1media/us~morgn.gif2016-04-05T22:40:34-07:00Calvin Schermerhorn72410f8bbde58a1e8e60023cf6749d711494714689065Chapter 7plain2016-04-05T23:03:25-07:00Calvin Schermerhorn72410f8bbde58a1e8e60023cf6749d7114947146On any particular evening in the 1850s the steamship merchant Charles Morgan could be seen exiting his New York City offices at 5 Bowling Green. In his mid-fifties, Morgan gazed out on a city that knew him as Commodore Morgan, a captain of a growing industry. His steamships burned coal, but his firm was powered by federal largesse and the republic’s expansion in the American Southwest. Army contracts during the U.S.–Mexican War gave him a commanding advantage over competitors, and a flood of westbound slaveholders sustained it. They permitted the firm to grow to such proportions that it projected private power in foreign affairs. Morgan embodied the tycoon just as the word entered the English lexicon and owed more than a little of his rising fortunes to the Gulf Coast slave trade. Casting an eye leftward up Broadway, he could spy the front stoop of his competitor Cornelius Vanderbilt’s offices. Beyond it rose the spires of Trinity Church, beneath which carriages and carts rattled up and down Broadway. Looking southward, Morgan glimpsed the Battery and steamers on New York Bay. In front of him was the elegant fountain in Bowling Green Park and the carriage that took him home to a stylish mansion in Madison Square. Six feet tall, strong, and clean-shaven, Morgan had widely spaced eyes, a prominent nose, thick, graying, sandy hair, and traces of a Connecticut accent. He was quiet, shrewd, and self-confident. As his carriage lumbered uptown, he could contemplate a business that reached thousands of miles from the metropolis. With strokes of a pen rather than strokes of a lash, his New York–based partnership profited from slaving and the enlargement of the cotton complex.
Morgan’s line dominated steamship travel on the Gulf Coast and was one of the largest shippers of enslaved people in the 1850s United States.
