riches have made in sixty years. How many New Yorkers of today
would look upon a man with $100,000 as "wealthy"?

The sources of these fortunes also show the economic changes our
country has undergone. Today, when we think of our much exploited
millionaires, the phrase "captains of industry" is the accepted
description; in Mr. Beach's time the popular designation was
"merchant prince." His catalogue contains no "oil magnates" or
"steel kings" or "railroad manipulators"; nearly all the
industrial giants of ante-bellum times--as distinguished from the
socially prominent whose wealth was inherited--had heaped
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