The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

by T. J. Stiles

  The Americans went back to their hotel as the various merchant bankers they had approached put together a joint position on the canal, which they communicated in a letter on October 14. “If, after organisation, surveys, & estimates, it shall appear that a canal can be made at a cost that would offer a fair return for the capital needed,” they declared, “we will endeavor to get English capital to join in completing it.” As one of the financiers summarized their response, “The matter is not ripe for the present.”71

  The next day, the Baring partners read with surprise a gross distortion of their position in the financial columns of the London Times. “The junction of the Atlantic and Pacific may almost be regarded as a work commenced,” the story began. White's hyperbole and insinuations echoed throughout the piece. “It is the grandest physical work the world can witness.… A promise was given to Sir Henry Bulwer that an equal participation in the enterprise should be offered to this country on reasonable terms. To fulfil that pledge two commissioners from the company, Messrs. White and Vanderbilt, arrived in London… and after a short period of negotiation a satisfactory arrangement was completed this afternoon.” It was a planted story—White's own London fog.72

  “C. Vanderbilt & Joseph L. White of New York have been here in regard to the Nicaragua Ship Canal,” Baring Brothers wrote to Thomas W. Ward, the firm's agent in Boston. “We see in the Times and [London] Globe that they would make more of [what was agreed] than [was] said here.… We don't think anyone knows at present whether the canal is practicable or not, therefore these newspaper puffs are all absurd.”73

  Who were these Americans, with their grand plans, empty estimates, and deceitful boasts to the newspapers? The English financiers were hardly ignorant of the United States; the Rothschilds, for example, employed as their agent August Belmont, who since his arrival in New York in 1837 had inserted himself into the center of that city's politics and society. Days before Vanderbilt's visit, Baring Brothers and two other London houses each had agreed to purchase $25,000 in stock in the Panama Railroad, because the project was backed by William H. Aspinwall, whom they knew and respected as an aristocratic merchant. They perceived that Vanderbilt and his associates had connections to the U.S. government, but they knew little else about them. On October 15, one of the Baring partners penned a letter to James G. King of New York. “I should be glad if you can give us any information respecting the partners forming the Pacific Canal co.,” he wrote, “and about support it is likely to meet with on your side.”74

  James King had been born in Manhattan only three years before Vanderbilt, yet he belonged to a completely different world. His father was Rufus King, one of the first two U.S. senators from New York and a friend of Alexander Hamilton's. James graduated from Harvard and served as a congressman, president of the Erie Railroad, and president of the New York Chamber of Commerce. He occupied the very peak of New York society and often might be found as a dinner guest in homes, as Philip Hone observed, known for “excellent taste” and “the utmost good breeding.”75

  King did not know Cornelius Vanderbilt. “To your enquiry respecting the partners connected with the Pacific Canal Co., we can give you only general information,” he wrote to Baring Brothers on October 29, 1850. “Some of them, we hear of as large owners of steamboats employed in our neighboring routes, the success of which we have no means of estimating—large means, certainly, and so employed. And with the public, they have more credit for sagacity and enterprize, than for caution.”

  Sagacity and enterprize, not caution: this distinction offers fascinating insight into the differences between the business milieus of the merchant banker and the steamboat entrepreneur in 1850. The competitive spirit that moved Vanderbilt to strain every resource in battle against an opponent remained suspect in King's eyes. Most of all, though, King's assessment spoke to the social gap that still yawned between Vanderbilt and the mercantile elite. “Altogether,” he concluded, “they do not possess, so far as we can judge, the confidence or cooperation of our prudent people. And they must join with them names better known and more widely confided in before they are able to command support here. And that, with other motives of more abundant capital abroad, is probably the reason of the plan being presented in London—before it was here.”76

  Vanderbilt and White boarded the steamship Pacific for the return voyage home. They carried with them nothing to show for their efforts but White's puffery in the Times. They docked on October 31; two weeks later, the real story of their reception in London leaked out in the press. The canal company was a mere “speculation,” the New York Herald wrote. “No stock had been taken—no stock books opened—not one cent of capital subscribed or paid in.” For Vanderbilt, the scathing Herald story marked a low point in his long career. The scheming White had become the image of the canal company; Vanderbilt was lumped in with him, and cast as a political dummy hoping to flip the canal rights. “The whole affair was an experiment,” the Herald concluded, “in which a few lawyers in Wall Street were the principal movers, their original purpose being to obtain a charter, and afterwards dispose of it at any good price.”77

  What remained now for Vanderbilt was to make real what his critics thought was a vaporous fraud.

  *1 Since stock usually had a par value of $100, per-share dividends were described in percentages.

  *2 In Nicaragua these parties were also called the Democrats and the Legitimists, respectively.

  Chapter Eight

  STAR OF THE WEST

  The air of crisis seemed to turn Americans' minds toward death. All through 1850, the South had made increasingly loud noises about seceding from the Union. The issue was whether slavery would be allowed in the vast swath of territory conquered from Mexico. Southerners saw attempts to block the spread of the “peculiar institution” as an assault on their labor and property system, as an unfair discrimination against their section. Most Northerners saw any extension of slavery as unfair competition with free labor, and the relatively few but vocal abolitionists denounced the institution itself. The crisis persisted throughout 1850, as Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, the Senate's aging statesmen, labored over a compromise. The price of failure, many believed, would be the nation's extinction.

  The dead literally haunted New York that summer, as the famous teenage sisters Margaret and Kate Fox came down from Rochester to perform séances. The pair appeared to have the gift of speaking to spirits of the deceased, who would answer with a rapping noise that a less credulous public might have recognized as the cracking of toes. “I've attended twice,” George Templeton Strong informed his diary. “I'm mystified.” The girls proved a sensation. The spirits they conjured answered questions with remarkable accuracy—though Strong complained about “the trifling and undignified demeanor of these ghosts.”1

  The People's Line on the Hudson died that year, in a way. For complicated legal and business reasons, Daniel Drew sent it to the cross. Just before the new year, Drew attended the auction of its steamboats at the Merchants' Exchange and purchased the best ones in his own name, in order to resurrect his monopoly. He attended to his own immortality as an avid member of the Mulberry Street Methodist church, one of only two churches in the city “built with no design of renting the seats [to rich congregants], though several have adopted the plan since their erection,” as a religious journal wrote.2

  When Vanderbilt returned from London, he found that the crisis had lifted. The four bills comprising the Compromise of 1850 had passed through Congress. They admitted California as a free state, settled a boundary dispute between Texas and New Mexico, paid a large sum to Texas, and organized Utah and New Mexico as territories open to slavery. The deal also enacted a new fugitive slave law, requiring federal marshals to assist in recapturing escaped slaves. It restored calm to politics, but gave new energy to abolitionists. Still, they remained a small minority, loathed by many merchants in New York, a city made rich by Southern cotton.3

  “Now, however, there is no quarter of the wo
rld to which attention is more actively directed than Central America,” declared a newspaper on November 2, 1850. For all the talk of disunion, Americans had continued to flock to and from San Francisco as gold emerged from the mountains in vast quantities. Most of the migrants—and all of the gold—traveled by steamship, crossing the isthmus at Panama. Miners, merchants, and bankers longed for a faster route. “The Nicaragua route must command the entire traffic to California, the moment it shall be rendered practicable, even by a mixture of water and land conveyance,” the press asserted.4

  Vanderbilt threw himself into making that route practicable. He prepared the Prometheus for its first voyage, and ordered his lawyers to prepare a petition to Congress, offering to carry the California mail for $180,000 a year, a mere fraction of what the government currently paid. In a formal proposal, delivered in December, he offered to build six first-class steamships “at his own proper cost” to transport the mail via Nicaragua, “which transit route will be opened… probably within six months.” Joseph White played no part in this appeal, for an important reason: the steamship line Vanderbilt now organized was entirely separate from the canal company. Years later, his assistant Lambert Wardell vividly recalled how important it was to Vanderbilt that he personally owned the Prometheus. “She was the only [steamship] owned entirely by one man, up to that time at least. When she started out there was not a cent owing on her, he remarking that he wanted her to ‘go out on her own bottom.’”5

  As with the ship, so with the man: Vanderbilt himself would finally go to Nicaragua. It would be the first of three remarkable voyages to that distant republic, a land virtually unknown to his fellow countrymen. There were practical reasons to go, of course; as a master of the transportation business, he could best judge for himself the technical considerations of a canal or transit line. That was why he had set out to go there once before. But there was something Homeric in this uneducated man's conception of himself. Like Achilles, he would lead the charge himself; like Odysseus, he would face ocean storms, river rapids, tropical fevers, and the crocodiles and sharks of Nicaragua's waters. These trips would further open his eyes to the world and enhance his heroic reputation.

  At ten o'clock in the morning on December 26, Vanderbilt stood on the deck of the Prometheus as it churned through New York Harbor on its maiden voyage. Packed with passengers and freight, it would stop at Greytown and then Chagres, where most passengers would debark, since the canal company was not yet carrying travelers across Nicaragua. The Prometheus cut a fine figure of a ship as it steamed for the Narrows, with its distinctive vertical bow rising three decks in height, twin smokestacks, and enormous sidewheels—though it had to cut power in minutes to clear a rope caught in a paddlewheel. But this time Vanderbilt would not be stopped.6

  The Prometheus proved itself. “Ship performing admirably,” wrote Joseph N. Allen in his diary, “riding the seas like a duck and though very rough not a drop or spray even on deck.” The forty-seven-year-old Allen was a merchant in New York and one of Vanderbilt's closest friends; he had agreed to help the Commodore establish the transit business in Nicaragua.7 He noted that some of the “rich” passengers grew “very much excited” when the ship hit heavy cross seas, causing its 230-foot hull to plunge and roll. Three days out of port, a crewman fell to the deck from the mainmast (like all steamships in this era, the Prometheus had supplementary sails), dying on impact, leading to what Allen called “the solemn scene of a burial at sea.” The ship made a New Year's Day call on Havana, and arrived at Greytown on January 4, 1851.

  Greytown nestled on the inside of a harbor formed by the outlet of the San Juan River into the Atlantic. A sandy spit of land, Punta Arenas, enclosed the bay, in which porpoises frolicked among dugout canoes, called bungos, and canal-company steamboats. (Vanderbilt chose Punta Arenas as the location for machinery works, warehouses, and an office.) The town consisted of some sixty thatched huts, pushed nearly into the water by the great tropical forest that pressed up to the Atlantic shore. “There were no clearings, no lines of road stretching back into the country,” wrote Ephraim Squier; “nothing but dense, dark solitudes, where the tapir and the wild boar roamed unmolested; where the painted macaw and the noisy parrot, flying from one giant cebia to another, alone disturbed the silence; and where the many-hued and numerous serpents of the tropics coiled among the branches of strange trees, loaded with flowers and fragrant with precious gums.” Going ashore, Vanderbilt found a shanty port populated by three hundred Americans, Miskito Indians, mestizos, and “the English authorities,” as Squier wrote disapprovingly, “consisting chiefly of negroes from Jamaica.… All mingle together with the utmost freedom, and in total disregard of those conventionalities which are founded on caste.”8

  At eleven in the morning on January 8, Vanderbilt and his party (including engineer Orville Childs) boarded the steamboat Orus and chuffed into the San Juan River. A heavy tropical rain fell as the paddles beat against the increasingly swift current, carrying them between high, vertical banks and dense, dark forest, past islands in the broad river. Now came the moment of greatest danger. On January 11, they spent an hour and forty minutes battling the torrent of water crashing through the Machuca rapids. Vanderbilt shoved the pilot aside and took the helm, an engineer recalled, “tied down the safety valve [and] put on all steam.” With the boiler pressure building dangerously, the paddles whirling at furious speed, the boat shot through, Allen wrote, after “a tremendously hard struggle and grating… on the rocks.”9

  The next day they reached the ruins of Castillo Vejo, the ancient Spanish fortress that Horatio Nelson had stormed as a young man. On January 13, the Orus spent two hours fighting the raging Toro rapids, twice getting stuck on the boulders in the stream. Once again it appeared that the boat would be wrecked, deep in the Nicaraguan rain forest. This time Vanderbilt ordered ropes to be tied to trees on either bank, and had the boat painfully winched up over a hundred feet of water-swept rocks. Harper's Weekly later reported that one of the party, “a tough old sea-captain, declared he would not go through such work again for all Central America.” Finally, on January 14, they landed at the village of San Carlos, where the San Juan River poured out of Lake Nicaragua.

  The Director—the riverboat that Vanderbilt had sent down in July 1850 and that had steamed up to the lake on January 1—was nowhere to be seen. The Commodore told Allen to wait for its return at San Carlos, in the care of the town's governor, Patricio Rivas; then he set out for Granada in the Orus with Childs and the other engineers. Allen remained behind with mixed feelings. On one hand, he studied Spanish with “a very pretty and very obliging daughter” of Rivas; on the other, he slept on an animal-hide cot, with rats skittering along the rafters, various lizards and “enormous spiders” scurrying across the walls, and hogs rooting outside.10

  Vanderbilt and party, meanwhile, crossed Lake Nicaragua. Home of a rare species of freshwater shark, this enormous expanse could switch in an instant from calm to violent, throwing the shallow-draft steamboat into swells far more alarming than the ocean storms encountered by the Prometheus. The boat chuffed past the island of Ometepe, with its twin volcano cones covered in greenery, nosing thousands of feet into the clouds. On the approach to Granada's landing, the waterfront could be seen teeming with poor Nicaraguans, splashing and bathing, “without regard to sex or age, all mixed up indiscriminately,” as Allen wrote after he caught up with Vanderbilt, “a sight to make a northerner open his eyes.”11

  To reach Granada, the group made their way past wandering, pecking chickens and outlying cane-and-mud huts with thatched roofs. Then they entered the streets of the city proper, lined with tile-roofed adobe houses decorated with window balconies, ornamental archways, and heavy wooden doors that guarded elegant courtyards. They finally reached the plaza, with its decaying cathedral. Even for the increasingly worldly Vanderbilt, it was all strange, far more alien than London. On Sunday, January 19, for example, a religious festival erupted. “Such a din,” Allen complained.
“The streets were thronged with people.… In those occupied by the lower classes thousands of flags and streamers are fluttering in the wind.… As the morning advanced the people assembled in the neighborhood of the plaza and attired themselves in a variety of ways, among others by assuming masks and uncouth costumes.”12

  Vanderbilt and Childs consulted with the Nicaraguan authorities, surveyed the canal route (through neighboring Lake Managua, up to the Gulf of Fonseca), then headed south to scout the transit route. The transit road would cut through roughly twelve miles of land from the western edge of Lake Nicaragua to the Pacific coast. The Commodore led his men sixty miles south toward Rivas, through a still more alien landscape. They passed scattered haciendas (mostly cattle ranches), seeing monkeys, armadillos, and fences made by lines of cactus and prickly-leafed aloe plants. In the immediate vicinity of Rivas, where some ten thousand people lived about three miles inland from the lake, innumerable fruit trees gave the area the feel of “an immense and beautiful garden,” as one observer thought.

  Vanderbilt and Childs rode a rough nine miles from Rivas to the Pacific, through steep hills, trees, and brush, a route described by one reporter as “dangerous and even impassable during the rainy season.” Fortunately, the fifty-six-year-old Commodore was an excellent horseman. He and the engineers marked out the best path for the road, down to the virtually uninhabited little horseshoe harbor of San Juan del Sur, “one of the prettyest bays I ever saw,” as Allen described it. “I must say that with a moderate outlay of money it can be made as safe a harbor as is to be found anywhere.” Creating a harbor on the lake, on the other hand, would be more costly, as the western shore was exposed to swells that beat upon the beach from the southeast. The engineers selected Virgin Bay for the primary landing, but they would have to build a breaker and pier.13