The careers of Field, Leiter and several other Chicago multimillionaires ran in somewhat parallel grooves. Field was the son of a farmer. He was born in Conway, Mass., in 1835. When twenty-one he went to Chicago and worked in a wholesale dry goods house. In 1860 he was made a partner. During the Civil War this firm, as did the entire commercial world, proceeded to hold up the nation for exorbitant prices in its contracts at a time of distress. The Government and the public were forced to pay the highest sums for the poorest material. It was established that Government officials were in collusion with the contractors. This extortion formed one of the saddest and most sordid chapters of the Civil War (as it does of all wars,) but conventional history is silent on the subject, and one is compelled to look elsewhere for the facts of how the commercial houses imposed at high prices shoddy material and semi-putrid food upon the very army and navy that fought for their interests.[170] In the words of one of Field's laudatory biographers, "the firm coined money"--a phrase which for the volumes of significant meaning embodied in it, is an epitome of the whole profit system. Some of the personnel of the firm changed several times: in 1865 Field, Leiter and Potter Palmer (who had also become a multimillionaire) associated under the firm name of Field, Leiter & Palmer. The great fire of 1871 destroyed the firm's buildings, but they were replaced. Subsequently the firm became Field, Leiter & Co., and, finally in 1887, Marshall Field & Co.[171] The firm conducted both a wholesale and retail business on what is called in commercial slang "a cash basis:" that is, it sold goods on immediate payment and not on credit. The volume of its business rose to enormous proportions. In 1884 it reached an aggregate of $30,000,000 a year; in 1901 it was estimated at fully $50,000,000 a year. FOOTNOTES: [162] Some of this land and these water grants and piers were obtained by Peter Goelet during the corrupt administration of City Controller Romaine. Goelet, it seems, was allowed to pay in installments. Thus, an entry, on January 26, 1807, in the municipal records, reads: "On receiving the report of the Street Commissioner, Ordered that warrants issue to Messrs. Anderson and Allen for the three installments due to them from Mr. Goelet for the Whitehall and Exchange Piers."--MSS. Minutes of the [New York City] Common Council, 1807, xvi:286. [163] "Prominent Families of New York":231. Another notable example of this glorifying was Nicholas Biddle, long president of the United States Bank. Yet the court records show that, after a career of bribery, he stole $400,000 of that bank's funds. [164] At this very time his wealth, judged by the standard of the times, was prodigious. "His wealth is vast--not less than five or six millions," wrote Barrett in 1862--"The Old Merchants of New York City," 1:349. [165] "The Railways, the Trusts and the People":104.