Free The Jews in America Trilogy by Stephen; Birmingham Page B

that the Lehmans started with a wagon. One thing is certain. By 1844, when Henry Lehman arrived in Mobile, the wagon had become the fashionable means of peddling. With his wagon, then, he started north along the Alabama River and within a year had worked his way successfully to Montgomery.
    The capital of Alabama, however, in those days was a town not much bigger than Rimpar, Bavaria, where Henry had come from—four thousand population, to which Montgomery added two thousand slaves—but it was considerably less attractive. Montgomery was approached by planked roads which disintegrated into rutted, unpaved streets in the center of town. The streets turned into rivers of red mudin rainy weather, and the buildings were hastily erected frame affairs that leaned against each other and against a variety of livery stables. The livery-stable odor, and the swarms of flies it drew, pervaded Montgomery air, and between the buildings open sewers ran down to the river and its row of rickety piers, drawing more flies. Yellow fever was endemic. Rats the size of small dogs took charge of the streets at night. The only buildings of any consequence in Montgomery were three pretentious hotels—the Exchange Hotel, the Madison House, and the Dexter House—built by speculators whose faith in Montgomery’s future as a cotton capital had been supreme. At the time of Henry Lehman’s arrival these dreams had not yet materialized and the hotels stood largely empty.
    For all its unappetizing appearance and unhealthy climate, Montgomery was a prospering town. Its location on the banks of the Alabama linked it to the ports of both Mobile and New Orleans, and made it a natural warehouse and trading center from which the flourishing cotton trade could radiate. Henry Lehman rented a small building in Commerce Street and spread his stock of merchandise on wooden shelves—crockery, glassware, tools, dry goods, bagging, and seeds. With a hand-painted shingle that read “H. Lehman,” the Lehman name entered the annals of American enterprise. Henry lived in a room behind his shop, working late at night over his account books by the light of a whale-oil lamp, doing what Joseph Seligman had done, saving money to send home for more brothers. It was a lonely, celibate existence—in Montgomery Henry became known as “our little monk”—and in the quiet hours he began to fear for his own health. “There is money to be made here,” he wrote to Germany, “if the Fever doesn’t get me first.” Within two years he was able to send for his next-younger brother, Emanuel, and by 1850 Mayer, the youngest, had joined him. The offices of the firm, now called Lehman Brothers, stood in Court Square in the heart of town, directly opposite Montgomery’s main slave-auctioning block. The Lehmans were listed in the city directory as “grocers,” but they advertised themselves as “Agents for the Sale of Leading Southern Domestics”—from which it should not be inferred that the Lehmans sold slaves (though they were eventually prosperous enough to buy a few). “Domestics,” in the cotton business, referred to “osnaburgs, sheetings, shirtings, yarn, cotton rope, and ball thread.” They were, in other words, cotton brokers.
    The Guggenheims are proud to say that they started on foot and, so doing, amassed what may have been the greatest single fortune in America. The only fortune that may outweigh the Guggenheims’ isthat of John D. Rockefeller. It seems senseless to quibble. The Guggenheims became immensely rich. But one of the great “problems” with the Guggenheims, socially, in New York had less to do with their foot-borne origins and their wealth than with their curious proclivity for surrounding themselves with scandal. Several Guggenheim men have had the misfortune of dying on the doorsteps of strange ladies’ houses, or of becoming involved in spectacular