Chapter 14: Different From the Start
TL: Hanguk
America has a lot of famous people.
For a country with only two hundred years of history, it churns out an absurd number of household names, the kind even someone with no real interest in history is bound to have heard at least once.
I suppose that's part of how it became the world's greatest superpower, but anyway.
My knowledge wasn't that of a history major; it stayed firmly in the realm of general trivia. Even so, there were a few names I knew for certain.
Rockefeller, Carnegie, J.P. Morgan.
I'd heard somewhere that America's great tycoons, the men who defined the country as it crossed from the early modern era into the modern age, had careers that overlapped almost exactly in time.
Come to think of it, hadn't someone said the reason they expanded their businesses so easily was the money they made off the Civil War?
If so, that meant Rockefeller wasn't the only one. All of them were promising young men right now, dreaming of enormous success. Wasn't this a buy-the-dip opportunity that would never come again?
Of course, that was just a manner of speaking. If I really sat back and did nothing, the odds were high I'd get stabbed in the back, have my entire fortune sucked dry, and then get tossed aside.
"A fine proposal. Let's meet, then."
Still, I couldn't very well let prey that had walked right up to me on its own two feet just wander off.
I sent word to Hewitt & Tuttle that I wanted to review their proposal favorably, and asked them to dispatch a representative.
In the meantime, I cheerfully kept the cotton production rolling and steadily grew my money.
A short while later, I had a fateful meeting.
"So you're John Davison Rockefeller?"
"Yes. Rockefeller, the clerk handling your account at Hewitt & Tuttle. It's an honor to meet Mississippi's new Cotton Prince."
"Oh, that's nothing. I just got lucky and inherited a lot. What matters more is growing it further from here."
We shook hands lightly and went inside.
"You look awfully young, though. How old are you this year?"
"I'll be eighteen next year."
Three years younger than me. At that point it wouldn't be strange to call him not young, but a kid.
They say the truly gifted are different from childhood, but did the Rockefeller of right now have the substance to match his reputation?
If it really was Rockefeller who'd personally written the proposal that had come to me, then I supposed men destined for greatness really were something else. Honestly, though, I wasn't convinced.
If I clumsily meddled here for no reason, I might only set off some nasty butterfly effect in history.
For the moment I showed him his proposal alongside the current structure of agricultural distribution in Natchez, and asked,
"Well? Besides what's in your proposal, are there any further improvements worth applying? If so, we could draw up an additional contract."
"Mr. Sergent, if you don't mind, might I take a brief look at the shipping invoices and expense ledgers from the firms you currently deal with? I can give you a far more accurate answer from real numbers than from theory."
An ordinary merchant would have been too busy rattling off the merits of the goods he'd brought to sell.
But this kid was telling me, without hesitation, that he had to be shown the weak points before he could find what to improve.
My interest piqued, I had Leo bring a few documents.
Rockefeller began scanning the ledgers spread across the desk, his eyes darting rapidly over pages crammed with numbers.
"Just as I thought. Mr. Sergent, you're paying only the downriver freight from Cincinnati to Natchez."
"Isn't that obvious?"
"It is, but if you partner with us, those costs can be improved dramatically."
Rockefeller pulled a small notebook and pen from his coat and began scribbling figures.
"The downriver rate is fixed at nine-tenths of a cent per pound. But the upriver leg, returning from Natchez to Cincinnati, mostly goes back less than half loaded. If we fill that empty space with reverse cargo, salt or hardware and the like, the shipping company loses nothing, so they can bring the round-trip rate down to an average of seven-tenths of a cent."
[At five shipments per month, annual cost reduction of $11,760 possible]
"Oh!"
"We at Hewitt & Tuttle will take responsibility for arranging that upriver cargo ourselves. You, Mr. Sergent, can sit back and save over ten thousand dollars a year."
Sure enough, young as he is, a capitalist demon really is a cut above.
The single most important ability in this society.
He's got an incredible nose for money, hasn't he?
"Excellent. Let's do it your way."
I signed the contract on the spot.
But if his promise was this unmistakable, wouldn't it be better to try for a partnership or a recruitment right now?
The stable option was to keep him as my employee, but if he wore the title of my subordinate, it might get in the way of expanding the business down the line.
"Rockefeller, a talent like you must be a real gem to Hewitt & Tuttle, no? Surely you're treated accordingly."
The remark, a little feeler I tossed out, drew the first faint shadow across Rockefeller's face.
"They're fair employers. But they're satisfied with their present profits. They regard any new venture as a liability. And they take a dim view of raising their employees' salaries, too."
Just as I thought, still young.
The moment a topic touched on whether he felt he was being treated unfairly, he couldn't hide his emotions.
If I poked at this side of him gently, the way to win him over might turn out to be surprisingly easy to see.
"Ambition is no flaw at all, Rockefeller. Someone who recognizes able talent is bound to come along sooner or later."
Whether he caught my meaning or not, his eyes flashed for an instant.
Digging any deeper than this would be too obvious, so I changed the subject smoothly and moved on to talk of investment.
"Speaking of investment, a sharp operator like you must have an uncommon eye for promising opportunities. In times like these, where do you think one should look to make money?"
"Railroads are always promising, to start. The western railroads are sure to become a goose that lays golden eggs. The western mines, on the other hand, honestly, I think there's a lot of froth in them. Are you planning to invest in this sort of thing yourself, Mr. Sergent?"
"The western railroads interest me too. Right now I'm also looking to take an interest in agricultural produce."
"Agricultural produce?"
Rockefeller cocked his head, then his eyes went wide, and he asked, cautiously,
"Is it... by any chance insurance against the day relations between North and South sour?"
He came up with that possibility from just that much?
It seemed the kind of human being who was simply born to become rich did exist after all.
"It's something that had better never happen, but if by some chance such a tragedy did break out, I'd have to respond to it. Better to prepare in advance, wouldn't you say?"
"I agree completely."
The South couldn't feed itself.
It had quite literally gone all in on cash crops like cotton and tobacco across the whole of its vast land.
To put it plainly, of the entire United States' current corn output the North produced about half, of the wheat four-fifths, and of the oats roughly seven-eighths.
If war broke out here, the South would have no choice but to fall straight into a food crisis, and with just a little maneuvering ahead of time, my standing would shoot up high enough to pierce the sky.
Naturally, even Rockefeller wouldn't be able to see that far ahead, so I'd have to tack on a more plausible explanation.
"Even if no extreme situation breaks out, the South's food self-sufficiency is just too low. Someday the North could use that as a weapon to pressure the South, so I think if I set up insurance in advance, a chance to make big money will come along."
"Mr. Sergent, if you're thinking it through to that degree, aren't you already putting the plan into action?"
"No. I've had a lot to handle lately, so it's still in the planning stage. And grand as the plan sounds, I don't know much about agriculture, and I know even less about medicine."
That said, because I knew better than anyone the despair and helplessness a hopeless patient feels, part of me did want to take a real crack at running a hospital.
And fortunately, when it came to agriculture, wasn't there an expert right here?
Meeting my gaze, Rockefeller blinked a couple of times, drew a short breath, and said,
"Are you... by any chance in need of an able, experienced hire?"
"Most welcome. Only, poaching a trading partner's talent outright is a bad look, so it'd come off better if you took the route of striking out on your own. I'll put up the capital, and you'll effectively become the head of a subsidiary of the Sergent plantation."
"I see. That looks like the best way."
Bouncing things off a cushion like this, in effect, under Rockefeller's name, lets me keep pumping money out of even the fields I can't touch directly.
Military supply contracts, for instance.
Doing it myself would be terrible for my image, but the expected gains were too big to give up over something like that.
"By the way, Mr. Sergent. Might I ask one thing of you as well?"
"Go ahead."
"For the next several months, I'd like to follow you around and see how you run things."
"You want to gauge whether this is a place worth building your nest, is that it?"
It must have hit the mark, because Rockefeller flinched.
Then again, no matter how much I acknowledged his prospects and dangled money in front of him, from the outside I was just a silver-spoon brat with good parents who happened to run a cotton plantation reasonably well.
He'd need time to decide whether to take a few sips of the sweet stuff and bail, or to trust me as a partner and follow me to the end, wouldn't he?
"To be honest, I don't think the outlook for cotton plantations is bright. And that's setting aside the fact that I personally believe slavery is wrong."
For all that he's a byword for the sweatshop boss, Rockefeller was apparently a devout Christian and an abolitionist.
I suppose that's just the unavoidable limit of the nineteenth century as an era.
Which is all the more reason I want him for myself.
"Then your thinking is in line with mine. Watch from beside me how I'm preparing for the future, and give me your objective feedback."
"What? Is that really all right?"
"Of course. Because I'm certain the two of us will get along quite well."
No matter how much fragmentary knowledge of the future I have, on my own my range of movement is too limited.
More than anything, aren't I curious how a man who'll go down as one of America's richest will rate twenty-first-century management methods?
"Then... for now, I'll stay at your side for a while, partly to wrap up the contract procedures."
Saying he'd do the job properly regardless, Rockefeller flipped his notebook open then and there.
The short-term goal was for the Sergent family to become the South's largest food supplier before the war broke out.
Anyone else could only have dreamed of it, but I had a reliable brain, knowledge of the future, and above all, overwhelming capital.
Sure enough.
A person is better off with money.
*
I was confident the food side would succeed with Rockefeller on board, but in truth I had one more play up my sleeve.
This was something even Rockefeller couldn't help with, something I had to push through entirely on my own, so I couldn't guarantee I'd make it in time.
Which meant once I'd made up my mind, I had to act as fast as possible.
I went straight to Kate and John, and the two of them welcomed me warmly.
John in particular, the one who'd come charging all the way out to my plantation last time over a ridiculous misunderstanding, didn't bother to hide how sorry he still felt.
"I really am sorry, James. Back then I really, ugh, just thinking about it now still makes my face burn."
"Haha, not at all. If anything, things turned out better thanks to what you did, John."
"Still, a misunderstanding's a misunderstanding. If there's ever anything you need my help with later, you just say the word."
If he was going to put it like that, there was no way I'd hold back.
Hey, he's the one who told me to ask anytime, right?
"Actually, someone on the plantation got hurt recently, and I had to call in a doctor."
As we traded this and that and the mood grew warm and cordial, I quietly brought out the real reason I'd come.
"John, Kate, how do the two of you handle it when your slaves fall ill or get hurt?"
"Same as you, pretty much. Have them taken to a hospital, or call a doctor if it seems bad enough."
Slaves were precious labor assets, so having them treated when they fell ill wasn't anything strange.
In that case, wouldn't it be fine to just build a hospital outright?
The two of them, hearing my idea, blinked blankly, as if it were a method they'd never even imagined.
"You're saying we should build a medical facility to care for the slaves?"
"When slaves fall ill or get hurt, you call a doctor or take them to a hospital anyway, don't you? If that's the case, it's better to just run a hospital that looks after our family's slaves. Our family already has a contract with a personal physician, after all. Pay him a bit more and ask him to look after the slaves too, and it'll actually come cheaper."
"That's... it certainly does sound plausible."
Between mine, Kate's, and the Miner family's slaves all together, the number of slaves alone came to nearly fifteen hundred.
What's more, I was still buying slaves even now, so that number would climb past seventeen hundred, eighteen hundred, and eventually top two thousand.
At this scale, the reasons to run a standalone medical facility were more than abundant, and it really would do a great deal to improve the slaves' health, too.
"When I looked into it, I found that the Mississippi State Medical Association, the MSMA, was founded this year. It would be good to tie in with them and grow the medical operation a bit more."
"Then what about the medical staff?"
"We can bring the doctors and key assistants over from the MSMA, and for nurses we can use the experienced women among the slaves."
If on top of this we treated poor white men at a low price too, it would come across as a charitable service to the local community by the Sergent family.
"But James, why are you suddenly trying to build something like a hospital? And on such a large scale, at that."
"That's because..."
The nightmare of a civil war that would blanket the whole of America five years from now.
The Civil War was the war that killed more Americans than any other in history, yet it was also a family quarrel between people who, in the end, had to go on living under one roof.
"It looks like it'll be to my benefit."
A patient, whether black or white, it made no difference.
A soldier suffering in the war, whether Confederate or Union, it didn't matter.
Pour money in, and draw out a profit that money itself could never buy.
This investment is going to be a jackpot. Guaranteed.
*****
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