One of the most notorious robber barons of the late nineteenth century was born in 1839, the son of a merchant and patent-medicine salesman, in the Finger Lakes region of New York. In 1853 he moved with his family to Cleveland and entered business in 1856, at the age of sixteen, as a bookkeeper with a Cleveland mercantile firm Hewitt & Tuttle. Here Rockefeller first displayed the conservative, meticulous business instincts that would govern the rest of his career. After a few years he broke off and formed a wholesale grocery business of his own with a partner, Maurice B. Clark. Business boomed during the Civil War years, and the partners expanded into oil refining in 1863 under the name of Andrews, Clark & Company (Rockefeller preferring to keep his name out of the public eye). This business started as a sideline, but in 1865 Rockefeller bought out Clark and shifted...