At the time of his father's death, William B. Astor, the chief heir of John Jacob Astor's twenty million dollars, was fifty-six years old. A tall, ponderous man, his eyes were small, contracted, with a rather vacuous look, and his face was sluggish and unimpressionable. Extremely unsocial and taciturn, he never betrayed emotion and generally was destitute of feeling. He took delight in affecting a carelessly-dressed, slouchy appearance as though deliberately notifying all concerned that one with such wealth as he was privileged to ignore the formulas of punctilious society. In this slovenly, stoop-shouldered man with his cold, abstracted air no one would have detected the richest man in America.
Acquisitiveness was his most marked characteristic. Even before his father's death he had amassed a fortune of his own by land speculations and banking connections, and he had inherited $500,000 from his uncle Henry, a butcher on the Bowery. It was said in 1846 that he possessed an individual fortune of $5,000,000. During the last years of his father he had been president of the American Fur Co., and he otherwise knew every detail of his father's multifarious interests and possessions.
WILLIAM B. ASTOR'S PARSIMONY.
He lived in what was considered a fine mansion on Lafayette place, adjoining the Astor Library. The sideboards were heaped with gold plate, and polyglot servants in livery stood obediently by at all times to respond to his merest nod. But he cared little for this show, except in that it surrounded him with an atmosphere of power. His frugality did not arise from wise self-control, but from his parsimonious habits. He scanned and revised the smallest item of expense. Wine he seldom touched, and the average merchant spent more for his wardrobe than he did. At a time when the rich despised walking and rode in carriages drawn by fast horses, he walked to and from his business errands. This severe economy he not only practiced in his own house, but he carried it into every detail of his business. Arising early in the morning, he attended to his private correspondence before breakfast. This meal was served punctually at 9 o'clock. Then he would stride to his office on Prince street. A contemporary writer says of him:
He knew every inch of real estate that stood in his name, every bond, contract and lease. He knew what was due when leases expired, and attended personally to the matter. No tenants could expend a dollar, or put in a pane of glass without his personal inspection. His father sold him the Astor House [an hotel] for the sum of one dollar. The lessees were not allowed to spend one cent on the building, without his supervision and consent, unless they paid for it themselves.
In the upper part of New York hundreds of lots can be seen enclosed by dilapidated fences, disfigured by rocks and waste material, or occupied as [truck] gardens. They are eligibly located, many of them surrounded by a fashionable population.... Mr. Astor owned most of these corner lots but kept the corners for a rise. He would neither sell nor improve them.... He knew that no parties can improve the center of a block without benefiting the corners.
He was sombre and solitary, dwelt alone, mixed little with general society, gave little and abhorred beggars.
It was a common saying of him "when he paid out a cent he wanted a cent in return;" and as to his abject meannesses we forbear relating the many stories of him. He pursued, in every respect, his father's methods in using the powers of city government to obtain valuable water grants for substantially nothing, and in employing his surplus wealth for further purchases of land and in investments in other profitable channels. No scruples of any kind did he allow to interfere with his constant aim of increasing his fortune. His indifference to compunctions was shown in many ways, not the least in his open support of notoriously corrupt city and State administrations.
This corruption was by no means one existing despite him and his class, and one that was therefore accepted grudgingly as an irremediable evil. Far from it. Corrupt government was welcomed by the landholding, trading and banking class, for by it they could secure with greater facility the perpetual rights, franchises, privileges and the exemptions which were adapted to their expanding aims and riches. By means of it they were not only enabled to pile up greater and greater wealth, but to set themselves up in law as a conspicuously privileged body, distinct from the mass of the people.
