The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

by T. J. Stiles

  But all that is only a drop in the bucket compared to that on the wharves or slips (as they are called here), the warehouses, docks, ship-yards, and auction stores, which occupy South, Front, and Water streets, pouring a flood of human beings. Here the sound of axes, saws, and hammers, from a thousand hands; there the ringing of the blacksmith's anvil; hard by the jolly tar with his heavo; the whole city surrounded by masts; the Hudson, East river, and the bay covered with vessels, some going out and some coming in, to say nothing of the steam-boats; in short, imagine upwards of an hundred thousand people, all engaged in business; add to these some thousand strangers which swarm in the streets and public houses; such is New-York.33

  They were coming not so much from the impoverished districts of Europe (not yet, at least) as the fields and towns of the United States itself, especially New England and rural New York State. And that, to some small degree, was Vanderbilt's doing, for he had stood on the barricades of the transportation revolution and commercial expansion that were transforming American life. The northeastern states felt the effects first, due to both their access to tidewater and their proximity to capital-rich merchants of the seaports, who bought produce from farmers, sold them goods, and built the first cotton and woolen mills in their villages. Semi-subsistence farming disappeared; country folk left home as never before, looking for opportunities or simply some kind of cash income. Between 1820 and 1850, the percentage of the U.S. population living in towns and cities rose from 7 to 18 percent, and the absolute numbers increased fivefold. Uprooting oneself to find one's fortune became a new way of life; one Bostonian described his move to New York in 1833 as the product of “the general principle of Yankee roam-all-over-the-worlditiveness.”

  Now all depended on the marketplace, which linked together once-isolated communities. “Ten years ago we had nothing” exclaimed the Catskill Recorder in 1828, “now we have everything.” In 1826, the New York Evening Post announced—in the same issue that marked Thomas Gibbons's death—the first shipment of Michigan pork through the Erie Canal. With such humble items new eras are made.34

  Newly mobile, self-interested, unbound by the old culture of deference, this emerging nation of strangers gave rise to an aggressive spirit of enterprise. They called it “go-ahead.” It became a New York catchphrase, for this business-minded city began to overflow with the chosen people of go-ahead, the New England Yankees. From farmboys to clerks to merchants, they invaded Manhattan and made it the capital of “the universal Yankee nation,” as P. T. Barnum called it.

  Fiercely calculating, afloat in a sea of drifting people who knew nothing of each other's character, the Yankees of New York and New England crafted new values to suit the age of the marketplace. To outsiders—English aristocrats, for example—they seemed to be “uncouth and curious rustics,” one historian writes, “whose energies were exclusively given over to the pursuit of the main chance.” In the course of two years in America, Frances Trollope learned the Yankee character well, and concluded that they cherished no attribute more highly than sharp dealing, better known as being “smart.”

  “I like them extremely well,” she wrote of Yankees, “but I would not wish to have any business transactions with them, if I could avoid it, lest, to use their own phrase, ‘they should be too smart for me.’” On her first visit to New York in the late 1820s, she “neglected” to strike a deal with a carriage driver before the ride, and was forced to pay an exorbitant sum. “When I referred to the waiter of the hotel, he asked if I had made a bargain. ‘No.’ ‘Then I expect’ (with the usual look of triumph) ‘that the Yankee has been too smart for you.’” Americans from other regions, she wrote, described them “as sly, grinding, selfish, and tricking. The Yankees… will avow these qualities themselves with a complacent smile, and boast that no people on earth can match them at over-reaching in a bargain.” It was a curious kind of vanity, she observed; if you listened to a Yankee describe himself, “you might fancy him a god—though a tricky one.”35

  Cornelius Vanderbilt needed every ounce of shrewdness in the enterprise he now embarked on. In May 1829, he sealed an arrangement with some stagecoach men and Captain Wilmon Whilldin on the Delaware to form the Dispatch Line, providing through service between New York and Philadelphia via New Brunswick and Trenton. The gatekeeper on the turnpike tracked the line's rising tolls as the Citizen carried ever more passengers: $19.30 in May, $73.75 in June, $126.22 in July, $157 in August. Vanderbilt stretched his resources to the limit to purchase more steamboats: his old favorite, the Bellona; the rebuilt Emerald (which he sent around Cape May to run on the Delaware); and the Baltimore and the John Marshall in early 1830. Now the master of a mostly secondhand fleet, with his brother Jacob and cousin John as captains, Vanderbilt carried the battle to the competition—who were none other than the new owners of the Union Line. A rate war broke out; the fare to Philadelphia plunged to a dollar, including free meals on board.36

  Then, at the start of the 1831 season, the Dispatch Line would take a startling turn.

  NOTHING ENTIRELY DISAPPEARS in history. The threads of tattered old fabric—especially social fabric—are ever woven into new tapestries. While Vanderbilt wrestled with his pickpocket in New York, his competitors plotted in their gardens to remake the culture of deference—or, at least, to maintain some sort of continuity, to impose some kind of order on the chaos of the marketplace.

  Their gardens could be reached from New York only by boat, a special steam ferry that carried world-weary city folk across the Hudson to enjoy their splendor. Indeed, the name of this resort became a synonym for tranquil beauty: Hoboken. All 564 acres of the place belonged to Colonel John Stevens, who with his sons had long been Vanderbilt's allies, and now were his rivals.

  The Stevenses were what the Livingstons might have been—patricians who successfully made the transition to this more individualistic, commercial, and ruthless age. Colonel Stevens, in fact, was the late Chancellor Livingston's brother-in-law. Like the chancellor, he dabbled in the sciences; and like the chancellor, he dabbled with little real ability, though he freely appropriated the inventions of those who worked for him. The Livingstons' monopoly had forced him to send his first steamboat to the Delaware; his sons (John, Robert, Edwin, and James) soon dominated that river with more and better boats, and collaborated with Gibbons on the Union Line.

  The sons inherited the colonel's technological interests, but with actual mechanical talent. Robert L. (for Livingston) Stevens proved to be one of the great engineers of the day, repeatedly improving steamboat design. The brothers mastered business competition as well, in sharp contrast to the Livingstons, whose North River Steamboat Company failed in 1826—whereupon the Stevenses immediately began to run their own boats from New York to Albany. In New Jersey, they took over the Union Line from William Gibbons, purchasing the Thistle and the Swan. In 1829 they drove the Citizen's Line into extinction. They intended to do the same to Vanderbilt's upstart Dispatch Line.37

  Their strategy involved far more than free meals and discounted fares: they intended to make the stagecoach obsolete. As far back as 1812, the colonel had published a pamphlet proposing that a steam engine be put on wheels and pull a train of carriages on a road of rails. By the late 1820s, the “rail road” had become reality on such lines as New York's Mohawk & Hudson. The Stevenses reasoned that it was the perfect replacement for the bone-rattling stagecoach ride across New Jersey's turnpikes, and so they collected investors to build one. And, along with capital, they sought something the chancellor would have approved of: a legal monopoly.

  This was not the eighteenth century, however, and this would not be a copy of the Livingston monopoly. For one thing, the family worked through a corporation chartered by the state legislature—the Camden & Amboy Railroad—with publicly traded shares. For another, the Stevenses faced fierce opposition from other interests, including the organizers of the Delaware & Raritan Canal, led by Robert F. Stockton, a wellborn navy lieutenant who was a swashbuckler at sea and i
n business alike. Stockton maneuvered the Stevenses into merging their well-financed railroad with his undercapitalized canal on February 15, 1831, creating the “Joint Companies,” as the enterprise was known. The immense size of this new entity gave it the leverage to extract a remarkable bounty from the legislature: “That it shall not be lawful… to construct any other railroad or railroads in this State, without the consent of said companies.” By signing over such a valuable piece of its sovereignty to a consortium of wealthy men, New Jersey earned the snide nickname “the Camden & Amboy State.” The price for its virtue was an annual fee of $30,000 and a limit of $3 on the through fare (three times what Vanderbilt charged). The Stevenses had finally brought order out of the anarchy of competition—or bought order, to be precise.38

  At just about this time the Dispatch Line disappeared. The standing assumption has always been that the Stevens brothers bribed Vanderbilt. According to an old New Brunswick mariner, “It was said they bought him off here and yonder and made him rich.” The payoff was motivated by fear, the man claimed; Vanderbilt “fought 'em so hard that he left here with a reputation that scared people.”39

  Tough, shrewd, and frugal, Phebe Vanderbilt strongly influenced her son Cornelius, who revered her. Of English descent, she married into an old Dutch family on Staten Island. Her husband ran a small farm and a sailboat ferry to Manhattan; she earned her own money, which she lent out at commercial rates of interest. Collection of the New-York Historical Society

  The Staten Island of Vanderbilt's youth was a rural landscape at the mouth of busy New York Harbor. This 1833 view from the Narrows captures both the shipping and the undeveloped hillsides behind the Quarantine, the state hospital for immigrants. Young Vanderbilt ran a sailboat ferry like the one shown here. Library of Congress

  Hardworking, modest, beloved by her offspring, Sophia Johnson Vanderbilt was Cornelius's first wife and cousin. Their early years together weren't always easy, yet their intimacy grew over time, as they traveled together and grappled with family turmoil. Biltmore Estate

  New York Harbor, as seen in 1830 from the Battery, the promenade at the southern tip of Manhattan. Staten Island lies directly across the bay; to the right is the curved battlement of Castle Clinton, just offshore, later enclosed by landfill. The abundant shipping and display of fashion depicted here drew much comment from visitors. Collection of the New-York Historical Society

  The open-air Fly Market, shown here in 1816, represented the sphere that Sophia Vanderbilt occupied after the young couple moved to New York during the War of 1812. As seen here, women both sold and purchased goods amid the densely built-up city, where packs of pigs and dogs roamed freely Collection of the New-York Historical Society

  Young Vanderbilt inhabited the lower social and economic tiers of a world captured in Francis Guy's 1820 painting of the corner of Wall and Water streets. To the right, the ships can be seen moored along South Street. On the left, with flag, is the Tontine Coffee House, the city's first financial market. Collection of the New-York Historical Society

  An aristocratic Southern planter who settled in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, Thomas Gibbons was Vanderbilt's mentor and only employer. He turned a personal dispute into an attack on the Livingston family's monopoly on steamboats in New York waters. That culminated in Gibbons v. Ogden, the U.S. Supreme Court's first commerce-clause case and a legal landmark to this day. Drew University

  Legal complications stemming from the battle against the steamboat monopoly led Vanderbilt to move his family to New Brunswick, New Jersey, the southern end of the ferry line he operated for Gibbons. His wife Sophia managed an inn in their home, dubbed Bellona Hall, through the 1820s. She used the proceeds to feed, clothe, and educate the children, without her husband's aid. Library of Congress

  Vanderbilt emerged as one of the leading maritime architects of the paddlewheel era, a distinction perhaps first earned in 1835 with the revolutionary Lexington. Faster and more fuel-efficient than any steamboat afloat, it inaugurated his competition in the combined steamboat-and-railroad routes between New York and New England. On January 13, 1840, cotton bales piled on the deck ignited and started a tragic fire. Library of Congress

  In the late 1840s, at the height of Vanderbilt's career as a steamboat entrepreneur, New York swelled with immigrants and bustled with commerce as the city became the nation's primary seaport and emporium. Vanderbilt's most famous steamboat, the Cornelius Vanderbilt, is seen here behind the rival Bay State. Museum of the City of New York

  One of the earliest daguerreotypes of Cornelius Vanderbilt, made in 1845. At the age of fifty or fifty-one, he now dominated steamboat traffic on Long Island Sound. Within two years of the making of this image, he would engineer his election to the presidency of the Stonington Railroad. Library of Congress

  Famous as Vanderbilt's enemy in the Erie War of 1868, an epic fight over the Erie Railway Daniel Drew spent most of his life as Vanderbilt's secret partner. Drew used his experience with street-level finance to become a steamboat entrepreneur financier and stock operator. He went bankrupt shortly before Vanderbilt's death. Library of Congress

  Canal contractor, steamboat entrepreneur, and political manipulator, George Law represented both the business energy and corruption of the antebellum era. For twenty years he loomed as one of Vanderbilt's most notorious enemies. In 1847 Law's steamboat Oregon defeated the Cornelius Vanderbilt in a famous race on the Hudson, watched by thousands of spectators. Library of Congress

  William Henry, Vanderbilt's oldest son, was born in 1821. As a young man he went to work in the Wall Street office of Daniel Drew. William suffered an emotional breakdown, and his father sent him and his wife, Maria Kissam, to live in this farmhouse near New Dorp, Staten Island. Vanderbilt took notice as his son built his farm into a successful operation. Library of Congress

  Nathaniel Jocelyn of New Haven painted this portrait of Vanderbilt in 1846, when the entrepreneur was starting to look for social respectability. That year he moved to Washington Place, in the heart of New York's most aristocratic district. The merchant elite trusted and feared him, but did not yet accept him as a social equal. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

  No sooner had the thousand or so residents of Yerba Buena renamed their village San Francisco than the gold rush began. This 1848 engraving shows the sleepy town on the eve of the deluge, looking into San Francisco Bay. Library of Congress

  If the Stevens brothers did bribe him, then he proved himself a tricky god indeed. He never intended for the Dispatch Line to last. He knew all along that the railroad, when complete, would destroy rivals who depended on stagecoaches. (This threat had weighed heavily on William Gibbons as early as January 1829.) Hardly had he launched his line than he began to plan a full-scale assault on an entirely different route, to the coastal towns of Westchester County and western Connecticut. Charles Hoyt and Curtis Peck currently ran a boat there with little or no opposition, making them vulnerable to an attack by a hardened fighter like Vanderbilt.

  He carefully scouted the passage, and spotted a strategic spot for a new landing—an outcropping known as Jay's Rock near the shore of Sawpits, a cluster of lumber mills on the Westchester border with Connecticut (later dubbed Port Chester). On June 8, 1829, when the Dispatch Line had just started, he signed a ten-year lease to the rock with Mary De La Montaigne and Susan Moore, “for all docking privileges…; the said Vanderbilt is to [bear] all the expense of building such wharf or wharves as he may think proper from said rock to the mainland for steam boat purposes.” Soon he had a crew of workmen driving in piles and pouring in cartloads of dirt to build a dock to Jay's Rock. He put the Citizen and his old Fanny on daily runs between New York and Norwalk, Bridgeport, and New Haven with a stop at his Sawpits pier.

  In early 1830, with the Dispatch Line's fare war still raging, Vanderbilt began his retreat from New Jersey. He and Sophia packed up Bellona Hall and loaded one of the steamboats with their belongings, their horses, and their children. They debarked
in New York and made for a narrow town-house at 134 Madison Street, near gritty Corlears Hook.40

  The disappearance of the Dispatch Line, then, should be no mystery, bribe or no bribe. Vanderbilt did retain an interest in New Jersey, however, with his lucrative ferry to Elizabethtown. Nor was his brief fare war his last contact with the Stevens brothers. He would encounter them again—and next time it would end in bloodshed.

  “I HEARD AN ENGLISHMAN… declare,” reported Frances Trollope in 1832, that “in the street, on the road, or in the field, at the theatre, the coffee-house, or at home, he had never overheard Americans conversing without the word DOLLAR being pronounced between them.”41 Who better exemplified this mania for money, this frenzy for calculation, than Vanderbilt? And yet, as he acquired more boats and hired more employees, as he grappled with the growing complexity of his business, he faced the fundamental problems of this new nation of self-serving strangers. How could a man earn a profit in a world where anything could come under attack at any time? How could you know whom to trust?