CHAPTER 5

The Auction

Long before oil was struck in western Pennsylvania by Colonel Edwin Drake, it had oozed from subterranean springs into Oil Creek (the name dated from the eighteenth century), mantling the surface with an iridescent scum. The slimy liquid was so ubiquitous that it tainted well water and plagued local contractors drilling for salt. Already in the eighteenth century, the Seneca and Cornplanter Indians devised manifold uses for it, employing it for soothing skin liniment, medicine, and even war paint. To extract oil from the creek, they floated blankets or flannel rags on the water, then wrung the oil from the saturated material. Even before Drake’s find, Seneca Oil had become known as a sovereign remedy for stiff joints, headaches, and other ailments. Around 1850, Samuel Kier gathered unwanted oil from his father’s salt wells, bottled it in little half-pint bottles, and marketed it as Kier’s Rock Oil. With a touch of the charlatan, Kier touted the all-purpose medicinal properties of this elixir, contending it would cure liver complaints, bronchitis, and consumption—and that was just for starters. One wonders whether Doc Rockefeller flogged Kier’s Rock Oil from the back of his buggy.

In the 1850s, the whale fisheries had failed to keep pace with the mounting need for illuminating oil, forcing up the price of whale oil and making illumination costly for ordinary Americans. Only the affluent could afford to light their parlors every evening. There were many other lighting options—including lard oil, tallow oil, cottonseed oil, coal oil refined from shale, and wicks dipped in fat—but no cheap illuminant that burned in a bright, clean, safe manner. Both urbanization and industrialization sped the search for an illuminant that would extend day into night, breaking the timeless rhythm of rural hours that still governed the lives of farmers and city folk alike.

The petroleum industry was hatched in a very modern symbiosis of business acumen and scientific ingenuity. In the 1850s, George Bissell, a Dartmouth College graduate in his early thirties who had enjoyed a checkered career as a reporter, Greek professor, school principal, and lawyer, had the inspired intuition that the rock oil plentiful in western Pennsylvania was more likely than coal oil to yield a first-rate illuminant. To test this novel proposition, he organized the Pennsylvania Rock-Oil Company, leasing land along Oil Creek, a tributary of the Allegheny River, and sending a specimen of local oil to be analyzed by one of the most renowned chemists of the day, Professor Benjamin Silliman, Jr., of Yale. In his landmark 1855 report, Silliman vindicated Bissell’s hunch that this oil could be distilled to produce a fine illuminant, plus a host of other useful products. Now the Pennsylvania Rock-Oil Company faced a single, seemingly insurmountable obstacle: how to find sizable quantities of petroleum to turn Professor Silliman’s findings into spendable cash.

It took nearly three years for Bissell’s company (which soon evolved into the Seneca Oil Company) to dispatch someone to Pennsylvania to hunt for large, marketable pools of oil. To this end, an investor in the project, a New Haven banker named Townsend, enlisted a boarder in his rooming house, Edwin Drake, to travel to Titusville in December 1857. A former conductor on the New Haven Railroad, Drake was a thirty-eight-year-old widower who was solemn, rather courtly, and disabled by neuralgia of the spine. Photos present a dashing figure with a full beard, broad forehead, and bright, heavy-lidded eyes. Though he made only a nominal investment in the venture, he was dressed up with the fancy title of president to dazzle the gullible yokels and was conveniently endowed (and permanently entered the history books) with the honorific title of colonel.

When Drake arrived in Titusville, Oil Creek Valley was still an idyllic place of dense pine and hemlock forest, rich in game. In his stovepipe hat and somber black clothes, the pallid Drake formed a picturesque contrast with this wilderness setting. Despite the enticing traces of oil that stained the creek’s surface, the search for significant oil deposits, without geological knowledge of underground oil structures, proved a long and frustrating one. While the locals found Drake charming and sociable and supplied with a good repertoire of stories, they also mocked him as a harebrained dreamer, seized by a wild obsession. When he tried to dig for oil, the walls caved in. Then, borrowing a method used for salt wells, he started to drill for oil. In this inhospitable setting, choked with underbrush, it was a feat just to assemble the necessary machinery and erect a strange, tall, wooden structure known as a derrick. On Sunday, August 28, 1859, Drake’s folly was rewarded when oil bubbled up from a well drilled a day earlier. It was less a matter of Drake discovering oil—its existence was scarcely a secret—than of his figuring out a way to tap commercial quantities in a controlled process so that it could be pumped from the earth in systematic fashion.

Laura Celestia Spelman, always known to friends as “Cettie.” (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)

Drake’s feat touched off pandemonium as bands of fortune seekers streamed into Titusville and its pastoral surroundings. Speculators scrambled over the greasy slopes of the creek, leasing acreage from unsophisticated, often unlettered, owners; one farmer turned down an offer of a one-quarter royalty and stubbornly held out for a one-eighth share. Pretty soon derricks sprouted everywhere along the dark, narrow valley, the drilling scarring and denuding the once lush forest slopes. Drilling was the first step in an extended production chain. Within a year of Drake’s discovery, a dozen ramshackle refineries sprang up along the creek’s steep, secluded banks. Inevitably, this tumultuous activity attracted notice in Cleveland, which had the advantage of proximity to northwest Pennsylvania. Even in those days of slow transport, one could travel from Titusville to Cleveland in a day. Several Cleveland businessmen were already refining illuminating oil from bituminous coal and were naturally interested in a rival method. On November 18, 1859, nearly three months after Drake’s find, the Cleveland Leader reported on the mad hubbub around Titusville, saying that “the oil springs of northern Pennsylvania were attracting considerable speculation” and that there was “quite a rush to the oleaginous locations.” Among the first Clevelanders descending upon the area was a produce merchant named James G. Hussey, who was a former boss of Rockefeller’s partner, Maurice B. Clark, and he came home with ecstatic stories about the riches to be made.

We don’t know what Rockefeller thought of Drake’s breakthrough at the time, but years later, having harvested his unparalleled fortune from oil, John D. Rockefeller saw a large and providential design in the discovery of Pennsylvania oil, stating that “these vast stores of wealth were the gifts of the great Creator, the bountiful gifts of the great Creator.” He expressed his gratitude that “Colonel Drake and the Standard Oil Company and all others connected with this industry had the opportunity for useful work in preparing and distributing this valuable product to supply the wants of the world.”¹ As we shall see, Rockefeller always viewed the industry through this rose-tinted spiritual lens, and it materially aided his success, for his conviction that God had given kerosene to suffering mankind gave him unswerving faith in the industry’s future, enabling him to persist where less confident men stumbled and faltered.

For all his later evangelical fervor about oil, John D. Rockefeller didn’t behold its potential in a sudden revelatory flash but made an incremental transition from produce to oil. Clark and Rockefeller might have taken on consignment some of the first crude-oil shipments that reached Cleveland in early 1860, but it was the friendship between Maurice Clark and Samuel Andrews, an Englishman from Clark’s hometown in Wiltshire, that drew Rockefeller into the business. A hearty, rubicund man with a broad face and genial manner, Andrews was a self-taught chemist, a born tinkerer, and an enterprising mechanic. Arriving in Cleveland in the 1850s, he worked in a lard-oil refinery owned by yet another Englishman, C. A. Dean, and acquired extensive experience in making tallow, candles, and coal oil. Then, in 1860, Dean got a ten-barrel shipment of Pennsylvania crude from which Andrews distilled the first oil-based kerosene manufactured in Cleveland. The secret of “cleansing” oil with sulfuric acid— what we now term refining—was then a high mystery, zealously guarded by a local priesthood of practical chemists, and many curious businessmen beat a path to Andrews’s door.

An expert on illuminants enthralled by the unique properties of kerosene, Andrews was convinced it would outshine and outsell other sources of light. Finances were tight in the Andrews household—his wife took in sewing to supplement his income—but by 1862, Sam was plotting to leave Dean and strike out on his own. On the lookout for backers, he frequently dropped by the offices of Clark and Rockefeller. In another instance of the worldly advantages of his religious affiliations, Rockefeller knew Andrews and his wife from the Erie Street Baptist Mission Church. When Andrews started talking about oil refining, the dubious Clark cut short his perfervid talk: “I told him there was no chance, that John and I together did not have more than $250 we could spare out of our business; we simply had enough working capital, together with our credit at the banks, to enable us to make advances to consignors, paying insurance and rent. ”² Stymied by one partner, Andrews barged into Rockefeller’s office and resumed his sales pitch. Already so flush that he had invested in his first railroad stock, with cash to spare for the firm, Rockefeller was far more receptive. After one chat with Rockefeller, Andrews went back into the warehouse to badger Clark. “I started to shut him off,” recalled Clark, “but when he said, ‘Mr. Rockefeller thinks well of it,’ I impulsively replied, ‘Well, if John will go in I will.’ ”³ With becoming modesty, Rockefeller later interpreted his own role as more passive, even skeptical toward the fateful oil venture and said that Maurice Clark’s two brothers, James and Richard, were such oil enthusiasts that he had been railroaded into refining by the combined pressure of the three Clarks and Sam Andrews.

Whatever the truth, Rockefeller and Maurice Clark pledged $4,000 for half the working capital of the new refining venture, Andrews, Clark and Co., placing the twenty-four-year-old Rockefeller squarely in the oil business in 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation and the stunning Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. Of the initial $4,000 investment, he said dryly, “It seemed very large to us, very large.” ⁴ Scarcely dreaming that oil would ever supersede their main commodity business, they considered it “a little side issue, we retaining our interest in our business as produce commission merchants.”⁵ As a commission agent distant from the oil wells, stationed at the commercial crossroads of Cleveland, Rockefeller naturally entered the industry as a refiner. As a middleman, he belonged to a new breed of people in the emerging industrial economy who traded, refined, or distributed products in the widening chasm that separated raw-material producers in the countryside from their urban consumers.

The spot chosen for the new refinery tells much in miniature about Rockefeller’s approach to business. He exercised an option on a three-acre parcel on the sloping, red-clay banks of a narrow waterway called Kingsbury Run, which flowed into the Cuyahoga River and thus provided passage to Lake Erie. A mile and a half from downtown Cleveland, it seemed at first glance an inauspicious site for the new refinery, christened the Excelsior Works. In these bucolic outskirts beyond the city limits, cows browsed peacefully, and trees still shaded the waterway. But for Rockefeller, the inconvenience was outweighed by the fact that it would soon adjoin new railroad tracks. On November 3, 1863, proudly flying the Union colors, a gleaming locomotive of the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad pulled into a Cleveland station decked with bunting and launched a new era, giving the town access to New York City via the Erie Railroad and to a valuable direct route to the Pennsylvania oil fields. Able to ship by water or over land, Rockefeller gained the critical leverage he needed to secure preferential rates on transportation—which was why he agonized over plant locations throughout his career.

Before long, a string of other refineries had sprouted along Kingsbury Run. With a population of about 44,000, Cleveland was full of dynamic young men struggling to get ahead, and oil refining presented a rare chance to parlay a small investment into a huge fortune. It cost a pittance—as little as $1,000, or less than the cost of opening a well-stocked store—to construct a small refinery and hire hands to run it. By mid-1863, twenty refineries operated in the Cleveland area and shipped a quarter of their kerosene abroad. At first, the profits came in so thick and fast that everybody—big and small, clever and inept— made handsome profits without the fierce winnowing of adversity, the stern lash of marketplace discipline. Rockefeller sarcastically alluded to these palmy days as “the harvest time in which such large profits were reaped by the saloon-keepers and preachers and tailors and men from all the walks of life who were fortunate enough to find an oil still.”⁶ Oil was put to myriad uses during the Civil War, treating the wounds of Union soldiers and serving as a substitute for turpentine formerly supplied by the South. Even on the battlefield, the use of kerosene refined from crude oil spread, and Ulysses S. Grant often sat in his tent, drafting dispatches by the flicker of a kerosene lamp.

Later on, Rockefeller became so embittered toward Sam Andrews that he denigrated him, quite unjustly, as the expendable figure in the Standard Oil saga. “Samuel Andrews was taken into the business as a poor workingman with little or nothing in the early stages when it was difficult to find men to cleanse the oil. . . . He had too much conceit, too much bull-headed English obstinacy and so little self-control. Was his own worst enemy.”⁷ This verdict, rendered much later, was darkly tinged by intervening events, but in the beginning Andrews enjoyed cordial relations with Rockefeller. Andrews knew nothing of business but was content to let Maurice Clark and Rockefeller mind the office while he acted as refinery boss. Reversing Rockefeller’s harsh judgment, Ida Tarbell went so far as to label Andrews “a mechanical genius” who had improved the quality of the kerosene and the percentage of it yielded by each barrel of crude oil.⁸

In the early days, Rockefeller wasn’t so detached from the practical side of refining as when his empire later grew and he withdrew into the impregnable fortress of his office. Devoid of superior airs, he was often seen at Kingsbury Run at 6:30 A.M., going into the cooper shop to roll out barrels, stack hoops, or cart out shavings, reflecting the thrift inculcated by his mother and his puritanical religious upbringing. Since a residue of sulfuric acid remained after refining, Rockefeller drew up plans to convert it to fertilizer—the first of many worthwhile and extremely profitable attempts to create by-products from waste materials. Shaped by a childhood of uncertainty, he aspired to be self-sufficient in business no less than in life and reacted to a perpetual shortage of barrels by deciding to build his own. Disgusted by a suspicious error in a plumber’s bill, he told Sam Andrews, “Hire a plumber by the month. Let us buy our own pipes, joints, and all other plumbing material.” ⁹ The refinery also did its own hauling and loading. Such was Rockefeller’s ingenuity, his ceaseless search for even minor improvements, that within a year refining had overtaken produce as the most profitable side of the business. Despite the unceasing vicissitudes of the oil industry, prone to cataclysmic booms and busts, he would never experience a single year of loss.

If Rockefeller entered the refining business with some reservations, he soon embraced it as the big, bold opportunity he had craved. Never one to do things halfway, he plunged headlong into the business, and his enthusiasm overflowed into his home life. Sharing a room with brother William, he often nudged him awake in the dead of night. “I’ve been thinking out a plan to do so and so,” he would ask. “Now, what do you think of this scheme?”¹⁰ “Keep your ideas till morning,” Will would sleepily protest. “I want to sleep.”¹¹ In the predawn dark, John usually chatted with Maurice Clark and Sam Andrews at Cheshire Street, where they talked interminably of oil. As John’s sister Mary Ann observed, the older men deferred to him instinctively. “They did not seem to want to go without him. They would . . . walk in and visit in the dining room while John was at breakfast.” She found the infatuation with oil repugnant, screening out the dreadful carnage of the Civil War. “I got sick of it and wished morning after morning that they would talk of something else.”¹²

Rockefeller leaped into oil with a zest reminiscent of his absorption in the Baptist Church. He lovingly tended his refinery much as he had swept the chapel floor, a parallel not lost on contemporaries. Said Maurice Clark: “John had abiding faith in two things—the Baptist creed and oil.”¹³ This very old, very young man found boyish pleasure in doing business, and when he captured a large contract, he strutted and whooped with a buoyant step or cut a small comic caper. As one early associate remarked, “The only time I ever saw John Rockefeller enthusiastic was when a report came in from the creek that his buyer had secured a cargo of oil at a figure much below the market price. He bounded from his chair with a shout of joy, danced up and down, hugged me, threw up his hat, acted so like a madman that I have never forgotten it.” ¹⁴ These isolated joyful outbursts only underscored the usual constriction of his personality.

Rockefeller’s overwhelming influence on the oil industry stemmed from the conflict between his overmastering need for order and the turbulent, unruly nature of the infant industry. In the overheated memories of his enemies, Rockefeller became an omnipresent bogeyman who first appeared in the Oil Regions—the name given to the area along Oil Creek that encompassed Titusville, Oil City, and Franklin—not long after Drake’s discovery. One legend, rehashed by several early biographers, was that Rockefeller went to Titusville in 1860 to represent a group of Cleveland capitalists and advised them to refrain from the business, citing the uncertain flow of oil. In truth, Rockefeller testified, “I was engaged in the business when I took the trip; that was why I took the trip, to see about a supply of oil for my refinery.” ¹⁵

To reach his destination, he had to travel first by rail and then by stagecoach to penetrate the dark forests and wooded hills along Oil Creek. Despite the spot’s isolation—news of Fort Sumter’s fall took four days to arrive—so many adventurers descended upon the area that train aisles were jammed with newcomers while others squatted on the roof. It was no place for the squeamish. To reach the railroad, oil had to be carted in barrels across more than twenty miles of rough backcountry, a trade serviced by thousands of brawling, swearing teamsters with shaggy beards and slouch hats who charged extortionate rates. (The Pennsylvania barrel, equal to forty-two gallons, remains the industry standard to this day.) Sometimes oil-laden wagons stretched in interminable caravans along the rutted roads. Many barrels tipped over and smashed, making the hills treacherous. During wet seasons, the mud grew so thick that teamsters often took two horses, one to pull the other out when it invariably got stuck. Horses were routinely lashed to death with heavy black whips as they pulled enormous loads through the black muck. Left to die by the roadside, their hides and hair were eaten away by petroleum chemicals, leaving ghastly, corroded carcasses strewn across the landscape. Transport by water was no less revolting. Oil Creek flowed into the Allegheny River, where hundreds of flatboats and steamers handled the cargo traffic. Sometimes oil barrels were loaded on barges and floated down to Pittsburgh on man-made freshets produced by suddenly releasing water stored behind floodgates. “Lots of oil was lost by the capsizing of barges and smashing of barrels in the confusion and crush of the rafts,” said Rockefeller.¹⁶ By 1863, the Allegheny, befouled with oil, actually caught fire and burned a bridge in Franklin.

Tramping the banks, Rockefeller beheld the satanic new world bequeathed by the oil boom, an idyllic valley blackened with derricks and tanks, engine houses and ramshackle huts, thickly crowded together in a crazy-quilt pattern. Boomtowns appeared briefly, witnessed frantic activity, then vanished as abruptly as they had appeared. Rockefeller saw something slapdash about the industry. “You will remember that the business in its early years was a sort of gold-field rush,” he reminisced. “Great fortunes were made by some of the first adventurers, and everything was carried on in a sort of helter-skelter way.”¹⁷ Rockefeller represented the second, more rational stage of capitalist development, when the colorful daredevils and pioneering speculators give way, as Max Weber wrote, to the “men who had grown up in the hard school of life, calculating and daring at the same time, above all temperate and reliable, shrewd and completely devoted to their business, with strictly bourgeois opinions and principles.” ¹⁸

By the time Rockefeller arrived in the Oil Regions, it looked as if the oil would be more than a transient phenomenon. In September 1861, two Clevelanders brought in the Empire Well, the first mighty gusher, which rose “higher than steeples,” in the evocative words of one observer, yielding three thousand barrels of oil per day.¹⁹ To onlookers, there was something uncanny about this towering jet of oil. So fast did the Empire Well flow that its owners could scarcely find barrels to carry it off, and people came running with pails, dippers, cups, and buckets to scoop up the black gold. A sudden oil glut sent prices skidding to ten cents a barrel even as teamsters continued to charge $3 or $4 per barrel to ship it to the railroads. From its first days, the industry tended to oscillate between extremes: gluts so dire that prices plummeted below production costs, or shortages that sent prices skyward but raised the even more troubling specter of the oil running dry.

Among the many tales of Rockefeller’s first trip to the oil fields, one told by Franklin Breed, a Titusville producer, has a ring of authenticity. He and Rockefeller rode on horseback through the valley to reach Breed’s well, then negotiated the final half mile on foot. As Breed later wrote:

It was necessary to cross a bayou of five or six feet in width and probably four feet deep. This bayou contained sediment which the oil men took from the bottom of the tanks. This, with mud in the bayou, resembled tar. Spanning the bayou was a six inch log. . . . I was used to crossing on it but Rockefeller declared he could not walk on it. He did, however, and he fell off. . . . He looked up at me with a smile and said, “Well, Breed, you have got me into the oil business head and ears.” ²⁰

In talking to the hard-bitten wildcatters, Rockefeller must have seemed standoffish and self-possessed, but he professed to enjoy their company, calling them “pleasant fellows, the same type we meet in the mining regions, jolly, good-natured, happy-go-lucky. ”²¹The description is not without a note of condescension. But he listened closely to what people said and filed away as much information as he could, repeating valuable information to himself until it was memorized. There was humility in this eagerness to learn. As he said, “It is very important to remember what other people tell you, not so much what you yourself already know.”²²

However stimulated by the money to be made, Rockefeller was appalled by the loose morals of a place infested with cardsharpers and prostitutes and already dubbed “Sodden Gomorrah.”²³ The wildcatters were so rowdy, said a visitor, that throughout the area you could hear “the slap of cards on whiskey-stained tables of groggeries.”²⁴ Another visitor marveled at the universal dissipation and reported, “The orgies in Petroleum Centre sometimes eclipsed Monte Carlo and the Latin Quarter combined.”²⁵ For a sober, pious Christian such as Rockefeller, this world of brawny men addicted to vice must have seemed infernal. The oilmen walked around in tall boots, leaving black footprints in the brothels, taverns, and gambling houses of Titusville and Oil City. Many flaunted their nouveau-riche excesses, wearing high silk hats, diamond stickpins, and gold watch chains. In travelers’ reports, it is striking how frequently people resorted to hellish imagery to capture the mood. Rockefeller’s trips to the Oil Regions must have strengthened his belief that he stood foursquare for virtue in a godforsaken place. As an ardent temperance advocate, he was extremely uncomfortable around drinkers—perhaps one reason why he seldom visited the oil fields.

Two stories, both of uncertain authenticity, convey Rockefeller’s disdain for the morals prevalent among many producers. One night in Rouseville, a local committee of vigilantes crept up to a flatboat moored to a bank and filled with ladies of easy virtue and whiskey salesmen; at the height of a bacchanal, they cut the boat loose and sent the sinners twenty miles downriver. It is said that Rockefeller “thoroughly approved” of the action. ²⁶ Another story tells of the time he stayed in Franklin, where he boarded at the Exchange Hotel and liked to have bread and milk for supper. Occasionally, he donned a dingy old suit to help his men load barrels. One Sunday, an employee came rushing in to tell Rockefeller that the river was rising dangerously and might sweep away their barrels. Rockefeller, preparing for church, put on his hat with aplomb, said he had to go to prayer, and refused to attend to business. Perhaps Rockefeller really did have God on his side, for his barrels survived the flooding intact. ²⁷

Drilling for oil often seemed less an industry than a lottery: Nobody knew if oil would prove a lasting benefit to mankind or an evanescent wonder. If the Oil Regions created many millionaires, they left many more paupers. Instead of building up an industry, most producers preferred to drain their wells as quickly as possible in this harum-scarum atmosphere. Under the so-called rule of capture, people could drill diagonally and siphon off a neighbor’s oil, adding to their haste to pump. Rockefeller succeeded because he believed in the long-term prospects of the business and never treated it as a mirage that would soon fade. Rockefeller’s first visit to Pennsylvania must also have persuaded him that he had picked the right entry point to the business. Searching for oil was wildly unpredictable, whereas refining seemed safe and methodical by comparison. Before too long, he realized that refining was the critical point where he could exert maximum leverage over the industry.

John D. Rockefeller had an unfailing knack for knowing who would help or hinder him in his career, an instinct only sharpened by time. Sensitive to patronizing behavior, he bridled when anyone tried to lord it over him, and he wanted to be dealt with as a peer even by senior men. Recoiling at what he saw as the Clark brothers’ pomposity, he eventually grew as censorious of them as he had been of George Gardner. The Clarks were the first of many business partners to underrate the audacity of the quietly calculating Rockefeller, who bided his time as he figured out how to get rid of them.

All along, crosscurrents had ruffled his relationship with Maurice B. Clark, whom he dismissed as “an ignorant, conceited Englishman.” ²⁸ A tall, bluff man with a fiery temper and shadowy past, Clark had started out as a gardener in his native Wiltshire, chafing under a tyrannical boss. One day in 1847, he reared up and flattened the man. Fearing arrest, he fled to Boston as a penniless, uneducated fugitive from justice. He migrated west to Cleveland and worked as a woodchopper and teamster before entering the produce business. More of a free spirit than Rockefeller, Clark smoked, drank, and swore freely in the warehouse and showed scant religious interest. The personality profile didn’t appeal to Rockefeller, who bristled at Clark’s profanity, but he praised him as a smart, hustling businessman.

Because Rockefeller had such respect for ledgers, Clark, nearly ten years older, looked down on him as a mere clerk, a rigid, blinkered man without vision. “He did not think I could do anything but keep accounts and look after the finances,” said Rockefeller.²⁹“You see, it took him a long time to feel that I was no longer a boy.” ³⁰ He thought Clark envious of his success in soliciting business on the road, perhaps because this undercut Clark’s image of him as an expendable clerk. At first, Rockefeller swallowed his anger and stoically endured this injustice. “He tried almost from the beginning of our partnership to dominate and override me,” he said of Clark. “A question he asked several times in our discussion of business matters was, ‘What in the world would you have done without me?’ I bore it in silence. It does no good to dispute with such a man.”³¹ Rockefeller had no doubt who was contributing the lion’s share of business. “I was the one who made the firm’s success. I kept the books, looked out for the money.”³² As part of Rockefeller’s silent craft and habit of extended premeditation, he never tipped off his adversaries to his plans for revenge, preferring to spring his reprisals on them.

The investment in oil refining had brought Maurice’s brother James into the office, and Rockefeller came to detest him. An ex-prizefighter, James Clark was a powerful, bullying young man, and he tried to intimidate Rockefeller, who responded with great sangfroid and courage. One morning, James burst into his office and started swearing violently at Rockefeller, who put his feet up on the desk with imperturbable poise and showed no sign of upset; a fine actor, he always had masterful control of his facial muscles. When James finished, Rockefeller said evenly, “Now James, you can knock my head off but you might as well understand that you can’t scare me.” ³³ This fearless young man couldn’t be intimidated. After that confrontation, James Clark didn’t rant and bluster as much around Rockefeller, but it was clear that they were incompatible colleagues.

As with Maurice, Rockefeller quarreled with James about business methods and was dismayed by his devious side deals in oil. When James boasted about swindling a former boss or cheating people on buying trips to Pennsylvania, it must have aroused Rockefeller’s innermost suspicions, for he closely audited his partner’s expenses. Like Maurice, James smarted at Rockefeller’s self-righteousness and branded him the “Sunday-school superintendent.”³⁴ Already contemplating the future, Rockefeller wanted to be surrounded by trustworthy people who could inspire confidence in customers and bankers alike. He drew a characteristic conclusion: The weak, immoral man was also destined to be a poor businessman. “We were beginning to prosper and I felt very uneasy at my name being linked up with these speculators.”³⁵ Later on, the Clarks fully reciprocated this contempt, with James describing Rockefeller’s sole contribution to Andrews, Clark as that of a “financial manipulator” and claiming that in 1863 Rockefeller had cheated him of several thousand dollars.³⁶

If their differences had been chiefly a clash of personalities, Rockefeller’s partnership with Maurice Clark might have lasted years, but they had sharply divergent views about oil’s future and the desirable pace of expansion. Despite the Civil War, the drills never stopped in Pennsylvania, except when General Lee invaded the state and producers had to defend it. As the export business in kerosene widened, Andrews, Clark banked solid profits in refining during every year of the war. Yet prices remained as volatile as the war itself, with the supply-demand equation shifting radically each time a single spouter or gusher came in. Amid the ruthlessly competitive conditions, it was never clear where prices would settle or what constituted a normal price. The price fluctuations in a single year were staggering, veering between 10¢ and $10 a barrel in 1861 and $4 and $12 in 1864. Undeterred by these extreme gyrations, both Rockefeller and Andrews wanted to borrow heavily and expand, while Clark favored a more circumspect approach.

What likely clinched Rockefeller’s decision to break from the three Clarks was that they had the votes to override him and Andrews and didn’t hesitate to use their majority in a high-handed way. In later reminiscences, Rockefeller disclosed an incident that casts light on his relations with the Clarks: “[Maurice Clark] was very angry when I borrowed money to extend our business of refining oil. ‘Why, you have borrowed $100,000,’ he exclaimed, as if that were some sort of offense.”³⁷ Rockefeller’s amazement seems somewhat disingenuous: It was a stupendous sum, but all Rockefeller could see was that Maurice Clark lacked his audacity. “Clark was an old grandmother and was scared to death because we owed money at the banks.” ³⁸ One can forgive the Clarks if they found something overbearing about this bumptious young man who would risk all their capital, evidently without notifying them. Significantly, the Clarks were irked by both Rockefeller’s frugality and his prodigality—his tightfisted control of details and advocacy of unbridled expansion. Daring in design, cautious in execution—it was a formula he made his own throughout his career.

By 1865, Rockefeller, age twenty-five, decided it was time for a showdown with the Clarks. He wasn’t the sort to persist in a flawed situation, and he was now prepared to clear away the encumbrances that had thwarted his early career.

For Rockefeller, success in the oil business required a bullish, nearly glandular faith in its future. Before deciding to enter the business on a large scale, he needed one last God-given proof that the oil wouldn’t disappear—decisive evidence that came in January 1865 at a place called Pithole Creek. The nearby rocks and chasms had always emitted sulfur gas and attracted the notice of oilmen. One day, a group of eccentric producers, waving a witch-hazel twig serving as a divining rod, drilled on the spot where the twig dipped down. When a tremendous gusher spouted up days later, another madcap chapter in the oil industry commenced, with speculators, drillers, and business agents converging on the spot. Within a few months, the sleepy frontier settlement with four log cabins was transformed into a hectic little metropolis of twelve thousand people. Overnight, fifty hotels sprang up, along with a theater that seated one hundred and was lit by crystal chandeliers. So improbable was Pithole’s rise that it seemed a phantom city, a conjurer’s trick. “It was more than a city,” says one chronicler, “it was a state of postwar euphoria.”³⁹ Even by the sordid standards of the Oil Regions, it was a disreputable place. “Every other shop is a liquor saloon,” said one journalist. “It is safe to assert that there is more vile liquor drunk in this town than in any other of its size in the world.”⁴⁰

One eyewitness to the whole Pithole lunacy was an observant eight-year-old girl named Ida Minerva Tarbell, who lived ten miles away in Rouseville and saw hordes of eager men streaking to the boomtown. When her father built an oil-tank shop there, he made the fastest money of his life. Unfortunately, Pithole’s ebullient heyday was short-lived, and within a few years its wells were exhausted from fire and overproduction. Before the town reverted back to sylvan peace, people began to scavenge for scrap. For $600, Ida Tarbell’s father bought the fancy Bonta House hotel, constructed a few years earlier for $60,000, and carried off its lumber, doors, and windows to erect a home for the Tarbell family in Titusville. By 1874, the moment of its greatness having flickered, Pithole counted just six voters.

In hindsight, Pithole was a cautionary fable of blasted hopes and counterfeit dreams, renewing fears of the industry’s short life span. But in January 1865, it suggested that there were many undiscovered pockets of oil, and it probably acted as a catalyst that hastened Rockefeller’s break with the Clarks. This parting was vintage Rockefeller: He slowly and secretly laid the groundwork, then moved with electrifying speed to throw his adversaries off balance. That January, Maurice Clark had openly fumed when Rockefeller asked him to sign yet another note. “We have been asking too many loans in order to extend this oil business,” Clark said. Undaunted, Rockefeller shot back: “We should borrow whenever we can safely extend the business by doing so.”⁴¹ Trying to intimidate Rockefeller, the Clark brothers threatened to dissolve the partnership, which required the unanimous consent of all the partners.

Determined to break loose from the Clarks and the commission business, Rockefeller sounded out Sam Andrews privately and told him:

Sam, we are prospering. We have a future before us, a big future. But I don’t like Jim Clark and his habits. He is an immoral man in more ways than one. He gambles in oil. I don’t want this business to be associated with a gambler. Suppose I take them up the next time they threaten a dissolution. Suppose I succeed in buying them out. Will you come in with me?⁴²

When Andrews agreed, they shook hands on the deal.

A few weeks later, just as Rockefeller expected, he quarreled with Maurice Clark, and the latter threatened to dissolve the partnership. “If that’s the way you want to do business we’d better dissolve, and let you run your own affairs to suit yourself,” Clark warned.⁴³ Moving swiftly to implement his scenario, Rockefeller invited the partners to his home on February 1, 1865, and vigorously expounded a policy of rapid refinery expansion—a policy he knew was anathema to the Clarks. Playing right into Rockefeller’s hands, James Clark tried to browbeat him. “We’d better split up,” he declared.⁴⁴ In conformity with the partnership agreement, Rockefeller got everyone to state publicly that he favored dissolution, and the Clarks left imagining they had cowed Rockefeller. In fact, he raced to the office of the Cleveland Leader and placed a notice in the morning paper dissolving the partnership. The next morning, when the Clarks saw it, they were stunned. “Do you really mean it?” an incredulous Maurice Clark asked Rockefeller. He hadn’t realized before that Rockefeller had lined up Andrews on his side. “You really want to break it up?” “I really want to break it up,” replied Rockefeller, who had sounded out sympathetic bankers in the preceding weeks. ⁴⁵ It was agreed that the firm would be auctioned to the highest bidder.

Even as a young man, Rockefeller was extremely composed in a crisis. In this respect, he was a natural leader: The more agitated others became, the calmer he grew. It was an index of his matchless confidence that when the auction occurred, the Clarks brought a lawyer while Rockefeller represented himself. “I thought that I could take care of so simple a transaction,” he boasted.⁴⁶ With the Clarks’ lawyer acting as auctioneer, the bidding began at $500 and quickly rose to a few thousand dollars, then inched up slowly to about $50,000— already more than Rockefeller thought the refining business worth. Since this auction was a turning point on his road to industrial supremacy, let us quote his account of the historic moment as he related it in his memoirs:

Finally it advanced to $60,000, and by slow stages to $70,000, and I almost feared for my ability to buy the business and have the money to pay for it. At last the other side bid $72,000. Without hesitation I said $72,500. Mr. Clark then said: “I’ll go no higher, John; the business is yours.” “Shall I give you a check for it now?” I suggested. “No,” Mr. Clark said, “I’m glad to trust you for it; settle at your convenience.” ⁴⁷

Rockefeller knew the moment was fraught with consequences. “It was the day that determined my career. I felt the bigness of it, but I was as calm as I am talking to you now,” he told William O. Inglis. ⁴⁸ He paid a lofty price for his freedom, surrendering to Clark his half interest in the commission business along with the $72,500. (The purchase price would be equivalent to $652,000 today.) Yet he had captured a tremendous prize. At age twenty-five, he had won control of Cleveland’s largest refinery, which could treat five hundred barrels of crude oil daily—twice the capacity of its nearest local rival—and ranked as one of the world’s largest facilities. On February 15, 1865, the Cleveland Leader printed the following item: “Copartnership Notice—The undersigned, having purchased the entire interest of Andrews, Clark & Co. in the ‘Excelsior Oil Works,’ and all the stock of barrels, oil, etc., will continue the business of the late firm under the name of Rockefeller & Andrews.”⁴⁹ Rockefeller savored his revenge against the Clarks, who were shocked that their junior partner had lined up, on the sly, financing for such a large deal, and Rockefeller gloated at the older men’s complacent naïveté. “Then [the Clark brothers] woke up and saw for the first time that my mind had not been idle while they were talking so big and loud.”⁵⁰ All of Rockefeller’s Baptist contempt for vanity, show, and loose talk is condensed in that single observation. On March 2, 1865, Clark and Rockefeller was also dissolved, and Rockefeller eliminated the three fractious Clark brothers from his life forever.

For Rockefeller, the harrowing memory of the Clarks stayed with him, and he talked as if he had survived a nightmare. “The sufferings I went through in those years, the humiliation and the anguish, I have not words to describe. And I ever point to the day when I separated myself from them by paying this large bonus as the beginning of the success I have made in my life.”⁵¹ It’s hard to know whether Rockefeller exaggerated the Clarks’ haughtiness, but the important points are that he was proud and sensitive and that their barbed words reverberated deeply in his mind. Having emerged as his own boss, he would never again feel his advancement blocked by shortsighted, mediocre men.

The demise of Clark and Rockefeller unfolded against the waning days of the Civil War. By December 1864, General Sherman had reached Savannah and swung north through the Carolinas. About two months after Rockefeller won the refining business, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse. As a town that had sheltered many runaway slaves before the war, Cleveland was especially grieved by the subsequent news of Lincoln’s assassination. On April 27, the funeral train brought his body to lie in state for several hours in a special mortuary pavilion, with women in spotless white robes gathering by the railroad tracks to sing choral dirges to the slain president.

By this point, the new firm of Rockefeller and Andrews had been installed on the second floor of a brick building on Superior Street, several blocks from the Cuyahoga River, in an office complex known as the Sexton Block. From his new command post, the young entrepreneur could stare out the window and follow the progress of barges drifting by laden with oil barrels from his refinery. Already a mature businessman, he relied on Andrews only as a technician and assumed control of all other aspects of the business. Having discarded several older partners, the young man had no real business mentors, heroes, or role models and was beholden to no one. John D. Rockefeller was not only self-made but self-invented and already had unyielding faith in his own judgment.

For all his resoluteness as a young businessman, Rockefeller tarried in settling his private life. Yet he had already fathomed his own needs and sought a woman who would be pious and loving, dedicated to the church, and strongly supportive of his career. Because of his easy, affectionate way with his mother, Rockefeller felt comfortable with women, took genuine pleasure in their company, and, unlike the caddish Bill, treated them with respect.

During his brief period at Central High School, Rockefeller had befriended two bright, literate sisters, Lucy and Laura Celestia Spelman, and taken a special fancy to Laura, or “Cettie,” as she was called. Though he still had an awkward manner with girls, the sisters saw a warm, likable side to him. Unlike most other girls at the school, the practical-minded Cettie was taking commercial courses to master business principles, and she applauded John in his storied 1855 job search. As a friend of Cettie’s later noted, “She saw that he was ambitious, and she thought that he was honest, which probably appealed to her more than anything else.” ⁵² Clearly, she transmitted to John the message that his chances of winning her would be materially enhanced if his economic prospects improved.

There seems little doubt that in courting Cettie, John was held back by the disparity in their socioeconomic status, which accounts for the nine-year hiatus between their first meeting in high school and their 1864 marriage. The Spelmans were high-toned people, a blue-ribbon family living in a fine house. A friend of Laura’s recalled, “Perhaps Cettie wasn’t exactly rich and beautiful, but her father was as well off as any of the girls in our class, a member of the Ohio legislature, and somewhat known for his philanthropic work, so—you know how those things are among children—we thought that it was strange for her to rather show a leaning toward Johnny.”⁵³ It’s easy to see what drew John to Laura aside from patent compatibility, for the Spelmans signified the respectability that had so frustratingly eluded his own family.

Civic-minded, stirred to action by social injustice, the Spelmans offered more than entrée into the local gentry and were a family of genuine substance. Born in Massachusetts, Harvey Buel Spelman, a direct descendant of the Puritans, and Lucy Henry met in Ohio and were married in 1835, giving birth to Laura Celestia on September 9, 1839. When they moved to Akron in 1841, they lived humbly at first, with Mrs. Spelman taking in washing to extend their income; Cettie, as a little girl, sometimes yanked a small red wagon around town to deliver laundry. Even when Harvey Spelman opened a dry-goods store and amassed considerable wealth, he and Lucy didn’t retreat into private pleasures but redoubled their militant reform efforts. As a member of the local board of education, Harvey Spelman spearheaded the creation of a progressive public-school system, a crusade that propelled him into the Ohio state legislature in 1849. Also busy in church causes, the Spelmans helped to found a Congregational church in Akron. Their religious beliefs buttressed their secular activism, and they were pledged to root out evil as part of both their religious and political agendas.

With his broad forehead, tufty brows, and pugnacious beard, Harvey Buel Spelman was a man of burning fundamentalist convictions and apocalyptic musings. He frequently discerned God’s hand smiting the American people for their wicked extravagance, and he issued flaming diatribes against demon rum: “The widespread and excessive use of rum is the tinder which inflames the worst passions in human nature, fosters riots, Communism and strikes, promotes ignorance, vice and crime, and more than any other cause, threatens the stability of our free institutions,” he said in 1879.⁵⁴ Lucy Henry, his dignified, industrious wife, enjoyed singing hymns and had little time for small talk, though she could be jolly with her daughters. “At any reference to the Bible, to temperance, to education, to the widening sphere of women, her eyes flashed with old-time fire, and her face was aglow with conviction,” a preacher said, with pardonable hyperbole, at her funeral.⁵⁵

As an outgrowth of their church involvement—and this was true of many evangelicals after the Second Great Awakening—Harvey and Lucy were uncompromising abolitionists and temperance activists. With their home serving as a station on the Underground Railroad, they shepherded many slaves from Tennessee and Kentucky to freedom, and Sojourner Truth, the former slave, abolitionist, and itinerant preacher, spent several days with them. According to Cettie, the only time she ever saw her mother cooking on the Sabbath was to prepare hot meals for slaves in flight to Canada. The Spelmans felt no less ardently about drink. The crusading Mrs. Spelman not only marched in the streets but stormed the saloons, dropped to her knees in prayer, and pleaded with sinners at the bar stools to mend their ways, while Mr. Spelman carried on a parallel campaign to shut down rum shops.

The Spelmans’ prosperous life in Akron ended in 1851 when Mr. Spelman’s business went bankrupt, the casualty of a bank panic. The family then moved to Cleveland, where Mr. Spelman’s fortunes revived, but a dark edge of economic uncertainty always shadowed the family. So while the Spelmans occupied a higher social rung than young Rockefeller, they were haunted by the prospect of economic misfortune and inclined to look favorably upon an up-and-coming suitor with a proper Christian pedigree. Cettie needed to find a husband who could safeguard her family’s security, so it is not surprising that she championed John’s career and eagerly coached him to succeed from the start.

It is hard to picture a young woman more perfectly suited to John D. Rockefeller’s values than the sensible, cheerful Laura Celestia Spelman, who shared his devotion to duty and thrift. They ratified each other’s views about the fundamentals of life. Two months younger than John, Cettie was short and slender, with a round face, dark brown eyes, and a wealth of chestnut hair parted down the middle and smoothly pulled back from her forehead. Rockefeller would never have tolerated a noisy woman, and Cettie was soft in voice and manner. Like John, though, her mild surface belied an adamantine determination. She was “gentle and lovely, but resolute with indomitable will,” noted her sister Lucy, better known in the family as Lute.⁵⁶ “There was a persuasion in her touch as she laid her fingers ever so gently on your arm.”⁵⁷ Again like John, her geniality covered a hard core of sustained willpower. “She was full of mirth and cheer, yet . . . rather inclined to be grave and reserved,” Lute recalled.⁵⁸ A paragon of self-control, she never lost her temper and lacked the skittish frivolity of youth.

Early on, John and Laura must have spotted each other as kindred souls, especially when it came to religion. Cettie so unswervingly performed her duties at church and Sunday school that even her loving sister tactfully suggested that she went to extremes. “She was a religieuse. God and church came first with her. She cared little for the ‘social life,’ so called; and together she and her husband deepened and expanded their religion to cover and include every phase of life.”⁵⁹ Even in photos, one notes a Quakerish simplicity to her appearance, her black dress and lace collar evoking her Puritan ancestors. Despite her evangelical beliefs, she never imposed her views on others and preferred to instruct by example. As one high-school classmate remembered, “She exerted a strong influence upon the rest of us. For one thing she didn’t believe in dancing and theatregoing, because she did not think it was proper for church people to engage in pursuits that she considered worldly.”⁶⁰ For all that, Laura was no shallow philistine and had a wide range of interests in art, culture, and society. She played the piano for three hours daily and often accompanied John in duets, but she also had a taste for literature and poetry and could be an entertaining conversationalist.

An assiduous student, she was the valedictorian of her high-school class and her commencement speech, “I Can Paddle My Own Canoe,” was a ringing manifesto of female emancipation. (She graduated seven years after the first historic attempt by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott to organize women in Seneca Falls, New York.) From this speech, we can infer something of her adolescent values. “We may not tamely submit, and suffer ourselves to be led by any person or party, but have a mind of our own, and having once formed a decision ever abide by it.”⁶¹ This credo augured well for a woman destined to be embroiled in her future husband’s controversial career. In an outspoken statement of feminist belief, she chided men for depriving women of culture then hypocritically blaming them for their dependency. “But give woman culture—let her thread the many paths of science—allow mathematics and exact thought on all subjects to exert their influence on her mind and conventions need not trouble about her ‘proper sphere.’ ”⁶²

In 1856, Harvey and Lucy Spelman left Cleveland for Burlington, Iowa; the move evidently reflected renewed business hardships for Mr. Spelman, and they stayed away from Cleveland for three years. To alleviate the financial stress, Cettie and Lute stayed behind and jointly applied for teaching posts in the Cleveland public schools. Two years later, as the economic pinch eased, the two sisters spent a year at the Oread Collegiate Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. Established in 1849, this junior college was among the first institutions of higher learning open to women. Founded by abolitionist Eli Thayer, Oread stressed Christianity and the reading of the classics. Drawings show a picturesque, medieval-looking building on a hill, festooned with turrets, towers, and crenellations and surrounded by a stone wall. The cultural atmosphere, with its impassioned support for women’s rights and black welfare, must have been highly congenial to the sisters. Among other speakers, they heard inspirational lectures given by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wendell Phillips, Henry Ward Beecher, and John Brown. A devotee of the Protestant work ethic, Cettie even approved of the school’s daily regimen, which was minutely budgeted from wake-up at 5:30 A.M. until the lights went out at 9:45 P.M. “I do not call the rules strict but am pleased with all of them,” she informed her former music teacher.⁶³ At Oread, she dropped an occasional friendly note to Rockefeller, though the relationship was at this point less one of romance than of close camaraderie.

Over the years, Laura’s growing commitment to religion smothered her literary bent, but at Oread she was a veritable bluestocking, writing poetry, running the literary society, and editing the campus literary magazine. In a revealing article in the Oread Euphemia, she wrote about three aristocracies then ruling America—an aristocracy of intellect in New England, wealth in the mid-Atlantic states, and blood in the South. In view of later events, her descriptions of Boston’s intellectual preeminence or southern social decadence are less noteworthy than the vitriol she poured on the New York nouveaux riches. “In this specified portion of our glorious republic, the ‘parvenu’ lady, with a brain all guiltless of ever having developed an idea, attires her self in habiliments, whose cast(but not style) would admit of their being worn in the presence of royalty.” After lambasting the dominion of the “almighty dollar” in the mid-Atlantic aristocracy, she concluded mordantly, “The gigantic intellect of Boston must bow to Wall St. Stocks and Bonds.”⁶⁴ Such midwestern scorn for Wall Street’s monied upstarts was certainly consonant with Rockefeller’s beliefs. Little did the two know they would one day become synonymous with the “almighty dollar” and reside in the heart of Manhattan’s swankest, most sinful precincts.

In the spring of 1859, the Spelman sisters returned to Cleveland and began to take French, Latin, piano, and voice lessons at the Cleveland Institute. That autumn, Cettie and Lute, who always moved in tandem, began to teach in the public schools, Cettie serving as a teacher and principal’s assistant while Lute taught boys in the same building. Later on, Laura left no doubt of her family’s straitened circumstances at the time. “I had to do [work], which was a good thing,” she later told her son, “and I loved to do it, which was another good thing.”⁶⁵ Despite a well-merited reputation as a disciplinarian, she was a popular teacher, and on her last day on the job “all the girls in her class remained after dismissal to say good-bye to her and to cry over losing her,” said one pupil. “My! how they cried.”⁶⁶

In the early 1860s, Laura was sufficiently pleased with work that she felt in no special rush to get married. All the while, John Rockefeller, with the dogged patience that would defeat scores of embattled competitors, waited determinedly in the wings. In April 1860, Laura wrote her former music teacher, “I seem to have no anxiety about leading a life of single-blessedness,” but she mentioned Rockefeller and said that “a gentleman told me not long ago, that he was in no particular rush to have me get married, but he hoped that in the multitude of my thoughts I would not forget the subject.” ⁶⁷ She must have been torn when contemplating a match with Rockefeller, for teachers had to remain single, and marriage would end her career.

In 1862, Rockefeller, buoyed by his rising wealth in the produce business, began to woo Cettie in earnest, often appearing at her school at day’s end to take her home. The Spelmans then lived in a lovely area of apple groves and greenery called The Heights, and on weekends John and brother William often rode out there under the guise of watching Civil War recruits drill nearby. After the Spelmans moved to a new home in downtown Cleveland, John, often wearing boots spattered with oil from his new refinery, stopped by and took Cettie out for drives in his buckboard, and she heard with delight the details of his business. “Her judgment was always better than mine,” Rockefeller said. “She was a woman of great sagacity. Without her keen advice, I would be a poor man.”⁶⁸ There was loving exaggeration here, but in the early days of their marriage, he did bring home the books and review them with her.

Despite her constant reluctance, Rockefeller pursued her with quiet persistence; in love as in business, he had a longer time frame, a more settled will, than other people. By early 1864, with the first profits rolling in from refining, he had become a substantial person in Cleveland, cutting an impressive figure in his frock coat, silk hat, and striped trousers. He was a handsome young man, with a fine, straight nose, rather humorless mouth, and vaguely mournful visage. His mustache flowed into fluffy side-whiskers, but his hair was already receding at the temples. His eyes were steady and lucid, as if confidently scanning the horizon for business opportunities.

Later on, Rockefeller was peculiarly reluctant to divulge to his children details of his courtship, referring to the delicacy of the situation. One gathers that another man, more practiced in the arts of love, was after Laura and that by March 1864 John feared his rival might best him. The time had come to force the situation. As one person who heard the story secondhand remembered, “John D. wanted to marry her, so he went to her one day and proposed in a business-like way, just like he would make a business proposition. She accepted him in the same business-like way.” ⁶⁹ One imagines the two of them smiling shyly with relief. Shortly afterward, the ascetic Rockefeller did something wholly out of character, spending a shocking $118 for a diamond engagement ring. The splurge, one suspects, had a point: He wished to telegraph to the Spelmans that he was no longer a callow country boy but a rising young businessman who could support them in a style to which they were accustomed.

After a discreet, six-month engagement, on September 8, 1864, hard on the heels of Sherman’s march into Atlanta, John D. Rockefeller, twenty-five, married Laura Celestia Spelman, twenty-four, in the living room of the Spelman home on Huron Street. It was a small, private affair attended only by the two families. Like many things in Rockefeller’s life, it was carried out in secrecy, and the Cleveland papers printed no notice of it—very odd given the Spelmans’ prominence. It is unlikely that Big Bill attended, and John might have worried that his absence would spark curiosity about him. Having established his financial wherewithal, Rockefeller now reverted to type and spent just $15.75 on the wedding ring, which was duly recorded in Ledger B under the rubric “Sundry Expenses.”⁷⁰ In a denominational compromise, the pastors from Laura’s Plymouth Congregational Church and John’s Erie Street Baptist Mission Church jointly officiated, though Laura henceforth switched her allegiance to the Baptists.

Refusing to deviate from routine, John worked the morning of his wedding day, visiting both his downtown office and the cooperage at the refinery. He had arranged a special luncheon for twenty-six employees, without disclosing at first the reason for the celebration. When the jovial bridegroom left for the wedding, he told the foreman facetiously, “Treat them well, but see that they work.”⁷¹ With the Swiss precision that governed his life, Rockefeller allotted exactly one month—September 8 to October 8, 1864—for a honeymoon that traced a conventional itinerary. The newlyweds started off at Niagara Falls, followed by a stay at the Saint Lawrence Hall Hotel in Montreal and the Summit House in Mount Washington, New Hampshire. On the way home, they stopped off at Oread Collegiate Institute and met two new teachers, Sophia B. Packard and Harriet E. Giles, who would play important roles in their future.

Prior to his honeymoon, Rockefeller’s travels had been limited, and the provincial young man in the tall silk hat exhibited voracious curiosity throughout the trip. While touring Niagara Falls, he peppered the guide with so many questions that the man grew distracted, ran the buggy into a ditch, and smashed a wheel. At another point, they met an old man in the roadway whom John so sedulously drained of local lore that the latter finally pleaded with weary resignation, “For God’s sake if you will go with me over to that barn yonder, I will start and tell you everything I ever knew.”⁷²This was the same monotonously inquisitive young man who was known as “the Sponge” in the Oil Regions.

For the first six months of their marriage, John and Laura lived with Eliza at 33 Cheshire Street; then they moved into a dignified, two-story brick house at 29 Cheshire Street. Surrounded by a white picket fence, the house had tall, graceful windows but was disfigured by an ugly portico. Even though Rockefeller now operated and partially owned the largest refinery in Cleveland, he and Laura lived frugally without house servants. Rockefeller always cherished the chaste simplicity of this early period and preserved their first set of dishes, which stirred him to wistful reflections in later years. Thus, by the end of the Civil War, John D. Rockefeller had established the foundations of his personal and professional life and was set to capitalize on the extraordinary opportunities beckoning him in postwar America. From this point forward, there would be no zigzags or squandered energy, only a single-minded focus on objectives that would make him both the wonder and terror of American business.

The rakish young Henry Morrison Flagler. (Courtesy of the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum)