The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

by T. J. Stiles

  20 Nelson Robinson, Robert W. Kelley, and Daniel B. Allen v. Daniel Drew and Isaac Newton, June 27, 1848, file PL-1848-R, and Nelson Robinson, Robert W. Kelley, and Daniel B. Allen v. Daniel Drew and Isaac Newton, November 2, 1848, file PL-1848-R 2, Supreme Court Pleadings, NYCC; Medbery 312; Edmund Clarence Stedman, The New York Stock Exchange (New York: Stock Exchange Hstorical Company, 1905), 104. Interestingly, the court filings cited here make clear that manipulation of the road's traffic and its stock price were part of the initial investment plan.

  21 Boston Daily Advertiser, July 3, 1845. For full sources for my analysis of CVs operation, see the next endnote.

  22 NYH, July 4, September 26, 1845; Boston Daily Advertiser, July 3, 1845; NYTr, October 2, 1845, September 29, 1847; Stonington Reports, 46–50; Lane, 75. CV, it appears, rallied support among Drew and others by promising to challenge the legitimacy of the corporation's bonds, even though they represented a 50 percent reduction of the original debt. The argument used in court was that the original bonds were usurious and thus invalid, which would invalidate the compromised debt as well. The case never reached a decision. See NYH, cited above, and New York, Providence, and Boston Rail Road Company v. Elisha Peck, Richard M. Blatchford, James Foster Jr., Henry G. Stebbins, Matthew Morgan, Samuel Jaudon, and William S. Wet-more, January 3, 1848, file PL-1848-N-4, Supreme Court Pleadings, NYCC.

  23 ARJ, October 10, 1846; Seventeenth Annual Report of the Board of Directors to the Stockholders of the Hartford & New Haven R. R. Co. (Hartford: Case, Tiffany, 1852); HC, September 10, 1846.

  24 NYH, July 4, September 26, 1845, September 30, 1847; NYTr, October 2, 1845, September 29, 1847; Stonington Reports, 46–50. Regarding the dates of Drew's takeover of the Navigation Company: on August 7, 1846, WmC wrote a letter to COH; on August 17, he wrote to R. E. Lockwood, Drew's secretary, asking him to show the letter to Drew; fol. vol. 2, CFP.

  25 NYTr, October 31, 1844.

  26 Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), esp. 570–612; Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 530–3; Howard Bodenhorn, “Bank Chartering and Political Corruption in Antebellum New York: Free Banking as Reform,” in Edward L. Glaeser and Claudia Goldin, eds., Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America's Economic History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 231–57; Richard R. John, “Private Enterprise, Public Good? Communications Deregulation as a National Political Issue, 1839–1851,” in Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreecher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 329–54; Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 94–9, 242–3. Richard R. John stresses the pragmatic and nonpartisan considerations behind antebellum policy making; see Richard R. John, “Ruling Passions: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Richard R. John, ed., Ruling Passions: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America (University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 1–20.

  27 Howe, 648–743; NYTR, November 1, 1844.

  28 NYTr, October 31, November 1, 1844. On the dates, nature, and impact of Irish immigration, see Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum (New York: Free Press, 2001).

  29 Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 69–79; Anbinder, 156–7, 159, 201–6; Burrows & Wallace, 633–5; Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840–1857 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 24; NYT, May 14, 1845, February 4, 1849.

  30 NYT, January 5, 1877. An example of how the press followed Yankee Sullivan is in NYH, May 14, 1845, as well as its story of February 4, 1849.

  31 NYH, June 13, August 15, 1845, August 15, 1846; Grund, 212, 214. Halttunen's observations in Confidence Men (esp. 6–23, 93–4) of the disruptive impact of the market, the anonymity of Jacksonian society, and the importance of behavior in establishing gentility underscore the point I am trying to make about the artificiality of social status. On the NYH's mixture of “fawning” and “exposé” in its high-society coverage, see Burrows & Wallace, 525–7, 640. The idea that Jacksonian America experienced a great deal of social mobility was attacked by Edward Pessen; see especially Riches, Class, and Power Before the Civil War (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1973). However, Frederic Cople Jaher, The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 160–250, illustrates the extreme instability of the upper stratum following the end of the culture of deference. Pessen's point is well taken here, as many of the antebellum wealthy came from prosperous backgrounds. However, not all belonged to the old aristocratic families of the eighteenth century; the old aristocracy disappeared as a functional category, breaking the grip of a select group of families on wealth and power. Eric Homberger, Mrs. Astor's New York: Money and Social Power in a Gilded Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 3, is interested in the period that followed the downfall of the culture of deference, in the ways in which a highly unstable social elite sought to write and enforce rules of status. As my discussion will show, this issue pertains to my analysis as well, but I am more concerned with the new distinction between a fashionable elite and a functional one.

  32 NYH, March 2, 1840; Homberger, 135–42.

  33 Book of Minutes 1, July 30, 1844, to March 18, 1891, box 1, New York Yacht Club Library and Archives, New York, NY.

  34 Burrows & Wallace, 625–8, 635–8; Spann, 36–9, 55, 117, 132–3.

  35 “The Islets of the Gulf,” Graham's American Monthly Magazine of Literature, Art, and Fashion, January 1847; Dickens, 89, 91.

  36 BE, June 5, 1845; NYH, July 2, 8, 19–21, 1845; NYTr, July 22, 1845; BE, June 5, 1845; Meetings of September 29, 1845, and October 10, 1846, Minute Book of the Elizabethport and New York Ferry Company, box 4, Central Railroad Company of New Jersey Papers, Hagley Museum and Library. It should be noted that the Richmond Turnpike Company's charter expired on April 1, 1844. On January 29, 1844, before the corporation formally dissolved, Mauran and CV assigned to themselves all of its property and leases, and continued the business as the Staten Island Ferry. See People of the State of New York v. CV, Anthony Bird, Stephen Williams, Elias Butler, Jacob Van Cleef and Jacob Arnold, November 22, 1851, Supreme Court, Richmond County, box SI-68, NYMA.

  37 Liberator, March 24, 1848; NYT, January 5, 1877; Eric Homberger, The Historical Atlas of New York City (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 78, and Mrs. Astor's New York, 111–9.

  38 Phebe Vanderbilt v. Charles M. Simonson and His Wife, John K. Vanderbilt and Charles M. Simonson Junior, Executors, and Mary Simonson, Executrix of the Last Will and Testament of Cornelius Simonson, Deceased, and John K. Vanderbilt, April 27, 1844, file D CH-177-V, Court of Chancery, Jacob H Vanderbilt and John Vanderbilt v. the People of the State of New York, May 10, 1844, file PL-1844-P-424, Supreme Court Pleadings, People of the City of New York v. Jacob H Vanderbilt, December 19, 1844, file 1844–771, Court of Common Pleas, NYCC; NYT, December 19, 22, 1877; NYW, November 14, 1877; NYS, November 14, 1877. CJV later testified that his first seizure came at the age of seven; NYS, December 22, 1877.

  39 NYW, November 14, 1877; NYS, November 13, 14, 1877; NYT, November 13, 14, 1877.

  40 NYH, August 15, September 7, 1846. See also SA, August 27, 1846; NYTr, June 1, August 15, 27, 1846; MM, September 1846; ProvJ, November 30, 1846. CV charged the Norwich Railroad about $160,000 for the Atlantic.

  41 NYW, November 14, 1877; NYS, November 13, 14, 1877; NYT, November 13, 1877.

  42 ProvJ, November 28, 30, December 2, 1846; ARJ, December 5, 1846; Liberator, December 4, 1846; NYH, November 29, 30, December 10, 1846.<
br />
  43 NYH, June 2, 1847; SA, March 27, 1847; HC, September 10, 1846; Morrison, 312–3, 328; Heyl, 6:73–7.

  44 Morrison, 312–3; WDL to CtP, March 6, 1843, fold. 1, box 4, WDLP.

  45 Morrison, 312–3; NYH, September 5, 9, 1846, June 1, 1847; EP, June 1, 1847; NYTr, June 2, 1847.

  46 A Sketch of the Events of the Life of George Law (New York: J. C. Derby, 1855); entry for George Law, DAB; ARJ, April 11, 1846; David S. Manners and Lydia Roberts, Administrators of Samuel Roberts, Deceased, v. George Law and Arnold Mason, March 18, 1854, file 1854–2117, Superior Court, NYCC; Curtis Peck v. Daniel Drew, file PL-1850-P 3, January 7, 1850, Supreme Court Pleadings, NYCC; Heyl, 2:185–6. He also served for a year as a director of the Long Island Railroad, starting in 1843; see Long Island Railroad Company Directors' Minutes Book 1, 274, 318, PennCentral Collection, NYPL. Law actually owned the Oregon with A. P. St. John; see a lawsuit regarding the sinking and raising of the Oregon at Hell Gate, Russell Sturgis v. George Law and Alanson P. St. John, March 27, 1850, 1850–922, Superior Court, NYCC.

  47 Morrison, 312–3; NYH, June 1, 2, 4, 1847; EP, June 1, 2, 1847; NYTr, June 2, 1847; SA, June 25, 1847; Anglo-American, June 5, 1847. On the telegraph, see ARJ, January 2, 1847. Lane, 76–7, eager as always to repeat undocumented anecdotes, reverses the reasons for the defeat, claiming that CV prevented a slackening of speed.

  48 Hone, 801; NYH, June 26, 1847.

  49 Oliver Vanderbilt v. Richmond Turnpike Company, July 17, 1848, file 1848-#1238, Superior Court, NYCC; Stonington Reports, 44–54; EP, November 18, 1848; Long Island Railroad Company Directors' Minutes Book 2, 41–3, 64, box 305, PennCentral Railroad Collection, NYPL. ARJ, August 5, 1848, quoting the Hartford Times, referred to the Commodore as a “magnificent and agile steamer.”

  50 ARJ, February 5, 1848; Liberator, March 24, 1848.

  PART TWO COMMODORE

  Seven Prometheus

  1 Memoirs of General William T. Sherman (New York: Da Capo Press, 1984), 1:39–41.

  2 Sherman, 1:39; John F. Marszalek, Sherman: A Soldier's Passion for Order (New York: Free Press, 1993), 4, 61–7.

  3 Sherman, 1:40–1.

  4 Strong, 1:272, 302, 341. The “rosewood and red satin” observation is Strong's. Karen Halttunen writes, in Confidence Men, 187, that “personal rituals of self-congratulation,” a new “social formalism” seen in “the parlor theatrical” among the wealthy, started to emerge in the 1850s; obviously they emerged even earlier in New York.

  5 HC, March 9, 1848; RGD, NYC, 374:1, entry dated May 26, 1853. The Mercantile Agency, founded in 1841 by Lewis Tappan, became R. G. Dun & Co. in 1859. Though the records of the firm, held at Harvard Business School's Baker Library, are titled R. G. Dun & Co., the company will be called the Mercantile Agency until 1859 in this narrative. See James D. Norris, R. G. Dun & Co., 1841–1900: The Development of Credit Reporting in the Nineteenth Century (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978). In all R. G. Dun & Co. citations, the bracketed words are simply expanded from abbreviation in the original (for example, “very” for “vy”).

  6 On the aristocratic nature of CVs neighborhood, especially Astor Place and Lafayette Place, see Eric Homberger, Mrs. Astor's New York: Money and Social Power in a Gilded Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 104–19.

  7 SA, June 17, 1848; Independent, December 7, 1848; Stonington Reports, 44–54.

  8 New York Evangelist, March 27, 1851; entry for March 7, 1848, Hone ms.

  9 Stonington Reports, 52–8; NYT, September 23, 1852; Curtis Peck v. Daniel Drew, January 7, 1850, file PL-1850-P 3, Curtis Peck v. Daniel Drew, January 31, 1848, file PL-1848-P 256, and Nelson Robinson, Robert W. Kelley, and Daniel B. Allen v. Daniel Drew and Isaac Newton, June 27, 1848, file PL-1848-R, Supreme Court Pleadings, NYCC; RGD, NYC, 366:251, 300C.

  10 RGD, NYC, 374:1, 341: 184; Medbery, 312; Minutes of the New York Stock and Exchange Board, vol. 4: 1851–1858, 248, New York Stock Exchange Archives. Decades later, Drew testified that he had often seen CV at Robinson's office; NYW, March 9, 1878. Medbery's excellent account vividly and clearly describes practices on the early stock exchange; see especially pages 21–8. On the cultural impact of commercial abstractions, see Confidence Men, 6–y.

  11 For an excellent summary of the emergence of the corporation in antebellum America, see Gunn, 49.

  12 For an important discussion of the vagueness and permeability of the distinction between corporations and partnerships, see Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Partnerships, Corporations, and the Limits on Contractual Freedom in U.S. History: An Essay in Economics, Law, and Culture,” in Kenneth Lipartito and David B. Scilia, eds., Constructing Corporate America: History, Politics, Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 29–65. Gregory A. Mark notes that nineteenth-century courts refused “to recognize a corporate personality separate from the summed interests of the individuals who made up the corporation;” see “The Personification of the Business Corporation in American Law,” University of Chicago Law Review 54, no. 4 (autumn 1987): 1441–83.

  13 This discussion derives from a full reading of the evidence presented throughout this book. My interpretation of the profound shift in culture produced by the corporation and other commercial abstractions is informed by James L. Huston, Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765–1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1998), but I differ with his conclusion that “nothing that occurred in the years 1765 to 1880 drastically revised the revolutionary heritage” (149). I believe that the emergence of the business corporation, and the corresponding reaction, did drastically revise the revolutionary heritage, and did so long before “industrialization” fully arrived. In a broader cultural sense, Halttunen captures this anxiety over the hidden—an anxiety closely tied, I believe, to the emergence of commercial abstractions. Joseph A. Schumpeter discusses the “evaporation of the substance of property” in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942), 156–8.

  14 Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 136–7; Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 2000), book 1, chap. 6, 70.

  15 John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 225–55, esp. 243. See also Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 557–69.

  16 Soulé, 172, 174, 202, 214; H. W. Brands, The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream (New York: Doubleday 2002), 62.

  17 Sherman, 46.

  18 Ibid., 56–60.

  19 MM, April 1847.

  20 Entries for March 22, September 6, 1848, Minute Book of the Elizabethport and New York Ferry Company, box 4, Central Railroad Company of New Jersey Papers, Hagley Museum and Library; Petition of C Vanderbilt for Confirmation of Letters Patent, Issued April 3, 1816 (New York: S. S. Chatterton, 1852), NYPL. On joint real estate holdings, see, for example, Oroondates Mauran and CV v. Morris Wolf, May 11, 1843, file 1843-#814, Court of Common Pleas, NYCC. I am indebted to Mr. Frank Mauran of Providence, Rhode Island, for information from Oroondates Mauran's account books.

  21 NYW, November 14, 1877; entry for March 23, 1845, Strong, 1:257.

  22 Polk quoted in T. J. Stiles, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 24; Strong, 1:337; Brands, 70.

  23 Strong, 1:344; James G. King to Messrs Baring Bros. & Co., January 22, 1849, reel 41: Letters Received from New York, BB; James P. Delgado, To California by Sea: A Maritime History of the California Gold Rush (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990), 19, 27; NYH, April 19, 1849.

  24 My guess that Daniel B. Allen created the scheme is based on the fact that he took the largest number of shares (three). See Daniel B. Allen, Jeremiah Simonson, William McLean, Alexander H Britton, WHV, Nath
aniel Hayward, Henry Anderson, John Peck, and the Said Daniel B. Allen, Jacob H Vanderbilt, and James Brady, Trustees of the California Navigation Company of New York, v. James H Fisk and CV, January 24, 1851, file PL-1851-A 17, Supreme Court Pleadings, NYCC. I will use the spelling “Corneil” for the diminutive for Cornelius J., as this was the spelling his wife later used; see NYW, December 22, 1877.

  25 NYTr, March 28, 1878.

  26 Larson, 240; John G. B. Hutchins, The American Maritime Industries and Public Policy, 1789–1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1941), 358–63; Leonard D. White, The Jacksonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1829–1861 (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 458. White notes, 450, that enthusiasm for federal subsidies for steamships that could be converted to naval use predated Polk's administration.

  27 Kemble, 3, 7–19; Joseph B. Lockey “A Neglected Aspect of Isthmian Diplomacy,” AHR 41, no. 2 (January 1936): 295–305. For a review of federal subsidies for steamships overall during this period, see Hutchins, 348–68. Richard R. John notes in Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 94–9, 242–3, that the Post Office Department had long subsidized stagecoach lines, to the extent of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year; in 1845, though, Congress cut off such subsidies. As John's work makes clear, the Post Office is no small exception to the rule that the federal government largely left the economy alone prior to the Civil War. Though it had its critics in the Locofoco movement, essentially all parties embraced its expansive role, and the Democrats made it a tool of party building (see 213–4, 236–40). In size and in scale of corruption, however, the steamship subsidies appear to have dwarfed the stagecoach subsidies.

  28 Mark W. Summers, The Plundering Generation: Corruption and the Crisis of the Union, 1849–1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 134; Kemble, 14–5, 19–20, 22–5; SED 50, 32nd Cong., 1st sess., vol. 8; SR 292, 36th Cong., 2nd sess., vol. 1; Theodosius F. Secor and CM v. George Law, May 22, 1861, file 1861–832, Superior Court, NYCC; Western Journal of Civilization, September 1852. The federal subsidies, and Sloo's assignment of his rights, were much more complicated than perhaps is suggested by this brief description. For example, the navy supervised construction of the vessels, which were on call for national service; and Sloo actually assigned his rights to a trusteeship run by Law, Roberts, and a representative of Sloo's interests. Sloo was to receive 10 percent of the annual profits of the five ships on the Atlantic.