sell another railroad bond, but in 1874 was again selling A&P bonds, touted as the only snow-free route to the Pacific. In 1875, the A&P failed, and its franchise was taken over by the St. Louis–San Francisco Railway, which was forced to sell half its A&P interest to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (AT&SF). Joseph unfortunately died, five years before being able to see the AT&SF reach Los Angeles. The Seligmans tended to generally lose money on their equity investment in railroad ventures. An example is the purchase of land in Arizona to be used for grazing cattle, which would then be transported to market on the A&P. The aridity of the desert made it unsuitable for the venture, but there remains a town by the name of Seligman, Arizona. United States economy President Ulysses S. Grant, who had befriended Jesse Seligman when he was a First Lieutenant near Watertown, New York, offered Joseph Seligman the post of United States Secretary of the Treasury, which he declined, possibly due to shyness. George Sewall Boutwell accepted the position and eventually clashed with the Seligmans. In 1877, President Rutherford Hayes asked Seligman, August Belmont, and a number of other New York bankers to come to Washington, D.C., to plan a refinancing of the war debt. Each banker submitted a plan, but Secretary of the Treasury Sherman accepted Seligman's plan as being the most practical. It involved retaining gold reserves totaling forty percent of circulating greenbacks through bond sales. Seligman–Hilton affair In 1877, Judge Henry Hilton, the owner of the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York, denied entry to Seligman and his family because they were Jews, creating nationwide controversy. It was the first antisemitic incident of its kind in the United States to achieve widespread publicity. Background to incident During the 1870s, several incidents made Alexander Stewart hostile towards Seligman, although the two men had served together on the board of the New York Railways Company, whose president was Judge Henry Hilton, a Tweed Ring associate. The first incident involved Seligman's declining the post of Secretary of the Treasury. Stewart, who was a friend of President Grant, was then offered the post. However, because he was associated with Henry Hilton, and Hilton with Tammany Hall, the Senate declined to confirm him. Seligman was invited to serve in the Committee of Seventy, a group of New Yorkers who banded