he very classes to whom
it was so partial.

Simultaneously, while reaping large revenues from his fur trade among
the Indians in both the East and West, Astor was employing a different
kind of fraud in using the powers of city and State government in New
York in obtaining, for practically nothing, enormously valuable grants
of land and other rights and privileges which added to the sum total of
his growing wealth.

CORRUPT GRANTS OF CITY LAND.

In this procedure he was but doing what a number of other contemporaries
such as Peter Goelet, the Rhinelanders, the Lorillards, the
Schermerhorns and other men who then began to found powerful landed
families, were doing at the same time. The methods by which these men
secured large areas of land, now worth huge sums, were unquestionably
fraudulent, although the definite facts are not as wholly available as
are, for instance, those which related to Fletcher's granting vast
estates for bribes in the seventeenth century, or the bribery which
corrupted the various New York legislatures beginning in the year 1805.
Nevertheless, considering the character of the governing politicians,
and the scandals that ensued from the granting and sales of New York
City land a century or more ago, it is reasonably certain that corrupt
means were used. The student of the times cannot escape from this
conclusion, particularly as it is borne out by many confirming
circumstances.

New York City, at one time, owned a very large area of land which was
fraudulently granted or sold to private individuals. Considerable of
this granting or selling was done during the years when the corrupt
Benjamin Romaine was City Controller. Romaine was so badly involved in a
series of scandals arising from the grants and corrupt sales of city
land, that in 1806 the Common Council, controlled by his own party, the
Tammany machine, found it necessary to remove him from the office of
City Controller for malfeasance.[104] The specific charge was that he
had fraudulently obtained valuable city land in the heart of the city
without paying for it. Something had to be done to still public
criticism, and Romaine was sacrificed. But, in fact, he was far from
being the only venal official concerned in the current frauds. These
frauds continued no matter which party or what set of officials were in
power. Several years after Romaine was removed, John Bingham, a powerful
member of the Aldermanic Committee on Finance, which pas