In the wilderness of the West, Astor, operating through his agents, could debauch, rob and slay Indians with impunity. As he was virtually the governing body there, without fear of being hindered, he thus could act in the most high-handed, arbitrary and forcible ways. In the East, however, where law, or the forms of law, prevailed, he had to have recourse to methods which bore no open trace of the brutal and sanguinary. He had to become the insidious and devious schemer, acting through sharp lawyers instead of by an armed force. Hence in his Eastern operations he made deception a science and used every instrument of cunning at his command. The result was precisely the same as in the West, except that the consequences were not so overt, and the perpetration could not be so easily distinguished. In the West, death marched step by step with Astor's accumulating fortune; so did it in the East, but it was not open and bloody as in the fur country. The mortality thus accompanying Astor's progress in New York was of that slow and indefinite, but more lingering and agonizing, kind ensuing from want, destitution, disease and starvation.
Astor's supreme craft was at no time better shown than by the means by which he acquired possession of an immense estate in Putnam County, New York. During the Revolution, a tract consisting of 51,012 acres held by Roger Morris and Mary his wife, Tories, had been confiscated by New York State. This land, it is worth recalling, was part of the estate of Adolphus Phillips, the son of Frederick who, as has been set forth, financed and protected the pirate Captain Samuel Burgess in his buccaneer expeditions, and whose share of the Burgess' booty was extremely large.12 Mary Morris was a descendant of Adolph Phillips and came into that part of the property by inheritance. The Morris estate comprised nearly one-third of Putnam County. After confiscation, the State sold the area in parts to various farmers. By 1809 seven hundred families were settled on the property, and not a shadow of a doubt had ever been cast on their title. They had long regarded it as secure, especially as it was guaranteed by the State.