As immigration swarmed West and Cincinnati grew, his land consequently took on enhanced value. By 1830 the population was 24,831; twenty years later it had reached 118,761, and in 1860, 171,293 inhabitants. For a Western city this was a very considerable population for the period. The growth of the city kept on increasingly. His land lay in the very center of the expanding city, in the busiest part of the business section and in the best portion of the residential districts. Indeed, so rapidly did its value grow soon after he got it, that it was no longer necessary for him to practice law or in any wise crook to others. In 1819 he gave up law, and thenceforth gave his entire attention to managing his property. An extensive vineyard, which he laid out in Ohio, added to his wealth. Here he cultivated the Catawba grape and produced about 150,000 bottles a year.
All available accounts agree in describing him as merciless. He foreclosed mortgages with pitiless promptitude, and his adroit knowledge of the law, approaching if not reaching, that of an unscrupulous pettifogger, enabled him to get the upper hand in every transaction. His personal habits were considered repulsive by the conventional and fastidious. "He was dry and caustic in his remarks," says Houghton, "and very rarely spared the object of his satire. He was plain and careless in his dress, looking more a beggar than a millionaire."
There were certain other conventional respects in which he was woefully deficient, and he had certain singularities which severely taxed the comprehension of routine minds. None who had the appearance of respectable charity seekers could get anything else from him than contemptuous rebuffs. For respectability in any form he had no use; he scouted and scoffed at it and pulverized it with biting and grinding sarcasm. But once any man or woman passed over the line of respectability into the besmeared realm of sheer disrepute, and that person would find Longworth not only accessible but genuinely sympathetic. The drunkard, the thief, the prostitute, the veriest wrecks of humanity could always tell their stories to him and get relief. This was his grim way of striking back at a commercial society whose lies and shams and hypocrisies he hated; he knew them all; he had practiced them himself. There is good reason to believe that alongside of his one personality, that of a rapacious miser, there lived another personality, that of a philosopher.
