August Belmont

**August Belmont, Sr.** (8 December 1813–24 November 1890) was born in Alzey, Hesse, to a Jewish family. He emigrated to New York City in 1837 when he became the American representative of the Rothschild family's banking house in Frankfurt.   Later he became an American citizen, and married Caroline Slidell Perry, daughter of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry.

## Early life
August Belmont was born on December 8, 1813—some sources say 1816—to Simon and Frederika Elsass Schönberg. His mother died when he was seven, and he went live with his uncle and grandmother in Frankfurt. He attended the Jewish Junior and Senior High School until he began his first job as an apprentice to the Rothschilds. He was then given a confidential clerkship in 1832 and promoted to private secretary before travelling to Naples, Paris, and Rome. In 1844, Belmont was named the Consul-General of Austria at New York City. He resigned in 1850 because he thought Austria was cruel in the way it treated Hungary.

Though Belmont lobbied hard for it, Buchanan denied him the ambassadorship to Spain after his election in 1856, thanks to the Ostend Manifesto. As a delegate to the 1860 Democratic National Convention, Belmont supported Stephen A. Douglas, who subsequently named Belmont chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Belmont energetically supported the Union cause during the Civil War as a War Democrat, helping Missouri congressman Francis P. Blair raise and equip the Union army's first mainly German-American regiment. Belmont also used his influence with European business and political leaders to support the Union cause in the American civil war, stopping the Rothschilds and other bankers from lending to the Confederacy and meeting personally with the British prime minister, Lord Palmerston, and members of Napoleon III’s government.

## Postwar political career
Belmont stayed as chairman of the Democratic National Committee after the war, but he thought it was the worst ever time for the party. As early as 1862, Belmont and Samuel Tilden bought stock in the *New York World* in order to make it publish stories supporting the Democrats, with the help of Manton M. Marble, its editor-in-chief.

The Republican party was divided at the war’s end, so Belmont organized new party gatherings and tried to get Salmon Chase elected president in 1868.  He thought Chase was least vulnerable to charges of disloyalty to the party during the Republican Lincoln-Johnson administrations.

Horatio Seymour’s became the democratic candidate instead, and lost to Ulysses S. Grant by a lot of Electoral College votes, although the popular vote was much closer.  In 1872 the Democrats supported liberal Republican Horace Greeley's disastrous presidential campaign. The election of 1872 prompted Belmont to resign as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, but he stayed interested in politics as a champion of US Senator Thomas F. Bayard of Delaware for the presidency, and as a fierce critic of the process granting Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency in 1877, and as an advocate of “hard money.”

## Death
Belmont died in New York in 1890. The *Letters, Speeches and Addresses of August Belmont* was published at New York in 1890. Belmont left an estate valued at more than ten million dollars. He is buried in Newport, Rhode Island.

Ham mousseline à la Belmont was created in his honour by Charles Ranhofer at Delmonico's.

## References
## Other websites
* Photograph of August Belmont's birth record, Zivilstandsregister Alzey, Germany, 1813
* Mr. Lincoln and New York: August Belmont 
* *Our Crowd* by Stephen Birmingham (c) 1967 Harper and Row NY  Pages 57–62