by T. J. Stiles
Perhaps he was at the Fashion Course on Long Island when the tax man knocked on the door, for it was there that Vanderbilt indulged in the latest phase of his rivalry with Robert Bonner, editor of the Ledger, for ownership of the fastest trotting horses in New York. After one race at the course in 1862, “it was whispered that Mr. Bonner would give his mares a trial of one mile,” the Atlantic Monthly later reported, “and his appearance on the course in his road wagon, driving the well-known beauties, detained the whole assembled multitude.” Bonner and Vanderbilt's informal heats on Harlem Lane and Bloomingdale Road remained a topic of fascination in horse-mad New York, a city all the more crazed for racing as the wartime boom multiplied the men of leisure. Vanderbilt offered to bet $10,000 that his finest pair could beat Bonner's, but Bonner refused to bet as a matter of principle. Instead, he offered to stage a public time trial.
After the jockeys cleared off the track, the audience watched the Commodore walk onto the turf with a watch in hand. “When Mr. Bonner brought out his team there was a murmur of admiration,” the Atlantic Monthly wrote. He started his horses, Lady Palmer and Flatbush Maid, on a fast first mile round the track, then whipped them to an even faster second mile. As Vanderbilt kept time, his competitor drove the team to a speed of 2 minutes and 28¾ seconds per mile, and the crowd roared. “It was entirely unprecedented,” the Atlantic Monthly observed. “After learning the time in which his horses had trotted, Mr. Bonner publicly declared that, while it was a rule with him never to make a bet, he would present ten thousand dollars as a gift to any gentleman who owned a team, if he would drive them in the time just made.” Vanderbilt took his horses as seriously as he did his business; he would work very hard to earn that gift.55
There was nothing really new about Vanderbilt's day on the Fashion Course, but it hinted at how he and the world around him were coming into closer alignment. On one hand, the old mercantile aristocracy continued to treat him as a worthy business partner but a bit of a vulgarian. His status as a social outsider among the elite has been exaggerated—his poor manners and ignorant speech even more so—yet there was undoubtedly an inner sanctum of patrician life in which he was still not welcome. In April 1860, for example, Strong had informed his diary that he had been asked to join a “committee of twenty which is hereafter to take charge of polite society regulate its interests, keep it pure.… It is to pass on the social grade of everybody, by ballot—one blackball excluding.” The other members included “Hamilton Fish, Anson Livingston, John Astor, William Schemerhorn, and others of the same sort”—but not, of course, Commodore Vanderbilt. “His wealth is unquestioned,” R. G. Dun & Co. had reported in 1860, but “his over-reaching disposition makes people shy of him.”56
On the other hand, Vanderbilt socialized with another set that came rapidly to the fore in the volatile atmosphere of the war years: the aggressive, enterprising, risk-taking “fast men” of Wall Street. These men—Vanderbilt's circle—raced trotters, played whist at Saratoga, and bought and sold stocks with an avidity never seen before.57 The cultural appeal of exclusivity would persist; in some eyes, the social strength of old family names only grew stronger, and new families sought to mingle and marry with them. Still, the economic and cultural reorientation of the Civil War undoubtedly created a sense that new growth was crowding out the old. Dixiecentric cotton merchants declined, and the geographical center of business shifted north. What historian Sven Beckert calls an emerging industrial bourgeoisie was not so much a new class, perhaps, as the triumph of a new outlook among the wealthy, one that had long existed but now came to the fore. It was an ease with the abstract economy, the intangible commerce of stocks and bonds and clearinghouse transactions, the impersonal corporations that began to supplant old family firms. This was the mind-set of the rising generation of rich New Yorkers. To them, the aged Commodore would be seen not as a barbarian but as a hero, an esteemed elder who saw far beyond the men of his time. In 1870, for example, when William W. Fowler published Ten Years in Wall Street, a memoir of his decade as a player on the stock market, he dedicated the book to Vanderbilt.58
In 1862, the Commodore had not yet performed the miracles that would make him a messiah to many on Wall Street. Despite his past financial warfare, the new men who rushed into the “coalhole” where the Open Board met, who lurked in the offices of brokers on Broad Street or Exchange Place, hardly gave him a thought. A year would pass before he forced the entire financial community to rethink what a man could do with those stocks, bonds, and greenbacks with which their invisible world was built. In the meantime, the secretary of war called him back into the service of his country.
AT FIFTEEN MINUTES AFTER NINE in the morning on July 29, 1862, a sleek, bark-rigged sailing ship weighed anchor at the Laird shipyard in Birkenhead, England, and proceeded down the Mersey River on a trial trip. Various ladies and gentlemen, friends and relatives of the builders, enjoyed a party on deck to celebrate. It was a fine ship, 220 feet in length (210 at the keel), with two steam engines (horizontal, to remain belowdecks); a propeller that could be raised or lowered, depending on whether it was powered by steam or sail; and, curiously enough, a collapsible funnel. Stranger yet, it had been fitted for cannons, though none were currently on board. Strangest of all, it was called simply “hull No. 290.”
The “trial trip” and celebratory party were all part of a ruse. Thomas H. Dudley, the U.S. consul at nearby Liverpool, had spied on the 290 all through its construction, and learned that it was, in fact, a commerce-raiding cruiser being built for the Confederacy. Already he had taken legal steps to prevent delivery, forcing the South's naval agent in England, James D. Bulloch, to rush his ship to sea. The hastily planned trial run took place immediately after Bulloch received word that the British authorities were about to seize the vessel. “In the evening transferred our visitors to a steam tug,” wrote sailor George Townley Fullam in his journal. On board came the full complement of crewmen for a long cruise in search of Union ships. To evade British law, the 290 sailed to the Canary Islands to receive its armament of eight guns.
Its commander was Raphael Semmes. The dashing Semmes had served in the U.S. Navy decades before going over to the Confederacy, seemingly training all the while to be the perfect pirate. Already he had shown his prowess as captain of the CSS Sumter, which had seized eighteen merchantmen before the Union fleet trapped it in Gibraltar. Now, in his custom-built cruiser, he embarked on a far more destructive voyage. He also gave the 290 a new, more resonant name: Alabama.59
ON JULY 17, 1862, PRESIDENT LINCOLN sent a formal message to Congress. “I have inadvertently omitted so long to inform you that in March last Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt, of New York, gratuitously presented to the United States the ocean steamer ‘Vanderbilt,’ by many esteemed the finest merchant ship in the world,” he wrote.60
Despite Welles's initial refusal to accept the great sidewheeler, many of the navy's senior officers now considered the Vanderbilt “the most formidable war vessel afloat in our waters,” as Harper's Weekly reported. On July 31, for example, General David Hunter wrote to Stanton from Port Royal on the Southern coast, “I have just had an interview with Flag-Officer [Samuel] DuPont, who considers it extremely important to the safety of his fleet that the Vanderbilt should be sent here immediately.” Admiral David D. Porter informed Congress after the war, “We never had a vessel that could run down a blockade-runner during the whole war, except the Vanderbilt and two others.” Its combination of speed and size made it formidable.61
During the Merrimack scare, the untrusting Stanton had learned to trust both the ship and its builder. Accordingly, new orders went forth from the War Department to the office at 5 Bowling Green. “The Vanderbilt is to be fitted out for cruising in the West Indies to run down the privateers that our Navy cannot catch,” Assistant Secretary of War Peter H. Watson wired the Commodore on September 3. “You are authorized to fit her up as well and as speedily as possible for the service.… Captain [Gustavus V.] Fox will correspond with y
ou about fitting her out and arming her. The Navy are very anxious to obtain the aid of the Vanderbilt, for without it they cannot maintain the blockade against the Nashville, Ovieta, No. 290, and other fast vessels.”62
Once again, the federal government gave this private individual great public responsibilities, as if the title “Commodore” were a formal rank. Once again, Vanderbilt carried out his duties swiftly and capably. “The Vanderbilt is now in first-rate condition,” Lieutenant C. H. Baldwin reported to Fox from New York on November 7. Baldwin, the ship's new commander, wanted to sail to the Caribbean, where he thought the Alabama (or 290, as Union officials persisted in calling it) might try to capture the Atlantic & Pacific steamers as they returned from Panama, laden with gold. He hoped to meet the rebel cruiser in battle, writing, “I pray I may have the opportunity of doing something worthy of so splendid a command.”63
While the Vanderbilt was still refitting, the Commodore received a telegram from Stanton, asking him to come to Washington. He arrived late in the evening and went directly to Stanton's office in the War Department, where the secretary was still at his desk. As was the custom with each of these two men—who were getting to know each other quite well—they immediately proceeded to business. Stanton peered through his little round glasses and said something about appointing Vanderbilt to a position as quartermaster in New York. “We'll stop right there, Mr. Stanton,” the Commodore replied. “There is no position in this government that I want, and none that I will take; no place of emolument that I can take.” This brought the secretary to a halt. “He was delicate on that point,” Vanderbilt recalled. Given the late hour, Stanton said he would explain in the morning why he had called him to Washington.
At nine o'clock the next day, October 27, Vanderbilt returned to Stan-ton's office. “I have thought this thing over and made up my mind,” the secretary said. “Come and get into the carriage.” The two rode to see General Nathaniel P. Banks, a former speaker of the house turned unsuccessful general (against Confederate general Thomas T. “Stonewall” Jackson, against whom almost everyone was unsuccessful). Stanton spoke privately with Banks for a few minutes, then called in Vanderbilt. Stanton explained that Banks was to lead “a secret expedition, and no one else is to know it but us three.”
“No one will know it from me,” Vanderbilt replied. “I will assure you that.”
“I want you to assist General Banks in New York in fitting it out,” Stanton said. He asked Vanderbilt to charter steamships as transports and see that they were adequately prepared and supplied; he also briefly discussed with him a system of inspectors. (“His interviews were short,” Vanderbilt recalled, much to his liking.) Then Vanderbilt and Banks took the afternoon train to New York.64
Banks went on to Boston to organize the new recruits who formed most of his expeditionary force, and Vanderbilt began to charter steam ships. He tried to deal directly with ship owners to avoid brokers, and bargained fiercely to keep the cost as low as possible. “I believe religiously that he has saved the government fifty percent in fitting out these vessels,” said Commodore George J. Van Brunt, the naval inspector assigned to the expedition. “My intercourse with Commodore Vanderbilt throughout this whole matter has been of the most pleasant kind; he was acting, as I thought, with great patriotism, in serving the government for nothing.”65
Banks wired Vanderbilt from Boston that he would need transportation for fifteen thousand men, as well as a large number of horses. The Commodore chartered twenty-seven steamers, all that were available, and still he needed more. Transporting the horses was the real problem; sailing ships suited them best, he thought. “Then a man from down east came to me with a letter from General Banks,” Vanderbilt later testified before Congress. He was a shipbuilder from Richmond, Maine, named Thomas J. Southard. “When he gave me this letter of introduction from General Banks I talked with him, and I found he understood more about a horse-ship than I did, a heap more. He said he had been in it a good deal in his life, fitting up different horse-vessels for the West Indies, &c.” Vanderbilt thought to himself, “This is just the man I want.”
“Mr. Southard,” the Commodore said, “I want you to understand that I feel a strong interest in this controversy that we have got into, and I feel it to be a duty to my country to do it all the service I can. I am going to do it voluntarily, without any pay—how do you feel on that?”
Southard sat mute.
“Think it well over,” Vanderbilt added. “We ought to find patriotism enough in our country to do something for it without everybody making money out of the funds of the government.” Finally Southard agreed to take no pay. He assumed the duty of finding and fitting out sailing ships to carry the horses, chartering a total of thirty-five.66
Unfortunately for the Commodore, Southard did not leave ship owners with the impression that he would take no compensation. The Mainer seems to have been a very smart man, in the old Yankee sense. He had family ties to ship chandlers and brokerages in New York, and—without ever explicitly demanding it—he implied that the ship owners must do business with his relatives, at a rate of 5 percent per charter. When Congress learned of the charges, Vanderbilt's handling of the Banks expedition took on the dimensions of a scandal—one that grew larger when one of the twenty-seven steamers, the Niagara, turned out to have rotten timbers which had been disguised by new planking that had fooled the inspectors. An impression formed that the entire fleet consisted of unseaworthy vessels chartered at exorbitant rates. The Senate convened an investigation, and a motion was made to censure Vanderbilt.
The motion died with the so-called scandal. Southard may have fooled the Commodore (and Banks, who recommended him) with his indirect commissions, but Congress concluded that the affair had been handled economically overall. As for the Niagara and two other ships with boiler troubles, such mishaps were to be expected in a large military expedition that was organized and launched in little more than a month.67
Banks had no misgivings about Vanderbilt's conduct. On the afternoon of December 4, the general joined the Commodore, Mayor George Opdyke, and other prominent men in a celebratory excursion into New York Bay aboard a Treasury cutter, in tribute to Banks and his mysterious expedition. A toast was then made to Vanderbilt, who typically replied (according to the New York Tribune) that “he was not a speechifier; he would speak by proxy, through Gen. Banks.” Banks informed the distinguished guests “that Commodore Vanderbilt was the only man who knew where the expedition was going.” Vanderbilt kept the secret.68
Banks, it turned out, would not make a grand attack on a Confederate stronghold. He was bound for New Orleans, which the Union navy had captured earlier. There his army would be able to cooperate with Union forces under General Grant, now driving south toward Vicksburg. The secrecy, of course, served to keep the rebels in doubt about where he might land. But Stanton may have thought to protect Banks from a serious danger, one he had asked Vanderbilt to help thwart. Somewhere at sea lurked Captain Raphael Semmes and the CSS Alabama.69
ON THE MORNING OF DECEMBER 7, 1862, Captain Semmes went out on the deck of the Alabama and put his telescope to his eye. He looked every inch the pirate, in his long double-breasted coat with twin rows of bright brass buttons, his fierce moustache pointing to either side of his face like cannons run out of gunports on a man-of-war. He swept the horizon with his spyglass, looking for a wisp of smoke. Nothing. He turned and went back into his cabin, where he sat down to breakfast, “hopeless for that day of my California steamer,” he wrote in his memoirs, “and my millions of dollars in gold.”
For more than three months, the Alabama had burned or ransomed one Yankee merchantman after another. But what Semmes wanted more than anything else was to capture a Vanderbilt steamer on its way to New York, laden with California gold. The Confederate government would allow Semmes and crew to share in the prize; more important, such a capture might cripple the flow of gold to New York, just as specie shippers had warned the federal government at the start of the
war. It would also saddle Vanderbilt's company with expensive claims for the losses.
“We had accurate time-tables of the arrivals and departures of the California steamers in the files of the New York papers that we had captured,” Semmes recalled. He loitered now in the windward passage east of Cuba, where he expected the iron sidewheeler Champion to pass on its way from Aspinwall to New York. Today, Semmes thought, would not be the day. The boatswain ordered the crew into their white frocks and trousers for Sunday services on deck, as the captain sipped coffee in his cabin.
“Suddenly the prolonged cry of ‘S-a-i-l h-o!’ came ringing, in a clear musical voice, from aloft,” Semmes wrote, “the look-out having at length descried a steamer.” George Fullam, a sailor on the Alabama, recorded the ensuing frenzy. “Steam was immediately got up, the propellor lowered, sails taken in and furled,” he wrote in his journal. “All hands called to quarters, the battery loaded with shell and run out.… Everybody in the best possible spirits and eager for a fray” Semmes knew that the steamships of the Atlantic & Pacific company were fast, so he hauled up a United States flag to lull suspicions until he got closer.70
From the deck of the Vanderbilt steamer, Captain A. G. Jones peered through his own telescope at the approaching steam sloop as it emerged out of the sun glare. He could see it flew the Stars and Stripes, but he surveyed it with suspicion. Suddenly he exclaimed, “If that isn't an English rig, you may shoot me!” He was certain it was the English-built commerce raider, the Alabama. He ordered the engineer to put on all steam in an attempt to outrun the predator.71
Jones's ship was not the Champion, but the Ariel. The aging sidewheeler had steamed out of New York Harbor on December 1, bound for Aspinwall, and it carried no chests of gold. “The boat crowded to capacity with human beings, and some scarcely human,” wrote passenger George Willis Read. “The confusion and discomfort on board surpassed anything by far I have ever before experienced. The cooking was filthy beyond my powers of description. The smell and filth, with the rough sea, has kept me seasick most of the time.” Read was so disgusted that he interrupted the story of the Alabama's appearance to write that he ate only a baked potato that day. By the time he reached the deck, the Alabama had fired a blank cartridge and run up the rebel ensign.
