Jay Gould

He was Jason Gould then, and he wanted off the dairy farm badly enough that his father drove him to a school and left him there with fifty cents and a sack of clothes. He kept the books for a blacksmith to pay his way through Hobart Academy, took a half-interest in the shop, and sold it back to his father in early 1854. Then he taught himself surveying and mathematics, mapped Ulster County, and finished a history of Delaware County that a publisher brought out in 1856, by which time he had shortened the name to Jay. On the side he financed men burning wood ash for the tanning trade. In 1859 he began buying stock in small railways, which was the last ordinary thing he did.

Railroad securities in the 1860s were an instrument rather than an investment, and he played them better than anyone alive. Made manager of the Rensselaer and Saratoga in 1863, he joined Daniel Drew and James Fisk in the stock war that stripped Cornelius Vanderbilt of the Erie and left Gould its president in the summer of 1868. He and Fisk put Boss Tweed on the Erie board and got the legislation they wanted. In August 1869 they started buying gold to corner the market, working Ulysses S. Grant's brother-in-law for access to the president. By 1879 he held the Union Pacific, the Missouri Pacific and the Denver and Rio Grande, roughly 10,000 miles of track and about one-ninth of the national network, plus control of Western Union and, after 1881, the New York elevated lines.

Black Friday cost him almost nothing. He had hedged against his own corner, came out with a small profit that the lawsuits later took back, and Tweed's judges kept him from prosecution, while the collapse on September 24, 1869 ruined farmers and closed some of the oldest houses on Wall Street. Seventeen years later more than 200,000 workers walked off his southwestern lines after a Knight of Labor in Marshall, Texas was fired for attending a union meeting on company time. Gould brought in strikebreakers, some of them Pinkerton men, refused every demand, and asked the governors for troops. Missouri and Texas sent militia. At least ten people died, six of them bystanders shot by deputies guarding a freight train at East St. Louis. The strike broke inside two months and took the Knights of Labor down with it.

He died of tuberculosis on December 2, 1892 and went into a Greek-temple mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. The money then did what such money does. His daughter Helen completed the New York University library he had pledged, which carries the family name, and rebuilt the Roxbury house. His daughter Anna married a French count and then a duke. Karl Marx had already called him an Octopodus railway king and financial swindler in an 1881 letter, and the robber-baron label held for a century. It is not unanimous now: some economists argue his rate-cutting broke the railroad cartels and his ethics were unremarkable for the trade. Gouldsboro in Pennsylvania and Paragould in Arkansas still carry the name.

Jay Gould's life against the full span of the corpus.

• History of Delaware County, and Border Wars of New York book
  Written over several years while he surveyed for a living 1856
• The Erie Railway presidency company
  Taken from Vanderbilt and Drew in the Erie War 1868
• The gold corner other
  With James Fisk — it ended in the Black Friday panic of September 24 1869
• Control of Western Union company
  The country's telegraph network, taken by stock purchase 1881
• The New York elevated railways company
  Bought after 1881, giving him the city's rapid transit 1881
• Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis company
  A chokepoint on east-west traffic — the government sued to break it after he died 1889

• May 27, 1836 aged 0 Born on a small dairy farm at Roxbury, New York
• 1854 aged ~18 Sells his half of the blacksmith shop and surveys Ulster County
• 1856 aged ~20 Publishes his history of Delaware County
• 1863 aged ~27 Marries Helen Day Miller and is made manager of the Rensselaer and Saratoga They had six children.
• Summer 1868 aged ~32 Ends the Erie War as president of the railroad
• September 24, 1869 aged 33 The gold corner collapses into the Black Friday panic The premium on a gold double eagle fell from 62 percent to 35 percent in a day.
• March 1873 aged 36 Sues the impostor Lord Gordon-Gordon, then tries to abduct him out of Canada The kidnapping party was arrested before it could cross back.
• March 1, 1886 aged 49 The Great Southwest strike begins on his railroads More than 200,000 workers in five states. At least ten people were killed.
• December 2, 1892 aged 56 Dies of tuberculosis in New York City at 56

• Cornelius Vanderbilt 1794–1877
  Shipping and railroad magnate whose empire made him one of the wealthiest Americans in history. took the Erie from
• Ulysses S. Grant 1822–1885
  18th President and Union Army general whose leadership was decisive in winning the Civil War. worked his family for the gold corner
• Terence V. Powderly 1849–1924
  Led the Knights of Labor as it became the first mass national labor organization in the United States. broke his union
• Samuel Gompers 1850–1924
  Founding leader of the American Federation of Labor who established durable craft-union organization. built the union that replaced it
• J. P. Morgan 1837–1913
  Banking titan who stabilized the economy during the Panic of 1907 and shaped modern finance. rival financier
• James J. Hill 1838–1916
  Built the Great Northern Railway without federal land grants and shaped northern plains settlement. rival railroad builder