Authors:
Historic Era: Era 4: Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/August 1988 | Volume 39, Issue 5
Authors:
Historic Era: Era 4: Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/August 1988 | Volume 39, Issue 5
On July 24, 1832, a 60-year-old businessman in Albany, New York drew up an explosive will. The businessman was named William James, but historians call him William of Albany to distinguish him from the elder of his two famous grandsons.
Historians have not paid much attention to William of Albany. After all, he was only a businessman. Nevertheless, his story is fascinating, and his success in business set the stage for the dazzling successes that followed his family. I learned about him in a book about his namesake, Becoming William James, written by Howard M. Feinstein, a psychiatrist and an adjunct professor of psychology at Cornell.
William was born in Ireland in 1771, the second son of a Scotch-Irish farmer who wanted him to become a minister. He resisted, choosing instead to seek his fortune in the United States, to which he emigrated in 1789. After two years as a merchant’s clerk in Albany, William opened his own store, dealing in tobacco. A second store followed, and a third in 1800. By 1805, William’s stores sold produce as well as tobacco, and he was involved, with several partners, in transatlantic trade with Ireland.
He also was an early and important advocate of the plan promoted by the New York governor DeWitt Clinton to build a canal that would link the Hudson River to Lake Erie. In 1825, at the festivities that marked the opening of the Erie Canal, he addressed the crowd that gathered to watch the first boats begin the 363-mile trip from Albany to Buffalo.
William had made investments in real estate that show how clearly he understood the economic significance of the canal. Working with various agents, he bought 40,000 acres in Illinois alone, and in 1824, he purchased $60,000 worth of property in New York, including a saltworks and what was to become the village of Syracuse. After the canal opened, the value of that property soared. When cholera broke out in Albany in 1832, and William sat down to think about his will, he had much to think about—11 children, his wife, and an estate worth $3,000,000.
Two of his sons especially troubled him. One, named William, had rejected a career in business, become a minister, and deliberately settled far from Albany.
Another, Henry (the eventual father of the famous William and Henry), had firmly resisted his father’s efforts to push him into a career as a lawyer. Not only had he resisted, but at one point, after lavishing one hundred dollars on “segars” and other luxuries, he had run off from Union College in Schenectady, leaving his father to complain that the young man practiced “arts of low vileness and unblushing falsehood” and that he had “so debased himself as to leave his parents’ house in the character of a swindler.” Henry himself later admitted that in this period he “scarcely ever went to bed sober, and lost my self-respect almost utterly.”