Moses Taylor papers

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Description: Moses Taylor (1806-1882) was a little-known but representative figure in the history of the mercantile and industrial development of the United States and Cuba in the nineteenth century. Taylor was a New York City merchant in the West Indies trade (chiefly Cuba), a long-time president of City Bank of New York, an entrepreneur and manager in the railroad and mining industries, a life-long Tammany supporter, an ambivalent War Democrat with personal and business ties to the South, and an important member of August Belmont's clique of Democratic businessmen. Bulk of the papers reflects Taylor's business career over five decades and is composed of correspondence and records, 1834-1889, of the trading house of Moses Taylor and the reorganized trading and investments firm of Moses Taylor Company; personal papers, 1837-1880; papers of Taylor's estate, 1881-1900; papers, 1852-1882, relating to the estate of Taylor's father, Jacob Bloom Taylor; letters and papers, 1860s and 1870s, of Taylor's son, Henry A.C. Taylor, and other members of his family; correspondence and papers, 1830-1893, of Taylor's business partners, Percy Pyne (who was also his lieutenant and son-in-law) and Lawrence Turnure, and his closest associates in trade and industry, Henry Augustus Coit, Charles Heckscher and Philo Shelton; correspondence and records, 1830-1899, of the many industrial companies and public utilities in which Taylor and/or his family and estate had a financial interest; letters and papers, 1863-1888, relating to the Ten Years War of 1868-1878 in Cuba, during which Taylor's firm acted as agents for the independence movement; and records, 1793-1906, of other merchants.
Names: Taylor, Moses, 1806-1882 (Creator); Coit, Henry Augustus (Correspondent); Heckscher, Charles C., 1949- (Correspondent); Pyne, Percy Rivington (Correspondent); Shelton, Philo (Correspondent); Taylor, Henry Augustus Coit (Correspondent); Taylor, Jacob Bloom (Correspondent); Taylor, Moses, 1806-1882 (Correspondent); Turnure, Lawrence (Correspondent)
Dates / Origin: Date Created: 1793 - 1906
Library locations: Manuscripts and Archives Division; Shelf locator: MssCol 2955
Topics: Americans -- Foreign countries; Business; Capitalists and financiers; Coal mines and mining -- United States; Entrepreneurship; Foreign trade and employment; Industrial organization; Industrial relations -- United States; International trade; Investments -- Cuba; Labor; Mines and mineral resources -- United States; Railroads -- Pennsylvania; Railroads -- United States; Slavery -- Cuba; Sugar; Bankers; Cuba -- Commerce -- United States; Cuba -- History -- Insurrection, 1868-1878; New York (State) -- History; United States -- Commerce -- Cuba; Cayuga and Susquehanna Railroad Company; Chestnut Hill Iron Ore Company; City Bank (New York, N.Y.); Harvey Screw and Bolt Company; Jersey Shore Improvement Company; Lackawanna Iron and Coal Company (Scranton, Pa.); Moses Taylor and Company; New Jersey Zinc and Iron Company; Penn Mining and Smelting Company; St. Louis and Hannibal Railroad Company; Union Iron and Coal Company
Genres: Documents; Correspondence
Notes: Biographical/historical: Moses Taylor was a model nineteenth century New York merchant/capitalist, industrial organizer, War Democrat, and a president of the City Bank of New York from 1855 to 1881. The Model New York Merchant: Moses Taylor is a little-known but representative figure in the history of nineteenth century American business. When he died on May 14, 1882, the New York Times reported his passing as "An Old Merchant's Death", and carried a lengthy account of his life under the headline, "Starting in Life With Nothing and Leaving Millions Behind Him - His Early Labors By the Midnight Oil - The History of a Self-Made Man". In May 1911 McClure's Magazine ran a series of articles on the "Masters of Capital in America". In the installment on City Bank, Taylor is described as "the last and possibly the greatest of the great New York Merchants". Taylor's first business was the commercial house of Moses Taylor. Opened in New York City in 1832, the new commercial house focused on trade with the American South and the West Indies. The second business was the firm of Moses Taylor and Company reorganized in 1849 to manage his growing industrial and financial ventures as well as trade. The business records, which comprise roughly nine-tenths of the collection, document the activities of Taylor, his partners, and his close associates in trade and industry, among them Tomas Terry and the Drake family of Cuba, Marshall O. Roberts, August Belmont, William E. Dodge, Cyrus Field, Anson Phelps, Henry Augustus Coit, Charles Heckscher, Philo Shelton, John Blair, Samuel Sloan, and the creative Scranton brothers of Pennsylvania. Together with Taylor, these men comprised a powerful managerial elite, and, in various combinations, were involved jointly in a wide range of commercial and industrial undertakings. Moses Taylor was born in 1806 in a house on the corner of fashionable Broadway and Beaver Lane (now Morris Street) a few blocks from the busy waterfront where he would open his first store in 1832 at the age of 26. His business and personal influence kept pace with the rise of New York as the nation's principal business center. Due largely to the advent of the Erie Canal and the growth of the railroad, by the end of the 1830s New York was outstripping Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Albany in the competition for the frontier markets. The ambitious merchant/entrepreneurs of New York, seeking outlets through which to channel their excess wealth, had been colonizing the ore-fields of Pennsylvania and Ohio for nearly two decades. In the years after 1840 the growing concentration in New York of banking and insurance resulted in most railroad and mining main offices taking up residence in New York where there was quick money available, thus expanding the city's economic power and control. Business was Taylor's birthright. His father, Jacob Bloom Taylor, was a cabinet-maker, merchant, and agent of John Jacob Astor, a Republican alderman, and an inspector of state prisons. Moses Taylor's grandfather and namesake came to New York from England in 1736 and became one of the city's leading merchants. The New York Gazette of 1750 tells us that his business was located "at the corner house opposite the Fly Market". After attending private schools in the city, Moses Taylor at the age of fifteen began his business career as an apprentice clerk at J. D. Brown. Shortly afterwards he moved to G. G. and S. S, Howland, a flourishing import/export house specializing in the West Indies trade during the first quarter of the 19th century. Taylor worked at Howland Brother's for ten years as an unpaid clerk and it was there that he began an economic involvement with Cuba that lasted over fifty years. The brothers encouraged Taylor to trade on his own before opening a store in 1832 as a commission agent. In the same year the country's first cholera epidemic broke out in New York, killing over 2,000 people, driving out many of its wealthy citizens, and forcing the suspension of all commercial activity. According to Daniel Hodas the trading house of Moses Taylor survived with an enhanced reputation for reliability and sound dealings. His business and some records also survived the fire of December 16-17, 1835, which destroyed over six hundred buildings in the business district. When the Howland brothers retired, they offered Taylor a partnership with their nephew, William Aspinwall (the future developer of Panama). Taylor declined the offer, and with $15,000 of his savings, and J. J. Astor's backing, he established an import/export store. After a brief period of general trading he focused on the Cuban trade, which, in the first four decades of the 19th century, was surpassed only by Great Britain and France in the volume and value of exports to the United States. He began exploiting the connections in Cuba that he had cultivated during his apprenticeship with the Howland brothers, and within four years had established a regular shipping run to the West Indies. Moreover, the powerful Drake family of Havana made him their New York agent. This was an extraordinary indication of confidence which enhanced his position as a trader, and led to similar arrangements with other Spanish and Anglo-Cuban planters, most notably Tomas Terry. The Industrial-Capitalist In 1849 Taylor made changes to his business to accommodate his growing industrial investments. He set aside funds to bankroll that side of the business and made his long-term employee, Percy Pyne, a quarter partner in the new firm of Moses Taylor and Company. In time Pyne became Taylor's son-in-law and closest associate. English by birth, Pyne was educated at Christ's Hospital in London before emigrating to the United States. In 1836 at the age of sixteen he was hired by Taylor as a junior clerk, and in 1855 he married Taylor's daughter, Albertina, who was an active stockholder in many of her father's ventures. Pyne, whose ancestors originated in Spain and were named Pinos, acquired proficiency in Spanish and ultimately replaced Henry Augustus Coit as Taylor's representative in Cuba. Coit entered the Cuban trade in the late twenties, and for several years was a key figure in Taylor's early trading business. His command of Spanish and practiced social skills led to a partnership in the firm of the wealthy and powerful planter, Santiago Drake, the head of the Anglo-Cuban family. Taylor provided Coit with office and clerical help and in return Coit employed his contacts and expertise in Taylor's behalf. Coit was never a formal partner in Taylor's business, and in due course was replaced by Percy Pyne. Over the years Pyne served as an officer of virtually every company in which he and Taylor had a commanding interest. Pyne became in his own right an important industrial organizer and manager. Pyne's partnership, and the promotion two years later of another employee, Lawrence Turnure, enabled Taylor to expand the banking and investing side of the business, though the West Indian trade continued to be a reliable source of capital. Even so, it seems likely that by the end of the 1850s trade had been overshadowed by Taylor and Pyne's expanding involvement in industrial development. Bernstein, Iver. The New York City Draft Riots. Oxford University Press. 1990. "By the 1840s, specialized bankers, importers, jobbers, insurers, and brokers had increasingly rendered the generalist merchant of colonial times obsolete in New York and other eastern cities"). In 1837 Taylor was made a director of New York's City Bank (the forerunner of today's CitiBank and megabank Citicorp) in which he owned stock, and kept his and the firm's accounts. He also owned 15 percent of the shares of the Farmers' Loan and Trust Company (then affiliated with City Bank) and was the Chairman of its Executive Committee. During the illness in 1841 of City Bank's president, Gorham A. Worth, Taylor was appointed president pro tem of the bank. Taylor served pro tem again in 1854, and when Worth died Taylor was elected president, a position he held until his death in 1882, by which time he owned close to one third of the bank's stock. He was succeeded as president of the City Bank by Percy Pyne, who served until four years before his death in 1895. Chartered in 1812, over the years the City Bank had become powerful by loaning funds, discounting commercial papers and circulating banknotes, and by serving the interests of sugar merchants, cotton brokers, metal merchants, the largest New York gas companies, some southern railways, and the fortunes of the Vanderbilts. The bank also provided funds and influence for some of the industrial ventures of Taylor and his associates. This was an era when fortunes could be quickly made and quickly lost because the innovative technology of the period was a ravenous consumer of private wealth. A merchant who moved into industry without a dependable bank at his back was likely to go under without much delay. Taylor and Pyne's access to the cash reserves of one of the country's most important and fastest growing banks gave Moses Taylor and Company a secure base in the highly competitive world of industrial capitalism. As a private investor Taylor joined with Cyrus Field and Peter Cooper in the first Atlantic cable venture. But his investing career may actually be dated from 1843 when he loaned money to the Forest Improvement Company, a venture in building short railway lines in the anthracite fields of eastern Pennsylvania. When Taylor reorganized his business in 1849, he began committing funds to the railroad, iron, coal, and gas industries. In short order he and his partners were involved in the affairs of the Cayuga Susquehanna Railroad, which provided coal producers of the Schuylkill and Lehigh valleys with an outlet to western markets by way of Lake Cayuga and the Erie Canal; the Chestnut Hill Iron Ore Company, with August Belmont, Simon Cameron (later for a time Lincoln's Secretary of War) and Charles Heckscher; the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad, one of Taylor's most important enterprises; the Jersey Shore Improvement Co., which, for a brief period, controlled rail access to New York harbor and the city; Lackawanna Iron Coal Co., the Scranton brother's heart-breaker; the New Jersey Zinc Iron Co., which became a major producer of spiegeleisen, a critical ingredient in the production of steel; the New York Schuylkill Coal Co., always on the brink of failure and dependent on Taylor's large loans (3. In 1865 Taylor bought close to 12,000 shares in the New York Schuylkill Coal Company. On May 15 of the same year the company's president, O. W. Davis, asked for military aid to put down striking miners. Earlier in May a former Union General, W. W. Duffield, had become the company's site superintendent).; the Penn Mining Smelting Co., a failure, but not completely, because Taylor met there a mining engineer, Thomas Petherick, who would work with him in many future mining ventures; the Union Iron Coal Co., a venture with Pyne, and Louis Von Hoffman (Taylor's associate at City Bank), Charles Heckscher; and a host of other enterprises too numerous to mention here. Taylor's closest, most important and influential associate after Percy Pyne, was Charles Heckscher. He was born in Paris in 1806 and emigrated to the United States in 1829. Not long afterwards he established a commission and banking house, and began his life-long involvement in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania. He was instrumental in bringing Taylor into mineral development as an investor and manager. Over the years the two friends were associates in many enterprises, the New York Schuylkill Coal Co. and Scranton Coal Company, being the most notable. At the time of his death in 1866 Heckscher was one of the leading mineowners in the United States. By the time Taylor became active in the ore-fields of New Jersey and Pennsylvania he already possessed the essential ingredients for wielding power in industry: He had a solid standing as a merchant; he was a successful banker with widespread banking links and access to large sums of quick money; he enjoyed influential connections in the field of insurance; and he could rely on the good will of political friends and business associates. Evidently, Taylor was involved in the creation of only two industrial companies, the Chestnut Hill Iron Ore Company, and the Penn Mining and Smelting Company. It appears that Taylor preferred to pick up companies that were basically sound and had potential for growth, but were in poor financial shape due to mismanagement or lack of banking connections. His method as a financier seems to have been little different from other New York industrial financiers: He advanced loans, often in the form of quick cash, and, as quickly as possible he acquired blocks of stock which gave him financial control of the business enterprise. Then he would install his own site superintendent and engineers who would report directly to him in New York. The letters in the collection to Taylor and Pyne from Selden and Joseph Scranton reveal an industrial environment where constant suspicion and alert guardedness were indispensable instruments of survival. The Scranton brothers were inspired organizers but luckless managers and proved no match for the New York financiers whose loans they inevitably needed to carry out their imaginative industrial schemes. (Montgomery, David. Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872. University of Illinois Press. 1981. Writing about the Pennsylvania iron industry Montgomery says: "Here was an industry between the era of iron and the era of steel, beckoned forward by the great demand for rails and bridges provided by government-subsidized railroad promotion, but restrained by the fact that the new and necessary techniques were far too expensive to be financed by individual industrialists"). The friendly tone of many of the letters to Taylor suggest that he may have been less voracious than other New York financiers of the period. The records of the Lackawanna Iron Coal Co., provide a good illustration of Taylor's business methods. The company was founded in the mid-1830s by Selden and George Scranton on the site of what is now the city of Scranton in north-eastern Pennsylvania. The Scranton's were brought close to ruin by the economic depression of 1837, which caused the collapse of Pennsylvania's state public works. When the state withdrew its support from the railroad and other industries, Anson Phelps and William E. Dodge stepped in with financial aid. When Dodge became the director of the Erie Railroad, he induced the line's board to give the Scrantons a lucrative contract to make rails. In 1853 Taylor began investing in the company and in the Delaware, Lackawanna Western Railroad and the Mount Hope Iron Company in New Jersey. By 1861 Taylor controlled the Mount Hope Iron Company, and he, joining with John I. Blair, and Charles Heckscher, persuaded Joseph Scranton of the Lackawanna Iron Coal Co. to accept Taylor's share of the Mount Hope Iron Company (whose ore was needed by the Lackawanna Iron Coal Co). in exchange for stock in the Lackawanna Iron Coal Co. By the beginning of the Civil War the Mount Hope Iron Company had merged with the Lackawanna Iron Coal Co.. By this time Taylor owned 20% of the stock, making him one of the leading individual stockholders. At the same time he and Percy Pyne owned 25,000 shares in the Delaware, Lackawanna Western Railroad, which became the iron company's chief transporter. For the rest of his life Taylor was active in the affairs of the Lackawanna Iron Coal Co., and in the mid-1870s he was a key figure in the company's conversion to steel. Another typical enterprise, the New Jersey Zinc Iron Co., was organized in 1848 as the New Jersey Zinc Co., to develop the zinc resources of Franklin (better known as Franklin Furnace), a village in Sussex County. By 1867 Taylor had acquired half of the company's stock. In the same year he purchased the leasehold of the Franklinite Iron Company. Whereupon he became embroiled in a drawn-out legal dispute between the two companies. The suits and counter-suits continued until 1880 when New Jersey Zinc negotiated a settlement which led to a merger of the companies and the formation of the New Jersey Zinc Iron Co. In thirteen years Taylor had converted his leasehold into a one-half ownership of the most important zinc producer in the United States. At the same time as Taylor was building his empire in nearby states he was acquiring controlling stock in New York City's two largest gas-light companies and buying stock in other utilities in Brooklyn and Long Island, Buffalo, Chicago, and Scranton. He soon had the two rival New York companies sharing technical information, and buying coal together from his mines, shipped to the city on his railroad over rails made from his iron. After two decades of internecine war (and two years after his death in 1882) the leading New York gas-light companies were merged to form the Consolidated Gas-Light Co. (now Consolidated Edison). Although the merger was orchestrated by Pyne and Taylor's close friend, Samuel Sloan, it resulted largely from the process begun by Taylor in the 1850s to rationalize competition in a cut-throat, expanding industry. The War Democrat Unlike his father, Taylor was not a public figure. But he was, by virtue of his wealth and standing, influential in the Democratic Party and Tammany Hall. Like many other New York businessmen, he had strong cotton and tobacco ties to the South. He was a member of the pro-southern Democratic Vigilance Association. He served as vice-president of a monster rally held at New York's Castle Garden in support of the Compromise Bill of 185 calling for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and a stricter fugitive slave law. In 1856 he backed Buchanan's presidential candidacy. Two years later he sponsored a meeting which favored admitting Kansas to the Union on the basis of popular sovereignty. In 1860 he joined Astor, August Belmont, and Erastus Corning in backing Stephen Douglas. This is the profile of a supporter of slavery and unity, commonly referred to as a "conciliationist". On this thorny matter of slavery and wealthy New York Democratic merchant/capitalists like Taylor, it should be remembered that the profits derived from the slave-ridden Southern and West Indian cotton, tobacco, and sugar trades, was the basis of the fortunes of many northern merchant/capitalists. This wealth, directly related to slavery, fueled the Industrial Revolution. Taylor was also a member of the inner circle of wealthy and privileged merchants, bankers, industrialists, and railroad attorneys gathered around August Belmont, the cultivated German banker and representative of the House of Rothschild. Belmont was also the New York leader of the Young America nationalist movement. Iver Bernstein writes that these Democratic businessmen were "the most racist upper-class group in the city" during the ante-bellum period. He also comments that Young America feared and opposed abolition as a "threat to the stability of an expanding white American empire" (Bernstein. Op. Cit). and asserts that they were as influential as any elite in American history. Merchant support for the South and slavery was potentially subversive to the North and a cause for deep concern, as was made clear by the violent, near-revolutionary anti-draft riots in New York (and other eastern cities), which were initially backed by Democratic merchants, and which ended in the Irish poor fighting the Union Army mere blocks from the exchange houses of lower Manhattan, and beating and killing poor ex-slaves. As Bernstein points out, the political choices of 1860-61 were made especially difficult by the "commitment of many New York merchants and Southern leaders to free trade and white supremacy". In a speech to the New York Common Council in January, 1861, Fernando Wood, the city's pro-Southern mayor, publicized the plan for New York to secede from the Union as a free-trade republic. This extreme course of action was debated openly by some Democratic merchants and considered privately by many more. After Fort Sumter, Taylor, and other New York businessmen who were not manifestly opposed to slavery, joined the Union cause however. Although questions of motivation are always tricky, it may have been that the foremost concern for Taylor and his colleagues was not slavery or emancipation but the economic consequences for business of secession and the political and social disruption that must inevitably follow in its wake. Overseas markets were up for grabs, and the necessary global aggressiveness to win them was conceivable only in a unified and assertive nation with focused and coordinated political and economic goals. It could be argued that the eventual alliance of northern capitalists and Republican politicians, a key triumph for American capitalism, was as momentous for the United States as Emancipation. It was a coup, and at its core were opportunistic financiers and industrialists like Taylor and Percy Pyne, Charles Heckscher, August Belmont, Samuel Sloan, and Marshall O. Roberts, and their associates, friends, and business rivals. In any case, Taylor and many of his his associates chose the Union. As chairman of the loan committee of the Associated Banks of New York, and as a member of the Treasury Note Commission, in the first year of the war Taylor worked with other eastern industrialists to raise a one hundred fifty million dollar loan for the war effort. He also helped to expand the Union navy, and became a staunch supporter of the Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase. In July 1864 President Lincoln offered Taylor the important post of sub-treasurer of New York; but Taylor declined the position although pressured to accept by both Republicans and War Democrats. In 1864 he was appointed chairman of the campaign committee of the Union Republican Party formed to campaign for Lincoln's reelection. After Lincoln's death Taylor gave his support to Andrew Johnson with whom he shared a dislike of Radical Republicans and Reconstruction. In 1867 Taylor shifted his allegiance to U. S. Grant, but he continued to support Tammany at home, and was associated with the movement to change the New York City Charter it. With Astor, Marshall O. Roberts and others, Taylor served on a committee appointed to investigate Boss Tweed's Comptroller. In their report the committee cleared the city government of any wrongdoing. The New York Times condemned the report, while the editors of the New York Herald defended it. (New York Times and New York Herald, Nov. 7, 1870). Not noted as a philanthropist, a few years before his death Taylor gave money to create a hospital in Scranton to provide free general medical care for employees, and their families, of the Delaware, Lackawanna, Western Railroad and the Lackawanna Iron and Coal Company. Six years after Taylor's death, Moses Taylor and Company was dissolved by its three partners, Percy Pyne, Lawrence Turnure, and Percy Pyne Jr., who, except for the senior Pyne, formed a new company, Lawrence Turnure Company. to reform New York's charter.; Content: The collection spans the years 1834-1889, and consists of 10 boxes of personal and family papers, and 316 boxes and 1200 Letterbooks and account books which document Taylor's affairs as merchant, banker, and industrial-capitalist. They also shed light on the economic arrangements, social relationships, and managerial methods favored by Taylor in the anthracite coal country of eastern and central Pennsylvania where he built a nucleus of industrial companies that grew into a nationwide network. The evidence of his estate, estimated at between $40,000,000 and $45,000,000, and wide-ranging stock portfolio, testify to Taylor's significance as a merchant-capitalist. Though not comparable in size, capital, diversity, or influence, to the empires of a J. P. Morgan or a Cornelius Vanderbilt, as a model 19th century capitalist enterprise (Hodas, Moses, The Business Career of Moses Taylor, New York University, 1976. Hodas writes: "Taylor's evolution from small merchant to banker-industrialist illustrates the contribution one can make to a nation's economic growth. As a leading banker, Taylor headed financial institutions which aggregated the savings of individuals and channeled them into productive areas. He also had the capacity to make the kind of developmental decisions that were essential to continued economic expansion. His continuous merging of enterprises into larger units in order to increase their efficiency and profitability was a forerunner of the rationalization of American industry that took place at the turn of the century") Moses Taylor and Company holds up well.
Physical Description: Extent: 132 linear feet (326 boxes, 1166 v., 1 oversize folder)
Type of Resource: Text
Identifiers: NYPL catalog ID (B-number): b11992486; MSS Unit ID: 2955; Universal Unique Identifier (UUID): 1f17a520-a6bb-013d-a85a-0242ac110002