Fred Reed

A generation ago a novelist invented a fictional character as the protagonist in her highly acclaimed (and vilified!) book, Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand endowed her fictional character with vision, fierce independence, broad-ranging creativity and a sense of destiny. She named her creation John Galt, and opened her masterpiece with the book’s first sentence: “Who is John Galt?”

In nearly 1,000 pages Ms. Rand answered her question. Readers familiar with Atlas Shrugged know that the book is built on the premise that rugged American individualism, self-determination and genius bring progress to society. In her narrative way, she demonstrates that individual self-interest is of paramount importance. The aggregate of individual betterment is a better society. This was a practical demonstration of her personal philosophy of Objectivism. Gary Cooper, himself the epitome of rugged self-determination, could have played Galt in a movie version of the novel had it been filmed. Today we are apparently left with One Tree Hill's Dan Scott. We shall see . . .

The central figure of the present book, John Gault, shares uncanny resemblance to that novelist’s fictional creation. He is an inventor, a man who asks “Why? of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind,” to borrow a line from Rand’s fictional biography. “He was green eyed, with russet hair and a crystal-clear gaze. . . .”

Facts and interpretation. Research and analysis. “Facts and interpretation,” an old history professor stressed in this author’s formative post-graduate years. “History is nothing but . . . facts and interpretation.” There are facts aplenty in the pages that follow, and interpretation surely. It’s high time for a new fable about John Gault and his New Metallic Currency. It’s time for the recreation of John Gault’s novel invention. . . . He too was green-eyed, thinning russet-haired with a crystal-clear gaze. He needn’t be the stranger any longer.

Who is John Gault?

Chapter I

On Friday evening, December 8, 1848, the Boston Evening Transcript was aglow with reports of “The Gold Excitement” in faraway California. These accounts transcended “passages from the Arabian Nights,” the newspaper informed its readers: "What a spectacle, that the whole villages being deserted, and citizens and squatters, soldiers and sailors, black and white, men, women and children, rushing pell mell, away into the interior, over mountains, through forests, across rivers, into the newly discovered mine region!"

Riches were there for the taking. “No other implements are necessary than an ordinary sheath knife, to pick the gold from the rocks,” reliable sources reported.

Everybody, by the accounts, is getting money . . . $1,500 . . . $1,800 in a single day . . . already fifteen millions . . . other reports cascaded in. Gold fever was breaking on the eastern coastline. Even President Polk was convinced. Only three days earlier had he not addressed the Congress of the United States on this very subject in glowing terms? “The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service,” Polk told an excited Congress.

What a beacon-light these tales must have been to a fatherless, 16-year-old man-child that cold, bleak, late autumn, New England evening. Men were crowding out in the streets exchanging information, excitement, plans. To an Irish son of immigrants, we can hardly fathom what temptation such hysteria must have served, what rising adventurism and boyhood fancy such hullaballoo must have kindled. For John Gault, as for so many other young men that mid-century day, we know what happened soon after: he joined the mass exodus that answered the siren’s gilded call. Newspapers continued to fan the flames of excitement by painting visions of El Dorado. None other than editor Horace Greeley proclaimed the new Age of Gold: “the youth of the world was on the move, headed for San Francisco. The stampede was on.”

Gold mania was gripping the imaginations of all alike, but it was the youthful, “bursting with unproved confidence and bravado,” who were especially tempted by the “irresistible opportunity for adventure, for successful action.” Opportunity. Riches. Adventure. Thousands of young men like Gault answered Greeley’s challenge: “Who should go to California?” Greeley asked in his Tribune. Single young men of moderate means and resolute energies, was the visionary editor’s answer. “Give the first chance at the gold region to those who have as yet had no chance elsewhere,” he said. Go West, young man. Go.

To the strains of “Oh, Susanna,” “Sweet Betsy from Pike,” or in Gault’s case, “Coming ’round the Horn,” El Dorado lay only 18,000 miles and five arduous months away. Young John Gault enlisted into the exodus and shipped out from his native Boston to follow his dreams for riches and fame. It was to be the first of several such rainbows he would chase during his eventful lifetime . . . finding eventually a measure of both riches and fame.

But in the 1980s and early 1990s, when I was researching this subject for my book to be known as Civil War Encased Stamps, the Issuers and Their Times, the world knew little of John Gault. Who is, or was, he? “One of the lost men of American History,” said one. A “genius,” replied another. “An almost lost American,” retorted a third. “An advertising guru,” “a Yankee entrepreneur,” “a Boston sewing machine salesman,” remarked passersby in the cocktail party conversations of History.

For more than a century, collectors have pondered the simple metal and mineral stamp cases bearing his testament: “PAT AUG 12, 1862. /​/​ J. GAULT.” and speculated in true cocktail party repartee, offering clever words instead of insight. John Gault, the man, languished as a blank page . . . an uninvited guest at a party thrown in his honor. His ingenious invention, his encased stamps, demanded that John Gault emerge from obscurity, a well-rounded figure. What needed to be done was to put a face to the character of a man capable of such notable, if minor, achievement.

What we discover emerges as a well-rounded flesh and blood man of his times. Gault was a man of good character, sympathetic and family-oriented. He was intelligent. Opportunistic. He lived a life caught up in the great currents of his times, the 19th century. Gault was a minor swimmer in the great currents of his age. He didn’t create the tides. He was forced to swim in their wakes. A youthful visionary, he joined a Massachusetts mining company and set off for California. He returned a realist to face the unraveling of the Union. A tinkerer with mechanical ability, he invented a series of ingenious devices: principally a sewing machine to knit its parts together, his encased postage stamp device to remedy its financial problems, and a series of exploding artillery shells to quell its rebellion. In true objectivist fashion, however, his own station was his primary interest. And so, his interests meeting no great success, he ultimately turned to selling his generation whiskey and commiserating with others similarly passed by in the Great Stream of Life. . . .

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