The First Tycoon

by T. J. Stiles

  The ship's luxuriousness attracted the most notice. A grand staircase led down to a reception area, with a large circular couch, which opened onto the main saloon. “The furniture… is of rosewood, carved in the rich and splendid style of Louis XV covered with a new and elegant material of figured velvet plush,” the New York Tribune reported. “Connected with this saloon are ten staterooms, superbly fitted up, each with a French armour le gles, beautifully enamelled in white, with a large glass-door.… The berths are furnished with elegant silk lambricans and lace curtains. Each room is fitted up with a different color, viz: green and gold, crimson and gold, orange, etc.” Then there was the main dining saloon, paneled with polished marble and Naples granite, with tables boasting fine silverware and china with a ruby and gold finish. “The ceiling of the room is painted white, with scroll-work of purple, light green, and gold, surrounding medallion paintings of Webster, Clay, Washington, Franklin, and others.”16

  Vanderbilt—who paid close attention to his reputation—fully grasped the public impact of his grand holiday. Indeed, there is every reason to think that he planned the entire thing with an eye on his growing status as a cultural icon. He was not merely a businessman, but “one of our steamship nobility” as Scientific American wrote. Compared with his “magnificent steamship—his pleasure steam yacht… the yachts of the English nobility are like fishing cobles to a seventy-four gun ship.”17 He was no mere rich man; he was the Commodore.

  When May 19, the date of departure, arrived, Vanderbilt encountered an omen of what lay before him in the year ahead—a jarring reminder that there was indeed no friendship in trade. All spring, labor trouble had wracked the docks. Firemen and coal passers, the crewmen who fed the fires under the boilers, had organized repeated strikes in April, forming angry processions from ship to ship along the waterfront. Just a week before the North Star's departure, a mob of white dockworkers attacked their black counterparts when they learned that the black men received lower wages, which undercut their own pay18 The North Star had a picked crew of firemen and coal passers who had served on Vanderbilt's other ships, but they, too, caught the militant mood. One hour before departure, they (and some of the sailors) called a strike.

  “Mr. Vanderbilt refused to be coerced by the seeming necessity of the case,” Rev. Choules wrote. “He would not listen for a moment to demands so urged, and in one hour selected such firemen as could be collected; and many of them were green hands, and ill-adapted to give efficient service in their most important department.” The action was so in keeping with Vanderbilt's personality, it scarcely needs comment. Rather than accept his disadvantage, he fired the strikers and took his chances with untried men.19

  At ten thirty in the morning, after the new firemen had been ushered down into the hold and handed their coal shovels, the crew cast loose the lines that held the ship to the dock at the foot of Grand Street. The side-wheels began to churn, and the immense hull of the North Star eased into the East River. Some four hundred guests milled about the deck with Vanderbilt and his family; the visitors were to sail aboard until Sandy Hook, where they would transfer to the Francis Skiddy for the return to New York.

  Suddenly the happy crowd felt a jolt. The rapidly ebbing tide had caught the ship and smacked the stern into another pier. Vanderbilt shouted at the pilot to spin the wheel hard aport, to carry the North Star into the main channel, but the current was too strong. The ship struck hard on a hidden reef, and the alarmed visitors lost their footing as it keeled over onto one side, tilting the deck at a frightening angle. “For a moment,” Scientific American reported, “there appeared danger of her capsizing.” In a breath, the ship righted itself—but it was still “stuck fast.”

  The grand voyage had come to a halt 150 feet from the pier, with the near sinking of the celebrated yacht. But the Commodore knew how to manage a crisis. As the passengers returned to shore in another boat, he telegraphed Secretary of State William L. Marcy asking permission to use the U.S. Navy's dry dock across the East River. Permission was immediately granted. As soon as the rising tide lifted the North Star free of the rocks, it steamed into the facility for inspection and repairs. That night Vanderbilt dined aboard ship (as it sat in the stocks of the dry dock), accompanied by broker Richard Schell, and the two men drank a toast to Marcy. The Commodore paid the not inconsiderable sum of $1,500 for use of the dock. To Marcy, the money mattered less than facilitating a voyage that would serve as a bit of informal public diplomacy20

  Vanderbilt's children and their spouses* fretted over a long delay; fortunately the damage was superficial, and easily fixed. “At seven minutes to eight o'clock P.M. on the 20th of May,” Choules wrote, “we left the gates [of the dry dock] amid the cheering of our kind friends who lined the dock; and, as we steamed down the river, we fired salutes and received them from various ships, and at the Battery, where a large party had gathered to give us a farewell greeting.” As the North Star churned through the Narrows, past the home of Vanderbilt's aged mother, the crew fired off cannons and shot rockets into the clear night sky. The flinty old woman had taught the Commodore his shrewdness and frugality; now he saluted her from an emblem of extravagance, on a voyage that would prove shrewder than anyone could know.

  At nine thirty in the evening, the North Star passed Sandy Hook and slowed to a halt to allow the pilot, John Martineau, to board a boat for the return to New York. Martineau may have been a bit dispirited after his highly public embarrassment of the day before, and perhaps more so when, as he was about to step off the ship, he was called to Vanderbilt's cabin. He encountered Horace Clark, the Commodore's “professional adviser.” The Commodore, Clark informed Martineau, had sent a letter to the New York newspapers concerning his conduct. “He is entirely free from censure,” Vanderbilt wrote. “I know Mr. Martineau to be as good a pilot as there is out of the Harbor of New-York.” Then Clark dropped a “purse of gold” into Martineau's hand.21

  The North Star steamed into the Atlantic, its paddlewheels churning the calm sea under bright moonlight. An unexpected act of generosity marked the departure; but then, the entire voyage was an unexpected act of generosity. More telling may have been Vanderbilt's choice of messenger. With nearly his entire family aboard, from his oldest son to those sons-in-law who had long served him as lawyers, managers, and agents, he chose Clark. It was a sign of things—and trouble—to come.

  VANDERBILT HAD PREPARED as well as anyone could have for a long absence overseas. It would not be enough. “Ships are but boards, sailors but men,” Shylock wisely observes in The Merchant of Venice. “There be land rats and water rats—water thieves and land thieves.”

  When Vanderbilt had resumed his place in the Accessory Transit Company, he had not, in fact, moved to take complete control. It appears that he acted merely to protect his interests, to ensure an income stream as agent during his prolonged absence.22 As a result, the company suffered a power vacuum. It was filled, in part, by a man intimately familiar with the company's affairs, a man who still served as its counsel, if no longer as a director: Joseph L. White. Like a tapeworm, he had wound his way into the intestines of the Transit Company, and would not be removed until both he and it had been murdered.

  White's influence persisted because it was of a particular kind, confined to the company's relationship with the U.S. and foreign governments. The board did elect a new president, James De Peyster Ogden, but, as White explained to Secretary of State Marcy “He is new in the company & hence not familiar with its antecedents.” With characteristic arrogance and condescension, White took it upon himself to advise the new administration of President Franklin Pierce on Nicaraguan affairs. “I know the Central Americans quite as well, I think, as any man in this country,” he told Marcy. “Firmness & determination will accomplish anything with them.”23

  White was not wealthy enough to become a dominant stockholder—but Charles Morgan was. Initially, at least, Morgan made no attempt to take power. He waited until the North Star steamed over the horizon,
then began to buy up the company's shares. “The movement in Nicaragua is of such a decided character,” the New York Herald reported on May 28. “A large party have taken hold of it.” Soon a rumor ran through Wall Street that this was more than a short-term operation. Morgan, the brokers whispered, “is to take superintendence of the Company”24

  As Morgan strengthened his grip on the stock, White wormed into his confidence. Each offered something the other lacked. White could handle political intrigue with slippery, insinuating skills that did not come easily to a self-made businessman like Morgan; Morgan, on the other hand, possessed the wealth, financial acumen, and large blocks of stock that White lacked. The two men, it appears, agreed on a new axis of power in the Accessory Transit Company. On Monday, July 18, they held a new election for the board of directors. White and his lackey H. L. Routh resumed their seats, and Morgan took office as president. Vanderbilt was out.25

  Nelson Robinson survived on the board, but he could not protect the Commodore. Robinson's own interests were complicated enough. By March 1853, he had accumulated twelve thousand shares of the Erie Railroad. At a par value of 100, that made his holdings officially worth $1.2 million. There were few American businesses that, in their entirety, had a value equal to his stake in Erie. In the stock market, though, the share price was only 83, and it was falling. The stress proved to be too much for him. He declared that, as of May 27, he would retire from business. “The tremendous vicissitudes of stocks affected his nerves,” a Wall Street observer later wrote. “His family implored, his doctor insisted. At last he yielded and retreated into the country”26

  Vanderbilt's other long-standing ally, Daniel Drew, did nothing to help his absent friend. After the loss of the North America, he had abandoned all interest in California steamship lines. In any event, he was busy with his religious duties. For the past year, he had raised funds for a very special project of a Methodist charity, the Ladies' Home Missionary Society: to purchase the Old Brewery, the hulking warren that glowered over Paradise Square at the heart of the infamous Five Points, the most violent, impoverished slum in the city. Since 1837, the very poorest of the very poor had packed into the filthy and infested building, “creating a tenament so repulsive that it quickly became the most notorious in New York,” writes historian Tyler Anbinder. “Here is vice at its lowest ebb,” wrote the National Police Gazette, “a crawling and fetid vice, a vice of rags and filth.” Drew collected the $16,000 to buy the structure, which was then ripped down. On June 17, the society celebrated the opening of a new four-story mission where the Old Brewery had long stood.27

  With uncontested control of Accessory Transit, Morgan and White removed Vanderbilt from his post as agent, depriving him of his rich commission on tickets. “This payment was regularly made to Mr. Vanderbilt up to the time he left in his yacht for Europe,” the New York Herald reported on July 29. “Since, the company have refused to make payments to Mr. Vanderbilt's agent.” Morgan himself took over as agent. Brokers on Wall Street chattered anxiously about the act of treachery. As the Herald observed, “Trouble is anticipated upon the return of Commodore Vanderbilt.”28

  AS THE NORTH STAR CHURNED ACROSS unusually smooth seas, smoke billowing out of its twin black funnels, Vanderbilt instructed Captain Eldridge to cover no more than 250 miles every twenty-four hours. “As my journey would be a long one,” he explained in a letter to a friend in New York, “and as I meant to have the ship in such order on our arrival in a foreign country as to be a credit to our ‘Yankee land,’ I did not wish to hazard this by making any attempt to obtain high rates of speed.” Pushing a new engine too hard could damage it; steam engines generally had to be broken in before they could produce their best speed.

  Stoking a fire, though, was no mere unskilled labor; keeping the heat under a boiler at just the right level required experience. And the untrained firemen Vanderbilt had plucked off the wharf when he fired the strikers had no experience. After the first day passed, Vanderbilt wrote, “I was somewhat astonished.” Instead of 250 miles, the ship made 272. He went to the engine room to investigate, and found the green hands stoking away heedlessly, the great pistons and beams of the engines pounding up and down, turning the wheels at fourteen and a half revolutions per minute.

  He complained about the firemen, but he found that his guests were, in fact, delighted by the ship's speed. And so the man who always knew better than everyone else did something unusual: he indulged them.

  The party were so elated and pressed so hard to let her make one day's run, that I finally told the engineer that he might let her engines make 14½ revolutions per minute for twenty-four hours, but no higher would I permit him to go. Whenever it rated a particle above this I compelled him to shut the throttle valve and confine her to the 14½ To my astonishment, at the end of twenty-four hours, she had made three hundred and forty-four miles, a greater distance, by twenty-four miles, than ever was made from New York to Europe.

  It ran as fast as eighteen knots, a remarkable speed in 1853.29

  Vanderbilt referred to his group as a party, and a party they had. Even the ignorance of the raw sailors amused them. At one point, the mate ordered one of the green hands to ring two bells, a traditional mark of time at sea. The mate grew annoyed when nothing happened. “He again called for two bells,” Rev. Choules chortled in a letter home, “and the novice innocently said, ‘Please, sir, I can't find but one.’” Most evenings, the guests—attired in their heavy broadcloth suits and elaborate dresses, and tended by a squad of Irish maids—gathered in the main saloon, where one of the men played a piano and the ladies sang. Sometimes the crew joined in. Some of the sailors were black, and, Choules claimed, “were decidedly fond of negro melody. One of them, who answered to the euphonious name of ‘Pogee,’ was, I think, quite the equal of the Christy Minstrels [a famous musical group that performed in blackface].”30

  Now began the hour of Vanderbilt's glory. Southampton, Copenhagen, and St. Petersburg; Le Havre, Málaga, and Naples; Malta, Constantinople, and Gibraltar: the North Star sailed around Europe in triumph over the course of four months. The triumph was technical; at each port, marine experts pored over the ship. Commanders of the Royal Navy inspected its beam engines; officers of the tsar's fleet sketched its lines; pashas of the sultan's forces browsed through its cabins. And the triumph was patriotic: American newspapers published accounts of the North Star's progress, reporting its speed and fuel efficiency, describing the thousands of spectators who lined up at each port to visit the gigantic yacht. Editors across the United States reprinted lengthy articles from the English press. “In this magnificent trip to England by Mr. Vanderbilt,” the Chicago Tribune quoted the Southampton Daily News as writing, “Brother Jonathan has certainly gone ahead of himself.” (“Brother Jonathan” was a nickname for America in the 1850s, as common as “Uncle Sam” later would be.)31

  And the triumph was social. When the North Star docked in Southampton, Vanderbilt, with his wife and guests, took the train to London, where the prestigious expatriate American banker George Peabody played host—tendering his box at the opera, for example, to the Commodore and his family. The U.S. minister to Great Britain, Joseph R. Ingersoll, held a formal reception for Vanderbilt. “The attendance was large,” Choules wrote, “and the party a very fashionable one. The display of diamonds was very brilliant. General attention was directed to Mr. Vanderbilt, who was quite the man of the occasion; and all seemed desirous to obtain an introduction.”32 Lords and squires and millionaires crowded around the man from Staten Island, pressing him to bring his yacht up the Thames “and enable the fashionable world—then, of course, in London—to visit the North Star,” Choules added. Vanderbilt begged off, lest he “take a step which might appear like ostentation”—as if anything could be more ostentatious than crossing the Atlantic in such a yacht. More likely he wished to save coal.

  The lord mayor of London invited Vanderbilt to a soirée, where the Commodore and Sophia mingled with the Archbishop of Canterbury
and Thomas Carlyle. Vanderbilt went away with a party to the races at Ascot, the most fashionable racetrack in the world. In St. Petersburg came chats with Grand Duke Constantine, second son of the tsar, and a visit to the Winter Palace. In Florence came a session with Hiram Powers, perhaps the most famous American artist of the age, who sculpted a bust of Vanderbilt's proud head (for $1,000) and then accompanied him around Italy. In Naples the royal government turned the North Star away, for fear that the ship carried antimonarchical arms or rebels, but Vanderbilt and his wife paid calls on the British governors of Malta and Gibraltar.33

  On May 27, less than a week after the North Star's departure from New York, the Mercantile Agency recorded its scathing judgment of Vanderbilt as “illiterate & boorish,” not to mention “offensive.” This judgment was wrong—or, at least, incomplete. Though he could still manifest a brutal demeanor when locked in combat, he had learned by 1853 to affect the sort of polish expected of a man of wealth and accomplishment. Men ranging from Hiram Powers to Lord Palmerston were struck by his confident, commanding air, an impression reinforced by his erect posture and neat appearance. Though Choules was no disinterested observer, he spoke for many when he reflected on Vanderbilt's “dignified reserve” and “dignified self-control.” (After the journey, he would broadcast these judgments in a popular book on the trip.)34

  Vanderbilt even came to terms with his old rival, the English language. Not that he conquered it; as Lambert Wardell later recalled, he “abominated papers of every description.” The phonetic spelling and careless punctuation that marked the letters of his youth remained in those few notes he chose to write in his own hand. Usually he dictated to Wardell, who smoothed out the sentences.35 More significant was the change in his speaking. Among cronies and underperforming subordinates, he still would spout profanity with fluency and enthusiasm; but he had learned to speak on something like equal terms with men of refinement. This was reflected in Vanderbilt's comments at a grand municipal dinner given to him in Southampton, which were articulate, if brief. After a very few remarks, he said, “Were I able to express the gratification we have experienced in passing through the country and your town… I am fearful you would construe it into an attempt to make a speech.” Then he sat down.