August Belmont: Rothschild Agent, DNC Chairman and the Ostend Manifesto

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August Belmont was born Aaron Belmont in a German village in 1813 to a family prominent in the local Jewish community. At 15, when his father could not pay tuition at the Rothschild-funded Philanthropin school, relatives persuaded the Rothschilds to take him on as an apprentice, and by 1832 he was a confidential clerk traveling to Paris, Naples and the Vatican. In 1837 the Rothschilds sent him toward Cuba by way of New York, where he arrived in the Panic of 1837 to find their American agency bankrupt and $7 million in the hole. Without waiting for instructions he canceled the Cuba trip, opened August Belmont and Company on Wall Street, declared himself the Rothschilds' American agent, and bought wildcat banknotes, property and securities at as little as 10 cents on the dollar. By 26 he had a fortune of $100,000, but New York's Knickerbocker elite shunned him.

In 1841 he fought a duel over an alleged affair and was left with a permanent limp. In 1849 he married Caroline Slidell Perry, daughter of Commodore Matthew Perry and niece of Louisiana politician John Slidell, in an Episcopal ceremony. He funded Franklin Pierce, who named him U.S. Minister to the Netherlands, where he pursued a plan to pressure Spain through its debts into selling Cuba, an effort tied to the Ostend Manifesto scandal. James Buchanan declined to make him minister to Spain. In 1860 he became chairman of the Democratic National Committee and turned it into a centralized fundraising operation, resigning in 1872 after Horace Greeley's nomination. He died of pneumonia in Manhattan in 1890.

• He courted the touring ballerina Fanny Elssler without success.
• He asked the Secretary of State for a secret $50,000 fund to bribe Spanish officials and foment rebellion in Cuba.
• Adventurer Walter M. Gibson stole his dossier at The Hague and fed the New York Tribune claims that Belmont was funding Russia in the Crimean War.
• A War Democrat, he helped raise a pro-Union German-American regiment while the Slidell and Erlanger families arranged European loans for the Confederacy.
• As president of the National Jockey Club he gave his name to the Belmont Stakes.