John Jacob Astor: Landlord of New York #723540

When the gaudy regiments of the German Allies crossed from the Brooklyn shore after the battle of Long Island in August, 1776, and paraded up Broadway with their British comrades-in-arms, they brought with them one, who, indirectly, was to have a more important influence upon the sleepy, little city and the country which had only just been born, than any other in the glittering column pressing relentlessly in pursuit of Washington’s beaten battalions. None of the Germans’ swaggering officers, neither von Knyphausen nor von Riedesel nor blustering Colonel Rall, who should die gloriously after erring tragically, was to play so vital a part upon the world’s stage. For that matter, no Britisher there present, not even fat, pleasure-loving Sir William Howe, himself, was to do as much toward shaping the future of the sturdiest of the British Lion’s whelps as a certain stocky, fair-haired peasant named Heinrich Astor, who clung precariously to a sutler’s wagon in rear of the Hessian contingent.
This youth of twenty-two—who pronounced his name in such a fashion that for years afterward it was spelled, by himself, as well as by others, Ashdour—never carried a gun in battle or risked so needlessly the exceedingly healthy physique nature had provided him. His service as a tool of destiny was to consist in the writing of letters, crude, ungrammatical letters, but sufficiently instinct with life to tempt after him a greater: his younger brother, John Jacob, already chafing, as he had chafed, against the hide-bound routine of a German village, under the restriction of a father unsympathetic and intemperate.