Henry Clews

Henry Clews (1834–1923) was an American banker and financier. Born in Staffordshire, England, the son of a potter, he emigrated to New York as a young man and in 1859 founded the brokerage house that became Henry Clews & Co. During the Civil War his firm was second only to Jay Cooke's in marketing government bonds, and he was later a leading opponent of the Tweed Ring in New York politics. He survived the panic of 1873, which ruined his firm, and rebuilt it. His memoir Twenty-Eight Years in Wall Street, later expanded as Fifty Years in Wall Street, is a frank insider's history of the New York money market.