From the River to the Sea by John Sedgwick

From the River to the Sea by John Sedgwick

Author:John Sedgwick [Sedgwick, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-02T00:00:00+00:00


An 1882 cartoon showing Jay Gould bowling over the opposition.

Gould took the tannery back, but the uproar rendered it worthless. He left for New York City, married the homely daughter of a prosperous Manhattan merchant, and expended some of his father-in-law’s fortune to win control of a tiny railroad that ran from Vermont to the Hudson River. A year and a half later, he added another line. Then he got ambitious.

There had been a stock exchange in New York since the founding of the republic; the original traders signed the agreement organizing securities trading under a buttonwood tree at 68 Wall Street in 1792. As late as the 1830s, after the traders organized a formal New York Stock Exchange, it was a rare day if more than thirty shares of stock changed hands. It made for a clubby affair. Members of the exchange wore top hats and prided themselves on their civility. But by 1850 the number of transactions reached thirty thousand, and the action spilled outside to the sidewalks where “curb brokers” could get in on the buying and selling of securities, introducing the distinction between relatively ignorant outsiders and knowing insiders who towered far above them. One Wall Street trader came up with a name for those on top:

These men are the Nimrods, the mighty hunters of the stock market; they are the large pike in a pond peopled by a smaller scaly tribe. They are the holders of those vast blocks of stock, the cubical contents whereof can be measured by an arithmetic peculiar to themselves; they are the makers of pools large enough to swallow up a thousand individual fortunes. Sooner or later, the money of the smaller tribe of speculators finds its way into the pockets of these financial giants.



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