Jay Cooke

Jay Cooke (Aug. 10, 1821 - Feb. 18, 1905) was an American financier and fund-raiser for the federal government during the American Civil War.

At 18 Cooke entered the Philadelphia banking house of E.W. Clark and Co., and three years later he became a member of the firm. In 1861 he opened his own banking house in Philadelphia and floated a war loan of $3,000,000 for the state of Pennsylvania. He was engaged by the United States Treasury Department in 1862 for the sale of $500,000,000 worth of bonds. His services were secured again in 1865, when he disposed of three series of notes totaling $830,000,000. In 1870 Cooke’s firm undertook to finance the construction of the Northern Pacific Railway but failed at the approach of the financial crisis of 1873. By 1880 he had discharged all his obligations and had again become wealthy.

Northern Pacific

The Northern Pacific railroad had been a patronage "reward" to financier Jay Cooke, who in the War Between the States had been one of the Union's leading financiers. But Cooke and his associates built recklessly; the government's subsidies and land grants were issued on a per-mile-of-track basis, so Cooke and his cohorts had strong incentives to build as quickly as possible, which only encouraged shoddy work. Consequently, by 1873 the NP developers had fallen into bankruptcy. The people of Minnesota and the Dakotas, where the railroad was being built, considered Cooke and his business associates to be "derelicts at best and thieves at worst."

References

• Folsom, Burton W. The Myth of the Robber Barons, 1991.

Links

• Jay Cooke at Wikipedia