John Jacob Astor: America's First Multimillionaire - Hardcover

When he died a few months short of his eighty-fifth birthday, John Jacob Astor was the richest man in the United States. The fortune he left behind represented an astounding one-fifteenth of all personal wealth in America. Now, in this revelatory biography, bestselling author Axel Madsen deftly examines the private life of the first multinational entrepreneur of the New World.

Ruthless, tightfisted, but with an amazing gift for organizing business, Astor built an empire that spanned the commercial world of his time. From the end of the American Revolution to the mid-nineteenth century, Astor exhibited his flair for business and left a lasting impact on an emerging America. Astute and audacious, he became one of the first merchants to imagine the world as a global economy. And he had an uncanny knack for bolting out of businesses just before they went bust. He liquidated his China clippers just as tea from India and Japan cut into the tea trade; he dropped his fur interest just as fashion shifted and beavers and other furs became too scarce to be used in the emerging ready-made clothing industry. He then successfully converted his profits into Manhattan real estate.

Astor was a slumlord, a war profiteer, and a merciless jobber who shipped opium to China and sold liquor to Indians. He tricked President Thomas Jefferson into making an exception on the trade embargo against Britain and France for him–and profited handsomely when James Madison blundered into the War of 1812.

John Jacob Astor tells the fascinating tale of this German-born son of a butcher who made his fortune in a new world where his money influenced public policy and led him to socialize with presidents and kings. This intriguing book features some of the most fascinating figures in the early history of the United States, including Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Aaron Burr, and Washington Irving.

A thrilling account of this legendary figure and the harrowing cross-country expedition he financed in order to rule the rich western fur trade, John Jacob Astor weaves the story of the beginning of big business in America with Astor’s life and, ultimately, reveals a man whose desire to reinvent himself reshaped the modern world.