The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

by T. J. Stiles

  What Vanderbilt did not know was that William Garrison had arrived from Nicaragua in the middle of the month; that he had informed Morgan of the deal with Randolph and Walker; and that Morgan had agreed to join in a new line. Vanderbilt did not know either that, on February 18, President Rivas obediently revoked the Accessory Transit charter and granted the rights to Randolph; and that a copy of the decree was rushed to Morgan by a private messenger, who reached New York a little over a week later. Vanderbilt had walked into a gigantic trap.10

  STARTING IN FEBRUARY, Charles Morgan began to act very strangely. He was never a man to repeat a failed strategy, yet again he began to short-sell Accessory Transit stock. He sold it for as little as 21, on terms that gave him up to four months to make delivery. Vanderbilt took every share that Morgan offered. The financial columns of the press found Morgan's strategy mystifying. “As the length of the Commodore's purse is proverbial,” wrote the New York Tribune, “the result of such a contest can scarcely be doubted.” Vanderbilt carried the share price back up over 23, but Morgan redoubled his campaign, selling ten thousand shares short on March 4 alone. He seemed to have gone insane. Vanderbilt's ring reportedly controlled 68,000 out of a total of 78,000 shares. Morgan, it seemed, had cornered himself.11

  Early on the morning of Thursday, March 13, news reached New York that Walker had revoked Accessory Transit's corporate charter, seized its property within Nicaragua, and granted the transit rights to Randolph. It was rumored that a new line would be established by Garrison and Morgan. “The telegraphic despatches from New Orleans fell upon Wall Street like a bombshell,” the New York Herald reported. Walker's “coup d'état,” the New York Times observed, “has created a greater excitement in Wall Street, among stock jobbers, than any event of the past ten years.” Everyone rushed to sell, instantly knocking the share price down by a third. At the head of the swarm that scurried off the ship was Joseph White. He had received a private telegram with the news that same morning, and had rushed out to find his broker. “White sold out about $100,000 of his Transit stock the instant he received news,” the Times reported.12

  Vanderbilt faced the gravest crisis of his life to date. No catastrophe—not the great fires of 1835 or 1845, not the Panic of 1837, not the Schuyler fraud—had been so sudden, so deliberate, so thoroughly beyond his control. And yet, he did not sell out. What distinguished him in the moment of crisis was his self-command; characteristically, he prepared a counterattack on multiple fronts. He began with a trip to Washington. He met with Secretary of State Marcy and urged the administration to intervene in Nicaragua to “sustain the rights of American citizens.” He wrote a letter to Marcy for public consumption, refuting Walker's pretext, taken from Randolph, for annulling the Accessory Transit charter. He sent a similar letter to Senator John M. Clayton, the former secretary of state, who took to the Senate floor to denounce Walker and his high-handed acts.13

  Despite Vanderbilt's personal lobbying, the administration chose to do nothing. In some respects, its inaction is difficult to understand. This was a national crisis: a private American citizen had seized control of a foreign country, attacked a major corporation, and temporarily shut down a strategically vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States. But the cabinet was frozen by its divisions. Like so many other Southerners, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis supported Walker, hoping to increase the territory open to slavery. But even antifilibuster cabinet members refused to help Vanderbilt, because they suspected Accessory Transit of having assisted Walker. Most important, White's insolence remained “fresh in the minds of all,” according to the New York Times. White had claimed that the company owed allegiance only to Nicaragua, the administration grumbled—so let it appeal to Nicaragua.14

  Stymied in the capital, Vanderbilt embarked on what can only be called an independent foreign policy. In the months ahead, his negotiations with foreign powers and deployment of secret agents abroad would prove far weightier than the acts of the federal government.

  First, the Accessory Transit board voted on March 17 to give him “full powers to conduct all such negotiations and do such acts as in his judgment might be necessary.” Next, he announced the closing of this route to California. “THE NICARAGUA LINE IS WITHDRAWN FOR THE PRESENT,” he wrote. “I do not consider passengers or the property of American citizens safe on the transit of the Isthmus.” Then he went to see Aspinwall and Roberts. In place of their foiled plan for a monopoly, they reached a new agreement: as long as the Nicaragua route remained closed, Pacific Mail and U.S. Mail would pay Accessory Transit $40,000 a month to lay up its ships and forgo competition via Panama. The contract was strictly oral. It would spark outrage when it emerged, but it was in many ways merely an alteration of their existing plans.15

  Most important, Vanderbilt opened talks with the republics neighboring Nicaragua. Alarmed by Walker's success—and the threat of further filibustering—they concluded to oust the usurper. Costa Rica's pro-British president, Juan Rafael Mora, proved particularly determined to overthrow Walker. Vanderbilt agreed to cooperate.

  Now he had to save and recover the company's property. Save would be the operative word for the moment. Walker had seized only the boats and other material within Nicaragua's borders, but the steamships remained vulnerable. Vanderbilt had withdrawn the Atlantic steamers, but he still had to protect those on the Pacific. He ordered son-in-law James Cross to sail immediately for San Francisco to take them out of harm's way. He also sent engineer Hosea Birdsall to Greytown with orders to take possession of the steamboats on the San Juan River—a potentially decisive blow16

  For the moment, the fate of Vanderbilt's company rested in the hands of his two agents. They sailed off to war, armed only with their wits.

  SOMEWHERE OFF THE WESTERN COAST of Central America, sometime near the end of March, James Cross intercepted the Accessory Transit ship Cortez as it steamed south toward Nicaragua. He hailed it from the deck of a Pacific Mail steamer heading north from Panama, and transferred over in a small boat. Once on board, he presented his orders to its commander, Captain Collins. He was to land his passengers at Panama, not San Juan del Sur, to prevent Walker from capturing the Cortez.

  The trouble was, Cross and Collins still felt obliged to stop at San Juan del Sur. They probably needed to refuel, as the port was the company's only regular coaling station south of San Francisco. Cross also wanted to take that coal out of Walker's reach, for it was highly valuable in this remote region. And William Garrison was aboard the Cortez, returning to Nicaragua after reporting to his father; Cross did not want to awaken his suspicions. The trick would be to remove the coal without losing the ship.

  On April 1, the 220-foot paddlewheeler nosed into the little horseshoe harbor. Captain Collins ordered the pilot to drop anchor near the two sailboats that held the coal. Garrison rowed to shore, where a hundred or so filibuster troops waited. From the other direction came a boat with four of Walker's officers. They boarded the Cortez and announced that they had come to seize the ship. Collins graciously escorted them down to his cabin, where Cross waited with a luxurious meal and “an unlimited supply of champagne,” according to the New York Express. The filibusters popped cork after cork, believing that they were waiting for the passengers to land. As they drank with Cross, Collins ordered lines attached to the two coal hulks. The Cortez drifted silently out to sea with the ebb tide, its two consorts in tow. Once clear of the bay, the steam engines rumbled to life, and the drunken filibusters learned that they were trapped. The Cortez sailed to Panama, where Cross arranged for the passengers to complete their journey to New York in a U.S. Mail steamship on the Atlantic.17

  Cross's coup infuriated Walker. Costa Rica had just declared war on his regime, and he had counted on recruits from among the Cortez's passengers. William Garrison admitted that Cross had taken him by surprise, and that his father might not be ready to start the new line for another six weeks—a long time to wait for reinforcements.18

  Cross s
teamed north in the Cortez, intercepting the Uncle Sam on the way and diverting it to Panama. In San Francisco, he delivered a letter from Vanderbilt to Cornelius Garrison. Vanderbilt offered to let Garrison continue as the San Francisco agent for Accessory Transit, “on the condition that neither Mr. Garrison nor any of his family should have anything to do with any other steamships running in a line between New York and San Francisco,” Cross reported. Vanderbilt's attempt to co-opt Garrison was cunning. It remained unclear whether the rumors of Garrison's betrayal were true; the offer was meant to prevent his defection or force him to reveal himself.

  Garrison's reply was equally shrewd. “He freely and without any reservation accepted the offer,” Cross said, “and seemed to feel—and so expressed himself—very grateful for a continuance of the confidence which Mr. Vanderbilt placed in him when he first took the agency of the company in San Francisco.” Thus Garrison bought time to put his new line into operation.

  Before Cross returned home, he heard warnings about Garrison. “I was repeatedly cautioned by my friends in that city not to place too much reliance upon Mr. Garrison's professions,” he wrote. “Yet… I left San Francisco with the fullest possible assurances from him that he was and would remain faithful to the company.”19

  DESPITE GARRISON'S SUBTERFUGE, Cross succeeded in his mission. Hosea Birdsall did not. Even worse, by carrying out the Commodore's orders he nearly embroiled the United States and Great Britain in war.

  Birdsall arrived at Greytown on the night of April 16 aboard the Orizaba, the first Atlantic steamship in Morgan's new Nicaragua line. As the passengers transferred to a riverboat, Birdsall rowed over to Punta Arenas to see the Accessory Transit agent, whom Walker had left in charge of the company's property. The agent was a burly fifty-one-year-old engineer who stood six feet tall and wore an iron-gray beard. His name was Joseph N. Scott. Birdsall had every reason to expect Scott's cooperation. In 1821 Vanderbilt had hired Scott as a deckhand on the Bellona, and had taught him the ways of steam engines over the succeeding decades. But when Birdsall demanded control of the machine shops, coal, and steamboats, he refused to give them up. Scott had a personal agenda. Years before, he had advanced nearly $20,000 of his own money to purchase a lake steamboat, La Virgen, for Accessory Transit; despite his repeated pleas, the company's management had never reimbursed him. Scott had no love for Walker, whose men had threatened to shoot him more than once; but, he told Birdsall, if he wasn't repaid he would never give up the property.20

  Scott's recalcitrance would prove decisive for Nicaragua, its neighbors, and Cornelius Vanderbilt. Had he complied with Birdsall's order, Garrison and Morgan would have been unable to conduct the transit between the Atlantic and the Pacific. They never would have started a new line, cutting off Walker from any reinforcements.

  But Vanderbilt had given Birdsall a means of hurdling this unexpected obstacle. Through talks with Costa Rican diplomats, the Commodore knew that Nicaragua's neighbors were planning to invade. So he had handed Birdsall a letter (over the signature of outgoing Accessory Transit president Thomas Lord), authorizing him to ask for help from the Royal Navy, should the filibusters attack Punta Arenas. “You are authorized to ask for the assistance of the commander of any man of war of her Britannic Majesty's Navy in the port,” it read. “The object of the Transit Company is to prevent accessions of filibusters to Walker's force, pending his hostilities with Costa Rica, and to effect this purpose no pains must be spared, no effort left untried.” The letter shows how well Vanderbilt had analyzed Walker's vulnerabilities, and how explicitly he had allied himself with Costa Rica. “Unless our boats are seized by the filibusters,” it continued, “they cannot get into the interior—and without large accessions Walker must fail, and Costa Rica be saved.”

  Remembering these instructions, Birdsall rowed out to a British sloop-of-war, the HMS Eurydice, anchored nearby. At his urging, its captain, John W. Tarleton, boarded the Orizaba, stopped the unloading of passengers, and reviewed the waybook, which listed the passengers' destinations. He could identify no filibusters and refused to intervene. Birdsall had failed.21

  For all of Tarleton's diffidence, the affair became an international incident. When it emerged that Vanderbilt had asked the Royal Navy to interfere with an American vessel, the New York Times called it “almost too incredible for belief.” The outrage went to the top. At the time, President Pierce and Secretary of State Marcy were seriously contemplating war with Britain over the Crampton affair. The Orizaba incident, coming amid this crisis, embarrassed and angered them. “The President and Secretary,” the Times wrote, “are much incensed at this conduct of Vanderbilt & White.”22

  To make matters worse, Pierce had just recognized Walker's government. It was U.S. policy to recognize the de facto government of any state, he declared; and Nicaragua did have a native president, Patricio Rivas. But politics played a role. A presidential election loomed in the fall, and Pierce wished to be renominated by the largely pro-Walker Democratic Party. He would never side with Vanderbilt.23

  The aftermath of Birdsall's mission underscored the near impossibility of Vanderbilt's position. He found himself at the center of competing interests, perfectly aligned so that his every action offended every party. Federal officials found it almost impossible to differentiate between legitimate emigrants and volunteers for Walker's army, but they condemned Vanderbilt for the same inability If the company had declined French's terms for carrying those “emigrants,” Walker would have revoked the corporate charter; but when Walker revoked it anyway, the federal government refused to intervene.24 Denied U.S. protection, Vanderbilt appealed to the British, only to be blamed for that act as well. The Commodore had learned early on in life that he had to protect his own on his own. Now that lesson was pounded painfully deep. Even in far-off Central America, Vanderbilt could rely on no one but himself.

  IT WAS A YEAR OF REVOLUTION, insurrection, and mayhem.

  On April 15, as the hapless passengers of the Cortez waited in Panama for a train across the isthmus, one of them got into a fight with a Panamanian outside a hotel. The quarrel sparked an explosion of rage and frustration among the native population at the U.S. presence. A mob of hundreds—including many policemen—attacked American citizens wherever they could, forcing them to take refuge in the Panama Railroad depot. U.S. consul Thomas Ward estimated that the rioters killed fifteen and wounded fifty.25

  In Nicaragua, Walker launched a revolution against a revolution against his revolution. President Rivas, long his quiescent puppet, suddenly declared Walker “an enemy of Nicaragua” and fled to the protection of an antifilibuster alliance consisting of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. With Rivas's support, the allied army marched over the northern border and advanced on León. Walker responded with a rigged election for the presidency at the end of June. He won by a landslide.26

  Bloodshed wracked the United States as well, as tensions over the extension of slavery boiled over in the Kansas Territory, where rival militias of free-soil jayhawkers battled pro-slavery border ruffians from Missouri. On May 21, 1856, David Rice Atchison—recently a U.S. senator from Missouri—led eight hundred of those ruffians in the looting of Lawrence, the jayhawker capital. On May 24, John Brown and his sons murdered five pro-slavery settlers. A low-level civil war broke out, eventually costing two hundred lives.27

  And then there was San Francisco. In the few years since the gold rush began, the city's government had fallen under the control of David C. Broderick, a Democratic Party boss. He ruled through fraudulent votes, rampant corruption, and such enforcers as Yankee Sullivan, who (like many of Broderick's men) had relocated from New York. But the city's merchants had grown unhappy as municipal graft and debt damaged their own credit in the East. On May 14, after one of Broderick's men gunned down a crusading newspaper editor, the city's exasperated businessmen revived the Committee of Vigilance. They targeted Broderick's organization, hanging two of his men and banishing twenty-eight more in short order. Broderick esca
ped, but Yankee Sullivan hanged himself in his cell on June 1, shortly after his arrest.28

  Cornelius Garrison thought that this was an excellent moment to leave town. He almost certainly had been elected to his term as mayor with the support of the Democratic machine, and he was not exactly a champion of reform. On June 21, after a political operative named Walter L. Chrysler attempted to blackmail him, Garrison departed for New York—just as the vigilance committee took full power.29

  In July, all the leading players in the Nicaraguan transit drama, except Walker, had gathered in New York: Garrison, Morgan, Vanderbilt, and Randolph. Now came the ultimate absurdity in this theater of the absurd. On arriving from Nicaragua, Randolph tried to sell his transit grant twice. First, on July 16, he and Garrison agreed on a price: $10,000 in cash, 50 cents per passenger, and a 2.5 percent commission on nonspecie freight. (The steamboats and other property in Nicaragua, held by the state, would be paid for with credits for carrying filibuster reinforcements.) Ten days later, Randolph brazenly offered Vanderbilt the same transit contract, in return for various fees that amounted to $300,000. The New York Tribune aptly characterized Vanderbilt's reaction: “Give three hundred thousand dollars cash for a grant which Walker might find plenty of pretexts for revoking the next day, just as he had revoked the former one!”

  Rebuffed by Vanderbilt, Randolph fell back on his original plan. Morgan agreed to take the Atlantic half of the transit contract, formalizing the arrangements already in operation. Walker approved all of Randolph's actions; as he wrote on August 20, “The transit business is well settled at last.” But Vanderbilt had not yet begun to fight.30