Law, George

Born: 1806-10-25 Washington County, New York

Died: 1881-11-18 New York, New York

Born in Jackson, New York, George Law was a stone mason, engineer, financier, and businessman. As a boy, he worked on the family farm and attended school in the evenings during the winter. At age eighteen, he walked to Troy, New York in search of work. He labored as a stone mason for a time in Hoosick, New York before gaining employment on the Delaware and Hudson Canal in 1825. He worked as a mechanic for the canal, studied engineering on his own, supervised canal-lock construction, and eventually became a successful canal and railroad construction contractor. In February 1833, he married Sarah A. Anderson, with whom he had at least four children. In 1837, he traveled to New York City, where he won contracts for work on aqueducts and the city’s High Bridge. By 1849, he had worked on the Harlem and Mohawk Railroad and begun constructing ships. He soon branched into steamship operations, running ships from New York to as far as San Francisco and Panama. Throughout the 1850s, he constructed various railroads in New York City, operated lucrative steam ferries in and around the city, and invested in the Panama Canal Railway. Nicknamed “Live-Oak George” by the men in his shipyards, he earned national renown in 1852 for sending a mail ship to Cuba despite threat of fire by the Spanish captain general of Cuba after a purser on one of his ships had published statements that Cuba’s colonial authorities deemed inflammatory. Law’s popularity after this incident led the Pennsylvania General Assembly to, in 1855, propose him as the American Party’s candidate for president, although he ultimately lost the party’s nomination to Millard Fillmore. Once a Democrat, Law eventually became a Republican. By 1860, he owned $500,000 in real estate and had a personal estate valued at $3.6 million.

James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, eds., “Law, George,” Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York: D. Appleton, 1887-1889), 3:636; Pennsylvania and New Jersey, U.S., Church and Town Records, 1669-2013, 18 February 1833, Philadelphia (Lehi, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, 2011); Yonatan Eyal, The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828-1861 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 234; U.S. Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States (1850), Ward 18, New York, New York County, NY, 147; U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census of the United States (1860), Ward 21, New York, New York County, NY, 13; Gravestone, Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, NY.