American Aristocrats: A Family, a Fortune, and the Making of American Capitalism

407 Pages·2017·3.87 MB·English

by  Harry S. Stout

Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Harry S. Stout
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First Edition: November 2017
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Names:
Stout, Harry S., author.
Title: American aristocrats : a family, a fortune, and the making of American
capitalism / Harry S. Stout.
Description: New York : Basic Books, [2017] | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017022134 (print) | LCCN 2017035453 (ebook) | ISBN
9780465098996 (ebook) | ISBN 9780465098989 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH:
9780465098996 (ebook) | ISBN 9780465098989 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH:
Anderson, Richard C. (Richard Clough), 1750–1826—Family. | Anderson,
Richard Clough, 1788–1826. | Elite (Social sciences)—United States—Case
studies. | Wealth—United States—Case studies. | Landowners—United States
—Case studies. | Capitalism—United States—History—19th century. | United
States—History—19th century. | United States—Politics and government—
19th century.
Classification: LCC E207.A5 (ebook) | LCC E207.A5 S76 2017 (print) | DDC
973.5—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017022134
ISBNs: 978-0-46509898-9 (hardcover); 978-0-46509899-6 (e-book) E3-
20171013-JV-PC
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
1 Richard Clough Anderson, the Patriarch: 1750–1787
2 Measuring the Land: 1787–1796
3 A New Generation: 1797–1812
4 Richard the Sage: 1812–1817
5 “My Debts Must Be Paid!”: Politics and Land in the Evolving West: 1817–
1822
6 An Ill-Fated Mission: 1822–1824
7 A Tragic End: 1824–1826
8 The New Patriarch: 1826–1834
9 Rocky Mountain Highs and Real Estate Lows: 1835–1838
10 A Time of Testing: 1839–1844
11 Robert’s Mexican War: 1844–1848
12 Andersons at Home: 1848–1856
13 Times of Trial: 1857–1861
14 Charles Anderson’s Civil War: 1862–1865
15 An Ex-Confederate Colony: 1865–1866
16 Andersons in Transition: 1866–1870
17 Legacies: 1871–1888
Afterword
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise for American Aristocrats
Notes
Index
To my wife, Debbie, who was there through it all.
“Do you stand there, Scarlett O’Hara, and tell me that Tara—that land—
doesn’t amount to anything?… Land is the only thing in the world that
amounts to anything,” he shouted, his thick, short arms making wide
gestures of indignation, “for ’tis the only thing in this world that lasts, and
don’t you be forgetting it! ’Tis the only thing worth working for, worth
fighting for—worth dying for.”
—MARGARET MITCHELL, GONE WITH THE WIND
Introduction
T
his is the story of a family named Anderson. But unlike in many conventional
family histories, the protagonist in this story is land and the theme is anxiety
over acquiring and holding the wealth that land represents. Though largely
invisible in American history texts and secondary monographs, the Andersons
left a substantial corpus of letters and writings that speak to the evolution of the
American gospel of private property and accumulated wealth. In all there are
more than two thousand surviving letters and diaries in key archives stretching
from Richmond, Virginia, to Pasadena, California. Only one Anderson—General
Robert Anderson of Fort Sumter fame—survives in historians’ memory, but his
kinsmen and kinswomen were notable as well for what they achieved on the
early American frontier of Kentucky and Ohio. Together the letters and diaries
tell a crucial but largely untold personal story of the making of the early
American republic’s social, political, and economic infrastructure from national
origins through the Civil War.
Neither the Andersons nor their more storied associates were aristocrats
enjoying inherited power, wealth, and status. The men were hardworking,
ambitious people who believed passionately in the promise of America and in
cashing in socially, politically, economically, and culturally on their privilege as
free white men. It is not the story of nineteenth-century titans like John Jacob
Astor or Marshall Field but rather of a forgotten family who came to be part of
the nation’s financial elite. They lived at the intersection of the traditional and
the modern, where people still interacted in local, face-to-face networks, knew
each other, and identified themselves and other local families in hierarchies of
property and authority. In many ways Washington, DC, itself—a city of eight
thousand people in 1800 that grew to seventy-five thousand by 1860—was a
place where longtime inhabitants knew each other. Leaders, including
Congressman Richard Clough Anderson Jr., General Robert Anderson, and
attorney Larz Anderson, dwelled in a select world of intertwined elites.
While this book is not a microhistory of “ordinary” characters who stand in
for a larger set of “ordinary” people about whom little information survives,
neither is it an elite history of powerful public figures whose papers are
scrupulously preserved and exhaustively edited in the multivolume critical
editions reserved for heads of state, courts, and commerce. The Andersons
represent a broad swath of movers and shakers who substantially played the
central role in determining what the American experiment in republican
capitalism would look like.1
As forgotten elites they necessarily left gaps in the information surviving for
each Anderson family member. To some extent these lacunae dictated the
organization of this book. Rather than present a collective biography of more or
less complete histories, I have chosen a chronological narrative that follows
different family members at moments when their careers blossomed and the
trove of information is richest.
Collectively, the Andersons were part of a network of first-wave territorial
leaders whose stories suggest revisions to our sense of the frontier and what it
meant to be a “pioneer.” Their frontier, in contrast to Frederick Jackson Turner’s
imagined frontier, was not atomistic and radical. It craved organization and
civilization and a corporate ethos that would come to be embodied by the
Anderson family. Americans ironically fancy themselves as rugged individuals
resistant to outsiders’ rules, but in fact in the early days of the republic they were
rugged organizers, resistant to insiders’ disorder.
In the Andersons we see a keen sense of loyalty to kin and extended family.
In their lives we see that families are not genealogical charts that can be
untangled and laid out in separate lines. The Anderson extended family was a
web, impossible to touch at one point without setting the rest vibrating;
impossible to understand as one story without recognizing the contributions of
each individual to the whole. The Andersons were politically informed and
active. Many served in key offices in Congress and the Electoral College and as
state governors, as well as held diplomatic assignments to Latin America. Some
were career military officers and generals. Though living on or one step removed
from the frontier, the women were highly literate and the men well educated at
colleges: William and Mary, Harvard, West Point, Transylvania, and Miami of
Ohio. Most important, all were consumed with and consumers of land, and most
were actively involved in land speculation, not unlike members of the renowned