Living in the early twenty-first century in the West, a time of the ideologization of just about everything, when administrative-state sclerosis cripples national ambition and when we have been habituated to believe that everything is political, it can be difficult to comprehend times when other sorts of dynamics—and other sorts of public actors than those to which we are sadly accustomed today—shaped the American scene. Mark L. Goldstein’s new biography of the financier and philanthropist William Wilson Corcoran (1798–1888), Before the Gilded Age, goes some way to helping restore our grip on the middle decades of the nineteenth century, through the story of this remarkable man.

It is a graduate student’s dream to stake out for his dissertation a significant but largely neglected subject for which the source material is rich and abundant. Corcoran is such a subject for Goldstein, who marches us through Corcoran’s protean accomplishments from the 1830s to the 1880s: in banking and finance, in the arts and philanthropy, in the cause of national reconciliation and Southern recovery after the Civil War, in the beautification of Washington, D.C. While keeping a historian’s critical distance, he persuades us that there was a great deal here to admire, by the standards of Corcoran’s own time and to a degree of ours as well. It is the story of prodigious talent applied both in one man’s private interest and in the public service, and of how the line between the two can easily blur, in Corcoran’s case beneficently so.

Corcoran’s great bank, originally Corcoran & Co., then Corcoran & Riggs, and the source of his great fortune, arose with the demise of the Second Bank of the United States (where Corcoran had been a clerk), famously slain by the hand of Andrew Jackson in 1836. Corcoran’s superior instinct for financial opportunity and high tolerance for risk were apparent before and after the Civil War, as America transformed itself from an agrarian and commercial republic into a national market economy fired by the coming of the Industrial Revolution. We often think of the enormous requirements for capital investment (and riches made therein) as arriving chiefly in the Gilded Age, as industrialization proceeded apace. But Corcoran made his fortune (a mere loan officer in 1836, he was one of the richest men in America a decade later) before the Civil War as private banks were called on to fund land purchases, canals and steamboats, mining, early railroads, and all manner of infrastructure.

No one better embodied the spirit of laissez-faire dynamism that flourished then, or left a bigger wake, than Corcoran.

He was not the first to sense expanding opportunities for financial intermediaries, but, according to Goldstein, “his competitiveness, commercial reach and penchant for taking risks gave him advantages lost on others.” As we would say today, with a word somewhat overused in this book, Corcoran was a skilled “networker,” nurturing and cultivating connections beyond the old class and kinship relationships that entrepreneurs had typically relied on in the early republic. In a nicer turn of phrase, the author calls Corcoran “an ecumenical character,” moving easily between the intertwined worlds of economics and politics, between Washington and Wall Street, and cultivating anyone—Whig or Democrat; Southerner or Northerner; the already-famous like Daniel Webster, James Buchanan, Jefferson Davis, and William Tecumseh Sherman or the still-obscure but on-the-make—who could help close a profitable deal. Timing blessed Corcoran with added advantage. He grew rich in the decade and a half before the Civil War and remained a figure of consequence in the financial and increasingly the cultural life of America into the 1880s. Earlier historians have characterized these middle decades of the nineteenth century, in contrast to its ends, as an era of unique openness in between a fading order of social and economic deference and a new one when the rise of big business and government regulation again narrowed possibilities. No one better embodied the spirit of laissez-faire dynamism that flourished then, or left a bigger wake, than Corcoran.

Corcoran’s renown, and the reason most laymen know his name today, is not only due to his reputation, great as it was, as one of the country’s premier financial entrepreneurs, but also to his charitable activities in education, infrastructure (he helped build the Washington Aqueduct, complete the Washington Monument, and landscape the White House and Capitol grounds and the expanse that became the National Mall), and rebuilding the South after the Civil War. He gave to religious as well as secular institutions, including St. John’s Church across the street from the White House and the new Church of the Ascension. Some of his largest benefactions went to Southern churches, including a jaw-dropping 36,000 acres of land in Texas to the Episcopal Church. Though Corcoran left scant explanation for his philanthropic choices, Goldstein places him within the classic nineteenth-century mold of self-conscious benefactor concerned both for his own reputation and fate and for the welfare of the less fortunate. He also credits Corcoran with being a step ahead of more famous philanthropists—Carnegie, Ford, Rockefeller, Morgan—whose extraordinary bequests belonged to the age of industrial capitalism closer to century’s end.

The institution that did most to establish Corcoran in the public mind was his art gallery. It was first located in a Beaux-Arts edifice designed by James Renwick Jr. at Seventeenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue (which is now the Renwick Gallery), while its 1897 successor, on New York Avenue, was designed by Ernest Flagg. This privately funded public museum, which opened in 1874, was a de facto national gallery, dedicated initially to the support of American artists, before the nation officially got one with Andrew Mellon’s bequest in the 1930s. Corcoran began collecting in the 1850s and never quit, at first housing his collection in his mansion on H Street across from Lafayette Square and then in the Renwick building. It was the nation’s first dedicated art gallery and ahead of comparable institutions in both New York and Chicago. Much of his early collection comprised portraits from the most distinguished American practitioners, including John Singleton Copley, Raphaelle Peale, and Thomas Sully. After 1865, Corcoran saw art as a means of bringing a broken nation back together and restoring its “patriotic memory,” which also meant rehabilitating the South. Sully’s portraits of Andrew Jackson and Robert E. Lee topped the banker/collector’s acquisition list. As the nation moved west in the spirit of Manifest Destiny, the romantic landscapes of the Hudson River School grew ever more popular. Corcoran collected the best, notably Thomas Cole’s The Departure and The Return from 1837, the latter of which graces the dust jacket of Goldstein’s book, just below an engraving of Corcoran from 1882. The very best was Frederic Edwin Church’s immense Niagara from 1857, displayed in the central stairwell of the 1897 Corcoran Gallery and in the judgment of this reviewer one of the greatest matches of painting to setting ever achieved anywhere. Sadly, the Corcoran Gallery as we knew it is with us no longer, lost almost a decade ago to weak finances and leadership, though its art school remains. Much of the collection was dispersed to the National Gallery and can still be seen in scattered fashion, but the demise of William Corcoran’s pioneering institution left a huge hole in American culture and deprived our nation’s capital of a great monument to one of its great men.

Corcoran was also of course a white Southerner and a Christian at that.

Corcoran was also of course a white Southerner and a Christian at that. Georgetown and Washington, where he was born and spent his life, were profoundly Southern places in the nineteenth century, and Corcoran never apologized for his extensive business connections with the cotton kingdom. Such identification renders him and his legacy “problematic,” as we now like to say. Goldstein is sensitive, perhaps overly so, to the need that pervades our literary and political culture to declare ourselves on the right side of history. So his book begins with the anecdote of Corcoran boarding the Cunarder rms Scotia in New York harbor in October 1862 in flight from the nation’s capital, which had become increasingly hostile to Southerners, for self-imposed exile in Europe. With him for safekeeping went $34 million in gold. He did not return until war’s end. We go on to learn that Corcoran had even owned a slave or two, which makes him in today’s language not a slaveholder but “an enslaver” who “owned people.” Such virtue verbiage, along with the frequent term “White Southern privilege,” mars the author’s generally admirable prose. I cannot say whether this reflects Goldstein’s own convictions, or is something picked up in the seminar room (Before the Gilded Age began as a dissertation under the eminent financial historian David Sicilia), or was demanded by his university-press editors. I can say that, to his credit, he keeps the tendency in check and delivers a generous and fair-minded piece of scholarship. I hesitate slightly at Goldstein’s insistence that the mid-nineteenth century’s spirit of openness, which enabled a character like Corcoran to flourish as he did across a wide range of activities, was unique to that period. It seems to me that the window may have opened again in the two decades following World War II, but that is a twentieth-century story. This nineteenth-century story is told convincingly enough, in a good book about a great man.