An Affair of Class: Western Virginia Eccentric versus New York Tobacco Magnate

It is well known that members of early New York City’s mercantile elite—the Livingstons, the Morrises, the Jays—intermarried with an eye to enhancing their financial well-being. As Sven Beckert says, “The family parlor was the cockpit of early-nineteenth-century businesses.” But the city’s early artisans-turned-manufacturers also employed this strategy—for example, the 1789 marriage of Peter Lorillard and Maria Dorothea Schultz, who were of divergent national background but similar in their rising prosperity. The vicious hostility that broke out between brothers-in-law Peter Lorillard and Christian Schultz once the financial parity had dissolved shows just how transactional the original marital vow had been.¹

Beckert writes that “the working-class backgrounds of these manufacturers, their often rough manners and lack of genteel education, their dearth of kinship links to the mercantile elite, and the nature of their work itself marked them as upstarts.” Although the Schultz family appears to have valued charitable social behavior to a greater extent than the Lorillard family, when financial gains and losses were at stake, the contempt that came with class pretensions could lead men to do desperate things, particularly when honor was involved.² Such was the case in the feud between Schultz and his brother-in-law, which revolved around the sale of disputed land on the western Virginia frontier of the early nineteenth century. A region notorious for land speculation, poor surveying, and contested titles, it was a perfect breeding ground for animosities that threatened the business secrets of Lorillard’s company, one of the most successful snuff-making firms in the country.

In 1760, three years before Peter was born, his father, Pierre Lorillard, a Huguenot immigrant from eastern France, opened a snuff “manufactory” in a small rental house on Chatham Street in Manhattan. When Peter and his brother George grew up and took the reins, the business was soon processing 250,000 to 300,000 pounds of tobacco annually, and in 1820 employed twenty-eight to thirty men and fifteen or sixteen children. Meanwhile, Peter’s father-in-law, Christian Joachim Schultz, who had emigrated from Prussia, was “a substantial brewer.” In 1796 he erected a two-story frame brewery, seventy-two feet by twenty-eight feet, and in 1799 a brick malt house, fifty-five feet by twenty-three feet, with adjoining mills on four lots of land in the Bowery.³

At the time Peter and Maria Dorothea married, Peter undoubtedly expected that the Schultzes’ older son, Christian, then sixteen, would eventually take over the brewery. But as the years passed it became apparent to the father that this son was a bookish dreamer and not the least bit entrepreneurial. In 1803, the father put the brewery up for sale, announcing in a newspaper ad that he “intend[ed] to retire from business.” From then on the Schultz family’s fortune and social status deteriorated while Peter Lorillard’s fury and frustration toward them grew.⁴

The young Christian went his own way, seemingly oblivious to the state of his family’s affairs. From 1799 to 1806 he borrowed and read 326 books from the storied New York Society Library, everything from ancient Greek classics to contemporary travelogues. He studied for the ministry but, as he wrote a friend later, “When I was about entering upon that profession and preparing for taking orders I found that I could not swallow the oath of ordination . . . and I accordingly chose rather to abandon a certain and genteel living [with its] hypocrisy which I see practiced in our pulpits every day.” Instead, as he later wrote, he “became a supercargo to a rich cousin and [had] an opportunity of traveling and diverting myself with the ladies of other climes.” Then he worked in the grocery business. Sometime before 1807 he acquired a twenty-five-thousand-acre tract in Wood County (western), Virginia, in payment for a debt. He set off that year on an ambitious trip west, during which he scrambled through thickets and forded streams to examine his acreage. If he is known...