Goralski]

Together their accumulations in humdrum trade. Perhaps Peter Cooper, who
had made a million dollars in the manufacture of isinglass and glue, and
George Law, whose gains, equally large, represented fortunate
speculations in street railroads, faintly suggest the approaching era;
yet the fortunes which are really typical are those of William
Aspinwall, who made $4,000,000 in the shipping business, of A. T.
Stewart, whose $2,000,000 represented his earnings as a retail and
wholesale dry goods merchant, and of Peter Harmony, whose $1,000,000 had
been derived from happy trade ventures in Cuba and Spain. Many of the
reservoirs of this ante-bellum wealth sound strangely in our modern
ears. John Haggerty had made $1,000,000 as an auctioneer; William L.
Coggeswell had made half as much as a wine importer; Japhet Bishop had
rounded out an honest $600,000 from the profits of a hardware store;
while Phineas T. Barnum ranks high in the list by virtue of $800,000
accumulated in a business which it is hardly necessary to specify.
Indeed his name and that of the great landlords are almost the only ones
in this list that have descended to posterity. Yet they were the
Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Harrimans, the Fricks, and the Henry
Fords of their day. Before the Civil War had ended, however, the
transformation of the United States from a nation of farmers and
small-scale manufacturers to a highly organized industrial state had
begun. Probably the most important single influence was the War itself.
Those four years of bitter conflict illustrate, perhaps more graphically
than any similar event in history, the power which military operations
may exercise in stimulating all the productive forces of a people. In
thickly settled nations, with few dormant resources and with practically
no areas of unoccupied land, a long war usually produces industrial
disorganization and financial exhaustion. The Napoleonic wars had this
effect in Europe; in particular they caused a period of social and
industrial distress in England. The few years immediately following
Waterloo marked a period when starving mobs rioted in the streets of
London, setting fire to the houses of the aristocracy and stoning the
Prince Regent whenever he dared to show his