by T. J. Stiles
Thirty years earlier, John Adams had expressed other reservations. “With all the opulence and splendor of this city, there is very little good breeding to be found,” he had noted in his diary. “They talk very loud, very fast, and all together. If they ask you a question, before you can utter three words of your answer, they will break out upon you again, and talk away.” These habits would never really change. But at least one visitor found New Yorkers' directness refreshing. “The people of Philadelphia are stiff in their manners,” he noted by way of contrast, “& not so hospitable as those of New York.” This was a more cosmopolitan place, he observed, thronging with an “immense number of foreigners established in N. Y, attracted thither by the advantages of its commercial importance.”22
Commercial importance brought luxury, best seen on Broadway, the most fashionable street in North America. It flowed north from the Battery, glistening with enough elegance to impress even Rochefoucauld-Liancourt. “There is not in any city in the world a finer street than Broadway,” he declared. Lambert marveled at the boulevard's “large commodious shops of every description … exhibiting as splendid and varied a show in their windows as can be met with in London. There are several and extensive book stores, print-shops, music-shops, jewelers, and silversmiths; hatters, linen-drapers, milliners, pastry-cooks, coach-makers, hotels, and coffee-houses.” At the northern end of Broadway rose the new marble-clad city hall, presiding over an eponymous triangular park.
Still, with every mark of sophistication came a reminder of New York's rustic immaturity Beyond City Hall Park steeped a stinking pond called the Collect. Surrounded by a nauseating cluster of tanneries and slaughterhouses, the Collect was rapidly filled in after 1802, but the area was avoided by all who could help it. The back of the city hall was left undressed with marble because contemporaries thought “it was not likely to attract much notice.” But even the best neighborhood had its woes.
“It is remarked on all hands,” admitted the author of a guide to New York in 1817, “that the streets of New-York are the dirtiest in the United States.” There were the backyard lavatories, for one thing, that overflowed with every heavy rain. And then there were the roaming herds of “innumerable hungry pigs of all sizes and complexions.” Because of the swine, a petition of laborers explained, “many poor are able to pay rents and supply families with animal food during the winter.” The pig was “our best scavenger,” because it ate “fish, guts, garbage, and offals of every kind,” and was smart enough to find its way home each night. But the hogs perpetuated the habit of strewing rotten waste into the gutters. “So long as immense numbers of swine are allowed to traverse the streets,” wrote the travel-guide author, “so long will the inhabitants think themselves justified in throwing out their garbage to them for food; and so long will the streets of New-York remain proverbial for their filth.”23
The same tension between sophistication and simplicity—if not exactly squalor—could be felt off the streets as well, in the countinghouses, where clerks perched on high stools and scratched with quills in copy books, where porters lumbered in and out with sacks, crates, and barrels. A quarter of a century had passed since Adam Smith had explained the division of labor in The Wealth of Nations; yet this commercial community remained a city of the unspecialized. Apart from artisans who sold merely what they made, the economy belonged to general merchants.
“Their activities,” writes historian George Rogers Taylor, “comprehended almost every aspect of business.” Each master of the counting-house (perhaps with two or three partners) bought and sold cargoes of goods, owned the ships that carried them, and warehoused them in the same building with his office. He distributed these goods to smaller general merchants in towns and villages, and perhaps retailed them from his own storefront, and spun out a web of credit to his customers. He made no specialty of any particular product, but bought and sold what he could.24
He also traded in promissory notes and bills of exchange. Cash was scarce. British law had banned exports of specie (precious-metal coins, worth their face value in gold or silver) to the colonies and prohibited them from minting their own. Americans mostly used foreign coins acquired in their trade with the Caribbean—especially Spanish dollars (the legendary “pieces of eight”) and their constituent eighth-dollar coins. As the United States began to mint its own coins, Congress made the new American dollar equal to the Spanish in silver content, for an easier transition. In New York slang, the eighth-dollar coin, worth twelve and a half cents, was known as a “shilling” well into the nineteenth century.*1 (Spanish pieces of eight continued to circulate in the United States as legal tender until 1857.)25
By any name, silver was hard to come by, so Americans made do with informal devices. A bill of exchange, for example, was a certificate of debt written up by a merchant who was owed money by a party in a distant place—London was a common case. It would be purchased by someone in New York who owed money in London. The buyer would then send it across the Atlantic with instructions for the seller's debtor to pay his own creditor. In this way, the movement of coin and final settlement of credit took place locally, at either end of these long-distance transactions. But the system was highly personal and unpredictable; it depended heavily on how well individuals knew and trusted each other. Because of the risks, the buyers of bills usually paid less than face value for them, driving up costs for everyone.
Locally, merchants usually paid each other with promissory notes, pledging payment with interest on specific dates. The recipient of one would endorse it, then use it to pay his own debts. But if the person who first issued it refused to pay when it came due, the endorser could be sued for payment, “according to the usage and custom of merchants,” as the standard legal form read. It's notable that there was a standard legal form (in New York at least), indicating just how common unpaid notes were. And yet, promissory notes would remain a primary method of payment for decades to come.26
If this unspecialized, informal economy were to change, it would first be through organization, by institutions that would replace these messy personal dealings. And it was in New York where just such institutions began to rise. It was there that the merchants' patron saint, Alexander Hamilton, helped to found the Bank of New York, one of the nation's first commercial banks. Commercial banks concentrated money for bigger loans; as specialized, professional lenders, they tended to make better choices about borrowers than individuals did, so their loans were more productive. Banks also eased the cash shortage. They began to experiment with checking early on, and they also made loans by issuing banknotes—paper money—that could be redeemed at the bank for gold or silver coin.
Hamilton's role in the Bank of New York was nothing compared to what he accomplished as secretary of the treasury in Washington's first term, when the federal capital was temporarily located in Manhattan. In 1790, he presented a plan to have the federal government assume the states' Revolutionary War debts, paying for them with interest-bearing federal bonds, backed by a tariff and an excise tax on whiskey. Despite fierce resistance by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Congress enacted the program. The new federal bonds—known as “the Stock”—essentially created the securities market in New York, and by extension in America. The Stock's interest payments funneled federal revenue—those hard-to-come-by silver coins—to merchants, who invested the money in their enterprises. More important, the federal bonds provided a universal form of payment and collateral. The first, cautious banks in America unhesitatingly loaned money to merchants who mortgaged them; the Stock also provided a convenient means of payment over long distances, as they held their value anywhere in the country, even overseas in the British and Dutch markets.
The Stock was soon joined by shares in two banks: the new, federally chartered Bank of the United States (the second part of Hamilton's financial plan), and the older Bank of New York, which acquired a state charter and issued shares that year. Investors in New York began to meet six times a week for formal stock auctio
ns at the Merchants' Coffee House on Wall Street; between sessions, they clustered outside under a buttonwood tree to trade informally. In 1792, they formalized the stock market with the Buttonwood Agreement, setting fixed commissions for brokers (or “stockjobbers”) and establishing the Tontine Coffee House at the corner of Wall and Water streets as a physical exchange (though the informal “curb market” continued to thrive).27
These new institutions laid a foundation that was absolutely essential for the future. But their immediate scope and impact should not be exaggerated. The stock market remained small for many years, because there was little stock to trade. In 1792, the New York stock exchange publicly quoted the price of just five securities, including three federal bonds; by 1815, the number had grown to only twenty-three. The vast majority of businesses remained partnerships or personal proprietorships. As a business historian notes, a corporation was “considered appropriate only when the enterprise was intended to perform a public service,” such as the construction of a bridge or turnpike. A special act of the state legislature was required for every corporate charter. Few corporations had widely traded shares, and many were small, with a handful of investors, serving essentially as a new form for the traditional partnership.28
Every place, of course, is the scene of continuity But not every place is equally a fulcrum of change. New York's geographical advantages—its deep-water port at the end of a long river into the interior of the country—had attracted first imperial planners and then private merchants. Its density of merchants in turn gave rise to innovations in finance and business methods. A self-feeding cycle began to emerge, a multiplication of people and commerce, and needs and solutions, that was already starting to magnify New York's significance for the country as a whole.
Of all the accidents that would make the little boy Cornele into the man he would become, perhaps the most important was the location of his birthplace. From his waterside farmhouse hard by the Narrows, the future flowed in only one direction—toward the steeples and masts that marked the city across the bay.
A THIN LINE SEPARATES destiny from coincidence. A child's passion may begin a lifelong obsession; or a momentary interest, no more vehement than any other, may be remembered as an omen, thanks to the exaggeration of hindsight. For Cornele, the defining moment was a race. He was only six, he later recalled, when he rode a horse through the surf against another ridden by a neighbor's child slave. It would seem absurd if his rival had not returned decades later to publicly confirm the story. But what matters is that Cornele's earliest memory, the beginning of his self-image, was of competition—and victory.
A taste for competition may have been the natural result of growing up in a household filled with children. Certainly he never lacked confidence. With long limbs, a head of sandy hair, full lips, and a strong chin, he boasted a pair of penetrating eyes set between a high forehead and a long, sharp nose like the prow of a ship. A strong swimmer, he quickly grew tall and athletic, capable of immense labors and endurance.29
Farm life has always tended to erode the line between childhood and adulthood. Cornele lived a life of work and responsibility, hoeing and milking, piling and shoveling. There was church, too—Moravian services, the legacy of a conversion generations before that had taken the Vanderbilt family out of the Dutch Reformed tradition. But the sermons and hymns left no mark on him. He went to school briefly—for a mere three months, by one account—and would recall it as an agonizing process of rote memorization, drill, and punishment. Though he learned to read well enough, he manifested a lasting contempt for the conventions of written English. The handwritten letters that survive from his early twenties—the ink that flowed from a split nib, freshly dipped in an inkwell, now faded on brown, crumbling paper—show an alarming level of innovation in spelling. “See” became “sea” or even “se”—all in the same letter. To “know” was to “no.” And he wrote “wrote” as “roat.” His casual written diction stood in sharp contrast to the formality of the letters of contemporaries, even of those who also had little education.
Indeed, Cornele wrote so phonetically that it is possible to reconstruct his pattern of speech. Some of his quirks are not surprising. A man who has returned home, for example, “is got home;” if he was forbidden, he was “forbid;” if he ought to have been, he “aught a bean.” Cornele's conversations featured now unusual or long-lost pronunciations (such as “ginerally” for “generally”), including the frequent use of a long “a”: “air” for are, and “wair” for were. He also said “git” for get, “sence” for since, and he did not remember, but would “recollect.” And, like many others around New York Bay, he would add “a” before a verb ending in -ing, as in “Mr. Jones is agoing to Albany”30
When he was eleven, his older brother Jacob died. The event, scarcely mentioned in later years by Cornele or his chroniclers, surely shook this young boy's life. Already the family had lost a child—Phebe, born next after Cornele, had died very young—but Jacob died as a teenager, at an age when he no doubt served as his father's closest assistant in his operations and ambitions. Even apart from the emotional trauma of the loss of a brother, the event turned Cornele from a middle child into the oldest son. Small wonder that he left the schoolroom so young.31
Few traces remain of Cornele's childhood, such as it was. What is known is a mirage, a hazy image floating above the real childhood. It consists of stories repeated by the man the boy became, solidified into a portrait with frequent retelling, colored by admirers. The haziness, the distance, and the repetition not only cast doubts on the accuracy of the image, they raise questions about what it really means.
The mirage tells us that, as early as 1805, during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, the eleven-year-old boy began to work alongside his father in the periauger. Taking the place of his dead brother, he learned to man the tiller, to raise and set the sails, to tack into the wind. He grew comfortable with the vessel heeling steeply in a stiff breeze, the masts dipping toward the waves, or crashing through a rising storm. One morning, the story goes, the boy awoke to a day he had been looking forward to. His father had promised him a reward for a particularly exhausting chore of hoeing a potato field: Cornele could take his friend Owen in the periauger to New York and spend the day. Cornele gathered Owen and ran down to the shore, where his father stood beside a stack of hay he had contracted to deliver to the city “Now, Cornele, there's the periauger for you,” Vanderbilt recalled his father saying. “I've pitched on more than half the hay, you and Owen can just pitch on the rest, and take it up and unload it at the wharf as usual, and you can play on the way.” He tossed his son a few pennies, and left him to do the work. “A boy can get fun out of most anything,” Vanderbilt later grumbled, “and we got some fun out of that; but I remember we were just as tired that night as if we had been working.”
But what does the story mean? That the eleven-year-old was trustworthy enough to make a delivery across several miles of open water to what was now the biggest city in the country? That he resented his father's total control over his life? Probably something in both these explanations sealed the tale's place in Cornele's memory. But, observed across the chasm of two centuries, the story seems to demonstrate how the nearness of New York overshadowed this family, filling their lives with commerce, turning even a boy's play into a chance for profit. It is a story that could not be told about the more distant reaches of rural America.
The mirage expands. The next year, it tells us, Cornele's father took a contract to retrieve the cargo from a ship that had run ashore at Sandy Hook, the great sandbar that extends from New Jersey outside of Staten Island. Cornelius marshaled some laborers, three wagons, and a few row-boats to do the work. He put his son in charge of the wagons as they shuttled the cargo from the beached ship across the sandbar to the boats on the other side. Cornelius departed with the scows, leaving Cornele to lead the wagons and teamsters on the long drive to the ferry at South Amboy By the time the boy and his men arrived, he had sp
ent all his money on food and feed—but the ferryman demanded $6 for the crossing. Thinking quickly, Cornele went to a tavern and asked to borrow the money from the proprietor, offering to leave one of his horses and promising to redeem it with cash within twenty-four hours. The innkeeper agreed. They crossed, and the boy soon returned to give the innkeeper his money back.
The story would later be told as an example of Cornele's resourcefulness, but (if true) it too contains signposts that point to larger matters. For one thing, his family had so immersed him in business that, at the age of twelve, he already understood the principle of borrowing on collateral security. And the entire enterprise of salvaging a wreck further highlights the way the port of New York defined their lives.
There was another aspect of this tale that surely made an impression on the boy: the ferryman's ability to demand his own price. As an islander, Cornele could not help but feel that power in his bones. Living across the water from Manhattan and the mainland, he developed a sensitivity to the spaces between, to the significance of the crossing, to the strategic importance of the vessel that conveys from shore to shore. This knowledge, formed early in his mind, would serve him all of his life.32
