The Jews in America Trilogy (95 page)

Both Harmon and his father had been Tories during the Revolution, but that did not prevent Harmon from doing business with Paul Revere a few years later. In fact, as early as 1805, the two copper titans had reached an informal agreement by which they intended to corner the American copper market and set its price. Let us, Revere proposed,
buy “the whole block of copper in our single name”—or in the names of friends and relatives, depending on how sales went—and then, as he put it, “equalize between us the quality and the price.” Both men were firmly against the imposition of an import duty on foreign copper, particularly from Britain, brought into the United States. As Hendricks expressed it in a letter to Revere: “There will be more honor in beating John Bull out of our market by low price and superior quality than by duties which may tempt new manufacturers to operate more to our prejudice.” The two men wanted, in other words, no further domestic competition, and for several years they were able to have the American copper pie fairly evenly divided between them. They were also opposed to the administration of James Madison, whose purchasing agents they frequently accused of supplying fishy figures.

“We have observed Mr. Smith's report,” Revere wrote Hendricks early in 1806. “It is all of a piece with the present administration of government. His report has $56,840 worth of sheets, bolts, spikes.… Now we know there is in store in Charlestown more than $120,000 worth.…” Less than half, in other words, of what had been shipped was being acknowledged as received. But apparently the men got their money, for the Revere-Hendricks accounts show more than half a million dollars received in payment for government orders that year.

In 1803, a young man named Robert Fulton succeeded in demonstrating that a water-going vessel could be propelled by steam. Fulton's steam boilers were made of copper, and Fulton became another important customer of Harmon Hendricks. Hendricks boilers went into the
Fulton
—the first steam warship—the
Paragon,
the
Firefly,
the
Nassau,
and the
Clermont,
which for years plied up and down the Hudson River between New York and Albany. Soon, selling copper for Fulton's boilers—Fulton had a monopoly on the
manufacture of steamboats for thirty years—became more lucrative than selling copper for stills. Harmon Hendricks' partner (and brother-in-law), Solomon Isaacs, became so identified with boilers that he was nicknamed “Steamboat” Isaacs. In 1819, when Fulton was fitting out the S.S.
Savannah
to be the first oceangoing steamship, the craft was labeled a “steam coffin” by various nay-sayers in high places, who insisted it would never work. When the ship completed its triumphant voyage across the Atlantic in record time, Harmon Hendricks modestly announced that his copper was in the
Savannah'
s boilers.

The
Savannah,
however, was not one of his firm's more profitable undertakings. Harmon Hendricks had cousins in the city of Savannah—the Henrys and the Minises—who were important stockholders in the Savannah Steamship Company, and Hendricks had sold them his copper at family prices. One boiler, twenty by eight and a half feet in size, had cost $30,000 for the
Fulton
five years earlier. For the
Savannah
's two larger boilers, each twenty-six by six feet, he charged only $1,237.72. Also, for some reason, Hendricks' relatives never paid him in full. He received only $1,115.05—$122.67 short.

Success and riches were, of course, a mixed blessing when, as word of Harmon Hendricks' wealth reached them, distant kin from all over the globe began writing him for what they felt was their proper share of the bounty.

It is clear that a good part of each day was taken up dealing with these demands. There were, for instance, some of his stepmother's Lopez cousins in Newport who continually wrote to declare themselves “destitute,” asking for money in sums small and large. To a typically tearful Lopez note, asking for thirty dollars, Harmon Hendricks would append the curt notation of his own: “Sent her $20.” A few months later, another relative of his stepmother's Samuel Lopez, wanted two hundred dollars, promising
“with the honor of a Mason” to repay it. To a nephew of Gilbert Stuart, Harmon Hendricks loaned $12,000, and when Stuart heard of this he cautioned Hendricks: “If you have patience, he will repay you, but if, like a hard master, you attempt to cast him into prison you may lose all.” At the same time, money was coming into the Hendricks firm at a gratifying rate, from sales of copper as well as from such items as turpentine, pigs, pumpkins, gin, and garden seed. In 1807, Hendricks' brother-in-law Jacob de Leon noted to Hendricks that he had sold “upward of $70,000 in black birds”—a euphemism for Negro slaves—and would be paid in November. His good luck continued. On July 22, 1814, Harmon bet one Jack Cohen “a beaver hat” that there would be peace within four months—and won the bet, for hostilities of the War of 1812 ended before November.

But relatives continued to pester him. From England a widowed aunt, Rachel Waag, wrote to him to explain that her late husband's estate had not yet been settled; until then she needed money. Hendricks appointed one of his London representatives to supply her with cash. A cousin, Benjamin Da Costa, whose wife had died, sent his young son, Moses, to live with the Hendrickses, who already had twelve children of their own, and Da Costa kept Harmon Hendricks busy with instructions as to what sort of an education the boy should receive. Harmon had him studying Spanish and French, but Da Costa preferred that the boy study English, “the Mother Tongue,” and even suggested that Hebrew be dropped from his curriculum, “As I daresay he knows his prayers in that language by now, which is as much as I wish.”

There was also the painful problem of Harmon Hendricks' sister Sally, one of those whom Malcolm Stern's book adjudges to have been “insane.” Insane or not, she was certainly a trial to her family, never content to be where she was, always wanting to be somewhere else. She
spent her life being shuttled back and forth among relatives, none of whom was ever particularly overjoyed to see her. She was referred to as “our unfortunate sister,” and described as being “of a very unsettled disposition.” Her condition must have been particularly unsettling to Harmon Hendricks, three of whose children had already shown signs of being, as it was said, “peculiar.” One son, for example, made a fetish of cleanliness, and would eat nothing that had not been scrubbed with hot water and strong soap. He washed his hands as often as a hundred times a day. A daughter was “melancholy,” and lapsed into alarming depressions that lasted for days. Sally Hendricks' obsession was with her money, which, she insisted, many enemies were determined to take away from her and put to dark uses. Her father had left her a comfortable inheritance but, since she considered the money to be in such a hazardous position, she refused to spend any of it and filled her time moving her accounts—no one but she knew how many she had—from bank to bank. For a while, Sally lived with her brother-in-law Jacob de Leon in Charleston, but she was unhappy there and insisted on returning to New York “to see after her money.” She set sail from Charleston on a ship called the
Rose-in-Bloom,
and it was an agonizing voyage. She was mistreated at sea, she claimed, by the ship's captain, was given short rations and bad food, and, instead of a private stateroom, was placed in a cabin with another woman and a child. The woman, Sally complained, was “of a certain character.” In New York, Sally—and her complaints—went to live with Harmon Hendricks and his brood, a large and not entirely happy family.

There were difficulties of other sorts. By 1793, yellow fever had become an annual blight in both Philadelphia and New York, and, when it made its summer appearance, Harmon Hendricks was forced to close his copper mill and all business came to a standstill. “It carries off 60 a
day,” he wrote in 1805. New Yorkers were baffled by the disease, and a variety of theories as to its cause were advanced. Harmon Hendricks wrote that he believed “trade with the French Islands of the West Indies” was indirectly responsible, and that beef stored in warehouses for this trade had putrefied and somehow made the air contagious and unfit to breathe. He pointed out that people in the neighborhoods of the warehouses—which, of course, were not located in the tidiest parts of town—fell victims first. He was able to make a convincing argument of this, and, that same year, during the height of the plague, five thousand barrels of beef were dumped into the Hudson River. Those New Yorkers who could afford to fled north to the “Village of Greenwich” each year when the fever began to rage and, of course, those who were already infected by the mosquito that caused it took the disease with them.

But, for all his business and family ups and downs, Harmon Hendricks was able to establish himself as one of the East's most important merchant-manufacturers. By 1812, he was rich enough to make his celebrated offer of a loan to the government to finance its war with the British. By 1825, he had his own bank and was also a director of the Hartford Bank (which would tactfully ask “for a reply by Sunday mail if not trespassing on your Sabbath”). He also acquired considerable real estate. In addition to the New Jersey plant, he owned from Twentieth to Twenty-second streets between Sixth and Seventh avenues in Manhattan, and also thirty acres along Broadway. He continued to sell copper for the bottoms of stills and the boilers of ships, and to the United States mint for coins, while making loans in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. He also established the Hendricks family socially, and was a member of the elite Union Club. Harmon Hendricks died in 1838. Several years later, Joseph Scoville, in
The Old Merchants of New York City,
wrote:

Mr. Hendricks was a born New Yorker, of the Jewish persuasion—honest, upright, prudent, and a very cautious man.… He died immensely rich, leaving over three millions of dollars.… His heirs are worth at least seven millions.… With all the revulsions in trade, the credit of the house for half a century has never been questioned, either in this country or in Europe, and today in Wall Street their obligations would sell quite as readily as government securities bearing the same rates of interest. No man stood higher in this community while he lived, and no man left a memory more revered than Harmon Hendricks.

He also left three strong sons—Uriah II, Henry, and Montague—all eager to carry on his scattered enterprises.

And he left a more important heritage in terms of values that would come to be a preoccupation among the Jewish first families as they moved to positions of money and social acceptance. As Harmon Hendricks' little daughter Roselane put it in 1834, when she was fourteen years old, in her copybook of “Daily Compositions,” written in a careful schoolgirlish hand: “Education is one of the most important subjects to which our attention can be directed. It is to education alone that we are indebted for the formation of our minds, the improvement of our understandings, and the developing of our faculties.… It is education which elevates our mind towards that Great Being from whence every good flows.”

13

THE FIREBRAND

What the American Jewish community required was a man to serve as its conscience. At least this was the contention of young Uriah Phillips Levy of Philadelphia, who seems to have decided at a very early age that he would fill that role. To him it was a question of assimilation—and loss of all that it meant to be a Sephardic Jew—or of continuity, and he placed tremendous value on the latter. He thoroughly disapproved of what he had heard was going on in cities such as New Orleans, and of men such as Judah Touro, who were Jews with only half their hearts. He disapproved of fellow Philadelphians such as the Franks girls, who seemed not only to care nothing about their country but to care less about their
faith, being bent apparently only on marrying titled Englishmen. He disapproved of his Levy cousins Samson, Benjamin, and Nathan—the latter had been David Franks's partner—who danced at the Assembly, joined Christian clubs, and paid only lip service to their noble heritage. Their children were all marrying Christians and converting. Uriah Phillips Levy believed that American Jews needed Great Men—the kind who would stand up foursquarely as
Americans,
and just as foursquarely as
Jews,
who would assume positions of leadership in American institutions, but on their own Jewish terms. It was a large order to give to an already seriously fragmented and disunified group of people, but Uriah Levy gave it. He was small in stature, but his ego was more vast than the whole of the new republic. Equally sizable was the chip that Uriah Levy carried, through most of his life, on his diminutive shoulder.

To be a crusader, a setter-to-rights, he regarded as part of his birthright. He was, after all, a Philadelphia Levy. His family, Uriah Levy felt, were in no way to be taken lightly. After all, George Washington had been at his grandparents' wedding. His great-great-grandfather had been the personal physician to King John V of Portugal. The Levy family had made all the proper in-the-group marriages. One of Uriah's sisters had married a Hendricks, another a Lopez—one of Aaron Lopez' West Indian cousins. Though Uriah's family was sometimes referred to as “the poor branch” (the Samson Levys were considerably richer), the Levys were nothing if not proud.

In 1806, when Uriah Levy announced that he intended to embark upon a naval career, he was barely fourteen years old. He had already learned to identify, from their silhouettes, the names and flags of all the ships that entered and departed Philadelphia harbor. He first signed on as a cabin boy, with duties, among other things, of making up
the captain's bunk. By autumn of the following year, pressures were building toward the War of 1812, and President Jefferson declared an embargo on all American trade with Europe. This meant that the shipping industry fell idle, and Uriah used this time to attend a navigation school in Philadelphia, where it was quickly apparent that he was brilliant.