by T. J. Stiles
On December 16, Spencer ordered his men into the rafts. They pushed out into the stream, drifting down under the rain-forest canopy that rose some two hundred feet above them, through heavy rain and dense humidity Finally the current carried them into the wide San Juan. On the morning of December 22, he ordered them to pull the rafts into the mouth of a creek near the location of his first target: the filibuster fort at Hipp's Point. Hearing a steamboat churning upstream, he told everyone to lie down flat and be still. The boat chuffed up to their hiding spot, then continued on its way.
Spencer led his men through the forest to the rear of the fort. A Costa Rican scout shimmied up a tree, and scooted back down to report. He saw forty to fifty men, with two cannons—more than enough to defeat an attack, if the Costa Ricans lost the element of surprise. Silently the troops filed into position and crept up behind the unsuspecting filibusters. Spencer drew his revolver to fire the shot that would launch the assault.54
THE MOST IMPORTANT EVENTS may well be the quiet ones, the private ones. On November 26, for example, Corneil finally did something right in his father's eyes by marrying Ellen Williams of Hartford, Connecticut. It remains unclear how they met, but the Commodore heartily approved of “our dear Ellen,” as he called her, and showed genuine warmth for her family. He and Sophia attended the wedding in the Hartford home of Ellen's father, Oliver E. Williams.55
Vanderbilt's existence was divided into public and private, the carefully concealed and the loudly promoted. In November, Texas newspapers announced that he had formed a steamboat-and-railroad line from New Orleans to Galveston in competition with Morgan's most lucrative business. On December 10, Vanderbilt went to Washington to attend the opening of the new Congress. “Railroad and steamboat robbers crowd the lobbies,” the New York Times wrote. The House postal committee duly reported a bill to grant him the Atlantic mail contract. “A provision of this contract is that, in the event of this line not making as quick time as the Cunard steamships, $1,000 shall be deducted for every twelve hours' deficiency,” the Times noted.56
Some of the Commodore's secrets were meant to go public. On Christmas Eve he wrote a letter to the stockholders of the Accessory Transit Company to prepare them for an impending revelation. He noted that the Prometheus had been attached in one of the many lawsuits and auctioned off that very day, and that he had bought it for the bargain price of $10,011. But he purchased it in their interest, to be ready to reopen the line at a moment's notice. “Present appearances indicate a realization of my hopes,” he wrote, “that the company will be speedily restored to their rights.”57
THE CRACK OF SPENCER'S GUNSHOT echoed through the rain forest, sending the Costa Ricans surging forward with fixed bayonets. Panic swept the filibusters. They had posted no sentries, never imagining an attack from the rear. The Costa Ricans speared them and shot them as they scrambled over the breastworks and slid down the riverbank. Perhaps half a dozen escaped alive. Spencer detailed a platoon of thirty or forty troops to hold the works; then he and the rest returned to the rafts.
At around two o'clock in the morning on December 24, Spencer and his men drifted into Greytown harbor. Silently they boarded four Accessory Transit steamboats anchored in front of the company buildings, and crept onto Punta Arenas. “At daylight an alarm was sounded at Punta Arenas… that the Costa Ricans were there,” recalled Joseph Scott. “All the hands were called together to defend ourselves.… We organized into a company, with firearms, to retake the boats.”
Though outnumbered ten to one, the iron-bearded Scott organized a counterattack, only to be interrupted by Captain John E. Erskine, commander of a squadron of British warships in the harbor. Erskine announced that he would not tolerate any violence on either side—thereby confirming Spencer's possession of the steamboats—though he did convince the Costa Ricans to evacuate the point.58
After the troops returned to the steamboats, Spencer strolled into Scott's office. It was almost exactly a year since he had first set foot there, begging for work. Now he commanded an armed force that was changing the course of the war. “I asked him what he was going to do with the steamers,” Scott reported. “He said he meant to take them up the river.… [He said] I could do no further harm with them, meaning that I couldn't carry any more filibusters up the river.”59
Spencer ordered the little fleet to put on steam and head up the river. At the mouth of the San Carlos, he directed the smallest boat to turn into the tributary and notify General Mora of their success. Then Spencer used his knowledge of transit operations to bloodlessly capture the remaining steamboats and Castillo Viejo, one by one, giving the standard signals until he was close enough to surprise the crews and garrison with his Costa Rican detachment. But one target promised to be more difficult: the heavily fortified battery at San Carlos, where the San Juan River met Lake Nicaragua. After Spencer seized La Virgen, he loaded it with troops and ordered its engineer, William Wise, to put on all steam for San Carlos. Wise recalled that he nervously remarked that he would rather be put ashore in the wilderness than “risk his life in front of the heavy cannon stationed at the fort. To this Spencer replied that it was useless for [Wise] to talk, that he must get up steam and go up the river.”60
On December 30, Spencer stopped the boat just below San Carlos and detailed a detachment of sixty troops. He ordered them to sneak behind the fort, approach as closely as possible, and wait for a signal. He planned to trick the garrison, but if he failed they were to launch an attack. The men rowed to shore in boats, and La Virgen continued to San Carlos. Spencer piloted the steamboat to its usual anchorage and gave the customary blast from the whistle. The fort answered in kind. A boat rowed out with a few filibusters and the garrison's commander, Captain Kruger, to pick up mail.
As Captain Kruger's men tied up their boat alongside La Virgen, Spencer leaned over the rail. “Is that you, Kruger?” he asked.
“Yes,” came the reply.
“Come on board,” Spencer said.
Kruger followed him to the top deck, “and was immediately surrounded by Costa Rican officers,” he later reported, “who had been lying down flat on deck, concealed from view. Mr. Spencer then told me that he had taken all of the steamers and was in command of all the river.” Spencer declared that he had seized the boats in the name of Commodore Vanderbilt, and he demanded the surrender of the fort. Kruger balked, but the steamboat crew told him about the Costa Rican force hidden in the trees. “Mr. Spencer told me (when I hestitated) that the innocent blood of my men would fall on my head, as we would certainly be put to death by the Costa Ricans,” Kruger recalled. “I concluded to surrender.”61
Spencer's coup was almost complete. Mora's army arrived on December 31, whereupon Spencer and a detachment of troops boarded a small riverboat to go find the San Carlos, the largest and last uncaptured lake steamer. On January 3, the two boats encountered each other on the upper reaches of the San Juan River. The result was a repeat of his previous encounters: Spencer gave the correct signals, the boats came alongside, and the Costa Rican soldiers rose from hiding, rifles ready. The San Carlos's captain surrendered without a fight. Spencer went aboard and read aloud a proclamation from President Mora, promising safe passage to the passengers. He also tacked up a notice. “Gentlemen: Do not be deceived or induced to enter into any combination to take this boat out of my possession. I am amply prepared for any emergency that may arise. Keep quiet, behave as gentlemen should, and I pledge you my sacred word and honor to see you safe through to Greytown.” The Costa Ricans posted a guard in the main saloon, behind a barricade of piled-up trunks and baggage.
Spencer had carried out Vanderbilt's plan with exceptional skill and courage. Apart from the brutal storming of Hipp's Point, he had used speed and guile to achieve a sweeping—and bloodless—victory. As the San Carlos steamed down the river, Charles Morgan's son-in-law, Israel Harris, came forward. “We had you once, now you have us,” he said to Spencer. “We are even.”62
* The modern spelling is
“Goicuria,” but this book will follow historic sources, both English and Spanish.
Chapter Twelve
CHAMPION
“This famous pretended experiment for the spread of Anglo-Saxon enterprise and civilization at the point of a bayonet,” declared the New York Tribune, “and for introducing free institutions into Central America through the medium of a military despotism, has ended in blood, murder, rapine.” With these words, Horace Greeley succinctly described William Walker's reign in Nicaragua. But it had not ended quite yet. On January 27, 1857, the day this editorial appeared, the final siege of Rivas began.1
After Spencer's capture of the steamers and forts on the San Juan River, General Mora loaded most of his troops onto the steamboats and crossed Lake Nicaragua, where he joined the allied army encircling the filibuster stronghold. Walker would receive no reinforcements or supplies from the Atlantic—or from the Pacific, because Garrison diverted his ships to Panama as soon as he learned of Spencer's exploits.2 February, March, April—the siege of Rivas ground on. Finally an American naval officer, Lieutenant Charles H. Davis, intervened. He shuttled between the two camps and negotiated an agreement. On May 1, Walker surrendered to Davis, who conducted the filibusters through the allied lines. Walker departed Nicaragua.3
“The most disastrous blunder of Walker,” observed the New York Herald, “was his coup d'etat against ‘the house of Vanderbilt.’” The Commodore's role in Spencer's mission was suspected by the press as soon as the first reports reached New York in January. Then again, the newspapers imagined that the steamship tycoons were behind everything from the start. Ignoring evidence that Walker, Randolph, and the Central Americans had driven events, they called the conflict the “war of the commodores.” They even claimed, mistakenly, that George Law intrigued for the Nicaragua route. (The most he did was to sell rifles to Parker French.) In Spencer's case, however, the press was correct. The filibusters themselves stressed Vanderbilt's importance. “Walker owes his defeat not to the natives of Central America, but to his own countrymen,” one wrote in 1859, “and had it not been for the malice or revenge of Vanderbilt, he might have reigned in Nicaragua at this day”4
The filibusters based their entire movement on contempt for Spanish-speaking peoples, so they naturally underplayed the role of the “natives” in the war. In fact, the isthmian republics had fought hard and paid dearly. One British diplomat estimated that the war cost the lives of forty thousand Nicaraguans, Costa Ricans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Salvadorans. The Central American soldiers who survived filibuster gunfire and outbreaks of cholera carried disease home, causing epidemics. The war bankrupted Costa Rica (despite Vanderbilt's aid), which prompted murmurs of dissent against President Mora. But the greatest suffering was inflicted on Nicaragua, where one city embodied the death and destruction that Walker had strewed about him. “Granada… presents, with her demolished houses and masses of ruined citizens, a consummate picture of misery and distress,” wrote a correspondent for the New York Herald. “Walker, in burning and in the destruction of Granada, has earned a notoriety which for ages to come the historian will chronicle with infamy and horror.”5
And yet, it cannot be denied that Vanderbilt played a decisive role in Walker's downfall. He had found the filibuster's weak point, crafted the plan to strike it, selected the agent to carry out the operation, and paid its costs. The Central Americans likely would have won in the long run without his help—but with it, they won in the short run. “Mr. Vanderbilt… has shown the ablest generalship,” the London Times observed. “Walker's most formidable enemy has conducted the campaign from New York.”6
He exacted revenge on Garrison and Morgan as well. Even before Spencer struck, Morgan had complained of the “large expenditures made to organize a line.” Morgan was so close-mouthed that it is difficult to know how much he had at stake; as the Mercantile Agency noted, with regard to the Morgan Iron Works, “The extent of their means is a family secret with Morgan.” But once the line collapsed, he could no longer conceal his need for cash. In April, he mortgaged his iron works for $317,500. In 1859, clerk Benjamin Voorhees testified that Morgan and Garrison “suffered a loss of about $300,000. I have been so assured by [Garrison] and from my own knowledge of his affairs. I believe it absolutely true.” This was a staggering figure—as large as the entire estates of many of New York's richest men. And Morgan continued to bleed as Vanderbilt competed against his Gulf Coast line, slashing fares by up to 90 percent.7
Vanderbilt had wrought his revenge by guiding the military operations of a sovereign nation, at a cost of dozens of lives, through the instrument of a murderer on a jungle river a continent away from 10 Washington Place. His blow had captured international attention, alerting enemies present and future to just how far he would go to punish betrayal. But revenge didn't pay the servants. As Harper's Weekly asked, just before the filibusters surrendered, “When we have got rid of Walker, what next?”8
ONE FRIGID EVENING IN JANUARY, Vanderbilt, his brother Jacob, and a third man boarded a rowboat in the Hudson River at Hoboken, New Jersey. It may not have been in January of 1857—it may have been 1856 or 1855 or 1854—but what is certain is that the third man circulated the story of what happened that night. They were returning to New York from a corporate board meeting in New Jersey. It was late, and Vanderbilt did not want to wait for a ferry. So he hired the craft and took a seat in the stern as two boatmen pulled on the oars. They rowed into a dense mat of slush. It was rapidly getting darker and colder. The slush was hardening. A chunk of ice floating with the current plowed through and cracked dangerously against the side of the boat.
“The Commodore had from the first sat quiet,” reported Harper's Weekly in 1859, “and his companions, who looked to him as their leader, had followed his example. At length he sprang up. ‘Boys,’ said he, cheerily, ‘this won't do. Give me an oar! Now you two,’ he added, addressing his brother and one of his friends, ‘take those oars and row’” At first the boatmen refused to give up control of the boat. Vanderbilt glared at them and said, in a low voice, “You keep out of my way, or you'll maybe come to grief.” Standing upright in the bitter cold, balancing on the gunwales, he plunged his oar in the water to serve as a rudder and guided the craft through the bombardment of ice floes until finally they docked, sometime around midnight. “One of the parties who shared the Commodore's society on that evening,” Harper's wrote, “has been heard to declare that he grew ten years older in the five or six hours they spent in the boat.”9
Cornelius Vanderbilt remained a powerful physical presence, even in his sixties, as he prowled the city, straight and tall, his cravat around his neck, a cigar swiveling around in his mouth, wearing an air of profound confidence even in crises that threatened his survival. A mastery of physical danger can breed character, or it can breed a bully; it seems to have done a bit of both in the former boatman. It certainly made him a man whom contemporaries found striking. “One's first impression of Vanderbilt is that he is a man of steel,” one writer observed, fifteen years later. “There is a steely glint in his grayish-blue eyes that reinforces the impression.”10
Character, judgment, self-possession—these rose in Vanderbilt's values as he gained eminence. More than that, he began to reveal strands of warmth and humanity in his soul; even strangers now remarked on “his extreme courtesy.” Such strands were gently pulled into view by Ellen Williams Vanderbilt, Corneil's wife. On February 12, 1857, for example, Vanderbilt did something very unusual: he wrote a letter in his own hand, to the Williams family in Hartford. His fondness for them, especially for his daughter-in-law, overflowed the page. He had sent a letter to “our Dear Ellen,” he said, by a messenger “who promised to deliver it with his own hand.… I am in hopes to spend an evening with you shortly when we can talk over matters & things. Please give my best regards to all the ladies. Tell Ellen to send her notes along. I like to read them.”
But these threads of warmth were wound around the steel core of a demanding fath
er. The impetus for this letter came from his frustration with his son. “I this moment received a long letter from Cornelius in which he complains of Mr. Bond,” he wrote, “for something he dun on my account. All this looks like one of Cornelius visions.” This tantalizing choice of words hints that Vanderbilt still doubted his son's sanity, even after he had won his release from an asylum. The Commodore asserted that Mr. Bond felt great affection for the Williams family, “& if he did not he could not be a friend of mine for a moment. I think these few line should be all sufficient,” he added. “They air for the purpose of your correcting Cornl as his judgemint seams not to be mature upon all points. A great fault of his is to take disputes without sufficient cause.”11
This letter offers a flash of insight into Vanderbilt's own late-maturing notion of fatherhood. He flared with scorn for his son, yet also demonstrated genuine concern. He wanted to correct the troubled lad, to teach him judgment, coolness, character.
Soon after this note, the Commodore presented Corneil and Ellen with a “fine mansion,” together with an orchard, vineyard, garden, and hay-field, on a ridge overlooking Hartford. “There are few country seats in the land possessing equal attractions,” the Hartford Courant observed. “The rooms are uncommonly spacious.… The view of the city, of Hartford Rocky Hill, and of the valleys on both sides of the ridge is charming.”12 The Commodore still shook his head over Corneil, but he made sure that Ellen would live in comfort. In fact, he gave the estate not to his son, but to his daughter-in-law, whom he trusted more than his own flesh and blood.
ON MARCH 9, 1857, the New York Tribune announced the Supreme Court's decision in the Dred Scott case. “THE TRIUMPH OF SLAVERY COMPLETE,” declared one of its many headlines. The enslaved Scott had sued for his freedom on the grounds that he had resided in the free Wisconsin territory; Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled against him. Negroes, he wrote, “had no rights which a white man was bound to respect.” What shocked the majority of the Northern public was not the blatant racism, but the implication that free states had no power to bar slavery within their borders.13
