DuPont Dynasty
Behind the Nylon Curtain
Gerard Colby
Two
BUILDING A COMPANY
1.
THE RISE OF PIERRE DUPONT
France’s King Louis XV was a serious man, some said the most serious in Europe.
He wore his crown heavily, reminding those around him “After me, the deluge.” Louis
knew about deluges. He had brought a deluge of graft, corruption, and mistresses into
his court. He also brought a deluge of debts and death to the people of France.
France in 1764 was trying to recover from Louis’s latest war with his economic
rival, England. He had gambled everything in that contest and almost lost his entire
empire. He lost also the respect of his people. Seven long years of war had ravaged the
countryside and depleted France’s reserve of gold and human life. Starvation and
disease replaced Louis as ruler in the cities, the common man falling as common victim.
When Louis had finally called a truce the year before, sighs of relief were heard
throughout the nation as the French people paused to take stock of their losses and begin
the task of rebuilding the economic strength and competition that had caused the war in
the first place. The increasing needs of a growing population and economy brought their
accompanying increase in demands, and throughout most of France feudal life gave way
to the industrial revolution of capitalism, factories increasingly becoming the centers of
wealth’s accumulation. It was one of those great ages of change; the entire French
people stirred with expectation of the new, while feudal lords clung stubbornly to the
old, and everyone, king and peasant alike, seemed to suspect what was coming.
What came first was a challenge of ideas from the new middle class of industrialists,
the bourgeoisie. As in all social revolutions, the bourgeoisie’s unconscious challenge
for authority by their accumulation of wealth eventually took the more conscious form of
deliberate agitation of ideas favoring their economic interests. It was this war of ideas
that was prelude to the inevitable armed war of revolution.
In the warm month of April of that year Jacques Turgot, a baron turned financier and
leader of France’s capitalists, came across a newly published economic essay on
grains, “Reflections on the Wealth of the State.” It was written in a dry, technical style,
despite its more lively dedication to its financial benefactor, Madame de Pompadour,
the King’s former mistress. Yet it was a skillful attempt to master the new ideas of
landed capitalism, an ambitious flaunting of the theories of the Physiocrats. Turgot was
impressed. He decided to contact its young author, Pierre Samuel Dupont.
Pierre was only 25 at the time, although his round, pudgy face made him look older. A
collar of fat stretched from ear to ear beneath his cleft chin, matching the contours of his wide nose. His small brown eyes were weak, like his lips, lending an unimpressive
appearance. He was and looked the son of a small-town watchmaker, Sam Dupont, and
Anne Montchanin, member of an impoverished noble family.
Pierre’s mother had never quite been able to accept her family’s diminished status,
and she openly hoped her son would be the family’s messiah. She pushed Pierre to
acquire an education and had her cousin Jancourt introduce him into the circle of
Physiocrats. Pierre soon caught some of his mother’s fire. As he became more
impressed with the lavish wealth and extravagances of Versailles’s class of powdered
men and aloof ladies, Pierre found less that was praiseworthy in the wretched lives of
average Parisians. Inspired by the increasing power of the bourgeoisie he had met, he
learned all he could of their Physiocrat theories. He abandoned the plays he had been
writing and instead began to compose pamphlets on these more fashionable, rewarding
topics. Eventually one of his pamphlets found its way to Turgot.
Turgot took Pierre under his wing and within a year named him editor of the
monarch’s new Journal of Agriculture, Commerce, and Finance. At 26, Pierre had his
first regular salary, and celebrated by marrying his childhood sweetheart, Marie Le
Dee. On October 1, 1767, Marie gave birth to their first child, Victor Marie. Three
years later Pierre asked his benefactor, Turgot, to act as godfather to his next child.
“Yes, certainly, my dear Dupont,” replied Turgot. “If it is a boy, will you not call him
Eleuthère Irénée in honor of liberty and peace?”
1
On June 24, 1771, Eleuthère Irénée, founder of the Du Pont empire, was born.
Throughout the next decade and a half, Pierre Dupont loyally served the corrupt
French throne, holding various offices, including Inspector General of Commerce under
Louis XVI, who succeeded his grandfather in 1774. With Vergennes, his new benefactor,
Dupont was involved in the preliminary negotiations that led to the peace treaty of 1783
between France’s ally, the new United States, and her archenemy, Britain. In return for
this latter service, King Louis rewarded Pierre in December 1783 with nobility. The
coat of arms Pierre selected was characteristically modest: ostrich plumes, a lion, an
eagle, and the motto “Rectitudine Sto” (“By Uprightness I Stand”).
After the death of his wife in September 1784, Pierre assumed the responsibility of
grooming his sons at his Bois-des-Fosses estate at Nemours.
Victor didn’t enjoy grooming. He was more inclined to be a dilettante. A handsome,
brown-haired giant, Victor failed at every job ever given him. He failed as a junior
secretary in Pierre’s own Department of Commerce. As an investigator, he was
instructed to travel throughout the provinces and send back commercial reports; the
reports turned out to be excellent descriptions of fetes and dinner parties. Victor also
gave outspoken descriptions of individuals—which were sometimes not only
embarrassing, but politically dangerous for his family. Something had to be done with him. Perhaps a long voyage overseas. In 1787 Pierre had Victor appointed secretary to
the first French minister to the new United States, Comte de Moustier. There was only
one problem. The government refused to pay Victor a salary.
Pierre’s younger son, Irénée, was just the opposite of Victor. Irénée was smaller in
size. Although he had his father’s cleft chin and weak lips, his dark eyes were much
stronger in appearance, peering coldly from behind a long-sharp nose. Serious about
practical matters, especially serious about himself, Irénée was extremely restrained in
his emotions. At the young age of 16, he cut an aloof figure worthy of any self-respecting
middle-aged nobleman. It may seem a paradox that one could later be so successful in
the business world as Irénée and yet always have such difficulty befriending anyone
who was not family. Once, in a brief glimmer of self-reflection, Irénée himself damned
his unnatural “coldness” toward people. Yet it may have been that very fearful, lamed
personality that drove this younger son of Père Dupont to such ruthless pinnacles of
success.
Irénée showed little interest in matters of human relations; his absorption in science
prompted Pierre to send him to study under an old friend, Lavoisier, chemist and head of
the French monarch’s gunpowder mills. At Essonne, Eleuthère Irénée, named for “peace
and liberty,” was trained in the instruments of war for the powder-making role he would
later play on the American stage of history.
2. 2
REFUGEES FROM REVOLUTION
In 1788, popular rebellion finally erupted, sharpened by widespread hunger, the
King’s heavy taxes, and his use of foreign mercenaries to protect his wealthy court. To
consider the emergency, Louis convened the Estates-General of clergy, lords, and
commoners, and Pierre had himself elected a member of the supposedly non-nobility
Third Estate, representing Nemours, where his country estate was located. The
following year the bourgeoisie led the Third Estate in a seizure of power, and not to
resist the irresistible, Pierre joined the tide, even serving at different times as secretary
and president of the new Constituent Assembly.
As the nation moved further to the political left, however, Pierre remained stubbornly
on the right. With Lafayette, then commander of the National Guard, Pierre founded the
short-lived Societé de 1789, an organization made up of the most conservative wing of
the bourgeoisie which favored a constitutional monarchy. Shorn of his 30,000-franc
annual salary and allowances by the Jacobin's, the radical party of the petite bourgeoisie
(shopkeepers, etc.), Pierre began attacking the Jacobin's in the Constituent Assembly
with long conservative orations, always bowing in great delight whenever someone in
the galleries managed to clap in agreement. During one particularly loud and
enthusiastic speech, the Guard had to save Pierre from his outraged colleagues, who wanted to throw him into the Seine. Undaunted, Pierre, with his son Irénée, continued to
unleash reactionary broadsides from his newly acquired publishing house in Paris.
Increasingly isolated, Pierre only aggravated the situation when he and Irénée led their
sixty-man private guard to defend the King’s palace on August 10, 1792, from a Jacobin assault that was demanding an end to monarchy. The Dupont's, in fact, were the only
Frenchmen still willing to physically defend the rulers of France.
After that episode, from which he and Irénée only narrowly escaped their own end,
Pierre was driven into hiding while his publishing house was wrecked by crowds of
angry Parisians. Both Irénée and Victor, who had returned from America, tried to
assume republican pretensions. Irénée, now married to Sophie Dalmas, granddaughter
of a royalist general, worked at Lavoisier’s Essonne managing the saltpeter factory for
the new republican government and published a newspaper, Le Republican, to sing his
new revolutionary tune. Victor became a gendarme to avoid the draft, even participating
in raids on royalists. Only his marriage in 1794 to a royalist, blue-eyed Josephine de
Pelleport, brought enough pangs of conscience to end this career and renew suspicions
as to his political leaning.
Finally, just a year and a half after King Louis’s head fell to the guillotine, and two
months after his friend Lavoisier suffered a similar fate, Pierre was arrested on July 13,
1794. Dupont would undoubtedly have also met the guillotine had not the bourgeoisie,
now satisfied that their revolution was complete and irreversible, asserted control over
the revolution from the petits-bourgeois radicals that month. Robespierre, leader of the
Jacobin's, was wounded by an assassination attempt and on July 29, 1794, was executed
along with twenty-one of his lieutenants. On August 25 Pierre DuPont was allowed to
return to his estate a free man.
With the overthrow of the radicals, more fortunate times returned to the DuPont's.
Victor was reappointed to government, while Pierre, who remarried, returned to Paris
as a member of the new Council of Ancients, the lawmaking body of the French
Directory. It wasn’t long, however, before Pierre’s prejudice against “that Corsican,”
Napoleon Bonaparte, led him back into trouble.
“Don’t you know what Corsicans are?” he wrote Reuball, a high government official,
opposing Napoleon’s appointment as commander-in-chief of French forces in Italy. “These people should always be kept subordinates, even when they are capable and
honest.… Are there no Frenchmen left?”
2 Despite Pierre’s attacks, Napoleon’s military
victories won him constant promotions.
Pierre launched a new paper, L’Historien, as the organ for revived royalism and
attacks on the five Directors, but when he was elected president of the Council of
Ancients, the bourgeoisie struck, backing Napoleon’s coup. Both Pierre and Irénée soon
found themselves again in prison. Through a friend who was a member of the commission that prepared lists for deportation, Pierre luckily regained their freedom
under a plea of senility. But he had to pledge to leave France. It took little persuasion.
By 1799 Pierre had secured financial commitments to the tune of millions of francs to
back his investment plans for a colony, “Pontiania,” in America. To embellish his image
to prospective investors, he also separated and capitalized the two syllables of his
name, Du and Pont. Thus was born the “Du Ponts.”
To prepare the way, Pierre sent to America his new royalist wife, Francoise Robin
Poivre, along with her son-in-law Bureaux de Pusy and her granddaughter Sara de Pusy.
Madame DuPont would buy a large house, while Bureaux de Pusy, a former army
engineer, would see about prospects for land speculation.
On October 2, 1799, with the wrath of the revolution spurring them on, the thirteen
remaining DuPont's, including Pierre, Irénée and his family, and Victor and his family,
boarded an American ship, the American Eagle, bade France adieu, and set sail for
America under the DuPont banner. Right from the beginning of their American
adventure, the DuPont's made sure that Americans understood their feeling about their
wealth. Wary of the American crew, through the entire three month journey they guarded
their many crates of clothes and furniture, even their grand pianos, with drawn swords.
2.3
THE BIRTH OF DUPONT
In the gray wintry eve of January 1, 1800, a Newport, Rhode Island, family just
leaving their home for the New Year’s church service noted a strange shadow moving in
the nearby sea. There, a lone dark ship was slowly entering the harbor, its tall sails torn
and shredded, its sides bristled with barnacles, its deck bruised and battered by the high
seas. None of that small group hurrying off to their devotion could have suspected that
that ship carried a family destined by historical forces to affect their lives and those of
their posterity; for into the harbor of Newport that night flew the banner of DuPont de
Nemours.
The somber shore, with its barren docks devoid of welcomers, did not quash Pierre DuPont’s enthusiasm for his first step on American soil. Unlike his grandchildren, DuPont
did not expect 21-gun salutes when their ship finally pulled into an American port. In
fact, he was greatly relieved that they had even reached land. For ninety-three days the
American Eagle had wandered about the ocean like some lost child of the sea, more
than half that time flying the flag of distress. Lacking adequate provisions, the noble DuPont's had been reduced to consuming a soup of boiled rats that they had trapped in an
old tub, and twice they had had to hail passing English ships for food and water. The DuPont's were literally at sword’s end with their crew when land was sighted. After
ninety-three days, almost a month longer than it took Columbus to cross the Atlantic
three centuries before, the DuPont journey with the wandering American Eagle was finally over.
Landing amid the harsh New England winter, Pierre DuPont led his shivering clan to
the first lit house they saw. The elder DuPont rapped heavily on its door, but failed to
summon any answer. Instead, through the windows teased a full dinner neatly laid out on
a table awaiting the return of the family that had gone to their worship, as was the
custom of churchgoers of that time. While the American family unsuspectingly folded
their fingers in humble worship of their God of Wrath, the DuPont family broke into
their home and ate their entire meal.
3 A new age arrived on that first day of the
nineteenth century. The DuPont's had entered American history—in their own peculiar
way.
Unlike most immigrants to America, the DuPont's were no paupers. They arrived with
large wooden crates bulging with furniture, clothes, books, and some 241,000 francs.
Moreover, a million more francs were committed to be on the way. Unlike the early
immigrants, who had to build their own homes or find some temporary refuge, the
thirteen DuPont arrivals had waiting for them a large, comfortable house at Bergens
Point, New Jersey; Pierre named it Goodstay.
Soon after his arrival, Pierre journeyed to the bustling little city of New York, setting
up expensive offices at 61 Pearl Street and then at 91 Liberty Street. From his office,
Pierre released a prospectus in which the backgrounds of himself, Victor, and son-in law
Bureaux de Pusy were portrayed in all their glory. Shy Irénée, on the other hand,
was rendered only one meager sentence: “E. I. du Pont* has had much experience of
business methods in France in agriculture, in manufactures, and the useful arts.”
4 Small
promise for the man who would soon found the world’s greatest gunpowder company!
Pierre promptly celebrated his newfound liberty by purchasing slaves for his wife.
On June 21, 1800, for 70 pounds Paul Mersereau sold to Mrs. DuPont de Nemours, as
described in the contract, “One negro woman being a slave (called Jeen) and a young
female child (called Lydia)”
5
for fourteen years of slavery, after which time freedom
must be granted. Only five years later, Pierre would suddenly understand the yearn for
freedom. “I need to be free,” he would write to Jefferson.
6 Even then, however, Jeen
and her children remained slaves in the House of Du Pont.
At Goodstay, Pierre DuPont elaborated to his sons and daughters on his plans for his
private empire, “Pontiania,” and the family bustled with excitement. Pierre proposed
purchasing American lands and reselling them to small farmers at inflated prices.
7
However, an old friend from his diplomatic days in Paris, Thomas Jefferson, now Vice President,
answered one of Pierre’s letters by cautioning about land speculators who
had already infiltrated western lands and driven up prices. Apparently, Jefferson’s
warning flags guided the DuPont's from the rocks of land speculation, but Pierre only
came up with other fantastic schemes, including smuggling gold into Spain. Finally, after months of failure and desertions in the family ranks, Victor came to the rescue,
proposing that Pierre dissolve his New York firm and let Victor establish his own
company with loans from France. “On the condition that I am in absolute control of it,”
he said in a burst of smugness, “I will assume entire responsibility for the
consequences.”
8
Not overly impressed with the business aptitude of either his father or his brother, Irénée began to speculate on other ways to maintain his family’s high standard of living. In light of his past training under Lavoisier, one alternative stood out—gunpowder.
American powder plants in those days were few in number and poor in quality, and it took only one visit to the largest American powder plant, at Frankford, Pennsylvania, to convince Irénée of his true vocation. Americans simply did not know how to make gunpowder, and as Adam Smith would have said in that age of free enterprise, where there is a demand there will be a supply. Irénée determined he was going to be the supplier.
In February 1801 Irénée and Victor arrived at the French port of Le Havre full of expectation and a passion for the coin of their homeland. By June, while Victor was drowning his own mission in a sea of parties, Irénée was already returning home laden with favors. Napoleon’s astute foreign minister, Talleyrand, had reasoned that giving aid to E. I. du Pont would destroy forever England’s monopoly over the American powder market. He was right. Besides machinery at cost, Talleyrand offered mechanical designs by government draftsmen and the newest secret improvements in making powder, including speedier methods of refining saltpeter, an essential ingredient. The French regime even drew up the original legal papers for Irénée’s company on April 21, 1801, assigning “citizen” Irénée a salary of $1,800 a year as director, and assigning twelve of eighteen $2,000 shares to Père Du Pont’s firm in Paris. Thus was achieved the capital birth of Du Pont.
After Irénée’s return to America, his attempt to buy the Frankford Mills met with a stone wall of refusal. Then, upon his father’s advice, he tried to find a suitable site for his gunpowder mills somewhere in the hills surrounding Federal City (later, Washington, D.C.), his biggest prospective customer. But that too failed. After traveling by horseback for weeks, looking for a place that would meet his needs, Irénée was openly contemptuous of America and its people. “The country, the people, the locations are all worthless,” 9 he wrote his father in disgust. Then he rode into Wilmington, Delaware, and into history.
Here flowed the Brandywine Creek, actually a swift river that could easily power the wheels of a powder mill. Here Irénée found Frenchmen, men who shared his culture, his language, and even his political conservatism, being refugees from the successful slave revolt of Santo Domingo. Here was a community tailored to his needs, a community of men who would gladly work for him at lower wages than most Americans. At the nearby up-for-sale Broome farm there was even an unused cotton mill ready for conversion to powder-making and a hillside of timber from which to burn charcoal. And here also was personal friendship, Alexandre Bauduy, a Santo Domingo refugee who had long been a friend of Victor DuPont.
But above all, here was money, the money of Peter Bauduy, Alexandre’s brother, offered as financial support if Irénée would agree to settle on the Brandywine. It was an enticement Irénée could not resist. On April 27, 1802, Irénée and Bauduy bought the Broome farm, from which would spring the country’s largest powder plant within a decade.
But in 1802 Pierre Samuel DuPont could never have foreseen such a future for his name in America. After a series of family desertions, business failures, and the shock of finally being cut out of the family firm by his son Victor, Pierre DuPont was lost in melancholy. Prodded by his wife’s desire to return to her homeland, Pierre agreed to sail for France, but not before he left Victor with a $78,000 “loan” and signed over Jeen and her child Lydia for ten years of slavery 10 to Irénée. Irénée must have enjoyed the slavery of these hapless people for the full ten years, as there is no record of his ever having voluntarily set them free. In fact, in September of that year he acquired yet another slave: Jeen gave birth to a beautiful little girl.
In France Pierre resumed his business activities and even engaged in secret negotiations with Napoleon over the Louisiana Purchase on behalf of Thomas Jefferson. DuPont had known Jefferson for over twenty years, ever since Jefferson was minister to the royal court of Louis XVI. “You have never had but one Vice,” punned DuPont to Jefferson on the latter’s ascension to the presidency. “I compliment your country and both hemispheres that you have at last lost it.” 11 When, however, Pierre DuPont wrote Jefferson of his plan to return to France, the Sage of Monticello answered in a more serious vein, requesting Pierre to travel to Washington City for a special conference. As his date of departure was close at hand, Pierre declined. It was then that Jefferson wrote DuPont a long letter, asking him to undertake a strange mission in his behalf, one that would set the course of American—and DuPont—expansion right up to the present day. “… impress on the Government of France,” Jefferson asked, “the inevitable consequences of their taking Louisiana.” 12 The new president was determined that France should not occupy Louisiana, which she had just acquired from Spain.Jefferson’s whole political thesis on the future of his country centered around the belief that democracy and prosperity depended on the ability of free men to move onto free lands; the West, including Louisiana, was an integral part of this belief. As for the Indian peoples who happened to dwell on these “free lands,” he urged settlers “to press upon them.” 13 Along these lines, Jefferson drew up the Ordinance of 1784, opening the trans-Appalachian west to settlement, carving out ten relatively large territories that would immediately be entitled to self-government. Statehood would be theirs as soon as each territory was filled with a population equal to that of the smallest of the thirteen original states. And as that population grew, so also would the market for agricultural and industrial goods. In this way, Jefferson’s thesis helped to shape American industrial, and DuPont, history.
By 1790, a mere ten years before the Du Ponts’ arrival, a million people had settled in these valleys or to the west. 14 “Our success furnishes a new proof of the falsehood of Montesquieu’s doctrine that a republic can be preserved only in a small territory,” Jefferson proudly announced in 1801. “The reverse is the truth.” 15 “New frontiers,” he argued, were what were needed to prevent disputes between “factions,”* or classes, that Madison, his teacher in expansionist mercantilism, had warned about. “Extend the sphere,” Madison had explained in 1787, “and you take in the greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have common motive to invade the rights of other [wealthy] citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.” 16 By 1804 Jefferson was in full accord with Madison. “The larger our association, the less it will be shaken by local passions.” 17
Indeed, by 1801 the passions were there. A burgeoning population of small farmers and a growing export trade even from western lands like Tennessee and Mississippi were forcing Jefferson to seek again new “free lands” as a vent for social pressure between classes, as well as to find a market for investment and trade. Jefferson was aware that within five years of that date Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio would be shipping surpluses down the Mississippi, reemphasizing the importance of having the port of New Orleans open to American export trade.
This question of export markets was extremely important to Jefferson, so important that he was willing to risk war with France for New Orleans. As early as 1786 he had worked out an explanation of the social forces that caused Shays’ Rebellion that year, a popular uprising against the special privileges enjoyed by property holders. That populist rebellion in Massachusetts, crushed by troops, destroyed any illusion about a theoretical “voluntary association of government” and became the spur for the creation of a strong centralized government at the Constitutional Convention the following year. The cause of the Massachusetts rebellion, Jefferson explained, lay in the lack of enough export markets that would have enabled small farmers to sell their goods and pay their taxes and debts. “Open the Mediterranean,” 18 Jefferson then prescribed (and later did in his undeclared war against Tripoli and other North African city-states), and class tensions would be reduced with returning prosperity.
To Jefferson and to most Americans as the crisis deepened, the western frontier became a Utopia, an escape that allowed evasion of the task of building a truly harmonious society. But for the lower classes of free farmers and uneducated who could never hope to live like aristocrats such as Jefferson, the frontier replaced formal education; a kind of nonintellectual learning by survival and succeeding became an ingrained part of the American psychology. Edward Everett, Massachusetts’ delegate to the Constitutional Convention, summed it up as early as 1787 when he remarked that expansion “is the principle of our institutions,” 19 and it was the driving force behind Jefferson’s letter to DuPont de Nemours in 1802.
“This measure will cost France, and perhaps not very long hence, a war which will annihilate her on the ocean,” 20 wrote Jefferson to DuPont, and he asked his French friend also to deliver a letter to Robert Livingston. To Livingston, Jefferson was more blunt. “The day that France takes New Orleans we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.” 21
Pierre was shocked. He knew that if he presented Jefferson’s ideas to Napoleon as they were written, the French emperor would consider them an open challenge and declare war. He immediately wrote back to Jefferson proposing another alternative. Why not promise to help France regain Canada? Surely a French neighbor to the south is better than a British neighbor to the north, but if Louisiana must be yours, why not offer Canada in exchange? Why not say “Give us Louisiana and at the first opportunity we shall restore Canada to you.” 22 Old Pierre DuPont harbored a good memory, recalling one of the French designs behind his government’s alliance with the American colonies during their revolution: keep Canada open for possible repossession by France in the future. Now that day when France could regain her Quebec may have come, a big enough feather for any returning emigre to wear in his cap when looking for a government position. Of course, Pierre was little concerned with the fact that his suggestion meant war between Britain and the United States over Canada.
Jefferson wouldn’t stand for it. As far as his government was concerned, France had given up all rights in America with the Treaty of Ghent almost twenty years before. Desperately searching for other alternatives, Pierre finally had a brainstorm: why not offer to buy Louisiana? Jefferson again refused. But war, Pierre retorted, suddenly carrying the palm of peace, “will cost your commerce, agriculture, and nation ten times as much.” 23 Jefferson stubbornly disagreed and fired off a letter to Livingston warning him about DuPont’s misconceptions.
There was little doubt that Pierre DuPont was full of misconceptions as he left America. In fact, his mind was completely confused as he boarded the ship, Virginia Packett, even leaving behind important notes which he had planned to use to draw up a commercial report to his stockholders. This loss increased his apprehension about explaining his firm’s collapse and his rather large gift to Victor, but he hoped to allay enough suspicions to allow him to keep his Paris firm open and active. Always resourceful, even in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, Pierre compensated by spending his idle hours writing an abstract essay called “Instinct.”
It is unclear how much effect Pierre had on the final settlement of the Louisiana crisis. The President was still bellowing threats of war when he asked an excited Congress on January 18, 1803, to allocate funds for the Lewis and Clark expedition “to provide an extension of territory which the rapid increase of our number will call for.” 24 Jefferson was proposing expansion across the Mississippi with or without a peaceful settlement with France. But the President was at least frank about his real goal: Pacific trade. “The interests of commerce place the principal object within the constitutional powers and care of Congress,” he said, “and that it should advance the geographic knowledge of our own continent cannot but be an additional gratification.” 25
Despite Livingston’s pessimistic but accurate reports of Napoleon’s unwillingness to negotiate, Pierre’s more optimistic reports probably did help to stay any definite move toward war, Jefferson obviously having decided to avoid a conflict if at all possible. On January 11 he ordered James Monroe to France, supposedly to assist Livingston, but actually to make an offer of $2 million to Napoleon—and he secretly authorized more if necessary, without any confirmation from Congress. 26 If France wanted war, then Monroe and Livingston were to cross the channel and invite Britain into an alliance with the United States.
Then the impossible happened. On April 10, 1803, Napoleon called in his ministers
and ordered them to sell all of Louisiana for 60 million francs. Although Pierre did not
know it, Napoleon actually had no alternative. Militarily occupying Louisiana required
the island of Santo Domingo as a supply base. In 1802 Napoleon’s brother-in-law,
General Leclerc, did successfully invade the island, crush the Black revolutionary
government that had been established there, and, through betrayal at a peace conference,
capture its heroic leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture. But the pattern of deception soon loses
its character of surprise, and the combined onslaught of yellow fever and the valiant
guerrilla war carried on by L’Ouverture’s followers brought ultimate defeat to the
French invaders. Leclerc and 50,000 other Frenchmen were buried that year in the
warm soil of San Domingo, and with them died also Napoleon’s plans for occupying
Louisiana and reestablishing a French empire on the North American continent. By the
time another expedition could be gathered, rumblings of approaching war with Britain forced the emperor to retain his troops in Europe. Now, not only would he be unable to
occupy Louisiana, but his treasury’s need for funds for the coming conflict required him
to sell Louisiana entirely. On May 8, 1803, Louisiana was sold to the United States for
60 million francs, or approximately $15 million. One week later, Britain declared war
on France.
On the other side of the ocean the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United States, carrying Jefferson’s stars and stripes from the mouth of the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains. At the year’s end, bursting with pride and relief, Jefferson wrote DuPont of his gratitude. “I congratulate you on having lived to give those aids in a transaction replete with blessings to unborn millions of men, and which will mark the face of a portion of the globe so extensive as that which now composes the United States of America.” 27
Though the blessings to the unborn may be debatable, the Louisiana Purchase was a very real blessing to Pierre’s second son, Irénée. In terms of long-range benefits, the Louisiana Purchase widened western markets for DuPont explosives for generations to come. But there was an immediate boon as well. The spring of 1803 brought Irénée news of his father’s role in the Louisiana Purchase, and on July 20 he wrote to Jefferson requesting special government patronage. Shortly thereafter, the United States government became Irénée’s first customer, awarding him a contract for refining government-owned saltpeter.
By then, Irénée had moved his family to the Brandywine and was completing construction of his gunpowder mills. Sophie moved happily into her new home, called Eleutherian Mills. Five bays wide and two rooms deep, with a large central hall, the two-story stone mansion was an imposing sight perched gray and aloof on the green hillside. Nearby stood Irénée’s small stone office, and below, the Brandywine with three new mills, two new buildings, a new race for the mills, a drying place for the gunpowder, a magazine for storing it, and quarters for the workers.
Most of these first workers were men from the French community along the Brandywine. Irénée also used indentured servants, sometimes sent over from France by Pierre DuPont. 28 These men worked for nothing but their keep until their passage to America was paid off, and they were often obliged to remain in Irénée’s employ as an original condition for their passage.
Thus, cheap labor and government patronage joined an ever-expanding market as keystones in the construction of a profitable DuPont Company in its earliest days, keystones which DuPont never abandoned but has used to build its empire right up to the present day.
From his hilltop office overlooking the Brandywine, Irénée now watched his mills churn out hundreds of pounds of powder daily, powder that found a ready market, thanks to war. Some 22,000 pounds of DuPont powder were used by U.S. warships in the undeclared war against Tripoli and the other North African city-states. Sales jumped threefold in the first year, from $10,000 in 1804 to $33,000 in 1805. On July 4, 1805, Jefferson’s Secretary of War, Colonel Henry Dearborn, announced that Irénée’s company would do all the government’s powder work. Napoleon’s puppet government in Spain also ordered 40,000 pounds, much of which was used to crush rebellions by the oppressed Spanish population. But to Irénée DuPont there were no victors, no losers, no oppressors or oppressed, and above all, no causes—just rows of wooden casks filled with black powder, and a mounting family treasure.
The financial and labor source for both ventures was, of course, the powder company. Describing this, the acrid letters of Irénée’s partner, Peter Bauduy, complaining of Irénée’s business methods, were brewing a tempest of trouble across the ocean. In fact, by now the European stockholders were in an uproar over Irénée’s personal appropriations and the expenses for Victor while their own profit-sharing had been suspended by him.
To calm the storm, Irénée was forced to release DuPont Company’s first statement in 1810, showing a profit over six years of over $43,000 on some $243,000 in sales—a return of almost 20 percent! The statement fulfilled its purpose, reducing shouts to grumbles while the mills continued to grind out their profits: in 1810, $30,000; in 1811, $45,000, more in one year than was made in the entire first six years of business. That year was a turning point not only for DuPont Company, but also for the country as a whole: E. I. DuPont de Nemours & Co. was now the largest producer of gunpowder in the United States.
Such a monumental feat would probably have quieted the occasional clamor from Europe had not Pierre DuPont been stirring his own cauldron of mischief. When his Paris firm collapsed in the French panic of 1811, Pierre surrendered to his creditors his firm’s twelve $2,000 shares in Irénée’s powder company. These creditors, in turn, now began pressing claims for immediate payment. Irénée for the most part ignored these claims through the years, even when the desperate widow of his dead stepbrother,Bureaux de Pusy, came to America to see about her husband’s investment. Arriving in October of 1813, by August 1, 1814, she still had no stock report from Irénée, despite his previous assurances.
“You assured me so positively last June,” she wrote, “that the accounts of the Powder Company were almost finished.… I believed you and waited all that month, but for the twentieth time you have failed me.… Do you want to buy my shares in your establishment?” she asked desperately. “I enclose here a last offer to sell them to you at a price that seems fair to us both; but in God’s name answer.…” 29
Irénée did. He said no … politely, of course.
Only DuPont had the capacity to fill the huge powder needs of the government, and the government paid well for the delivery. Although Washington supplied its own saltpeter, DuPont still charged the highest 30 price up to that time for powder: 58 cents per pound. In the first year of war alone, DuPont showed gross sales of $148,597.62, the crucial margin of success for the young company. DuPont powder was soon carried by coastal schooners and powder wagons as far north as Boston, as far south as Charleston, and as far west as Pittsburgh. Even John Jacob Astor’s trappers and hunters in the West consumed 25,000 pounds of powder every year.
The Brandywine suffered few losses during the war. Although given special exemption from military duty, DuPont workers, mostly Frenchmen, were formed into two companies of militia by the DuPont brothers. It was with these men that the DuPont family in the election of 1813 engaged in their first experiment in America in paramilitary means to gain their own political ends. Assembling both companies in full uniform on October 5, 1813, Irénée and Victor marched on the polls to forcibly register alien votes for Irénée’s pro-war party, the Democratic-Republicans. Crowds of angry Delaware voters, however, became incensed at such strong-arm tactics and chased the DuPont companies back to the Brandywine.
Charges were brought against the DuPont brothers and confirmed by an official investigation. 31 Although the brothers were never brought to trial, the citizens of the state were so enraged over the affair that the following year Delaware’s legislature was compelled to prohibit the raising of private militia by employers. Reluctantly, Irénée disarmed his men. It was not to be the last time the DuPont's would raise a private army, but it was Irénée’s last personal spat with the law.
In fact, both DuPont's became exemplary American citizens after the war.
In 1815 Victor DuPont was elected to Delaware’s House of Representatives from the Brandywine, already called “DuPont country,” and in 1820 he entered the state Senate. Here, in Dover, the state capital, Victor was at home, swaggering in the familiar world of perfumed ladies and formal balls. For three years he reveled in dancing and drinking, finding between games of whist even the infrequent debates over roads and bridges a welcome relief from the austere Irénée and his meticulous payment of notes.
Irénée was resourceful in more than pecuniary ways. In 1816 Sophie, at the age of 41, gave birth to their seventh child, Alexis Irénée. Now there were Alfred, Victorine, Evelina, Henry, Eleuthera, Sophie, and Alexis. With three sons, Irénée would indeed have no lack of heirs to carry on his life’s work. And Irénée had taken measures to insure that the powder company would be his and his alone.
The death of Victorine DuPont’s husband, Ferdinand Bauduy, two years earlier had dissolved the last ties to his partner, Peter Bauduy. “May this sorrow unite us,” Bauduy had written Irénée after his son’s death. “Be my friend, for I have just lost the best one I had.” 32 It was a futile request. Little more than a year passed before Bauduy was forced out of the firm.
Thus Bauduy missed the war profits of the previous August of 1814, when Irénée sold 1,840 barrels to the government. In November another 156,000 pounds of powder brought Irénée $70,000. From then to the peace in February 1815, when he forced out Bauduy, Irénée sold an additional 687 barrels, worth $13,740. With peace, on one hand came sales to the Spanish Captain-General of Cuba, and on the other, demands for payment again from Irénée’s European shareholders. When one of these backers, banker Jacques Bidermann, sent his son Antoine to America to check out his investment, Irénée’s lovely daughter, Evelina, so charmed the lad that he stayed, married her, and ended up in Peter Bauduy’s old job.
Helping Irénée in this last maneuver was none other than Pierre Du Pont. At first so enraged with Irénée’s ignoring of his responsibilities to his European shareholders that he called him “unnatural,” Pierre quickly buried the family hatchet in 1815 when Napoleon escaped Elba and marched on Paris. Pierre, it seems, as secretary of the new provisional government, had earlier signed Napoleon’s abdication and ordered his banishment to Elba to make way for the monarch’s short-lived restoration. Napoleon reentered Paris just as Pierre was hurriedly sailing for America, abandoning his sick wife.
Two years later, after a long illness in America, this most colorful of the DuPont's entered a coma from which he never emerged. On August 7, 1817, with Irénée and Victor at his bedside, Pierre Samuel DuPont de Nemours ended his turbulent career with a simple, final sigh.
Pierre DuPont, the knighted nobleman of Louis XVI and the founder of America’s first industrial family, was buried beneath a simple slab of stone in the middle of a lonely place, called Sand Hole Woods, overlooking the Brandywine. Since that day, the DuPonts have buried their dead at Sand Hole Woods, transforming that simple graveyard into the world’s most exclusive cemetery of industrial royalty, the final resting place of the House of DuPont.
Six months after the death of his father, Irénée DuPont suffered another, and for the company, greater loss. On March 19, 1818, the old Upper Yards’ five mills exploded, one after another, leaving behind thirty-six dead. Only eight of the dead were identifiable, pieces of human flesh being found everywhere: in the flower gardens of Irénée’s mansion, on the lawn of Victor’s Louviers estate across the creek, even perched on the treetops like some ghastly fruit of death. Irénée’s brother-in-law, Charles Dalmas, and Irénée’s wife Sophie were both wounded, Sophie with an injury from which she would never recover.
Despite this setback, by 1824 the DuPont's of Delaware were entering a new bracket of wealth and power in America. Irénée was appointed a member of the board of directors of the Bank of the United States, which held a monopoly over U.S. currency and was a notorious center of fraud and corruption. He was to hold that post until 1829, two years before a congressional investigation revealed that institution’s use of bribes to win renewal of its charter.
Since 1814, Irénée had also been a director of the Farmers Bank of the State of Delaware and had even invested in toll roads and a ferry line across the Delaware River.
Victor also was enjoying himself. When he retired from the state Senate in 1824, he too became a director of the Farmers Bank. In 1826 Victor DuPont joined his brother on the board of directors of the Bank of the United States.
Victor could also be proud of his son, Charles I. DuPont. Charles would soon invest in the Union Bank of Delaware and the Columbia Insurance Company and pursue a successful law practice separate from the family business. Acceding to his father’s seat in the state Senate, he would eventually run for governor. One of his first steps toward achieving that ambition was his marriage first to Dorcas Van Dyke, daughter of U.S. Senator Nicholas Van Dyke, and later to Anne Ridgely, daughter of State Senator Henry M. Ridgely.
Thirty days later he was dead. Years of spirited living and third helpings had finally caught up with Victor’s 60-year-old heart. Suffering an attack on the streets of Philadelphia, he was carried to his room in the United States Hotel, where he died within two hours.
Some time later, his family was informed that Victor’s ticket had won, returning $850. For once Victor had finally had some luck.
Irénée took his brother’s passing very hard. Victor had been a tonic of cheer for Irénée’s lonely life of bills and empty profits. With Victor’s death went the family’s last connection with the grand societies of France and America. After his burial, the family grew increasingly clannish, reserved, and totally absorbed in profit-making.
The next year Irénée suffered his third great loss—his wife. Sophie had long declared a wish to return to France, and only months before her death Irénée had finally promised her “soon.” Sophie never made it. “Mrs. DuPont is so ill today,” Irénée wrote on August 5, “that I hardly know what I am writing.” 33 She died on November 27, 1828, at the age of 53.
After Sophie’s death Irénée sank deeper into his melancholia. He was now a man of 57 with streaks of gray running through his hair and sad eyes reflecting a deep, anguished loneliness. For months he could be seen staring into space for long periods of time. Then his eyes would turn back on his greatest love, the Brandywine. What had once been only a means to make his family rich now became an end in itself, and Irénée drowned his sorrows in the deluge of company affairs. Widowed Victorine tried to take her mother’s place in running Irénée’s home for him, while 30-year-old Alfred, his oldest son, helped out in the mills by taking on greater responsibility. But nothing could fill the void Sophie left. Eleutherian Mills was now an empty mansion for Irénée, with his second son Henry about to enter West Point as a cadet, and frail Alexis Irénée away at prep school.
Fortunately, the powder company absorbed most of Irénée’s time. DuPont Company by this time had a capacity of over 800,000 pounds annually, about one-seventh of the total U.S. output. By 1832 it had exported 1.2 million pounds of explosives, a big chunk of its 13.4-million-pound grand total output for almost thirty years of business. DuPont powder was now shipped all over the world, even to the West Indies and South America.
On June 27, 1833, Irénée saw his daughter Sophie Madeleine marry her first cousin, Lieutenant Samuel Francis DuPont, U.S.N., the youngest son of Victor. It was a small, private affair, the first of many intermarriages that would someday make the DuPont's the most inbred family in the United States. Watching this legal union of his blood with Victor’s, Irénée must have recalled the promise he once made to Victor when his brother expressed feelings of guilt about the debts he owed him. “We are bound to each other,” he reassured Victor, “like twins of whom both would die if one did.” 34
On October 29, 1834, only a month after he married off the last of his unwed daughters, Eleuthera, to Dr. Thomas McKie Smith, Irénée DuPont was struck down in the streets of Philadelphia by a heart attack. Carried to his room at the United States Hotel, he died there at 3:00 A.M. on Friday, October 31, 1834. Irénée, dead at 63, had survived his brother by seven years, yet had died in the same manner, the same city, and even the same hotel—“like twins.…”
Eleuthère Irénée DuPont, named for “liberty and peace” and founder of the greatest gunpowder industry the world has ever known, was lowered into a simple grave at the DuPont family cemetery in Sand Hole Woods. As Irénée’s three black-suited sons nervously stood by, piles of dirt were thrown down on the coffin, burying forever the man who had guided the firm for thirty-two years from its struggling birth to its present grandeur. Nearby, to the right, was the grave of Pierre DuPont, and to its right was that of Victor, as the elder son. To this day, DuPont's bury their dead to the right or left of Pierre DuPont, according to the “line” from which they are descended.
Alfred, in this as in other ways, was as unlike his father as a son could be. Broad shouldered and powerfully built, Alfred looked more like just another honest powder man than the son of shrewd Irénée DuPont. Alfred seemed a rather kind individual, more interested in his chemical experiments than in a profit sheet. Irénée could not inject into his son his own secular religion for profits and business management. Alfred frankly hated business affairs and lacked his father’s ruthless ability to build. Instead, powder-making was more to his liking.
It was precisely for this reason that Alfred insisted he did not wish to take the family helm at the time of his father’s death. As his younger brothers, Henry and Alexis, were too young and inexperienced to captain the country’s largest gunpowder company, the family was swept by panic only hours after Irénée’s death. The DuPont's solved the problem by initiating an institution that survived for 140 years: an interim presidency held by an in-law. Antoine Bidermann, Irénée’s son-in-law and close friend for over twenty years, became acting chief on November 1, the day after Irénée died.
With over twenty years of experience in the company’s sales, Bidermann proved an excellent administrator, helped, of course, by the company’s own great capacity for generating profits, now over a million pounds of black powder per year. For the next three years, while Alfred familiarized himself with the firm’s gears, the company grew to the point where Antoine was able to fulfill Irénée’s final wish: he paid off the last of the European shareholders. In 1837 he sailed to France and returned with the last of the non family stocks. Then he announced his retirement, his mission accomplished for his dead friend. On April 1, 1837, 39-year-old Alfred reluctantly took his father’s seat by the small wooden desk.
Now that his father was gone, Alfred was frankly frightened by his new responsibility. To alleviate his situation, he insisted that his younger brothers join him in a new partnership. Henry and “Aleck” agreed, establishing the precedent for future DuPont generations, of three partners serving as a kind of executive committee, with no offices such as president or treasurer, the senior partner being the final authority on all decisions. It was a tradition that would endure as long as the company remained a partnership, over sixty years.
Another precedent was established at this time. Victor’s children were excluded from leadership in the firm, an ostracism perhaps spurred by their careers outside the firm. Although Victor’s youngest son, Samuel Francis, did have a small voice in the company through his cousin-wife, Sophie, Victor’s side of the family was never allowed to play a commanding role. Irénée’s sons were determined to keep a tight rein.
By the time of Alfred’s ascension to power, industrial capitalism was in full bloom in America. It was the Machine Age, the age of inventions, of Morse’s telegraph, Goodyear’s vulcanized rubber, and Hoe’s rotary printing press. Sewing machines made their appearance along with thousands of cheap-labor immigrants from war-blighted Europe. The black billows of factories were rising all across young America, and with them the smoke of steamboats cruising down rivers and plowing through canals, and competing for the transportation market, the steam engine puffed over 2,000 miles of operable track.
Then the bottom fell out again. Speculation had overextended the resources of the country’s banks. New York banks finally suspended specie payments and the economy’s boom swung characteristically back into its infamous bust. One-third of the country’s workers were thrown out of work, and the streets of American cities filled with children begging for bread. Hundreds of people died of cold and starvation in those cruelest of days. A brief recovery in 1837 emboldened hope, but then the economy slipped back into seven more years of depression. By 1841, 33,000 businesses went under, with losses estimated at $440 million, and a full one-third of Ohio’s banks failed.
“We have seen within the last four years many sudden and heavy changes in money matters,” Alfred DuPont warned in February of that year, “but the crisis of the last week exceeds anything of the kind it has been our lot to experience.” 35
Actually, in the midst of all this poverty and ruin, DuPont Company was doing quite well. In fact, the plant was working at full capacity. The skirmishes along the Mexican border in 1836 and along the Canadian Quebec–Niagara border in 1838–1840 had brought in a steady stream of government orders. But more important was the cry, “Go west, young man!” as western expansion continued and the unemployed raced in long, endless trains of battered wagons toward hidden promises of the setting sun to meet their fate with hungry packs of land speculators.
Orders for DuPont powder kept pouring in to dig the Ohio and Mississippi canals to the Great Lakes, to blast out stumps for mid-western farmers. Railways and roads carved their way through the Rockies, iron and coal mines were discovered, silver mines were blasted, and lawmen brought a strange kind of justice to the West—all with DuPont powder. The U.S. government used DuPont powder to kill American Indians, drive them from their lands, and force them into disease-ridden “reservations,” and the discovery of gold in the West helped keep the powder demand constant.
But what was good for DuPont was not necessarily good for the country. Starvation and unemployment continued to gnaw at the country’s defenseless population. Bread riots broke out in the East, recalling to Alfred memories of his father’s tales of class war in revolutionary France. “Our political dissensions are such,” he wrote, “that it would require the enemy at our doors to induce us to make proper preparations for defense.” 36
Alfred was not the only one thinking of such a solution. In May of 1846 the United States provoked hostilities and then declared war on Mexico. Mexico was then the titular ruler of California, the whaler’s paradise and harbor for China trade. And with war, prospects of an expanded market and the 1848 discovery of gold came full economic recovery. Alfred agreed with one young congressman, Abraham Lincoln, that the war was immoral and provoked, but DuPont never refused government contracts. In fact, DuPont Company sold one million pounds of powder to the government during the war. To keep up with the huge volume of orders, Alfred was forced to build more powder mills, the Lower Works, below the Hagley Yard and across the creek.
Armed with DuPont powder, American armies swiftly invaded Mexico, smashing into the countryside as General Taylor swept south from Texas and General Scott attacked Mexico City, the capital. At Chapultepec Hill an American army surrounded and massacred hundreds of young cadets, most of them mere children, from a nearby military academy. It was Mexico’s own “day of infamy,” but she received little sympathy in concrete terms. When, for example, DuPont received a 200,000-pound order from Havana for the desperate Mexicans, Alfred immediately raced to Washington to display his patriotism. He returned to the Brandywine laden with the sorrow of duty to country and lucrative government contracts. “However unjust our proceeding may be,” he wrote the Havana agents, “and however shameful our invasion of Mexican territory, we cannot make powder to be used against our own country.” 37
And against our own family, Alfred might have added. His cousin (and brother-inlaw) Captain Samuel F. DuPont was commander of the warship U.S.S. Cayane at the time, clearing the Gulf of California of Mexican ships to facilitate the invasion of Mexican territory, destroying thirty vessels in all and seizing La Paz in Lower California. Sam even led a military expedition into the Mexican mainland after occupying the city of Mazatlán in November 1847. As for qualms of conscience, Captain DuPont seemed free of that too human burden. “They [the Mexicans] are not worthy of your sympathy,” he wrote his wife, Sophie, “because I doubt if there is a virtuous man in the nation.” 38
When “virtuous” United States dictated its terms of peace to Mexico, Sam was not satisfied with the American conquest of more than half the total territory of Mexico (Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and California), a domain greater in area than France and Germany combined. “The folly of not including Lower California is hard for us to get over,” 39 he grumbled.
There were other losses that were hard for DuPont's to get over during those days of war and conquest. In 1847 an explosion tore up the Upper Yards and the lives of eighteen men. Anne DuPont, wife of Charles, described to her cousin the scene from Louviers: “The shrieks of the wives and children so soon made widows and orphans rose in sad succession to the preceding horror. Human heads, arms, and feet were found on that peaceful-looking bank of the Brandywine where you and I have walked.” 40
Alfred DuPont never got over it. Perhaps because he felt guilt-ridden about the wartime speedup in production that always raises risks to the men’s safety, perhaps because he was already so fatigued by the heavy load of responsibilities, the explosion shattered Alfred’s already frayed nerves.
Once, Alfred would have surrendered his responsibilities right then and there. But by now he had become, like his father, obsessed with the drive for profit-making, a creature driven by the insatiable needs of private enterprise. Alfred struggled on for two more years, still continuing to increase the workers’ rate of production. In 1849 Du Pont workers boosted the previous year’s production by 400,000 pounds. They made 10,000 pounds of powder every day, the mills running twenty-four hours a day, fourteen by lamplight. Alfred also introduced some improvements in shipping techniques. He brought coopers and machinery to the Brandywine to manufacture kegs on the premises, standardizing their size and quality and ensuring their availability. Next, he had a pier and magazine built on the Delaware River at Edge Moor, three miles above Wilmington, to load ships more easily. Now bad weather would not prevent loading, as it had when wagons brought powder to the ships directly from the yards.
Finally, in 1850, Alfred’s health could take no more and he resigned from the company. Now an invalid, he would last six more years before dying as he was born, within earshot of the grinding mills.
Such was the case with Alfred’s successor and younger brother, Henry. Three months before Irénée’s death, when he became concerned about Alfred’s lack of enthusiasm for the business side of the company, Henry was called home from his participation in the U.S. Army’s massacre of the Creek Indians.
Henry DuPont was a graduate of West Point, and looked it. Standing straight as a board, he had fiery red hair and beard that flared in contrast to his black suit and matching high hat, his cold blue eyes giving the finishing touch to the commanding appearance he so relished. And Henry not only looked like a commander; he was determined to be one. Alfred’s resignation now left Henry to fulfill his ambitions.
With a battle cry of economy and expansion that sent the entire gunpowder market into a flurry of excitement, Henry collected thousands of dollars in outstanding debts, fired some agents and hired new ones, and soon expanded DuPont’s market across the country.
When mills 7 and 8 exploded in 1852, killing two men, Henry proved he was no Alfred. Chomping on his “Henry Clay” cigars (as with his father, Henry chose this apologist for chattel slavery as his idol), Henry traced down the cause to an alleged mistake by one worker, William Cowan. Henry abruptly fired the man, publicly charging him with negligence. Less than a year later, Cowan, still unemployed and hounded by charges of guilt, hanged himself.
Henry was hungry for markets; no market was too far from his grasp. When DuPont’s contract to deliver powder to Czarist Russia during the Crimean War was hindered in 1854 by a blockade by the British royal navy, Henry had his young nephew Lammot DuPont, the tall, lanky son of Alfred, run the blockade outside Chesapeake Bay. Through Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean steamed Lammot, a fleet of angry British warships in hot pursuit. It was perhaps the greatest single naval manhunt of the nineteenth century, yet to be given its proper place in recorded history. Successfully passing through Bosporus and into the Black Sea, Lammot was just nearing the besieged Russian lines at Sebastopol when British warships challenged and then fired two broadsides into his ship. Still he managed to steam ahead, steering between huge, hazardous rocks before finally beaching safely behind Russian lines. The result for DuPont was a cool $3 million. 41
This success, however, did not prevent Henry from also selling gunpowder to the British.
With the Crimean War profits, DuPont easily weathered the 1858 depression. Unfortunately for Henry, that year marked yet another explosion, which killed three men and, for the first time, a DuPont Alexis I. DuPont. “Aleck,” the fatalist of the family, had seldom seriously considered his work personally dangerous. “I did not think it would happen this way,” 42 he said between prayers, and died.
The soft, warm earth of the Brandywine had no sooner covered Alexis DuPont than Henry announced a successor to the departed’s seat at the exalted table of partners. Lammot DuPont, champion of Sebastopol, brightest among the rising stars in the DuPont celestial globe of 24 grandchildren of the company’s founder, was chosen for good reason. Lammot had just perfected a method that allowed DuPont to use Chilean and Peruvian nitrate.
Previously, Peruvian nitrate (salt of soda or sodium nitrate) contained impurities that quickly made powder damp, with poor firing results. For this reason, E. I. DuPont had rejected its use. Lammot, using his grandfather’s calculations, solved the problem with a unique formula: 72 parts Peruvian nitrate, 12 parts sulphur, and 16 parts charcoal. This allowed a higher percentage of oxygen and nitrogen in the mixture and kept the powder dry. Glazed with sulphite, it even poured more freely. American gunpowder would no longer be dependent on India’s potassium nitrate (salt of potash), which was expensive to ship.
Lammot’s formula lowered costs and increased demand so much that the DuPont's were forced to build mills in Pennsylvania that they could not personally supervise. DuPont also drove the market price for powder down to 18 cents a pound by 1859, cutting the ground out from under its competitors and increasing even further demand for its own powder. Lammot’s new “soda powder” was the first innovation in gunpowder in hundreds of years, for the first time separating blasting powder from powder used in firearms.
By 1859 the “Red Fellow,” as the men called Henry, was beaming like a torch, but beneath his joy lurked a nagging fear. Across the vast American market the question of a slave economy being able to coexist with free-labor capitalism had reached the boiling point after over half a century of simmering rivalry.
As a Whig, Henry insisted that the slavery of Black people was not an issue for whites to have to fight over. Instead, he supported Henry Clay’s attempts to reach a compromise between the two completely hostile economic systems. But the march of history would no longer be waylaid by compromise. Northern industrialists, if they were to expand into new western territories, could not afford to allow southern production to profit by slave labor, and the southern planters could not afford to lose the slaves upon which their very existence as a privileged class depended.
Only such deep economic contradictions could swell to the surface moral clarions loud enough to sway the hearts and minds of millions, and clarions there were and millions were moved. And in the midst of it all, sitting in a state that had both slave and free labor, both slave master and abolitionist, Henry DuPont easily surmised that armed conflict might be inevitable. In 1858 he sent Lammot to Europe for three months to study plants and improved production methods in England, France, and Belgium. The next year Lammot began to rebuild the Pennsylvania mills to enable them to produce his new soda powder. But just as the conversion neared completion, history moved faster than Lammot. The lightning before the storm had at last kindled the thunder of drums.
Not overly impressed with the business aptitude of either his father or his brother, Irénée began to speculate on other ways to maintain his family’s high standard of living. In light of his past training under Lavoisier, one alternative stood out—gunpowder.
American powder plants in those days were few in number and poor in quality, and it took only one visit to the largest American powder plant, at Frankford, Pennsylvania, to convince Irénée of his true vocation. Americans simply did not know how to make gunpowder, and as Adam Smith would have said in that age of free enterprise, where there is a demand there will be a supply. Irénée determined he was going to be the supplier.
In February 1801 Irénée and Victor arrived at the French port of Le Havre full of expectation and a passion for the coin of their homeland. By June, while Victor was drowning his own mission in a sea of parties, Irénée was already returning home laden with favors. Napoleon’s astute foreign minister, Talleyrand, had reasoned that giving aid to E. I. du Pont would destroy forever England’s monopoly over the American powder market. He was right. Besides machinery at cost, Talleyrand offered mechanical designs by government draftsmen and the newest secret improvements in making powder, including speedier methods of refining saltpeter, an essential ingredient. The French regime even drew up the original legal papers for Irénée’s company on April 21, 1801, assigning “citizen” Irénée a salary of $1,800 a year as director, and assigning twelve of eighteen $2,000 shares to Père Du Pont’s firm in Paris. Thus was achieved the capital birth of Du Pont.
After Irénée’s return to America, his attempt to buy the Frankford Mills met with a stone wall of refusal. Then, upon his father’s advice, he tried to find a suitable site for his gunpowder mills somewhere in the hills surrounding Federal City (later, Washington, D.C.), his biggest prospective customer. But that too failed. After traveling by horseback for weeks, looking for a place that would meet his needs, Irénée was openly contemptuous of America and its people. “The country, the people, the locations are all worthless,” 9 he wrote his father in disgust. Then he rode into Wilmington, Delaware, and into history.
Here flowed the Brandywine Creek, actually a swift river that could easily power the wheels of a powder mill. Here Irénée found Frenchmen, men who shared his culture, his language, and even his political conservatism, being refugees from the successful slave revolt of Santo Domingo. Here was a community tailored to his needs, a community of men who would gladly work for him at lower wages than most Americans. At the nearby up-for-sale Broome farm there was even an unused cotton mill ready for conversion to powder-making and a hillside of timber from which to burn charcoal. And here also was personal friendship, Alexandre Bauduy, a Santo Domingo refugee who had long been a friend of Victor DuPont.
But above all, here was money, the money of Peter Bauduy, Alexandre’s brother, offered as financial support if Irénée would agree to settle on the Brandywine. It was an enticement Irénée could not resist. On April 27, 1802, Irénée and Bauduy bought the Broome farm, from which would spring the country’s largest powder plant within a decade.
2.4
KEYSTONES OF AN EMPIRE
Today the name DuPont summons visions of nylon stockings and dacron shirts, of
paint and waxes, photographic film and antifreeze, of cellophane wrappers and atomic
energy, of social omnipotence and an almost intoxicating wealth. But in 1802 Pierre Samuel DuPont could never have foreseen such a future for his name in America. After a series of family desertions, business failures, and the shock of finally being cut out of the family firm by his son Victor, Pierre DuPont was lost in melancholy. Prodded by his wife’s desire to return to her homeland, Pierre agreed to sail for France, but not before he left Victor with a $78,000 “loan” and signed over Jeen and her child Lydia for ten years of slavery 10 to Irénée. Irénée must have enjoyed the slavery of these hapless people for the full ten years, as there is no record of his ever having voluntarily set them free. In fact, in September of that year he acquired yet another slave: Jeen gave birth to a beautiful little girl.
In France Pierre resumed his business activities and even engaged in secret negotiations with Napoleon over the Louisiana Purchase on behalf of Thomas Jefferson. DuPont had known Jefferson for over twenty years, ever since Jefferson was minister to the royal court of Louis XVI. “You have never had but one Vice,” punned DuPont to Jefferson on the latter’s ascension to the presidency. “I compliment your country and both hemispheres that you have at last lost it.” 11 When, however, Pierre DuPont wrote Jefferson of his plan to return to France, the Sage of Monticello answered in a more serious vein, requesting Pierre to travel to Washington City for a special conference. As his date of departure was close at hand, Pierre declined. It was then that Jefferson wrote DuPont a long letter, asking him to undertake a strange mission in his behalf, one that would set the course of American—and DuPont—expansion right up to the present day. “… impress on the Government of France,” Jefferson asked, “the inevitable consequences of their taking Louisiana.” 12 The new president was determined that France should not occupy Louisiana, which she had just acquired from Spain.Jefferson’s whole political thesis on the future of his country centered around the belief that democracy and prosperity depended on the ability of free men to move onto free lands; the West, including Louisiana, was an integral part of this belief. As for the Indian peoples who happened to dwell on these “free lands,” he urged settlers “to press upon them.” 13 Along these lines, Jefferson drew up the Ordinance of 1784, opening the trans-Appalachian west to settlement, carving out ten relatively large territories that would immediately be entitled to self-government. Statehood would be theirs as soon as each territory was filled with a population equal to that of the smallest of the thirteen original states. And as that population grew, so also would the market for agricultural and industrial goods. In this way, Jefferson’s thesis helped to shape American industrial, and DuPont, history.
By 1790, a mere ten years before the Du Ponts’ arrival, a million people had settled in these valleys or to the west. 14 “Our success furnishes a new proof of the falsehood of Montesquieu’s doctrine that a republic can be preserved only in a small territory,” Jefferson proudly announced in 1801. “The reverse is the truth.” 15 “New frontiers,” he argued, were what were needed to prevent disputes between “factions,”* or classes, that Madison, his teacher in expansionist mercantilism, had warned about. “Extend the sphere,” Madison had explained in 1787, “and you take in the greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have common motive to invade the rights of other [wealthy] citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.” 16 By 1804 Jefferson was in full accord with Madison. “The larger our association, the less it will be shaken by local passions.” 17
Indeed, by 1801 the passions were there. A burgeoning population of small farmers and a growing export trade even from western lands like Tennessee and Mississippi were forcing Jefferson to seek again new “free lands” as a vent for social pressure between classes, as well as to find a market for investment and trade. Jefferson was aware that within five years of that date Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio would be shipping surpluses down the Mississippi, reemphasizing the importance of having the port of New Orleans open to American export trade.
This question of export markets was extremely important to Jefferson, so important that he was willing to risk war with France for New Orleans. As early as 1786 he had worked out an explanation of the social forces that caused Shays’ Rebellion that year, a popular uprising against the special privileges enjoyed by property holders. That populist rebellion in Massachusetts, crushed by troops, destroyed any illusion about a theoretical “voluntary association of government” and became the spur for the creation of a strong centralized government at the Constitutional Convention the following year. The cause of the Massachusetts rebellion, Jefferson explained, lay in the lack of enough export markets that would have enabled small farmers to sell their goods and pay their taxes and debts. “Open the Mediterranean,” 18 Jefferson then prescribed (and later did in his undeclared war against Tripoli and other North African city-states), and class tensions would be reduced with returning prosperity.
To Jefferson and to most Americans as the crisis deepened, the western frontier became a Utopia, an escape that allowed evasion of the task of building a truly harmonious society. But for the lower classes of free farmers and uneducated who could never hope to live like aristocrats such as Jefferson, the frontier replaced formal education; a kind of nonintellectual learning by survival and succeeding became an ingrained part of the American psychology. Edward Everett, Massachusetts’ delegate to the Constitutional Convention, summed it up as early as 1787 when he remarked that expansion “is the principle of our institutions,” 19 and it was the driving force behind Jefferson’s letter to DuPont de Nemours in 1802.
“This measure will cost France, and perhaps not very long hence, a war which will annihilate her on the ocean,” 20 wrote Jefferson to DuPont, and he asked his French friend also to deliver a letter to Robert Livingston. To Livingston, Jefferson was more blunt. “The day that France takes New Orleans we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.” 21
Pierre was shocked. He knew that if he presented Jefferson’s ideas to Napoleon as they were written, the French emperor would consider them an open challenge and declare war. He immediately wrote back to Jefferson proposing another alternative. Why not promise to help France regain Canada? Surely a French neighbor to the south is better than a British neighbor to the north, but if Louisiana must be yours, why not offer Canada in exchange? Why not say “Give us Louisiana and at the first opportunity we shall restore Canada to you.” 22 Old Pierre DuPont harbored a good memory, recalling one of the French designs behind his government’s alliance with the American colonies during their revolution: keep Canada open for possible repossession by France in the future. Now that day when France could regain her Quebec may have come, a big enough feather for any returning emigre to wear in his cap when looking for a government position. Of course, Pierre was little concerned with the fact that his suggestion meant war between Britain and the United States over Canada.
Jefferson wouldn’t stand for it. As far as his government was concerned, France had given up all rights in America with the Treaty of Ghent almost twenty years before. Desperately searching for other alternatives, Pierre finally had a brainstorm: why not offer to buy Louisiana? Jefferson again refused. But war, Pierre retorted, suddenly carrying the palm of peace, “will cost your commerce, agriculture, and nation ten times as much.” 23 Jefferson stubbornly disagreed and fired off a letter to Livingston warning him about DuPont’s misconceptions.
There was little doubt that Pierre DuPont was full of misconceptions as he left America. In fact, his mind was completely confused as he boarded the ship, Virginia Packett, even leaving behind important notes which he had planned to use to draw up a commercial report to his stockholders. This loss increased his apprehension about explaining his firm’s collapse and his rather large gift to Victor, but he hoped to allay enough suspicions to allow him to keep his Paris firm open and active. Always resourceful, even in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, Pierre compensated by spending his idle hours writing an abstract essay called “Instinct.”
It is unclear how much effect Pierre had on the final settlement of the Louisiana crisis. The President was still bellowing threats of war when he asked an excited Congress on January 18, 1803, to allocate funds for the Lewis and Clark expedition “to provide an extension of territory which the rapid increase of our number will call for.” 24 Jefferson was proposing expansion across the Mississippi with or without a peaceful settlement with France. But the President was at least frank about his real goal: Pacific trade. “The interests of commerce place the principal object within the constitutional powers and care of Congress,” he said, “and that it should advance the geographic knowledge of our own continent cannot but be an additional gratification.” 25
Despite Livingston’s pessimistic but accurate reports of Napoleon’s unwillingness to negotiate, Pierre’s more optimistic reports probably did help to stay any definite move toward war, Jefferson obviously having decided to avoid a conflict if at all possible. On January 11 he ordered James Monroe to France, supposedly to assist Livingston, but actually to make an offer of $2 million to Napoleon—and he secretly authorized more if necessary, without any confirmation from Congress. 26 If France wanted war, then Monroe and Livingston were to cross the channel and invite Britain into an alliance with the United States.
On the other side of the ocean the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United States, carrying Jefferson’s stars and stripes from the mouth of the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains. At the year’s end, bursting with pride and relief, Jefferson wrote DuPont of his gratitude. “I congratulate you on having lived to give those aids in a transaction replete with blessings to unborn millions of men, and which will mark the face of a portion of the globe so extensive as that which now composes the United States of America.” 27
Though the blessings to the unborn may be debatable, the Louisiana Purchase was a very real blessing to Pierre’s second son, Irénée. In terms of long-range benefits, the Louisiana Purchase widened western markets for DuPont explosives for generations to come. But there was an immediate boon as well. The spring of 1803 brought Irénée news of his father’s role in the Louisiana Purchase, and on July 20 he wrote to Jefferson requesting special government patronage. Shortly thereafter, the United States government became Irénée’s first customer, awarding him a contract for refining government-owned saltpeter.
By then, Irénée had moved his family to the Brandywine and was completing construction of his gunpowder mills. Sophie moved happily into her new home, called Eleutherian Mills. Five bays wide and two rooms deep, with a large central hall, the two-story stone mansion was an imposing sight perched gray and aloof on the green hillside. Nearby stood Irénée’s small stone office, and below, the Brandywine with three new mills, two new buildings, a new race for the mills, a drying place for the gunpowder, a magazine for storing it, and quarters for the workers.
Most of these first workers were men from the French community along the Brandywine. Irénée also used indentured servants, sometimes sent over from France by Pierre DuPont. 28 These men worked for nothing but their keep until their passage to America was paid off, and they were often obliged to remain in Irénée’s employ as an original condition for their passage.
Thus, cheap labor and government patronage joined an ever-expanding market as keystones in the construction of a profitable DuPont Company in its earliest days, keystones which DuPont never abandoned but has used to build its empire right up to the present day.
From his hilltop office overlooking the Brandywine, Irénée now watched his mills churn out hundreds of pounds of powder daily, powder that found a ready market, thanks to war. Some 22,000 pounds of DuPont powder were used by U.S. warships in the undeclared war against Tripoli and the other North African city-states. Sales jumped threefold in the first year, from $10,000 in 1804 to $33,000 in 1805. On July 4, 1805, Jefferson’s Secretary of War, Colonel Henry Dearborn, announced that Irénée’s company would do all the government’s powder work. Napoleon’s puppet government in Spain also ordered 40,000 pounds, much of which was used to crush rebellions by the oppressed Spanish population. But to Irénée DuPont there were no victors, no losers, no oppressors or oppressed, and above all, no causes—just rows of wooden casks filled with black powder, and a mounting family treasure.
2.5
THE ATLANTIC BREWS A STORM
The Brandywine was the scene of family festivities in 1809 when Victor DuPont and
his family returned from his latest business disaster in Genesee, New York. Victor had
gone there after his commercial firm collapsed in 1809, to engage in land speculation.
There was only one problem—he found no buyers. Donning the role of family savior,
Irénée announced that he was building his brother a regency mansion and buying him a
business, a wool factory provided with fleece from herds sired by his own Don Pedro,
a ram of unusual virile qualities that Irénée had brought back with him from France. The financial and labor source for both ventures was, of course, the powder company. Describing this, the acrid letters of Irénée’s partner, Peter Bauduy, complaining of Irénée’s business methods, were brewing a tempest of trouble across the ocean. In fact, by now the European stockholders were in an uproar over Irénée’s personal appropriations and the expenses for Victor while their own profit-sharing had been suspended by him.
To calm the storm, Irénée was forced to release DuPont Company’s first statement in 1810, showing a profit over six years of over $43,000 on some $243,000 in sales—a return of almost 20 percent! The statement fulfilled its purpose, reducing shouts to grumbles while the mills continued to grind out their profits: in 1810, $30,000; in 1811, $45,000, more in one year than was made in the entire first six years of business. That year was a turning point not only for DuPont Company, but also for the country as a whole: E. I. DuPont de Nemours & Co. was now the largest producer of gunpowder in the United States.
Such a monumental feat would probably have quieted the occasional clamor from Europe had not Pierre DuPont been stirring his own cauldron of mischief. When his Paris firm collapsed in the French panic of 1811, Pierre surrendered to his creditors his firm’s twelve $2,000 shares in Irénée’s powder company. These creditors, in turn, now began pressing claims for immediate payment. Irénée for the most part ignored these claims through the years, even when the desperate widow of his dead stepbrother,Bureaux de Pusy, came to America to see about her husband’s investment. Arriving in October of 1813, by August 1, 1814, she still had no stock report from Irénée, despite his previous assurances.
“You assured me so positively last June,” she wrote, “that the accounts of the Powder Company were almost finished.… I believed you and waited all that month, but for the twentieth time you have failed me.… Do you want to buy my shares in your establishment?” she asked desperately. “I enclose here a last offer to sell them to you at a price that seems fair to us both; but in God’s name answer.…” 29
Irénée did. He said no … politely, of course.
2.6
AND WAR
With the arrival of the War of 1812, DuPont Company won its own victory over the
balance sheets. In the autumn of 1811 the thunder of approaching war had forced the
federal government to order 50,000 pounds of DuPont powder. In 1812, with hostilities
actually begun, Washington hiked the order to 200,000 pounds; in 1813, to 500,000
pounds, forcing Irénée to double the company’s capacity with the new Hagley mills
nearby. With additional orders from the Navy, DuPont sold more than a million pounds
of powder to the government during the war. Only DuPont had the capacity to fill the huge powder needs of the government, and the government paid well for the delivery. Although Washington supplied its own saltpeter, DuPont still charged the highest 30 price up to that time for powder: 58 cents per pound. In the first year of war alone, DuPont showed gross sales of $148,597.62, the crucial margin of success for the young company. DuPont powder was soon carried by coastal schooners and powder wagons as far north as Boston, as far south as Charleston, and as far west as Pittsburgh. Even John Jacob Astor’s trappers and hunters in the West consumed 25,000 pounds of powder every year.
The Brandywine suffered few losses during the war. Although given special exemption from military duty, DuPont workers, mostly Frenchmen, were formed into two companies of militia by the DuPont brothers. It was with these men that the DuPont family in the election of 1813 engaged in their first experiment in America in paramilitary means to gain their own political ends. Assembling both companies in full uniform on October 5, 1813, Irénée and Victor marched on the polls to forcibly register alien votes for Irénée’s pro-war party, the Democratic-Republicans. Crowds of angry Delaware voters, however, became incensed at such strong-arm tactics and chased the DuPont companies back to the Brandywine.
Charges were brought against the DuPont brothers and confirmed by an official investigation. 31 Although the brothers were never brought to trial, the citizens of the state were so enraged over the affair that the following year Delaware’s legislature was compelled to prohibit the raising of private militia by employers. Reluctantly, Irénée disarmed his men. It was not to be the last time the DuPont's would raise a private army, but it was Irénée’s last personal spat with the law.
In fact, both DuPont's became exemplary American citizens after the war.
In 1815 Victor DuPont was elected to Delaware’s House of Representatives from the Brandywine, already called “DuPont country,” and in 1820 he entered the state Senate. Here, in Dover, the state capital, Victor was at home, swaggering in the familiar world of perfumed ladies and formal balls. For three years he reveled in dancing and drinking, finding between games of whist even the infrequent debates over roads and bridges a welcome relief from the austere Irénée and his meticulous payment of notes.
Irénée was resourceful in more than pecuniary ways. In 1816 Sophie, at the age of 41, gave birth to their seventh child, Alexis Irénée. Now there were Alfred, Victorine, Evelina, Henry, Eleuthera, Sophie, and Alexis. With three sons, Irénée would indeed have no lack of heirs to carry on his life’s work. And Irénée had taken measures to insure that the powder company would be his and his alone.
The death of Victorine DuPont’s husband, Ferdinand Bauduy, two years earlier had dissolved the last ties to his partner, Peter Bauduy. “May this sorrow unite us,” Bauduy had written Irénée after his son’s death. “Be my friend, for I have just lost the best one I had.” 32 It was a futile request. Little more than a year passed before Bauduy was forced out of the firm.
Thus Bauduy missed the war profits of the previous August of 1814, when Irénée sold 1,840 barrels to the government. In November another 156,000 pounds of powder brought Irénée $70,000. From then to the peace in February 1815, when he forced out Bauduy, Irénée sold an additional 687 barrels, worth $13,740. With peace, on one hand came sales to the Spanish Captain-General of Cuba, and on the other, demands for payment again from Irénée’s European shareholders. When one of these backers, banker Jacques Bidermann, sent his son Antoine to America to check out his investment, Irénée’s lovely daughter, Evelina, so charmed the lad that he stayed, married her, and ended up in Peter Bauduy’s old job.
Helping Irénée in this last maneuver was none other than Pierre Du Pont. At first so enraged with Irénée’s ignoring of his responsibilities to his European shareholders that he called him “unnatural,” Pierre quickly buried the family hatchet in 1815 when Napoleon escaped Elba and marched on Paris. Pierre, it seems, as secretary of the new provisional government, had earlier signed Napoleon’s abdication and ordered his banishment to Elba to make way for the monarch’s short-lived restoration. Napoleon reentered Paris just as Pierre was hurriedly sailing for America, abandoning his sick wife.
Two years later, after a long illness in America, this most colorful of the DuPont's entered a coma from which he never emerged. On August 7, 1817, with Irénée and Victor at his bedside, Pierre Samuel DuPont de Nemours ended his turbulent career with a simple, final sigh.
Pierre DuPont, the knighted nobleman of Louis XVI and the founder of America’s first industrial family, was buried beneath a simple slab of stone in the middle of a lonely place, called Sand Hole Woods, overlooking the Brandywine. Since that day, the DuPonts have buried their dead at Sand Hole Woods, transforming that simple graveyard into the world’s most exclusive cemetery of industrial royalty, the final resting place of the House of DuPont.
Six months after the death of his father, Irénée DuPont suffered another, and for the company, greater loss. On March 19, 1818, the old Upper Yards’ five mills exploded, one after another, leaving behind thirty-six dead. Only eight of the dead were identifiable, pieces of human flesh being found everywhere: in the flower gardens of Irénée’s mansion, on the lawn of Victor’s Louviers estate across the creek, even perched on the treetops like some ghastly fruit of death. Irénée’s brother-in-law, Charles Dalmas, and Irénée’s wife Sophie were both wounded, Sophie with an injury from which she would never recover.
Despite this setback, by 1824 the DuPont's of Delaware were entering a new bracket of wealth and power in America. Irénée was appointed a member of the board of directors of the Bank of the United States, which held a monopoly over U.S. currency and was a notorious center of fraud and corruption. He was to hold that post until 1829, two years before a congressional investigation revealed that institution’s use of bribes to win renewal of its charter.
Since 1814, Irénée had also been a director of the Farmers Bank of the State of Delaware and had even invested in toll roads and a ferry line across the Delaware River.
Victor also was enjoying himself. When he retired from the state Senate in 1824, he too became a director of the Farmers Bank. In 1826 Victor DuPont joined his brother on the board of directors of the Bank of the United States.
Victor could also be proud of his son, Charles I. DuPont. Charles would soon invest in the Union Bank of Delaware and the Columbia Insurance Company and pursue a successful law practice separate from the family business. Acceding to his father’s seat in the state Senate, he would eventually run for governor. One of his first steps toward achieving that ambition was his marriage first to Dorcas Van Dyke, daughter of U.S. Senator Nicholas Van Dyke, and later to Anne Ridgely, daughter of State Senator Henry M. Ridgely.
2.7
A PASSING OF CROWNS
The Brandywine turned festive on January 1, 1827, with dinner and brandies and the
innumerable toasts of Victor DuPont. Victor, patting his jolly corporation, even bought a
New York lottery ticket, saying he felt lucky that year. Thirty days later he was dead. Years of spirited living and third helpings had finally caught up with Victor’s 60-year-old heart. Suffering an attack on the streets of Philadelphia, he was carried to his room in the United States Hotel, where he died within two hours.
Some time later, his family was informed that Victor’s ticket had won, returning $850. For once Victor had finally had some luck.
Irénée took his brother’s passing very hard. Victor had been a tonic of cheer for Irénée’s lonely life of bills and empty profits. With Victor’s death went the family’s last connection with the grand societies of France and America. After his burial, the family grew increasingly clannish, reserved, and totally absorbed in profit-making.
The next year Irénée suffered his third great loss—his wife. Sophie had long declared a wish to return to France, and only months before her death Irénée had finally promised her “soon.” Sophie never made it. “Mrs. DuPont is so ill today,” Irénée wrote on August 5, “that I hardly know what I am writing.” 33 She died on November 27, 1828, at the age of 53.
After Sophie’s death Irénée sank deeper into his melancholia. He was now a man of 57 with streaks of gray running through his hair and sad eyes reflecting a deep, anguished loneliness. For months he could be seen staring into space for long periods of time. Then his eyes would turn back on his greatest love, the Brandywine. What had once been only a means to make his family rich now became an end in itself, and Irénée drowned his sorrows in the deluge of company affairs. Widowed Victorine tried to take her mother’s place in running Irénée’s home for him, while 30-year-old Alfred, his oldest son, helped out in the mills by taking on greater responsibility. But nothing could fill the void Sophie left. Eleutherian Mills was now an empty mansion for Irénée, with his second son Henry about to enter West Point as a cadet, and frail Alexis Irénée away at prep school.
Fortunately, the powder company absorbed most of Irénée’s time. DuPont Company by this time had a capacity of over 800,000 pounds annually, about one-seventh of the total U.S. output. By 1832 it had exported 1.2 million pounds of explosives, a big chunk of its 13.4-million-pound grand total output for almost thirty years of business. DuPont powder was now shipped all over the world, even to the West Indies and South America.
On June 27, 1833, Irénée saw his daughter Sophie Madeleine marry her first cousin, Lieutenant Samuel Francis DuPont, U.S.N., the youngest son of Victor. It was a small, private affair, the first of many intermarriages that would someday make the DuPont's the most inbred family in the United States. Watching this legal union of his blood with Victor’s, Irénée must have recalled the promise he once made to Victor when his brother expressed feelings of guilt about the debts he owed him. “We are bound to each other,” he reassured Victor, “like twins of whom both would die if one did.” 34
On October 29, 1834, only a month after he married off the last of his unwed daughters, Eleuthera, to Dr. Thomas McKie Smith, Irénée DuPont was struck down in the streets of Philadelphia by a heart attack. Carried to his room at the United States Hotel, he died there at 3:00 A.M. on Friday, October 31, 1834. Irénée, dead at 63, had survived his brother by seven years, yet had died in the same manner, the same city, and even the same hotel—“like twins.…”
Eleuthère Irénée DuPont, named for “liberty and peace” and founder of the greatest gunpowder industry the world has ever known, was lowered into a simple grave at the DuPont family cemetery in Sand Hole Woods. As Irénée’s three black-suited sons nervously stood by, piles of dirt were thrown down on the coffin, burying forever the man who had guided the firm for thirty-two years from its struggling birth to its present grandeur. Nearby, to the right, was the grave of Pierre DuPont, and to its right was that of Victor, as the elder son. To this day, DuPont's bury their dead to the right or left of Pierre DuPont, according to the “line” from which they are descended.
2.8
ALFRED THE MEEK
In the seven generations of DuPont's that have stood in the golden flow of the
Brandywine, it has been the rarest of the species who did not at some time crave
command of the family enterprise. For the DuPont's, the company has been a passion
that borders on the fanatic, a prize that has often torn family binds to shreds. True, most
in the family have been unwilling to invest the time and work required to win such an
august role, and even some who did have deferred for reasons of health or other
personal obsessions, like running for Congress. But none that devoted his life to the
family firm and remained long enough to partake of the sweet pleasures of its economic
power has ever rejected the family crown when it was offered—none, that is, save
Alfred DuPont. Alfred, in this as in other ways, was as unlike his father as a son could be. Broad shouldered and powerfully built, Alfred looked more like just another honest powder man than the son of shrewd Irénée DuPont. Alfred seemed a rather kind individual, more interested in his chemical experiments than in a profit sheet. Irénée could not inject into his son his own secular religion for profits and business management. Alfred frankly hated business affairs and lacked his father’s ruthless ability to build. Instead, powder-making was more to his liking.
It was precisely for this reason that Alfred insisted he did not wish to take the family helm at the time of his father’s death. As his younger brothers, Henry and Alexis, were too young and inexperienced to captain the country’s largest gunpowder company, the family was swept by panic only hours after Irénée’s death. The DuPont's solved the problem by initiating an institution that survived for 140 years: an interim presidency held by an in-law. Antoine Bidermann, Irénée’s son-in-law and close friend for over twenty years, became acting chief on November 1, the day after Irénée died.
With over twenty years of experience in the company’s sales, Bidermann proved an excellent administrator, helped, of course, by the company’s own great capacity for generating profits, now over a million pounds of black powder per year. For the next three years, while Alfred familiarized himself with the firm’s gears, the company grew to the point where Antoine was able to fulfill Irénée’s final wish: he paid off the last of the European shareholders. In 1837 he sailed to France and returned with the last of the non family stocks. Then he announced his retirement, his mission accomplished for his dead friend. On April 1, 1837, 39-year-old Alfred reluctantly took his father’s seat by the small wooden desk.
Now that his father was gone, Alfred was frankly frightened by his new responsibility. To alleviate his situation, he insisted that his younger brothers join him in a new partnership. Henry and “Aleck” agreed, establishing the precedent for future DuPont generations, of three partners serving as a kind of executive committee, with no offices such as president or treasurer, the senior partner being the final authority on all decisions. It was a tradition that would endure as long as the company remained a partnership, over sixty years.
Another precedent was established at this time. Victor’s children were excluded from leadership in the firm, an ostracism perhaps spurred by their careers outside the firm. Although Victor’s youngest son, Samuel Francis, did have a small voice in the company through his cousin-wife, Sophie, Victor’s side of the family was never allowed to play a commanding role. Irénée’s sons were determined to keep a tight rein.
By the time of Alfred’s ascension to power, industrial capitalism was in full bloom in America. It was the Machine Age, the age of inventions, of Morse’s telegraph, Goodyear’s vulcanized rubber, and Hoe’s rotary printing press. Sewing machines made their appearance along with thousands of cheap-labor immigrants from war-blighted Europe. The black billows of factories were rising all across young America, and with them the smoke of steamboats cruising down rivers and plowing through canals, and competing for the transportation market, the steam engine puffed over 2,000 miles of operable track.
Then the bottom fell out again. Speculation had overextended the resources of the country’s banks. New York banks finally suspended specie payments and the economy’s boom swung characteristically back into its infamous bust. One-third of the country’s workers were thrown out of work, and the streets of American cities filled with children begging for bread. Hundreds of people died of cold and starvation in those cruelest of days. A brief recovery in 1837 emboldened hope, but then the economy slipped back into seven more years of depression. By 1841, 33,000 businesses went under, with losses estimated at $440 million, and a full one-third of Ohio’s banks failed.
“We have seen within the last four years many sudden and heavy changes in money matters,” Alfred DuPont warned in February of that year, “but the crisis of the last week exceeds anything of the kind it has been our lot to experience.” 35
Actually, in the midst of all this poverty and ruin, DuPont Company was doing quite well. In fact, the plant was working at full capacity. The skirmishes along the Mexican border in 1836 and along the Canadian Quebec–Niagara border in 1838–1840 had brought in a steady stream of government orders. But more important was the cry, “Go west, young man!” as western expansion continued and the unemployed raced in long, endless trains of battered wagons toward hidden promises of the setting sun to meet their fate with hungry packs of land speculators.
Orders for DuPont powder kept pouring in to dig the Ohio and Mississippi canals to the Great Lakes, to blast out stumps for mid-western farmers. Railways and roads carved their way through the Rockies, iron and coal mines were discovered, silver mines were blasted, and lawmen brought a strange kind of justice to the West—all with DuPont powder. The U.S. government used DuPont powder to kill American Indians, drive them from their lands, and force them into disease-ridden “reservations,” and the discovery of gold in the West helped keep the powder demand constant.
But what was good for DuPont was not necessarily good for the country. Starvation and unemployment continued to gnaw at the country’s defenseless population. Bread riots broke out in the East, recalling to Alfred memories of his father’s tales of class war in revolutionary France. “Our political dissensions are such,” he wrote, “that it would require the enemy at our doors to induce us to make proper preparations for defense.” 36
Alfred was not the only one thinking of such a solution. In May of 1846 the United States provoked hostilities and then declared war on Mexico. Mexico was then the titular ruler of California, the whaler’s paradise and harbor for China trade. And with war, prospects of an expanded market and the 1848 discovery of gold came full economic recovery. Alfred agreed with one young congressman, Abraham Lincoln, that the war was immoral and provoked, but DuPont never refused government contracts. In fact, DuPont Company sold one million pounds of powder to the government during the war. To keep up with the huge volume of orders, Alfred was forced to build more powder mills, the Lower Works, below the Hagley Yard and across the creek.
Armed with DuPont powder, American armies swiftly invaded Mexico, smashing into the countryside as General Taylor swept south from Texas and General Scott attacked Mexico City, the capital. At Chapultepec Hill an American army surrounded and massacred hundreds of young cadets, most of them mere children, from a nearby military academy. It was Mexico’s own “day of infamy,” but she received little sympathy in concrete terms. When, for example, DuPont received a 200,000-pound order from Havana for the desperate Mexicans, Alfred immediately raced to Washington to display his patriotism. He returned to the Brandywine laden with the sorrow of duty to country and lucrative government contracts. “However unjust our proceeding may be,” he wrote the Havana agents, “and however shameful our invasion of Mexican territory, we cannot make powder to be used against our own country.” 37
And against our own family, Alfred might have added. His cousin (and brother-inlaw) Captain Samuel F. DuPont was commander of the warship U.S.S. Cayane at the time, clearing the Gulf of California of Mexican ships to facilitate the invasion of Mexican territory, destroying thirty vessels in all and seizing La Paz in Lower California. Sam even led a military expedition into the Mexican mainland after occupying the city of Mazatlán in November 1847. As for qualms of conscience, Captain DuPont seemed free of that too human burden. “They [the Mexicans] are not worthy of your sympathy,” he wrote his wife, Sophie, “because I doubt if there is a virtuous man in the nation.” 38
When “virtuous” United States dictated its terms of peace to Mexico, Sam was not satisfied with the American conquest of more than half the total territory of Mexico (Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and California), a domain greater in area than France and Germany combined. “The folly of not including Lower California is hard for us to get over,” 39 he grumbled.
There were other losses that were hard for DuPont's to get over during those days of war and conquest. In 1847 an explosion tore up the Upper Yards and the lives of eighteen men. Anne DuPont, wife of Charles, described to her cousin the scene from Louviers: “The shrieks of the wives and children so soon made widows and orphans rose in sad succession to the preceding horror. Human heads, arms, and feet were found on that peaceful-looking bank of the Brandywine where you and I have walked.” 40
Alfred DuPont never got over it. Perhaps because he felt guilt-ridden about the wartime speedup in production that always raises risks to the men’s safety, perhaps because he was already so fatigued by the heavy load of responsibilities, the explosion shattered Alfred’s already frayed nerves.
Once, Alfred would have surrendered his responsibilities right then and there. But by now he had become, like his father, obsessed with the drive for profit-making, a creature driven by the insatiable needs of private enterprise. Alfred struggled on for two more years, still continuing to increase the workers’ rate of production. In 1849 Du Pont workers boosted the previous year’s production by 400,000 pounds. They made 10,000 pounds of powder every day, the mills running twenty-four hours a day, fourteen by lamplight. Alfred also introduced some improvements in shipping techniques. He brought coopers and machinery to the Brandywine to manufacture kegs on the premises, standardizing their size and quality and ensuring their availability. Next, he had a pier and magazine built on the Delaware River at Edge Moor, three miles above Wilmington, to load ships more easily. Now bad weather would not prevent loading, as it had when wagons brought powder to the ships directly from the yards.
Finally, in 1850, Alfred’s health could take no more and he resigned from the company. Now an invalid, he would last six more years before dying as he was born, within earshot of the grinding mills.
2.9
HENRY THE CONQUEROR
Most men when they are “called to duty” leave business and go to war. For the DuPont's, the opposite is often the rule: they leave war and go into business. Such was the case with Alfred’s successor and younger brother, Henry. Three months before Irénée’s death, when he became concerned about Alfred’s lack of enthusiasm for the business side of the company, Henry was called home from his participation in the U.S. Army’s massacre of the Creek Indians.
Henry DuPont was a graduate of West Point, and looked it. Standing straight as a board, he had fiery red hair and beard that flared in contrast to his black suit and matching high hat, his cold blue eyes giving the finishing touch to the commanding appearance he so relished. And Henry not only looked like a commander; he was determined to be one. Alfred’s resignation now left Henry to fulfill his ambitions.
With a battle cry of economy and expansion that sent the entire gunpowder market into a flurry of excitement, Henry collected thousands of dollars in outstanding debts, fired some agents and hired new ones, and soon expanded DuPont’s market across the country.
When mills 7 and 8 exploded in 1852, killing two men, Henry proved he was no Alfred. Chomping on his “Henry Clay” cigars (as with his father, Henry chose this apologist for chattel slavery as his idol), Henry traced down the cause to an alleged mistake by one worker, William Cowan. Henry abruptly fired the man, publicly charging him with negligence. Less than a year later, Cowan, still unemployed and hounded by charges of guilt, hanged himself.
Henry was hungry for markets; no market was too far from his grasp. When DuPont’s contract to deliver powder to Czarist Russia during the Crimean War was hindered in 1854 by a blockade by the British royal navy, Henry had his young nephew Lammot DuPont, the tall, lanky son of Alfred, run the blockade outside Chesapeake Bay. Through Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean steamed Lammot, a fleet of angry British warships in hot pursuit. It was perhaps the greatest single naval manhunt of the nineteenth century, yet to be given its proper place in recorded history. Successfully passing through Bosporus and into the Black Sea, Lammot was just nearing the besieged Russian lines at Sebastopol when British warships challenged and then fired two broadsides into his ship. Still he managed to steam ahead, steering between huge, hazardous rocks before finally beaching safely behind Russian lines. The result for DuPont was a cool $3 million. 41
This success, however, did not prevent Henry from also selling gunpowder to the British.
With the Crimean War profits, DuPont easily weathered the 1858 depression. Unfortunately for Henry, that year marked yet another explosion, which killed three men and, for the first time, a DuPont Alexis I. DuPont. “Aleck,” the fatalist of the family, had seldom seriously considered his work personally dangerous. “I did not think it would happen this way,” 42 he said between prayers, and died.
The soft, warm earth of the Brandywine had no sooner covered Alexis DuPont than Henry announced a successor to the departed’s seat at the exalted table of partners. Lammot DuPont, champion of Sebastopol, brightest among the rising stars in the DuPont celestial globe of 24 grandchildren of the company’s founder, was chosen for good reason. Lammot had just perfected a method that allowed DuPont to use Chilean and Peruvian nitrate.
Previously, Peruvian nitrate (salt of soda or sodium nitrate) contained impurities that quickly made powder damp, with poor firing results. For this reason, E. I. DuPont had rejected its use. Lammot, using his grandfather’s calculations, solved the problem with a unique formula: 72 parts Peruvian nitrate, 12 parts sulphur, and 16 parts charcoal. This allowed a higher percentage of oxygen and nitrogen in the mixture and kept the powder dry. Glazed with sulphite, it even poured more freely. American gunpowder would no longer be dependent on India’s potassium nitrate (salt of potash), which was expensive to ship.
Lammot’s formula lowered costs and increased demand so much that the DuPont's were forced to build mills in Pennsylvania that they could not personally supervise. DuPont also drove the market price for powder down to 18 cents a pound by 1859, cutting the ground out from under its competitors and increasing even further demand for its own powder. Lammot’s new “soda powder” was the first innovation in gunpowder in hundreds of years, for the first time separating blasting powder from powder used in firearms.
By 1859 the “Red Fellow,” as the men called Henry, was beaming like a torch, but beneath his joy lurked a nagging fear. Across the vast American market the question of a slave economy being able to coexist with free-labor capitalism had reached the boiling point after over half a century of simmering rivalry.
As a Whig, Henry insisted that the slavery of Black people was not an issue for whites to have to fight over. Instead, he supported Henry Clay’s attempts to reach a compromise between the two completely hostile economic systems. But the march of history would no longer be waylaid by compromise. Northern industrialists, if they were to expand into new western territories, could not afford to allow southern production to profit by slave labor, and the southern planters could not afford to lose the slaves upon which their very existence as a privileged class depended.
Only such deep economic contradictions could swell to the surface moral clarions loud enough to sway the hearts and minds of millions, and clarions there were and millions were moved. And in the midst of it all, sitting in a state that had both slave and free labor, both slave master and abolitionist, Henry DuPont easily surmised that armed conflict might be inevitable. In 1858 he sent Lammot to Europe for three months to study plants and improved production methods in England, France, and Belgium. The next year Lammot began to rebuild the Pennsylvania mills to enable them to produce his new soda powder. But just as the conversion neared completion, history moved faster than Lammot. The lightning before the storm had at last kindled the thunder of drums.
Three
HARVEST OF GOLD
3.1
A HOUSE DIVIDED
NEED NOT FALL
“I think it is miserable that Lincoln’s elected,” Ellen DuPont angrily wrote her brother,
Henry Algernon DuPont, at West Point. “Whenever I think of our having such a
President from such a party, it makes me feel like tasting green persimmons does to the
children.… I wish the Republicans and the abolitionists were in the Atlantic, when we
would be at rest.”
1 Ellen was no exception in the DuPont household, for there is no doubt that the first family of Delaware had strong southern sympathies and made little effort to hide them. In fact, a branch of the family were themselves slaveholders in South Carolina. Pierre DuPont’s great uncle, Abraham Dupont, had settled his roost there in 1695. It was his son, Gideon DuPont, who brought the flooding technique to rice growing in Carolina, and these southern cousins now reigned as proud slave masters over a huge plantation in St. James Parish, Goose Creek. The DuPont's of Delaware were not particularly eager to be forced into a war against kin over an issue with which they were not necessarily in disagreement and which, they correctly surmised, had been endorsed by the Constitution since the founding of the federal union.
Did not Henry DuPont—charged some Delaware abolitionists—the chief of the Delaware clan, openly support John Bell, compromise candidate of the slaveholders? And did not Charles I. DuPont, state senator and Whig candidate for governor of Delaware, vigorously endorse the pride of white racism, John C. Breckinridge?
Of course, there was Sam, the thorn in Delaware’s Dixie hearts.
No one with the wildest imagination could claim Captain Samuel F. DuPont to be a friend of the South since Sam Houston of Texas had assailed him in the halls of the U.S. Senate in December 1855. Sam Houston, a figure of national prominence since ripping Texas from Mexican hands two decades earlier (for which Houston, the slaveholder, is portrayed today as liberator, and Santa Ana, leader of the last stand of Mexicans who had abolished slavery, is condemned as a dictator), delivered one of the severest tongue lashings ever to echo in those hallowed halls, condemning DuPont for his role on the controversial Naval Efficiency Board. DuPont had been the hatchet man of that unofficial tribunal, chopping down the careers of over seventy officers and publicly branding several hundred other officers with charges of incompetency. Senator Houston’s attack in response was razor sharp, and bleeding Sam DuPont never forgot it.
Although a firm opponent of slavery, this first cousin of Henry DuPont was no abolitionist. Like all the DuPont's, Sam stood opposed to John Brown’s valiant effort to free slaves by force of arms at Harper’s Ferry. Captain DuPont heartily approved of Brown’s hanging in 1859, even as the abolitionist’s Virginian executioners, Colonel Robert E. Lee and Virginia Governor Jefferson Davis, were plotting more monumental treachery of their own against established government. But when the tense country drew closer to its violent climax with the 1860 presidential election, Sam surprised no one when he supported the candidate of northern capital, a corporation lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. For the first time since their landing at Rhode Island, the DuPont's were not politically united, and everyone in the state seemed to know it.
A few hundred anxious people gathered in Wilmington after the polls closed on election night, and for Delaware’s slaveholders the state’s completed tally brought sweet victory. Breckinridge, the candidate of slavery and constitutional tradition, had overwhelmingly carried the state, while Lincoln received less than one-fourth of Delaware’s vote. Only in the Brandywine and Christiana hundreds did Lincoln receive clear majorities, the gunpowder workers giving “Boss Henry’s” endorsement of Bell a surprisingly bold rejection. While the DuPont workers’ returns may well have embarrassed Henry, he could excuse the vote as merely reflective of the North as a whole as labor organizations from Ohio to Maine endorsed and worked for the candidate of wage labor.
The returns brought another personal embarrassment for the family, however. Charles I. DuPont lost the election for governor, despite his admitted slave holding leanings. It seems Charles had made one fatal mistake—he had supported the Catholic’s right to organize his church as he saw fit. That his sister, Amelie DuPont, was a Catholic may have had some bearing on his position and, ultimately, his defeat. In any case, more than one DuPont of “Irénée’s side” of the family winked in intimate assurance that Victor DuPont’s strain for failure had at last surfaced in the successful lawyer.
Those who did engage in such mischief may well have winced with disappointment of their own, however, when the national returns finally came in, for defeat had extended its heavy hand beyond Charles to most of the family. While losing Delaware, the Wilmington telegraph office reported, Lincoln had won the country and been elected the sixteenth president of the United States.
There were varied kinds of mourning that night along the Brandywine. Charles fumed quietly, while the Red Fellow stormed about Eleutherian Mills like an enraged bull. A month passed and the snows of December were just cooling Henry’s temper when South Carolina announced its secession from the Union, soon followed by most of the slave holding states. For Henry and most of the family, confusion reigned supreme, no one sure where to land a safe foothold. It was a time of bewilderment—and fateful decision.
In February 1861, after Lincoln’s own inauguration, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated President of the Confederate States of America and the following month ordered the raising of a 100,000-man army under the command of General Robert E. Lee. From both sides of the Potomac went feelers to Delaware inquiring on which bank its first family would pledge their allegiance. As late as April 29, 1861, after Fort Sumter had been fired upon and the Civil War begun, Charles DuPont Bird of Dover sent an urgent letter to rebellious Virginia assuring that “some of the DuPonts are friendly to the South.” 2 For no small reason, the message was considered important enough to find its way into the hands of the Confederate commander-in-chief, General Robert E. Lee.
3.2
FATTENING THE WALLET
As angry Carolina batteries pounded Fort Sumter into dead silence, a long train of
anxious Delawareans filed up to Eleutherian Mills only to find its master absent from his
usual duties. Henry DuPont had slipped out of the state, igniting a wildfire of rumors.
Perhaps to Virginia, some speculated, or Maryland? All Delaware was soon ablaze
with excitement over the prospect. But this shrewdest of Irénée DuPont’s sons was no fool to private emotions. DuPont Company’s wealth, he well understood, didn’t depend on slave labor, but on a strong, doling Washington, and Lincoln had made contact months before the outbreak of war. Like his father and brother before him, Henry’s heart ultimately followed his wallet, and he suspected it would soon be fattened by a pledge of allegiance.
No sooner had the first Confederate cannon roared than Henry DuPont was seen scurrying about Washington, loudly pledging his undying loyalty to the flag and scooping up vast mounds of war contracts in the process. Between the first hostilities of April 11, 1861, and the year’s end, Henry sold over $2.3 million worth of cannon and musket powder to the U.S. government, 3 the greatest boom in sales DuPont had ever known. This ended forever the previous suggestion of his nephew, E. I. DuPont II, that the mills close down for a while, laying off five hundred workers. Instead, the mills were now worked day and night.
But even the Brandywine’s vast reservoir of black powder wasn’t enough to meet the war’s needs. New kinds of weapons, 14-, 15-, and 20-inch naval guns, for example, needed a more powerful powder to propel huge projectiles. Black powder blasted instead of propelled. In tests using the best DuPont powder, the big guns burst like bombs. What was needed was a powder that would produce a progressively burning propellant that would apply its energy in the barrel and not suddenly in the breech.
Captain Thomas J. Rodman, U.S.A., assisted by young Lammot DuPont, had labored on this problem before the war, and in 1859 developed what Rodman called “Mammoth Powder.” This powder was composed of grains ranging in sizes from walnuts to baseballs, depending on gun caliber. The larger grains burned at a slower rate of combustion, allowing the generated energy time to take the line of least resistance—the open barrel. With Rodman’s discovery, Lammot DuPont was able to separate propellant and disruptive lines of powder in DuPont’s mass production. Thus, when the war broke out, Lammot DuPont was the only man familiar enough with Rodman’s work who also had the manufacturing ability to put Mammoth Powder into mass production for battle use. It was this DuPont powder that gave the North’s naval guns crucial superior firing power during the war.
Other crises arose for DuPont Company during these early years of the war. By the end of 1861 the government’s supply of Indian saltpeter was already running low and Lincoln feared that British sympathies for the South (and its cotton) might close the British East Indies market of saltpeter to the Union. One day Lammot DuPont, still in his twenties, was summoned to Washington. There, in the midst of a war-bustled White House, Lammot quietly listened to the words of a worried president. When at last his ears deciphered their meaning, he stood with mouth agape.
He was being asked to sail to England and singlehandedly corner the world’s saltpeter market in the name of DuPont Company. Five hundred thousand dollars in U.S. gold bullion would be sent him in London on the next American steamer after he arrived. Would he do it? Swallowing a stammer with a loud gulp, Lammot fingered his close-cropped beard and agreed, but on one condition: DuPont Company must be awarded the government contract to refine the saltpeter. Even at such a tense moment emerged the DuPont instinct to squeeze every drop of profit out of an opportunity. It was just such an ability to exploit history that would someday make DuPont a name known on six continents.
3.3
ROBBING THE GOLDEN FLEECE
On the brisk fall morning of November 19, 1861, a tall, lanky man with an American
accent and a black fringe beard, and wearing a black suit and top hat stepped ashore in
England. Immediately, because of his resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, he caused quite
a stir. Within days, however, the local stir grew into a national uproar. Traveling throughout the markets of London, Liverpool, and Greenock, within nine days this man quietly bought up all the saltpeter in Britain. Everywhere, from the House of Rothschild to the Bank of England, he became a mysterious overnight legend. As the market became depleted, his buying soon drove up prices for saltpeter and he, in turn, was suddenly pressed by his creditors for prompt payment. If he didn’t procure the necessary funds quickly, he was told, he would lose everything he had so masterfully captured.
A few mornings later the office of Barings, Brown, Shipley & Company, an agent for DuPont Company, had a visitor, a young man claiming to be Lammot DuPont of Delaware and asking for a “small” loan of half a million dollars. The numbed agents gathered their nerve and courteously showed their visitor to the door. A day or so later, when Peabody & Company announced it had advanced Lammot DuPont the money, cries of anguish emanated from Barings, Brown, Shipley & Company, while that tall man whom they did not believe met the arrival of the third steamship from America since his arrival, carrying in its hold $500,000 worth of gold bullion.
Hardly had Lammot paid off his creditors and begun loading the saltpeter than the London Times suddenly fired another bombshell, publicly opposing the shipment. Bewildered, Lammot read that the U.S. warship San Jacinto had forced a British ship, the Trent, to stop on the high seas as it left Havana. After firing a shot across her bow, federal troops had boarded the Trent and seized James Mason and John Slidell, commissioners from the Confederate states on their way to England. With the enthusiastic approval of a jubilant Congress, the southern emissaries were then imprisoned in Boston. England immediately issued a note of protest, correctly charging that the boarding was a violation of international rights since the Trent was in international waters flying the British flag. With the cool tenacity of an English bulldog, London demanded Slidell and Mason’s safe return. Until this was done, the Times now insisted, the Union should be prevented from purchasing the saltpeter.
Beneath all the legal platitudes the paper bellowed, Lammot knew that the London Times spoke for Britain’s economic rulers and guessed his time was running out. He quickly finished chartering his ship and crew and was just loading the last of the cargo when a British customs officer appeared at the dock demanding to inspect the owner’s credentials. Lammot handed them over, hoping that would be all, but the officer then requested that Lammot accompany him to the customs house. With a wink to his crew, Lammot agreed, but actually the tall, bearded American had other ideas. As he left the dock following the customs officer, Lammot whispered to the captain of his ship to prepare to sail at a moment’s notice.
Now, one might suppose a normal procedure in such circumstances would be to dispose of these small affairs of state as quickly as possible and renew his efforts to escape with his prize. But such was not the way of Lammot DuPont. An insatiable appetite to learn the hidden intricacies of state maneuvers had been the secret of the DuPont's ability to harvest the rich fields of government patronage since Versailles, and this great-grandson of Pierre DuPont had learned well the family’s skill.
On the way to the customs house, Lammot induced the doltish officer to share lunch with him. Sated with food, wine, pleasantries, and flattery, the officer soon blurted out that it was actually the British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, who had ordered Lammot’s ship docked as part of a new British embargo on all shipments to America. It was all the sad confirmation that Lammot needed.
Later, rid of his official chore at the credentials house, Lammot returned to his ship and quietly ordered the captain to sail at high tide, 4:00 A.M. the next morning. London, however, was no Sebastopol when it came to eluding the will of the British stock market. A file of armed redcoats on the wharf the next morning saw to that.
As silently as he came, Lammot then took leave of England alone on another ship, and returned to Washington. There, in his characteristically unassuming way, Lammot quietly suggested to Lincoln that he threaten Britain with war. And just as quietly, Lincoln agreed, ordering Secretary of State Seward to draw up young DuPont’s credentials. All this, however, was only a toothless bluff to rescue the tattered vestiges of the Union’s pride. A few days before, Lincoln had received an ultimatum from London threatening war itself unless Slidell and Mason were immediately released. At the same time, reports came in that thousands of British troops had sailed for Canada. Faced with the dilemma of war on two fronts, Lincoln surrendered to compromise, releasing the southerners with full apologies. On January 1, 1862, Slidell and Mason boarded ship to resume their journey to England.
On that day also, from another ship, Lammot du Pont watched the American shore dip into a watery horizon. A few weeks later he arrived in London and four times pressed his name at 10 Downing Street only to be rebuffed each time. Indeed, it was the kind of treatment a DuPont was unused to, and Lammot finally decided to literally grip destiny by the throat.
While waiting there for an appointment one day, Lammot suddenly bolted from a chair and rushed past attendants right into Lord Palmerston’s private office. Before a startled but amused ruler of the world’s largest empire, Lammot DuPont then laid down his own ultimatum: saltpeter or war. Clearly agitated by the whole affair, the Prime Minister promised to have a decision by the afternoon. But Lammot fired back that that was impossible and concluded that war seemed the only alternative. He would sail for the United States the next day, he explained, and left.
That evening, while not exactly enjoying his last dinner at Morley’s Hotel, Lammot had a surprising visitor—the Prime Minister. Lord Palmerston joined him at a table and whispered that his permit would be granted the next day; the British Empire was bending, although a bit amusedly, to a DuPont. But Lammot, as stubborn as ever, insisted one be rendered on the spot. Palmerston, although embarrassed by the youth’s impulsiveness, scribbled off a permit and commented that he was at liberty to state confidentially to Mr. Lincoln that scarcely for any cause now would England go to war with America. He did not, however, mention why—the opposition, as Senator Hoar of Massachusetts would later put it in 1879, of “workers of Lancashire.”
By February 2, Lammot’s shipment of 4 million pounds of saltpeter was sailing over the ocean bound for America. It was an important and prosperous victory for the family, fully supplying the North’s (and DuPont’s) war effort for an entire year. Thereafter, relaxed tensions between Britain and the United States allowed easier purchases, and, for DuPont, easier profits.
3.4
ADMIRAL SAMUEL F. DUPONT
ADMIRAL SAMUEL F. DUPONT
THE PRIDE AND DISGRACE
Lammot DuPont was not the only member of his family who prominently served the
federal government during the Civil War. The very blockade of southern ports that had
indirectly caused the capture of Slidell and Mason and jeopardized Lammot’s mission
was the work of none other than Lammot’s colorful cousin, Rear Admiral Samuel F. DuPont. If family legend would have its way, Sam was an old, whiskered sea warrior when he received his commission as a midshipman in the U.S. Navy at the age of 12. In fact, Sam rose steadily into the Navy’s upper ranks through a passion for both service and connections. His very first commission had been arranged by his grandfather, Pierre DuPont, as a personal favor from President Thomas Jefferson. The second break for this elder son of Victor DuPont came during the Mexican War, when, given command of the warship U.S.S. Cayane, Commander DuPont ravished the Gulf of California and won his first official recognition. Typically, Sam’s superior at that time was Commodore William Shubrick, an in-law through his cousin and sister-in-law Julia DuPont. After that Sam was appointed a member of the board to organize the Naval Academy, winning for himself the title of “Father of Annapolis.” From there, Sam joined the Lighthouse Board and then the infamous Naval Efficiency Board, where he made a notorious name for himself as a butcher of naval careers.
In July of 1857, Samuel (now Captain) DuPont was given not only one of the Navy’s finest ships, the U.S.S. Minnesota, but also one of its most important duties up to that time: the William B. Reed diplomatic mission to China. Again, “A long friendly acquaintance with the Minister,” Sam admitted, “doubtless assisted in getting me the command.” 4 It was a fortunate, artful coincidence in the finest of DuPont traditions.
Although it proved to hold little historical weight against the gigantic drama unfolding between the states, the Reed Mission was considered important at the time of its launching. The United States was interested in opening new markets for products from its growing industries. Europe, long the consumer of most of America’s exports, was simply not enough of a profitable market by the 1850’s, and the movement to the Pacific Coast was induced partly by lucrative trading prospects with China’s huge population— a tremendous market for American shirts, tobacco, and manufactured goods. As early as 1800, twenty-three United States vessels had visited Canton with $2.5 million in cargo. By 1832 seven firms and twenty U.S. merchants were regularly trading with China, and by 1850 furs (particularly seal skins) from the Northwest had also found their way to the besieged giant of the East. 5
The economic motivations for the mission, however, held little interest for Captain DuPont. What did interest Sam almost to the point of fatigue was his ship and crew. Captain DuPont especially was alarmed about the caliber of seamen under his command. On September 7, 1857, he reported to the Secretary of Navy that his crew was below mediocrity. But Sam had a broad solution to the whole problem. “As seamen are so inferior to what they formerly were,” he wrote the Secretary, “the landsmen should be selected with more care and should not all of them be taken from our large cities from which we get some of the most vicious and worthless of their population.” 6 Instead, the snapping obedience of a naive country boy was closer to Sam’s heart.
DuPont's were seldom impressed by anything—not even a country—not connected with their firm, and Captain Samuel DuPont was certainly no exception. China, bleeding giant of hundreds of millions, was regarded by Sam with a Western arrogance familiar to conquerors. What did impress Sam upon his arrival in China was not China, but the European, and particularly British, warships patrolling its waters. In fact, Sam was downright jealous. These invading forces had just completed a successful war against the Chinese Imperial regime to win Britain’s “right” to continue dumping her $17 million annual Indian opium trade on China, despite a Chinese edict of prohibition since 1838.
China had suffered heavy losses in that joint European attack of 1842 and was subsequently forced to allow her population to become addicts for British profits. In addition, the cities of Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo, and Shanghai were opened for “trade” with other European powers, and the port of Hong Kong permanently ceded to the London Stock Exchange.
Then, in 1856 and 1857, the people of Canton rose in rebellion and began burning down foreign factories, the very essence of their exploitation. The British imperialists immediately waged war for more trade concessions and were joined by the Russian Czar and the new French Republic, both lusting for profitable treaty “revisions.” Russia and France, for varying reasons, then invited the United States to join as a treaty power, spurring the Reed Mission. The United States, however, wanted to remain neutral in the fighting now taking place between the attacking Europeans and the resisting Chinese. Such neutrality, Washington reasoned, might result in more friendly relations with Peking and greater trade dividends than joining in the attack would return.
Sam DuPont disagreed. No sooner had he arrived and witnessed the piracy of the European warships than he developed a sudden passion for China’s economy. With the cavalier attitude of a Brandywine aristocrat, Captain DuPont demanded that Washington allow him to join in the looting. “Our present neutrality does not enhance us in the slightest degree in their [Chinese] good opinion or good will,” he wrote Delaware’s Senator Bayard on November 24. “In short, they do not reason by our standard of ethics or anything else, and it seems quite absurd to judge them the same.” 7
Sam didn’t get his wish; the orders stood firm: no United States participation. Sam had to resign himself to pining away aboard the Minnesota, listening to foreign cannon roar against the harbor, watching enviously from his ship as European forces successfully attacked fort after fort, finally hammering the city of Canton into submission in December. Canton’s provincial viceroy, Yeh, was seized by the British and kidnapped to Calcutta, India, where he was imprisoned.
Yeh may have been one of the lucky ones. Canton became a hellhole for its Chinese population during the British occupation. British seamen looted, raped, and started fights that sometimes resulted in murder of Chinese. The Western forces heaped a barrage of violence on the defenseless population, treating them with open racist contempt. Indeed, it was surprising to no one that the people of Canton were hostile to the foreign invaders—no one, that is, except Captain DuPont. Sam was infuriated that the Cantonese were not cloaked in the slick veneer of politeness known to the upper class Mandarins. “They [the Cantonese] are a stiff-necked people by themselves,” he wrote in a huff, “and will have to be treated as such.” 8 Apparently, Reed agreed. “The powers of Western civilization must insist on what they know to be their rights and give up the dream of dealing with China as a power to which ordinary rules apply.” 9
Nothing sparked Sam to action like defending American business interests overseas. When it was feared that the oppressed Chinese population of Macao might rise in an insurrection that would endanger U.S. investments there, Sam charged his warship across the sea to the rescue, occupying the port from December 30, 1857, to February 27, 1858. By March 24 he was again in the Chinese interior, prowling along the Yangtze River, this time forcibly intervening for a white merchant faced with revolt by his Chinese crew. For Samuel DuPont, the interests of civilization and white supremacy were synonymous. This position would remain unchanged even during the bitterest hostilities against southern slaveholders during the Civil War.
Days of Pride
Slowly, with an uneasy gait, the blue-uniformed soldiers rode through the streets of
Baltimore, and as they filed past the rows of houses with their tall, white marbled steps,
crowds of white residents began to form along the side. The shouts soon came
—“Damned Yankees!”—but the men from Massachusetts looked straight ahead, trying to
get their regiment of militia through the city as quickly as possible and on to the
endangered capital, trying not to notice what had become the mounting fury of a racist
mob. Suddenly, the venom that had been so strengthened by the Confederate attack on Sumter only a week before, spilled out onto the streets, and the entire regiment was
under attack. Before it was over, a number of Union soldiers had been killed or
wounded. A few hours later, a hundred miles to the north, Captain Samuel DuPont, commander of the Philadelphia Naval Yard since his return from China, received word that all railroad communications between the nation’s capital and the North had been cut. Only Annapolis, Maryland, still had a line open to Washington. Captain DuPont immediately assumed responsibility for restoring communications and fired off a series of orders to all the forces of the Yard under his command. Soon Union ships were steaming between Philadelphia and Annapolis, opening a vital sea line of contact between the North and the endangered seat of government.
As reward for his quick initiative, Samuel DuPont was appointed president of the commission delegated to select a permanent naval base in the South for a proposed Union blockade off the southeastern coast. Port Royal, South Carolina, one of the finest and deepest harbors in America, was chosen as the target, and Sam DuPont was given command of the attack.
As Commodore of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, Samuel DuPont commanded the largest fleet in U.S. naval history up to that time: 75 ships, including 25 Army transports, and 14,000 troops under Brigadier General Thomas West Sherman. All these forces gathered at Hampton Roads, Virginia, a vast armada spreading out before Sam’s astonished eyes. It was a huge responsibility, but as Sam well knew, also a huge opportunity to enhance his naval career. On October 29, 1861, Commodore DuPont cast his die of ships to the fortune of the sea.
It almost proved a disaster. As the fleet advanced down the coast, nature rose to render Sam some justifiable fears. A thick, dark storm suddenly rolled over the sky and hit the fleet with hurricane winds. Throughout the entire tempest, as rain and sea lashed against his flagship, the Wabash, Sam could do nothing but trust his junior officers to keep the fleet together. When the rain finally lifted, he was heartsick: not a ship was in sight, just the choppy waves of a hungry sea. By November 3 at 8:00 P.M. he could see only seven ships from his flagship, and he was beginning to fear the worst. But within twenty-four hours Sam’s eyes widened gleefully as twenty-five ships anchored off Port Royal, many more dotting the horizon.
As his fleet flocked around him once more, Sam ordered the dangerous shoal outside Port Royal buoyed and breached by the lighter vessels, those under 18 feet of draft. Then, as silently as cats moving in on their prey, the heavy gunboats slipped over, and finally the Wabsh. “The responsibility of hazarding so noble a frigate was not a light one,” DuPont wrote with characteristic modesty in his official report. “Over a prolonged bar of over two miles there was but a foot or two of water to spare, and the fall and rise of the tide is such that if she had grounded she would have sustained most serious injury from straining, if not become a total loss. Too much, however, was at stake to hesitate and the result was entirely successful.… The safe passage of this great ship over the bar was hailed by gratifying cheers from the crowded vessels.” 10 The credit for the skillful maneuver, however, did not really belong to Sam but, as his own biographer points out, to the careful examination and calculation by Captains C. H. Davis and C. O. Boutell, U.S.N. 11 In effect, all Sam had to do was sail across the shoal when instructed to by his junior officers.
With the bar crossed, the attack began in earnest. By circling in constant motion, the Union ships were able to avoid serious damage from the shore batteries while levying a furious barrage of their own. Soon, some excellent DuPont Mammoth Powder reduced the rebel forts to silence, and Port Royal was in Union hands. Sam did not attend to the Union occupation. Commander Charles Henry Davis, his Chief of Staff, and Commander John Rodgers were the ones who actually went ashore in a raiding party, discovered that the forts had been abandoned, and hoisted the Union banner. Meanwhile, Sam was busy writing his formal reports to Washington. “The two, Rodgers and Davis, are off on the other side to see the Bay Point occupation and forts,” he wrote his wife, “and I am going to set to work on my reports.” 12
It was DuPont’s greatest victory, the circular motion tactic winning him an unqualified reputation as a skilled professional warrior. But Sam’s claim to fame was almost immediately challenged as stolen from his Chief of Staff, Charles Davis. Davis’s son and biographer years later claimed that “the tactics of the battle, which were Davis’s own, were masterful.” 13 Sam howled in outrage to his wife about the accusations, but they were later supported by Secretary of Navy Gideon Welles, who reported that Rear Admiral Sylvanus W. Godon had told him that “the attack by sailing in a circle was not part of the original plan (of DuPont), but an expedient, an afterthought, when it was found more convenient to move from under fire than to remain.” 14 Davis, according to Welles, was indeed the author of the circling tactic, not Samuel DuPont.
Nevertheless, it was Samuel DuPont who proudly wore the wreath of Port Royal’s conqueror, receiving the gratitude of a relieved Congress on February 22, 1862, and being appointed Rear Admiral, a new title given to the highest naval officers. Delawareans even presented their hero with a silver sword. Sam had never been able to feign humility. He was ecstatic.
After Port Royal, Admiral DuPont intensified the southern blockade in hope of cutting off the population of the rebellious states from needed supplies. Then he attacked northern Florida, occupying Jacksonville and capturing control of the St. John’s River. This effectively sealed off blockade runners. Sam also captured control of the Savannah River. At this time, had Sam landed troops, he might have been able to take Charleston and Savannah. But he didn’t, because of his own hesitancy as well as that of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Within a short while the opportunity was lost as Confederate General Robert E. Lee moved some of his forces into the area.
Still another opportunity was lost when DuPont’s junior officers, Commanders Davis and Rodgers, seized the initiative and moved their gunboats up the Savannah River to seal off Fort Pulaski from the city of Savannah. This accomplished, they then fired upon and seized the fort. Admiral DuPont then intervened and ordered them to relinquish their prizes, claiming Savannah had little strategic value and that he had not enough troops to hold it. It was to prove to be one of the most serious naval blunders of the Civil War, a key factor in the Admiral’s first and last defeat and the U.S. Navy’s worst disaster up to that time.
Crisis at Charleston
On March 9, 1862, the two ships clashed for hours, the Virginia’s broadsides bouncing off the iron suit of its adversary while the Monitor delivered blow after decisive blow from its swivel-turreted gun fired with the newest burning hell from the Brandywine: DuPont Mammoth Powder. Ultimately, the Monitor’s maneuverability and high-powered cannon won the edge of victory. The Union’s blockade was saved, sealing the fate of the Confederacy.
With the battle of the Monitor and the Virginia dawned a new age of metal ships, eclipsing forever the wooden world of the old Navy. Emboldened by the military and propaganda prospects of ironclads, Lincoln ordered many more built, not only to strengthen the blockage but also to turn the Union’s naval strategy toward taking the offensive. On January 6, 1863, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles ordered monitors to be sent to Admiral DuPont’s fleet for use in an attack on Charleston, South Carolina. “The capture of this most important port rests solely upon the success of the naval force,” Welles wrote DuPont, “and it is committed to your hands to execute.” 17 These were fateful words, shaping the doomed strategy of an overzealous naval commander only too eager to impress his superiors.
Sam DuPont’s first move of genius was to leave behind most of his fleet. The Canandaigua, Housatonic, Unadilla, Wissahickon, and Huron, all warships of considerable effectiveness but of the wooden variety, were left in reserve outside the harbor bar. Sam also left behind the huge Wabash and four other gunboats, the Vermont, Paul Jones, Sebago, and Marblehead, to protect U.S. Army positions at Hilton Head and Beaufort. Of course, this all would have been unnecessary had Sam instead decided to use those 10,000 troops to help his attack on the well-fortified southern harbor.
The streets of Charleston were filled with gray-uniformed Confederate troops in that April of 1863. Horses, pulling their loads of cannon and ammunition, raced up and down the main thoroughfares, charging the residents with a mood of anticipation. Yet, the normal business of the “peculiar institution” went on undisturbed: wagons brimming with Black faces scarred with fear and angry frustration rolled into the auction place to constitute Carolina’s most lucrative trade—slavery. Along the daisied walks in front of the huge white mansions of the city strolled dainty southern belles, colorful parasols shading their bleached-white skin. Indeed, Charleston seemed a smug little town, gilded with the trappings of stolen wealth and labor, sure of the perpetuity of its existence.
Only when strange thunderclaps broke into the quiet noon of April 7, only when Admiral Samuel DuPont had fired his mammoth cannon into the sweet spring air, did the city sense the frightening imminence of what had so proudly been hailed as war.
Sam’s ship, the U.S.S. New Ironside's, was positioned in the middle of the battle formation and protected by surrounding ironclads so “signals could be better made to both ends of the line.” 25 But the hazy weather of the South’s spring had stopped their advance and the Admiral elected to wait another day. At noon on April 7, the attack— and the chaos—began.
“I made signal to the vessels to weigh anchor,” Sam later reported, “having previously ordered them not to reply to the batteries on Morgan Island, but reserve their fire until they could pass Fort Sumter, in case there were no obstructions, and attack its northwest face.” 26 For DuPont to assume there were no obstructions was amazing. It reveals his unconcern about informing Secretary Welles of such an important battle aspect earlier. Obstructions were there, all right: rows of casks strung from piles extending from none other than James Island, a strategic position previously abandoned by the Union army with the full concordance of the Admiral.
It was a catastrophe. Snagged like a trapped school of tuna, the fleet could only endure the murderous fire poured down on them from Fort Moultrie and all the Confederate batteries on Sullivan’s Island, Morris Island, and Fort Sumter. The positioning of the Admiral’s boat (ostensibly to facilitate communications) proved disastrous when the monitors’ line found the New Ironsides clumsily blocking their attempts to maneuver.
Sam meanwhile refused to return fire at Fort Sumter “without great risk,” he believed, “of firing into them” (his own ships). It was total chaos, with Sam bumbling in the middle. As a final self-inflicted injury, he even crashed his own ship against two of the other ironclads.
Within forty minutes after the battle began, five of the ironclads were disabled and all had been hit. In anticipation of easy victory, Sam had allowed Henry Villard, a reporter from the New York Tribune, on board the New Ironsides for a coloring of glory. The publicity stunt backfired. Even inexperienced Villard, who tried his best to be generous in his account, could see that the Father of Annapolis and conqueror of Port Royal had stumbled into the deadliest of traps. “As the forts and batteries like so many vomiting craters of volcanoes sent forth one torrent of destruction after another,” he reported, “my heart failed and panged with fear of seeing the little monitors shivered into atoms.” 27
Apparently, Villard wasn’t the only man on board who panged with fear. Without his New Ironsides having fired more than a single round, although she was but 1,000 yards from Sumter’s batteries, Sam sounded the retreat for both his attack and his career.
Days of Disgrace
As Villard feared, DuPont’s fleet of monitors did indeed come close to being
shivered into atoms. The Keokuk, for example, was hit over ninety times, its armored
body punched with gaping holes. Even the New Ironsides, which suffered no real
material damage—because of its position in the middle of the formation, it was shielded
by the other monitors—was hit sixty to seventy times. “During the evening,” the Admiral later reported, “the commanding officers of the monitors came on board my flagship and, to my regret, I soon became convinced of the utter impracticability of taking the city of Charleston by the force under my command.” 28 Actually, Sam needed little convincing. In fact, contrary to the impression conveyed in his official report, Sam hadn’t even asked his junior officers for their opinions. The Tribune reporter was present at the time and recorded that “The Admiral quietly received their reports, but did not ask for their opinion.” 29
Ignoring the unused remainder of his fleet, DuPont still considered using only ironclads that had already been engaged in a disastrous battle. “I had hoped that the endurance of the ironclads would have enabled them to have borne any weight to which they might have been exposed,” he wrote, “but the weight of the Confederate batteries’ firing power had been too great.” 30 DuPont’s fleet altogether fired only 139 projectiles, the turret guns of the monitors being able to fire only once every seven or ten minutes. In contrast, the rebels fired 2,220 projectiles, according to the most conservative estimate. The Philadelphia Public Ledger of April 14, 1863, reported 3,500 shots fired from 400 to 500 rebel guns.
The next morning the Keokuk sank. Again, DuPont refused to consider the rest of his fleet for a renewal of the attack. “The reserved squadron of wooden vessels referred to in my general order of battle under Captain J. F. Green of the Canandaigua was always in readiness,” he reported, “but their service in the engagement was not called into action.” 31 As far as Sam was concerned, the attack was over.
Unfortunately for the hero of the Brandywine, the President of the United States disagreed.
On April 13 President Lincoln telegraphed DuPont ordering him to stay within the bar at Charleston and prevent the rebels from erecting batteries on Morris Island. DuPont defiantly refused, claiming the ships, because of poor anchorage, were endangered by an easterly gale.
On April 14 Lincoln tried again, ordering DuPont and General Hunter to take the batteries on Morris and Sullivan Islands. “We still hope,” wired Lincoln, “that by cordial and judicious cooperation you [DuPont and Hunter] can take the batteries on Morris Island and Sullivan’s Island and Fort Sumter. But whether you can or not, we wish the demonstration kept up for a tone for a collateral and very important object.” 32
The meaning of Lincoln’s order as Commander-in-Chief was obvious: continue the attack even as only a diversion for a military assault being planned elsewhere.
DuPont again refused, now belatedly claiming he needed more troops. General Hunter was furious. He suggested another attack immediately, employing his 10,000 troops. Still DuPont refused.
By now Hunter was desperate. On May 22 he wrote Lincoln charging that the Admiral had ignored his troops both during the attack and now, after the attack. “I fear Admiral DuPont distrusts the ironclads so much that he has resolved to do nothing with them this summer, and I therefore most earnestly beg you to liberate me from those orders to cooperate with the Navy which now tie me down to share the Admiral’s inactivity.” 33
Hunter proposed a daring invasion of Georgia. He promised to raise an army of freed Black slaves, commission their officers, and begin a march burning the plantations of slaveholders. Hunter’s abolitionist colors were showing, and Lincoln would have no part of it. In Colonel Henry A. DuPont’s words, it was “a plain violation of the laws of civilized warfare,” but not too uncivilized for General Sherman to receive permission to do exactly the same thing a year later. What made the crucial difference was Hunter’s plan to arm the Black slaves. That, Lincoln felt, was too radical an approach toward war against slave masters. The “Great Emancipator” had limits to emancipation.
Immediately after his refusal to renew the attack, Admiral DuPont came under public criticism, first from Secretary Welles and then from his own lieutenant-commander on the New Ironsides, George E. Belknap, a relation of W. W. Belknap, then serving in a high post in the War Department and later Secretary of War under Grant. But when critical remarks also flew from his chief engineer, Alban Stimers, Sam struck back. Whereas Belknap was related to circles of power, Stimers was a mere chief engineer, whom any admiral could handle. Stimers was promptly arrested and put on trial for insubordination. Luckily for the engineer, Secretary Welles intervened and rescued him from the Admiral’s storm of vengeance.
Most northern newspapers handled DuPont’s defeat diplomatically and generously; most, that is, except one. On April 15 the Baltimore American carried an account of the battle under the title, “HOW NOT TO DO IT.” Its editor, Charles C. Fulton, who as a reporter was at the Ogeechee River in the warship Bibb just before the Charleston attack, declared that “the operation against Charleston had been entrusted to incompetent hands.” 34 Exactly one week later Sam asked the Navy Department to publicly intervene and reject the American’s condemnation, especially since Fulton’s reports had received the censored approval of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox.
As was usual by now, the Admiral’s cries of outrage were poorly received in Washington. The Department simply replied that releasing DuPont’s official report would hurt U.S. morale because it was full of charges of the weaknesses of the ironclads. “What public benefit, let me ask, could be derived from its publicity,” Welles asked DuPont on May 15. “You had received both from the President and myself communications enjoining you to continue to menace Charleston in view of operations in other quarters.” 35
While DuPont felt he had been unjustly criticized, one question haunted Washington: why didn’t the Admiral suggest alternative plans for an attack on Charleston if, as he now claimed, the monitors were to blame? The answer was even more condemning than the Baltimore newspaper’s charge of military incompetence: careerism. Right after the attack, already under criticism, DuPont complained to his wife Sophie that “If consulted from time to time, if my opinion had been asked, I would have spoken freely.” 36 Fearing the bad favor of Secretary Welles and other superiors, Sam had elected to remain silent and risk the lives of the men under his command. “Had you at any time expressed an opinion against the expediency of an attack,” Welles wrote DuPont on May 14, “or a belief that it would be disastrous, such was my confidence in you, and my respect for your intelligence and capability, that I should certainly have reviewed the subject, and not unlikely an entirely different arrangement of our forces would have been projected.” 37
Meanwhile, another defeat fell on our hapless hero. Sam had allowed the sunken Keokuk’s guns to fall into enemy hands.
The Admiral had given a monitor to Chief Engineer Edward Robie to blow up the wreck and then neglected the responsibility of seeing to the task’s fulfillment. Although Robie failed in his attempt to use torpedoes to destroy the Keokuk, DuPont had little concern for the successful carrying out of that task until it was too late. Under the cover of night, rebel divers removed the ship’s guns.
By now, Welles had taken all his patience would endure. On April 16 Sam had written him a letter dripping with self-righteous honor. “I have to request,” DuPont had crowed, “that the Department will not hesitate to relieve me by any officer who, in its opinion, is more able to execute that service in which I have had the misfortune to fail— the capture of Charleston.” 38 Welles decided to take DuPont at his word. On June 3 he ordered Rear Admiral Andrew H. Foote to take over command of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron. Later, Welles made a more explicit explanation for his decision by censuring DuPont. “The duty of destroying the Keokuk," he angrily wrote the bewildered Delawarean, “and preventing her guns from falling into the hands of the rebels, devolved upon the commander-in-chief rather than on Chief Engineer Robie.” 39
Foote never lived to take command, much less take Charleston. He died en route from New York on June 26, and was replaced by Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren, who took over DuPont’s command on July 6, 1863—but not before Admiral DuPont managed to engage in one final act of publicity piracy.
On June 10 the Confederate ironclad Atlanta was seen approaching Wassaw Sound on its way to attack the Union blockade. Sam ordered the monitors Nahant and Weehawken, commanded by the ever reliable Captain John Rodgers, to do battle. Seven days later, on June 17, the Atlanta appeared, accompanied by two wooden steamboats filled with gay southern spectators eager to see the hated Yankees get beaten at last.
Rodgers lost no time in spoiling their day. As soon as he was in range, he fired his cannon at the Atlanta four times, each time achieving a hit, forcing the battered warship to run aground and surrender. The two steamboats turned about and fled with their horrified passengers. It was one of the South’s last great junkets.
The Atlanta had been taken, but the credit for the prize graced not the name of John Rodgers, but that of Samuel F. DuPont. “All look to it,” he wrote triumphantly to Sophie, “as a special providence in my behalf.” 40 His biographer claimed “the capture of the Atlanta by the Weehawken was primarily due to DuPont’s good judgment and to the promptitude with which he put his decisions into effect.” 41 [Time changes nothing with this family of inbred pond scum,legend's in their own minds DC]
Neither the public nor Congress was as impressed, however. On December 17, 1863, the Senate began an official inquiry into Admiral DuPont’s conduct at Charleston. On January 13, 1864, the House of Representatives did likewise. As far as the public and the government were concerned, Samuel DuPont had led the U.S. Navy into the worst defeat of its history.
Admiral DuPont, his health broken by his forced retirement in complete disgrace, spent the next two years in seclusion at Louviers, his father’s mansion on the Brandywine. Only here, by the familiar, constant grinding of the powder mills, was he able to find refuge from Congressional investigations and public damnation. Here, a man once considered as a possible future presidential nominee ended his life like his father—a failure. On June 23, 1865, at the age of 62, Samuel Francis DuPont died, of a broken heart, the family claimed. They were probably right.
3.5
HENRY A. DUPONT, HERO
OF THE BRANDYWINE
In those terrible days of mass slaughter, the countryside of Virginia was covered with
the human residue of battle. Thousands of men, their bodies torn and bleeding, would be
laid side by side in an open field. There, each man would wait to die, lullabied to
endless sleep by the low hum of a thousand lonely groans surrounding him and blending
into a choir of death. Such was the somber scene following the battle of Piedmont in June of 1864 when a thin federal officer waded silently through a vast blue lake of fallen compatriots, his eyes never lowering but fixed straight ahead, his black shiny boots never pausing in their gait but rising and falling; even after the blue sea of uniforms turned to gray, they still continued, stepping among the dead and dying, stopping only when they found the polished boots of a fellow officer.
There lay Colonel William H. Browne of the Confederate infantry, now a wounded prisoner, and now, as in the past at West Point, a good friend of Captain Henry A. DuPont, U.S.A., son of Henry DuPont, Sr. For a while, the two men talked the mutual language of aristocracy, expressing their anticipation of seeing each other during Browne’s captivity. Finally, as he rose to leave, Henry asked his former classmate if he had any money. No, Browne replied, whereupon DuPont reached into his pocket and drew out a ten dollar bill, and left.
Henry never saw Browne again. The Confederate officer died that night of his wounds and was deposited in a hollow Virginia grave the next morning. Years later, Henry would remark that his “most intimate and devoted friends were Southerners.” 42 Although it may seem strange that Henry A. DuPont fought so gallantly for the Union cause while harboring strong southern sympathies, the answer lies in the stronger bonds he felt toward the family code of hierarchy.
Henry DuPont had always wanted his son, Henry Algernon, to be the career soldier that family duty and company crisis had prevented him from becoming. From his earliest days, Henry Algernon just assumed that his military career was inevitable, and after his appointment to the Military Academy he more than satisfied his father’s ambitions.
When he graduated on May 6, 1861, Henry was first in his class. Not surprisingly, this oldest son of the de facto ruler of Delaware was also a first-class snob, considering West Point not aristocratic enough for a descendant of Pontius Cominius, the legendary Roman ancestor of the DuPont's. During his tenure as a cadet, Henry’s letters reveal that he had more in common with schoolmates from the southern planter class than with northerners, not merely because Delaware was also a slave state with common problems, but because of common aristocratic airs. 43
Eventually, Henry found his father’s stern aristocratic training useful on the battlefield. Put in command of an artillery unit, he quickly rose to the position of Chief of Artillery of the Department of Virginia and later of the Army of Virginia, holding the rank of brevet Captain. In 1864 he commanded Light Battery B of the Fifth U.S. Artillery at the Battle of New Market. Later, at the Battle of Winchester, his horse was shot from under him but, according to reports, he cheered his men on to press the attack. At the Battle of Fisher’s Hill, Captain DuPont countered a flank attack by rallying his guns while insisting on riding on his clearly visible, and for his men inspirational, white horse. Bullets whistled around him, as did afterwards the praise of his superiors. Henry’s rank was raised to brevet Major in September—then, after another brilliant performance at the Battle of Cedar Creek, to brevet Lieutenant Colonel the following month. But thirty years would have to pass before the government would, for opportune reasons, choose to award Henry the Congressional Medal of Honor “for gallant and meritorious conduct.”
Henry’s conduct, however, was not always so gallant or meritorious.
His description of General Franz Seigal, United States Volunteers, for example, reveals a haughty class arrogance. Seigal, like many thousands of immigrants who had volunteered willingly to fight against slavery, had participated in the 1848 workers’ revolution that swept Europe and threatened the rule of capitalists. Because of the general’s background, Henry’s limited toleration for taking orders from anyone was further strained, no doubt aggravated by Seigal’s questionable competency and his failure to credit Henry for delaying an enemy advance on a strategic bridge during the Battle of New Market on May 15, 1864. According to DuPont family legend, Henry gallantly refused General David Hunter’s order to bomb the Virginia Military Academy in June 1864.
His own memoirs testify, 44 however, that he executed the order with speed and deadly efficiency. When the Union demolition was completed, V.M.I, including its famed, extensive library, was left a gutted ruin, burned to the ground, while Henry was left mending his wounded conscience. Decades later, as a United States senator, Henry would introduce a bill for payment of compensation.
3.6
THE CONQUEST OF DELAWARE
While his son was in the field conquering new glory for the family name, “Boss
Henry” DuPont was beset with dangers closer to home. Delaware at the outbreak of the
war was still a slave state, and there were many grumblings of support for the
Confederacy. In Dover the state legislature refused to vote its loyalty to the Union, and
the downstate counties of Kent and Sussex, ruled by slaveholders, openly expressed
allegiance to the South. Because of Henry’s personal pledge of loyalty at the White House, Lincoln had Governor Burton of Delaware appoint him Major General of the state’s armed forces. The first order Henry gave in this office was to forcefully collect as many guns in the state as possible for “inventory.” Then he ordered every DuPont employee to take an oath of loyalty to the federal government. Those who refused were immediately fired; those who remained were given a bonus and drafted into two companies of state militia captained by Lammot and Charles DuPont. With his mills now guarded, Henry felt free to order every officer and man in the Delaware state militia to take the loyalty oath. However, unlike the Brandywine workers, not all Delawareans were yet accustomed to unilateral decrees from Henry DuPont. Many refused outright.
Faced with the prospect of armed insurrection, Henry lost no time in telegraphing the federal commander in Baltimore, General John A. Dix, and within days long blue files of federal troops were marching down the streets of Wilmington. With the state’s largest, and actually only, city securely in his hands, “General” Henry, as he was by now called, marched his forces into southern Delaware, crushing any spirit of resistance that flickered in the area. From that day on, DuPont control of the entire state of Delaware has been complete. Nor did Henry ever try to hide this awesome power. In 1868, 1876, 1880, 1884, and 1888 he was Delaware’s proudest presidential elector in the Electoral College.
3.7
PROFITS FROM TRAGEDY
The war rolled back and forth across the continent like some giant whirlwind of
death, twisting and tearing everything in its path, setting thousands of brothers and
friends at each other’s throats. In Delaware, too, the war caused its hardships. Sophie DuPont, wife of Rear Admiral Samuel DuPont, for example, complained of having “no
society whatever but Irishmen.”
45 Her next most frequent complaint was of Lincoln,
whom she, like many of her kin, intensely disliked. Indeed, the war was hard on the social life of the Brandywine, and as is often the case when idleness has only worry for companion, the DuPont women became deeply religious, their hours of pious devotions exceeded only by the hours spent discussing newfound aches and pains. For a short while, young Alexis Irénée II relieved some of their boredom by offering pistol lessons to the younger women. Then he and his pistols enlisted in the Union cause, and the church services increased in frequency.
Only once during the war did the DuPont girls have some color brought into their drab lives. After the firing on Fort Sumter, federal troops were sent to guard the mills. Sporting their brightest parasols and finest lace dresses, the girls often traveled to Camp DuPont, where they were treated to parades and even serenades by members of the band. Eventually, propositions were made to the women by soldiers whose class intimidated spines had been well starched with alcohol. At that point, Henry drew the class line, ordering a sundown curfew on all the family’s women.
Delaware was a lonely state for not only DuPont's, but most of its women. One out of every eight men, Black and white, was sent to war, the state soon being depleted of its best manpower. At one point available men became so scarce that Henry requested the use of fifty Confederate prisoners from Camp DuPont to fill vacancies in the artillery company guarding his mills. 46
Henry’s powder men were exempt from the draft on his own insistence. 47 Henry’s mills, however, could be as dangerous as the worst of battlefields. Between 1861 and 1865, eleven explosions ripped through the mills, killing forty-three men and injuring scores more. Henry blamed the explosions on “unknown causes,” insinuating sabotage, but most Delawareans conceded that a decline in the mills’ safety standards caused by the General’s production speed-up was probably more to blame.
Henry ran the mills day and night. He had lost about $150,000 when his southern inventories were seized by the Confederates (some of which were compensated for after the war), and also lost much business, but the war had been more than a soothing balm. Before the bloodshed began, Du Pont Company had never sold more than $752,000 worth of powder in a year. The second half of 1861 more than tripled that amount from just government sales alone, excluding other business the war economy stimulated. In 1862 Henry raked in another $661,000 from government contracts; in 1863, $527,000 more; in 1864, $444,000; between January of 1865 and the peace in March, another $65,000. 48 In terms of the present dollar’s buying power, DuPont made tens of millions of dollars out of the Civil War.
Labor organizations, which had risen during the late 1850’s only to volunteer whole locals as companies in the fight for free labor, began to make a comeback after 1863. This revival was spurred by industrialists who refused to raise wages although they were richer than ever from war profiteering. The industrialists had little hesitation about raising prices, however. While wages for the worker rose on a national average by 43 percent, they could not keep up with a 117 percent hike in the general price index.
The anger over inflation and unemployment finally broke out into rioting in New York in 1863, when the Draft Act was passed, although much of the insurrection was marred by ugly racist overtones and, in some cases, even southern sympathy. By the thousands, however, workers went to die in a fiery holocaust while young industrialists like Andrew Carnegie, Philip Armour, James Hill, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, and J. P. Morgan, all in their draft able twenties and all destined to become luminaries in American business history, managed to buy replacements for their numbers in the draft lottery for only $300—a small price, many a buyer conceded, when he saw his number in the morning papers listed among the dead. Meanwhile, these “new nobility” raised the price of pig iron on the New York market from $20 a ton in 1860 to $80 a ton in 1864, until 29-year-old Carnegie was in ecstasy, softly repeating to himself, “Oh, I’m rich! I’m rich!” 49 James Mellon perhaps exemplified the new wealth being created when he wrote to his father admiringly of friends who made millions through speculation in wheat. “They continue growing richer,” he explained, “and don’t care when the war ends.” 50
DuPont Company, of course, was not to be left behind. In December of 1862 Henry’s price for black powder was 18 cents per pound, up 2 cents from the market price of a year before. Henry justified the price hike by pointing to the rise in prices of materials used in making powder, but this was only partly true. During the war, charcoal’s price did rise 50 percent, sulphur 80 percent, cooper work 90 percent, saltpeter 135 percent; but what Henry didn’t bother to mention was that DuPont Company did not buy charcoal or cooper work—it provided its own. And, thanks to Lammot’s trip to England, the federal government furnished DuPont with saltpeter throughout the war. In fact, Lammot’s trip had netted the company a contract that brought in another $384,000 for refining 11,542,000 tons of government saltpeter. 51
Desperately, but futilely, Lincoln’s administration tried to fight back. In March of 1863 the federal government passed a tax of one cent per pound on the sale of gunpowder.
The tax passage was Lammot DuPont’s first defeat in political circles. The young chemist had traveled south to Washington to lobby against the proposed tax among his political contacts. The effort, by and large, was a failure. It seems the political climate in the city at the time was not conducive to openly condoning war profiteering. The country’s capital by now had been turned into one huge hospital. For the last two years Washington had been menaced by Confederate armies attacking from Virginia, the fighting and dying showering the surrounding countryside with blood. More than once Lammot had to wade through a vast sea of stretchers to get into the polished white government buildings—perhaps even passing by the poet Walt Whitman, who was also there at the time and who has handed down to us perhaps the most graphic recorded description of the city’s climate during the war. Unlike any DuPont, Whitman was working day and night caring for the wounded, his hair and beard already white at the age of 42.
“In one of the hospitals,” he wrote in his diary, “I find Thomas Haley, 4th New York Cavalry. He is a fine specimen of youthful physical manliness, shot through the lungs and inevitably dying. Next to him is Thomas Lindy, 1st Pennsylvania Cavalry, shot very badly.… Poor young man, he suffers horribly, has to be constantly dosed with morphine, his face ashy and glazed bright young eyes.… Opposite, an old Quaker lady is sitting by the side of her son, Amer Moore, 2nd U.S. Artillery, shot in the head. He will surely die. I speak and he answers pleasantly.” 52
And as Amer Moore lay dying outside, inside the marbled halls of corruption Lammot DuPont, young, strong, and healthy, spoke also, sometimes quietly, sometimes booming, but always lobbying. Lammot’s campaign to destroy the powder tax did fail, but it succeeded on a far more important front of the battle for profits: the idea of government owned powder plants was killed, the willingness of members of that Congress to take bribes having become legendary. 53
No man’s death diminishes a DuPont, it has been said, unless it is that of another DuPont, and certainly nothing diminished the fiery vehemence with which the clan demanded its share of the war’s booty. With each new tax that Lincoln’s desperate government passed, Henry DuPont would sadly shake his head and raise his prices, sometimes not even needing taxes for an incentive. In November 1863 DuPont’s price for powder was 26 cents per pound, up almost 70 percent in one year. The government then raised duties another one-half cent per pound, but while it was winning battles against Lee’s armies, it was losing the war with the DuPont's. By April 1864 Henry had again raised the price of DuPont powder to 30 cents per pound. The U.S. Treasury was now so depleted that it was unable to make immediate payment, so Henry was forced to exercise an uncharacteristic patience. Between April and July the government was able to remit only $360,000 to the DuPont's; by August it still owed the family $350,000 from the Army alone, to say nothing of the Navy’s debt for DuPont Mammoth Powder. 54 By the war’s end, Washington was paying Du Pont’s highest price since the war began —33½ cents per pound—and without complaint. “There has never been a case in any country in the world,” Henry had answered his critics, “where a nation at war has had its powder so cheaply as the United States have [sic] had it since the breaking out of the Rebellion.” 55
Upon examining the price for powder that the Confederate government was paying, one can see why Lincoln didn’t publicly complain. The nonprofit Confederate mills at Augusta, Georgia, operated at a cost of $1.08 per pound of powder when it began operations, and by the war’s end the South, depleted of resources like saltpeter, was paying up to $3 per pound. Throughout the war the Confederacy had only two small mills, the largest capable of producing only 500 pounds per day. In the four years of the war, Davis’s regime could not supply its infantry with more than ninety rounds of ammo per man.
DuPont on the other hand, furnished between 3.5 and 4 million pounds of powder to the federal government during the war, averaging over 2,700 pounds per day and exceeding the output of the Confederate mills at Augusta by over one million pounds. Obviously, Lincoln was glad to have the powder. But not so obviously, he was also glad to encourage the growth of northern industries with fat war contracts, for industrialization and its concurrent social organizational changes were shaping a new country—in fact, through the federal government, creating a national identity. Before the war there was really no Union to save because there actually was no nation-state in the modern sense of the term. This became Lincoln’s great task—to create a nation-state in the North in order to enforce a union with the South and destroy a slavery-based economy that retarded the growth of industrial wage-labor.
As Lincoln succeeded in this task, so also did the DuPont's, making a profit of over $1 million from the Civil War. As new markets were found in the West, DuPont Company relied more and more on transporting its powder over great distances. Lammot DuPont had a railroad spur built from nearby Montchanin to Wilmington, connecting the mills directly with the national railway network for the first time. Henry often requested and received special exemptions from the government prohibition on transporting powder, shipping DuPont powder across Iowa to the mines of Nebraska and gold fields of Pike’s Peak, even across the ocean to European colonialists busy at the time conquering and dismembering the continent of Africa.
3.8
THE DARK BRANDYWINE
Throughout the Civil War the great war-making powers of the DuPont mills made
them a choice target for Confederate military strategy. Once, two southern spies were
caught on their way to blow up the gunpowder plant. Paranoia ran deep through the
Brandywine Valley during these fearful days, neatly serving DuPont Company’s efforts
to exclude “outside troublemakers” such as labor organizers. One day this policy almost
resulted in murder. A stranger was seen walking in the vicinity of the mills. “A spy! A
spy!” shouted a hysterical mob as it swept down on the man with clubs. Among them was Lammot DuPont, who, after discovering the stranger was only a harmless tramp, let
the man go. There were other, more valid causes for fear during the war, however. Three times the mills were a target for possible Confederate attack.
In September 1862 Henry and Lammot DuPont were called to Washington and informed that General Robert E. Lee had moved his army into Maryland on the way to attack Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania. Three thousand of Lee’s cavalry, they were told, had been ordered to make a lightning raid on the mills. Feverishly, the DuPont's made preparations to meet the onslaught, but on September 17 Lee’s advance was beaten back at the Battle of Antietam, and the mills escaped danger.
The second peril came in June of 1863. Lee’s army had invaded the North as far east as the Susquehanna River near York, Pennsylvania. Two hundred DuPont workers and other Delawareans rode west under the command of Lammot and Eugene DuPont, son of the late Alexis DuPont, to protect the Philadelphia-Baltimore Railroad. Charles I. DuPont took direct leadership of Delaware’s militia, massing them along the state’s western border. Independence Day, usually a time of celebration and fireworks on the Brandywine, was spent in hushed silence. Then the Wilmington telegraph clicked the news of Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg. A sigh of relief, it was said, was clearly audible throughout the valley; then the area rocked with belated, and grateful, holiday festivities.
The last and greatest scare came in July 1864. Confederate general Jubal Early was marching north for another attack. Uneasiness throughout the Wilmington area turned to outright fear when false reports came in that Washington had fallen. Then fear turned to horror when further reports claimed Baltimore had also succumbed. The Brandywine was almost in a panic when a train between Baltimore and Wilmington was actually stopped by Confederate raiders. A huge crowd had gathered around the telegraph office when word finally came that Early had actually been repulsed at Washington.
But the dying went on. Delaware alone sent 13,651 of its men into the slaughter; many of them never returned. Throughout the four years of war, church bells tolled sadly in Wilmington and along the Brandywine whenever a casualty train passed through. Sometimes the people of Wilmington would board the trains and offer refreshments to wounded soldiers. New casualty lists bordered in black kept appearing, and the people of Wilmington grieved.
The DuPont's also suffered their war casualties, although not on the battlefield.
Since hostilities had begun, beautiful Charlotte Shepard Henderson DuPont felt like she was trapped behind enemy lines, and indeed she was. Charlotte was from one of the leading families of Virginia, and like every good, gentle southern belle, she defended slavery with that particularly bold ferocity known only to slave holding aristocracy. Married to E. I. DuPont II, son of Alfred, she remained unconsoled by the fact that abolitionists were neither members nor welcome guests of the DuPont family. DuPont powder made by her husband’s family, she knew, was killing her gray-uniformed relatives and friends by the score. Her southern sympathies were further aggravated by the self-righteousness of her mother-in-law, Margaretta DuPont. Margaretta was a bossy, strong-willed woman, too strong for Charlotte’s war-frayed nerves. Charlotte finally suffered a nervous breakdown from which she never fully recovered, dying years later in a mental asylum in Philadelphia. Irénée never forgave his mother for Charlotte’s mental collapse. He refused to speak to her right up to his death in 1877 only a few months after the burial of his wife.
The war years brought another death to the family—Victorine du Pont, the first child of Irénée and Sophie du Pont and the tragic widow of young Ferdinand Bauduy. In poor health at the age of 68, Victorine was fading quickly, and soon her life was flickering on its deathbed. Her brother Henry suggested sending for Reverend Brinckle, her dear friend “Mr. B.”
“Oh, not tonight,” she said. “I should like to see Mr. B. very much, but wait till morning.”
Just before dawn she opened her eyes to see the doctor taking her pulse.
“How is it?” she asked.
“Very low. I can scarcely feel it.”
“I thought so,” she whispered, and died.
“Mr. B.” finally joined her two years later, a victim of a typhoid epidemic that swept through Wilmington and dipped its deadly finger also into the Brandywine. Yet, even during this plague, the mills kept turning, grinding out their black gold into the dark of night.
When the sun finally rose on April 10, 1865, the nightmare of war was but a few hours over. Across the tired land a sweet stillness filled the air, and again it was spring. Throughout the North there was celebration, even on the Brandywine, especially on the Brandywine, where coffers brimmed with gold and stately mansions rose triumphantly to a new order, a new age. For where one era of the DuPont saga ended, another began, bringing one of the most determined and ruthless campaigns of empire-building ever recorded.
NEXT
BUILDING A MONOPOLY
notes
Chapter 2
1. John K. Winkler, The Du Pont Dynasty (Baltimore: Reynal & Hitchcock, Inc. 1935), p. 21.
2. Wilmington Evening Journal, December 16, 1930, article by Raymond Gynot, Professor of History, Sorbonne, Paris.
3. As author William Carr notes, family accounts differ as to whether Père Du Pont left behind a gold coin. The earliest family history by Bessie Gardner du Pont makes no reference to the incident at all. The first published reference to a coin is in 1942, 150 years later, by a Du Pont public relations executive, William Dutton, who drew on family legend. Later, Marc Duke in his The du Ponts, repeating the official version, notes that Du Pont did not await the return of the homeowners but quickly moved his family beyond Newport to a safe country inn. If this is true, one can understand why. As Judge Charles Brieant once put it (ironically in sympathy with the Du Ponts’ official version), colonial families were not likely to take intruders kindly. To Brieant, the fact that the Du Ponts were not beset upon by angry Americans was proof that a gold coin must have been left behind. There is another obvious possibility, one inadvertently provided by Duke, an apologist for the family and alleged informer for Du Pont Company: the Americans simply did not know who to look for and Père Du Pont had decided not to wait around to tell them.
4. William H. Carr, The Du Ponts of Delaware (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1964), p. 48.
5. B. G. du Pont, Life of E. I. du Pont, VI, 63.
6. Du Pont de Nemours to Thomas Jefferson, September 8, 1805, cited in Dumas Malone, ed., Correspondence between Thomas Jef erson and Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1930), p. v.
7. Pierre S. Du Pont de Nemours to Nicholas Bidermann, December 1, 1800, ibid., p. 173.
8. B. G. du Pont, Life of E. I. du Pont, p. 379.
9. Winkler, The Du Pont Dynasty, p. 55.
10. B. G. du Pont, Life of E. I. du Pont, VI, 64.
11. Malone, Correspondence, p. 30.
12. Ibid., p. 47.
13. William A. Williams, The Contours of American History (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1961), p. 179.
14. Ross M. Robertson, History of the American Economy (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1964), p. 107.
15. William A. Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1962), p. 16.
16. Williams, Contours, p. 149.
17. Ibid., p. 180.
18. Ibid., p. 148.
19. Williams, Tragedy, p. 20.
20. Malone, Correspondence, p. 47.
21. Thomas Jefferson to Robert Livingston, April 25, 1802.
22. Correspondence of Jef erson and Du Pont de Nemours, with introduction by Gilbert Chinard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1930), p. xxiii.
23. Ibid., p. xxxiv.
24. Williams, Contours, p. 183. 25. Ibid., p. 184.
26. Annals of Congress, 7th Congress, 2nd Session, p. 1105.
27. Chinard, Correspondence, p. xliii.
28. An outstanding example of this practice was the contract of powderman François Parant, whose unhappy story is related, from Irénée du Pont’s point of view, by B. G. du Pont in Volume VI of her Life of E. I. du Pont. Irénée, fearing that Parant, if he left the company, might become a neighboring competitor with his powder-making skills, had the powderman thrown in jail for two months after he quit and finally had him driven out of Delaware.
29. B. G. du Pont, Life of E. I. du Pont, IX, 228.
30. Winkler, The Du Pont Dynasty, p. 77.
31. Delaware Gazette, May 2, 1814 (on microfilm at the library of the University of Delaware).
32. B. G. du Pont, Life of E. I. du Pont, IX, 169.
33. Dutton, Du Pont, p. 61.
34. B. G. du Pont, Lives of Victor and Josephine du Pont (Wilmington: privately printed, 1930), p. 203.
35. Alfred V. du Pont to William Kemble, February 7, 1841, Papers of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., Series A, Part II, Eleutherian-Mills Library.
36. Alfred V. du Pont to William Kemble, July 12, 1842, Papers of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., Series A, Part II, Eleutherian-Mills Library.
37. Alfred V. du Pont to Moorison, Di Carrick & Co., May 20, 1846, Papers of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., Series A, Part II, Eleutherian-Mills Library.
38. Samuel F. du Pont to Sophie du Pont, May 7, 1848, Letters of Captain S. F. du Pont, 1846–48 (Wilmington: privately printed, 1885), p. 393.
39. S. F. du Pont to Sophie du Pont, June 6, 1848, Ibid., p. 409.
40. Carr, The du Ponts of Delaware, p. 150.
41. Article from the London Echo, Papers of Samuel F. du Pont, Series E, W 9–35018, Eleutherian-Mills Library.
42. Henry F. du Pont Collection of Winterthur Manuscripts, Group 9, Mrs. Samuel F. du Pont, Series E-General File, Box 176, W 9–39865, Eleutherian-Mills Library.
Chapter 3
1. William H. Carr, The du Ponts of Delaware (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1964), p. 162.
2. Ibid.
3. Records of the Of ice of the Chief of Ordinance, U.S. Department of War, 352. RG156, Microfilm Accession 352, Reel 4, Eleutherian-Mills Library.
4. Robert A. Thompson, “Samuel F. du Pont and the William B. Reed Mission to China” (Master’s thesis, University of Delaware, June 1965), p. 11.
5. Ibid., p. 2.
6. Henry A. du Pont, Rear Admiral Samuel F. du Pont (New York: National American Society, 1926), p. 88
7. Ibid., p. 94.
8. Ibid., p. 95.
9. John A. Harrison, China Since 1800 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1967), p. 27.
10. Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies, Series I, XII, 260.
11. H. A. du Pont, Rear Admiral, p. 120.
12. Ibid., p. 135.
13. Captain Charles H. Davis, U.S.N., Life of Charles Henry Davis, Rear Admiral (Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1899), p. 165.
14. Gideon Welles, Diary, CXI, 217.
15. H. A. du Pont, Rear Admiral, p. 139.
16. Ibid., p. 138.
17. Official Records, Series I, XIII, 503.
18. H. A. du Pont, Rear Admiral, p. 143.
19. Ibid., p. 167.
20. Ibid., p. 173.
21. Official Records, Series I, XII, 820.
22. Ibid., Series I, XIII, 503.
23. Ibid., XIV, 571.
24. Ibid.
25. H. A. du Pont, Rear Admiral, p. 191.
26. Ibid., p. 192.
27. Ibid., p. 201.
28. Ibid., p. 194.
29. Ibid., p. 208.
30. Ibid., p. 195.
31. Official Records, Series I, XIV, 5–8.
32. Ibid., p. 132.
33. H. A. du Pont, Rear Admiral, p. 225.
34. Official Records, Series I, XIV, 59.
35. Ibid., pp. 63–64.
36. H. A. du Pont, Rear Admiral, p. 179.
37. Official Records, Series I, XIV, 61.
38. Ibid., pp. 139–40.
39. Ibid., p. 300.
40. H. A. du Pont, Rear Admiral, p. 286.
41. Ibid.
42. Stephen E. Ambrose, “West Point in the Fifties, The letters of Henry A. du Pont,” Civil War History, X, 1964, p. 296.
43. Henry A. du Pont, The Campaign of 1864 in the Valley of Virginia and the Expedition to Lynchburg (New York: National Americana Society, 1925).
44. Ibid., p. 5.
45. Carr, The du Ponts of Delaware, p. 181.
46. Henry du Pont to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, September 28, 1862, Correspondence of the Department of War, No. 630, National Archives.
47. Henry du Pont to Edwin Stanton, August 13, 1862, Correspondence of the Department of War, No. 796, National Archives.
48. Records of the Of ice of the Chief of Ordinance, U.S. Department of War, 352. RG156, Microfilm Accession 352, Reel 4, Eleutherian-Mills Library.
49. Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, Labor’s Untold Story (New York: United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, 1970), p. 21.
50. Ibid.
51. Records of the Of ice of the Chief of Ordinance, loc. cit.
52. Boyer and Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, p. 20.
53. Ibid., p. 19.
54. William S. Dutton, Du Pont—One Hundred and Forty Years (New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1942), p. 98.
55. Ibid., p. 100.
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