ABSTRACT
Great wealth has been a significant feature of American life since before the American Revolution. Nor were American fortunes minuscule or paltry in comparison to European. Such American accumulators as John Jacob Astor, Stephen Girard and Peter Chardon Brooks in the North-east, and the great slave-owning planters in the South, possessed real and personal property of a magnitude and value comparable to the estates amassed by the Rothschilds in England and Gabriel Julien Ouvrard in France before the middle of the nineteenth century. No one in America possessed larger estates than those that the Crown granted the Hudson River valley manor lords in New York province at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth. One explanation of the size of the greatest American fortunes by the late eighteenth century is that they were accumulated over the course of generations.
