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18 “ 3 Stately Edifices and Lofty Spires I was born close by a saw-mill, was early left an orphan, was cradled in a sugartrough , christened in a mill-pond, graduated at a log-school-house, and, at fourteen, fancied I could do anything I turned my hand to, and that nothing was impossible, and ever since, Madame, I have been trying to prove it, and with some success.”1 William Ogden is said to have spoken these words to a woman who had recently descended into poverty when she asked what might become of her children. They eloquently sum up the credo of a man who recognized no boundaries on what he could accomplish if he set his mind to something and who assumed that everyone else could also rise above their present position with hard work and determination. Ogden participated as a key player in three of the most momentous events of the nineteenth century: the founding and development of the great city of Chicago, the birth and growth of railroads in America, and the advent of the nation’s westward expansion. Few other individuals made as much of an impact as Ogden on the infant nation as it strove to find its place among the world’s leading countries. It was a period in our history that required great leadership, and William B. Ogden fit the bill in every respect. But putting aside his widereaching accomplishments, what sort of human being was this onetime rural New York millwright? First and foremost, William Ogden was an enigmatic man. Because so little of his personal correspondence is known to exist—only two reproduced letters, both about the Chicago fire2 —we cannot get a clear picture of him from his own writings, normally an important tool for the biographer. His business letters, on the other hand, are numerous, but they are formal and impersonal and tell little except that he was a shrewd businessman. What can be ascertained from his actions, however, are that many of the qualities he believed in most fervently—honesty, integrity, and fair play—were the same qualities he often breached when it served his purposes. Still, he did Stately Edifices and Lofty Spires 19 not think of himself as a dishonest or unfair man, nor did his many friends— some of the most celebrated and accomplished people of his time—who revered Ogden. He was a man of great sweeping visions, and when he encountered an obstacle to the gaping maw of his dream, he could bend his ethics—occasionally to the breaking point—to get past it. He was an honorable man who occasionally did dishonorable things. Ogden would be powerfully influenced by four factors during his lifetime, factors that forged the kind of man he became. The first was the unyielding, rock-ribbed Protestant ethos in which he was raised, an ethos that stressed hard work, thrift, achievement, benevolence, and honesty. He followed the first four of these tenets from cradle to grave. That he was gifted with great intelligence and a certain heritage that insured he would not have to start at the bottom rung of life’s ladder made it easier for him to believe that hard work could overcome all obstacles. This belief often led him to have little patience with less fortunate members of society, particularly the dirt-poor immigrants who arrived in droves from western Europe during the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century. It was not that he was unkind to the poor; we see many examples throughout his life where his benevolence was unbridled. Yet when people interfered with his business plan by squatting on his land or taking his lumber to warm their shabby hearths, he could be unrelenting. The last tenet of that Protestant ethos, honesty, proved to be the stickiest for Ogden. He was not a dishonest man. However, he often compromised himself by succumbing to the lax business morality that had swept the nation by midcentury. An extraordinarily shrewd businessman, he firmly believed that destiny rewarded those who were willing to walk the fine line between right and wrong. When he stepped over that line, he easily justified it by comparison to the corrupt business standards that prevailed or in the name of the greater public good that he felt his enterprises served. In these instances, Ogden became a man of his times, rather than rising above the times as he might have done. At one point late in his...
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