In 1821 he even received a death threat because of 'his connexion with foreign powers, and particularly the assistance rendered to Austria, on account of the designs of that government against the liberties of Europe'. The liberal historian Jules Michelet noted in his journal in 1842: 'M. Rothschild knows Europe prince by prince, and the bourse courtier by courtier. He has all their accounts in his head, that of the courtiers and that of the kings; he talks to them without even consulting his books. To one such he says: "Your account will go into the red if you appoint such a minister." ' Predictably, the fact that the Rothschilds were Jewish gave a new impetus to deep-rooted anti-Semitic prejudices. No sooner had the Rothschilds appeared on the American scene in the 1830s than the governor of Mississippi was denouncing 'Baron Rothschild' for having 'the blood of Judas and Shylock flow[ing] in his veins, and . . . unit[ing] the qualities of both his countrymen.' Later in the century, the Populist writer 'Coin' Harvey would depict the Rothschild bank as a vast, black octopus stretching its tentacles around the world.
Yet it was the Rothschilds' seeming ability to permit or prohibit wars at will that seemed to arouse the most indignation. As early as 1828, Prince Piickler-Muskau referred to 'Rothschild . . . without whom no power in Europe today seems able to make war'. One early-twentieth-century commentator* pointedly
posed the question:
Does anyone seriously suppose that a great war could be undertaken by any European State, or any great State loan subscribed, if the house of Rothschild and its connexions set their face against it?
[NB * This was J . A. Hobson, author of Imperialism: A Study (1902). Though still renowned as one of the earliest liberal critics of imperialism, Hobson articulated a classically anti-Semitic hostility towards finance: 'In handling large masses of stocks and shares, in floating companies, in manipulating fluctuations of values, the magnates of the Bourse find their gain. These great businesses - banking, broking, bill discounting, loan loating, company promoting - form the central ganglion of international capitalism. United by the strongest bonds of organisation, always in closest and quickest touch with one another, situated in the very heart of the business capital of every State, controlled, so far as Europe is concerned, chiefly by men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience, they are in a unique position to control the policy of nations.']It might, indeed, be assumed that the Rothschilds needed war. It was war, after all, that had generated Nathan Rothschild's biggest deal. Without wars, nineteenth-century states would have had little need to issue bonds. As we have seen, however, wars tended to hit the price of existing bonds by increasing the risk that (like sixteenth-century Venice) a debtor state would fail to meet its interest payments in the event of defeat and losses of territory. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Rothschilds had evolved from traders into fund managers, carefully tending to their own vast portfolio of government bonds. Now, having made their money, they stood to lose more than they gained from conflict. It was for this reason that they were consistently hostile to strivings for national unity in both Italy and Germany. And it was for this reason that they viewed with unease the descent of the United States into internecine warfare. The Rothschilds had decided the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars by putting their financial weight behind Britain. Now they would help decide the outcome of the American Civil War - by choosing to sit on the sidelines.
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