As was the case with John Jacob Astor, the fortune of the Goelets was derived from a mixture of commerce, banking and ownership of land. Profits from trade went toward buying more land, and in providing part of corrupt funds with which the Legislature of New York was bribed into granting banking charters, exemptions and other special laws. These various factors were intertwined; the profits from one line of property were used in buying up other forms and thus on, reversely and comminglingly. Peter had two sons; Peter P., and Robert R. Goelet. These two sons, with an eye for the advantageous, married daughters of Thomas Buchanan, a rich Scotch merchant of New York City, and for a time a director of the United States Bank. The result was that when their father died, they not only inherited a large business and a very considerable stretch of real estate, but, by means of their money and marriage, were powerful dignitaries in the directing of some of the richest and most despotic banks. Peter P. Goelet was for several years one of the directors of the Bank of New York, and both brothers benefited by the corrupt control of the United States Bank, and were principals among the founders of the Chemical Bank.
These brothers had set out with an iron determination to build up the largest fortune they could, and they allowed no obstacles to hinder them. When fraud was necessary they, like the bulk of their class, unhesitatingly used it. In getting their charter for the notorious Chemical Bank, they bribed members of the Legislature with the same phlegmatic serenity that they would put through an ordinary business transaction. This bank, as we have brought out previously, was chartered after a sufficient number of members of the Legislature had been bribed with $50,000 in stock and a large sum of money. Yet now that this bank is one of the richest and most powerful institutions in the United States, and especially as the criminal nature of its origin is unknown except to the historic delver, the Goelets mention the connection of their ancestors with it as a matter of great and just pride. In a voluminous biography giving the genealogies of the rich families of New York—material which