Goin’ along William street the other day I passed what used to be, seventeen or eighteen years ago, one of the most important “financial centres,” as they call them in New York–I mean the office of A. W. Morse, the great “bull” operator of Wall street.
This Morse was a big man in his day, and his day lasted several years; but it came to an end at last, and it ended in a terribly dark night.
There was somethin’ really great about this Morse after all. He had a big head and a big heart, and all his ideas were big, and all his luck, good and bad, was big of its kind.
He wasn’t a very big man to look at, though. He was rather slight in frame, and had a hooked nose. I have noticed that a good many of the leadin’ men in Wall street have hooked noses.
Morris, like Jay Gould, came from a country village, and applied on a large scale here the shrewd ideas he had gathered together by experience there.
He used to be a noisy boy, fond of “brag” in his native village, and he made a noise as a man, and played the game of “brag” on a grand scale in New York.
He married before he came to New York, and he brought his wife with him. She was of some use to him at the start. He commenced business as A. W. Morse and Co., and people thought the “Co.” represented the moneyed partner or backer of the concern; but it didn’t. It only represented his wife, for whom he himself was supposed to be doin’ business, as her agent. This was a very good dodge to play, supposin’ as was very probable, he should get into any pecuniary trouble on his own account. But the people who dealt with him didn’t like this wife business when they found it out, and made some fuss over it at the time, but the matter was soon forgotten.
The firm of A. W. Morse & Co. made money, and Morse soon became a power in the street. He dabbled in Erie, Fort Wayne, Pittsburg and other stocks, and was soon known as Taurus Major, or the Great Bull.
He was a generous fellow, like most of the big Wall street men are–exceptin’ Jay Gould. One day when he was very busy a man came to the office, a man whom he only knew slightly, but who had once done him a triflin’ favor. All of a sudden this man got right on his knees, right in the middle of the room, and begged him, for God’s sake, to give him a chance to make some money, as he had a family who were literally starvin’.
Morris looked at the man on his knees a moment and saw that he was in real distress. Then he took the man by the hand and raised him up; he didn’t palaver over him, or waste any sympathy, but he simply said, “Go buy two hundred shares of Fort Wayne in my name; I’ll hold ‘em for you.” This was all, but it was equivalent to givin’ the beggar thousands of dollars, and the beggar knew it.
So presumin’ upon good nature, as most beggars do, the man instead of buyin’ only two hundred shares of Fort Wayne, as his benefactor told him, went and bought seven hundred shares and sent ‘em to Morse to be paid for by him. Morse thought this infernally cheeky on the beggar’s part, but he stood the racket.
There’s just where he was to blame. Any other man would have given the beggar the cold shoulder after this; but Morse not only stood the imposition, but he so fixed matters that within less than a month from the time that man had fallen on his knees before him he was worth nearly $30,000.
Morse’s office, after awhile, became a sort of head centre for the bulls. It was a little bit of a place, this office, not half large enough to accommodate the crowd who wanted to get into it, and so the people used to stand around the buildin’ and block up the street, talkin’ stocks like mad.
There used to be always in the centre of this crowd a man with a red nose that shone like fire, not from drink, but some skin disease. This man had a bone boilin’ establishment up-town, and he carried the smell of the bones about his clothes. He had made about $5,000 off his bones and had put all his money into Fort Wayne, at Morse’s advice. The bone-boiler believed in Morse and swore by him, just as the men who revised it are willin’ to swear by the revised Testament.
One day a man who had put his money into Fort Wayne thought it was about time to realize, and was on his way to sell out when he came across this red-nosed bone-boiler, whom he told of his intention. “Don’t you do it,” said the red-nosed man. “Don’t sell out at no price. Why the fat hasn’t begun to boil yet. Wait a while, and you’ll see Morse makin’ soup out of the fellows backin’ agin him.” So the man didn’t sell out, and in about two weeks he had made $10,000 by waitin’, and by just takin’ a red-nosed man’s advice. He always had the greatest respect for a red nose after that.
Morse was a magnificent “bluffer.” He could have beaten old Vanderbilt at that game. Once Pittsburg was shaky, and Morse had a lot of it. He instructed his agents on the quiet to unload and sell out. But to the Board of Brokers he kept on howlin’ for Pittsburg wilder than ever.
“I’ll give 105 for the stock,” he yelled, “or any part of it. I’ll give 100, seller one year, for whole of the capital stock,” and so on. But within twenty-four hours he had got rid of nearly all his Pittsburg, and done it so neatly, too, that not a soul suspected him.
But luck never lasts forever, and at last Morse found himself carryin’ too big a load.
Secretary Chase was sellin’ gold and lockin’ up greenbacks in the sub-Treasury. Big firms like Lockwood wouldn’t buy for customers on a margin or for anythin’ but cash, while they would sell on a ten per cent margin. Things looked very blue, and Morse looked very black.
One afternoon in the Evenin’ Exchange, Morse astonished the natives. He got up and offered to sell–not buy this time, but sell–a big lot of Fort Wayne stock. You could have heard a pin drop when he made this offer. Brokers looked at each other in wonder. “What’s the matter with Morse?” said one. “Is he crazy?” inquired another. “Is he drunk?” asked a third. But Morse knew what he was about. He saw the impendin’ crisis. He read the handwritin’ on the wall. He felt he had got to the end of his rope; he was “down on his luck.”
But his followers didn’t see it. People’s followers never see what their leader does till it is too late to do any good to ‘emselves or their leader, either.
It was on a Friday, in the middle of April, that Morse made his first and last offer to sell at the Evenin’ Exchange. The next day, Saturday, all the people that had gone into Fort Wayne and other stocks through his influence came rushin’ to him in streams, in perfect torrents, begging him to save ‘em and their stocks; implorin’, threatenin’, arguin’, nearly drivin’ him crazy.
But they kept it up all Saturday, and all Saturday evenin’ and all Saturday night. Some of his friends (!) didn’t let him go to bed at all. Sunday mornin’ found him wild-eyed, played out, fagged in mind and body. But they had no more mercy on him Sunday than they had Saturday. In fact, it got worse than ever, the rush and the pressure. At last, in the afternoon, to escape the crowd, he rushed out of the back door of his house, and went, of all places in the world, to church. He thought, and thought rightly, that none of his Wall street associates would ever think of lookin’ for him there.
There was a little church right near his house–a Methodist Church for the poorer classes. Now Morse seldom went to church, but somehow he enjoyed that church to-day, with those poor men and women alongside of him more than he would anythin’ else just then, except unloadin’ Fort Wayne. He stayed all through the service, apparently listenin’ to the old minister’s sermon…and as he listened, he determined to concentrate everything on Fort Wayne–try to save that at any event.
Morse went to bed on this determination, and he got up on it. But he did not go to bed on it any more–he didn’t get the chance.
On Monday when he went down-town things looked more squally, more bearish than ever–everybody wanted to sell, nobody wanted to buy. Morse saw this, saw there was no earthly help for it, or for him, and walked back to his office, which he didn’t need any longer.
About half past 11 that blue Monday the failure of A. W. Morse was announced. Then pandemonium was let loose awhile. If the men who revised the New Testament could have seen the show at the Stock Exchange just then, they wouldn’t have left the word hell out of the revise. Hades wouldn’t express the situation at all–only hell.
The creditors who had lost by Morse–who had trusted him–had some mercy on him. Most of them knew and felt how it was ‘emselves.
But it was the friends and followers of Morse who had been helped by him in a hundred ways, though misled at last, that went for him the hardest.
The man who had once been a beggar, and had fallen on his knees to Morse in his day of prosperity, and been aided by his kindness, that man now raised the loudest kind of a howl over his “losses” through Morse, though, after all, he had only lost what Morse had given him. But gratitude is a precious rare commodity in Wall street or anywhere else.
The red-nosed bone-boiler who had sworn by Morse now swore at him awfully. In fact, meetin’ Morse in front of his own office, one day, the red-nosed man called him every name he could lay his mind to, and poor Morse, he was so downhearted that he couldn’t do any back talk.
One man who had lost about $10,000 by Morse, though he had six months before made $20,000 by him, hired a rough, a regular heeler, for ten dollars, and got this rough to pound Morse one night almost to a jelly in one of the up-town streets.
And then a poor woman, a widow with four children, who had put all her little money in Fort Wayne, findin’ it impossible to realize, and hearin’ everybody talkin’ death and destruction and the day of judgment, went and bought a few cents worth of laudanum and killed herself and one of her children. She had tried to poison the whole four, but three of them lived. This last affair made quite a time, and weighed upon poor Morse heavier than anythin’ else. He foolishly went to see the poor woman in her coffin, and he never forgot that pale, worn-out lookin’ face.
He went to bed himself sick, and came near dyin’. But he didn’t die, quite yet. It would perhaps have been better if he had. He rose from his bed the mere shadow, the walkin’ ghost of his former self, and his mind was as much changed as his body. He had lost all his energy, and didn’t care what became of him. Every now and then he would try to make a spurt, but it was only a fitful thing–a mere flash in the pan.
For a while he wasn’t heard of. Then he turned gambler. He used to hang around Morrissey & Spencer’s place, in Twenty-Fourth street, and after awhile he got to hangin’ around the lowest kind of dives, no longer a big speculator, not even a regular gambler, but a mere hanger on of a gamblin’ hell, about the lowest thing a man can fall to this side of a thief.
He was sick at that, sick in soul and body; he had a bad cough; one foot in the grave, and often not one dollar in his pocket. His clothes were shabby; he was out of spirits, out of pocket, out of elbows, out of hope, out of funds, out of heart, right in the heart of a city where he had handled millions.
One night he caught cold by stayin’ out in the streets all night, afraid to meet his landlady, to whom he had promised some money to pay for a little garret room he had. The next mornin’ he crept back to his desolate little chamber unobserved, and stole softly into bed.
He never left that bed alive. He got worse. The landlady not wantin’ him to die on her hands sent for a doctor for her pauper lodger, but the doctor came too late. All the doctors in the world would have been too late for A. W. Morse now. There ain’t one doctor in the lot that can mend a broken heart.
He died in a seven by ten or so room, with a straw mattress on the floor, in Winter, and no fire. He died in a delirium, mutterin’ somethin’ about “thousands of shares” and “seller’s option,” and Fort Wayne. He died utterly alone and unattended, save a stray cat that had got into the room, and was found peerin’ around the corpse. He died in the city of New York a penniless beggar, an utter wreck. He had lost everythin’ and had been forgotten everywhere.
And his lifeless body was treated with indignity. The landlady havin’ nothing else of the dead man’s to hold, seized his body for his debt to her, and held it fast, too. If it hadn’t been for a man who happened to hear accidentally of the circumstances of the poor fellow’s death, and who took pity on the dead, though he had never met the livin’, ten to one Morse never would have had a Christian burial.
He lived like a duke, and died like a dog. And that’s about the long and short of the rise and fall of A. W. Morse.
Ten Years in Wall Street; or, Revelations of Inside Life and Experience on ‘Change.
[Editor’s notes: The source for the above column was a book: Ten Years in Wall Street; or, Revelations of Inside Life and Experience on ‘Change by William Worthington Fowler. Hartford, CT: Worthington, Dustin & Co., 1870. The melodramatic details in the column above were fabricated, though Morse did die poor.
The writer’s remark about “hooked noses” may be an antisemitic slur.
Morse’s failure came in the Spring of 1864. His reign as a leading speculator was brief, from 1862-1864.
Though this column refers to Anthony Wellman Morse (1834-1868), his father was Anthony Wooster Morse (1788-1843), who also had a crippling business experience in New York City, filing for bankruptcy in 1843. However, he did leave assets in the form of real estate in Alabama that allowed his family in Hanover, New Hampshire to stay afloat.]
