Financier

Background.

The Union's preeminent financier through the Civil War and into the 1870s was born on the western frontier. His father, Eleutheros Cooke, was a prominent lawyer and eventually congressman in Ohio, but the "Western Reserve" (which eventually became the state of Ohio) was during the period of Cooke's youth rugged and isolated. Cooke received his training in "high finance" by working at a series of commercial apprenticeships that took him gradually east, to the money markets he would one day dominate. He entered business at the age of fourteen as a clerk in his hometown of Sandusky, then moved to Saint Louis in 1836. When his employers there went under in the Panic of 1837, he relocated again, to Philadelphia where he found a clerkship with a canal packet line. Philadelphia Banker. When he reached Philadelphia, Cooke had arrived at what was then still the...