The First Tycoon

by T. J. Stiles

  Meanwhile, New York's wealthy men took in hand the problem of mobilization. Before the end of April, they organized the Union Defense Committee, with an office at 30 Pine Street. The members comprised a roster of the city's patriarchs: John J. Astor, Moses Taylor, Moses H. Grinnell, Alexander T. Stewart, Samuel Sloan, William E. Dodge, and nineteen others, of both parties. They raised regiments of volunteers; purchased arms, uniforms, and supplies; issued passes for travel to Washington; and generally assumed governmental functions.19

  To a great extent, this was inevitable. The limited government inherited by Lincoln's administration lacked the financing, the manpower, even the organizational capacity to undertake a major war. The federal budget for 1860 had amounted to just $63 million. (The annual figure would grow to more than $1 billion by the end of the war.) Only sixteen thousand men filled the regular army, and they were dispersed across the western frontier. The navy floated just forty-two ships, not all of them ready for service. Though the army boasted some highly professional quartermasters, they had never dealt with the demands now imposed on them; as James McPherson writes, “The War Department slumbered in ancient bureaucratic routine.” States and private citizens had to assume responsibilities ordinarily reserved for the national government.20

  Vanderbilt did not join the Union Defense Committee. He never joined civic organizations or loaned his name to charitable bodies. In part, he hated the formality of the proceedings; in part, he was too proud to be a rank-and-file volunteer. “When the rebellion broke out in 1861 and Mr. Vanderbilt was waited upon by Moses Taylor to take some government bonds,” Lambert Wardell recalled, “he declined to do so, but later on was a large purchaser of the bonds, purely from the standpoint of speculation. It is believed that had the idea originated with him he would have taken the bonds in the first instance, but he was averse to playing second fiddle to Mr. Taylor.”21

  And yet, his patriotism remained as real and deep as on the day when he had driven Lafayette through the streets of New Brunswick. His opportunity to serve came as the Union prepared amphibious expeditions against the Southern coast. But he grew dissatisfied—even angry—as the War Department and navy began to charter his ships. “The moment a man comes to New York he is surrounded by a lot of thieves all the time, and in every shape and direction,” Vanderbilt told a committee of the House of Representatives later that year. Ship brokers swarmed around the federal officials in charge of the charters, inserting themselves as middlemen for either the government or the private owners.

  “I am to give a man, one of these outside thieves,” Vanderbilt stated increduously “two and a half percent commission on that charter.”22 The idea offended both his patriotism and his sense of commercial justice—but he had a solution. On April 20, he wrote to Navy Secretary Welles, “I feel a great desire that the government should have the steamer Vanderbilt, as she is acknowledged to be as fine a ship as floats the ocean, and, in consequence of her great speed and capacity, that, with a proper armament, she would be of more efficient service in keeping our coast clear of piratical vessels than any other ship.” He suggested that the sale price be determined by any three men with the rank of commodore (still the highest in the navy), recommending the eminent Robert Stockton as one of them. “If this will not answer,” he added, “will the government accept her as a present from their humble servant?” In addition, he offered to sell the Ocean Queen, the Ariel, the Champion, and the Daniel Webster on the same terms.23

  “There is no such water craft afloat, and I know it,” Vanderbilt later testified before Congress, speaking of the Vanderbilt. “But he [Welles] would not hear it, and did not answer my letter.” Instead, Welles wrote a note on May 2 to Captain Samuel L. Breese, commandant of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, saying he did not want the Vanderbilt. “The complement originally ordered is full,” he stated, and the great steamer was “of a larger and more expensive description than the service is supposed to require.”24

  Why turn down a gift—the most “princely and munificent” ever offered by an individual to the government, in the words of the New York Herald? Perhaps Welles expected the war to end soon, as many did, and did not want to be left with an unnecessarily large and expensive-to-run ship. The secretary was also a man with a great deal of pride. The idea that his fleet needed Vanderbilt's help may have insulted him. Perhaps most important, there was tension between the War Department and the navy. Much of the chartering of merchant ships was not conducted by naval personnel; and Welles seems to have viewed all transactions with commercial men with a bit of cynical distaste.

  So the Vanderbilt would not be “at the head of the navy, where she ought to be,” as its owner believed. Instead, it would be chartered as a mere transport, along with most of the sidewheelers run by the Atlantic & Pacific Steamship Company, as the “outside thieves” collected their 2.5 percent and drove up the price. Vanderbilt received $2,000 a day for his great ship; in the end, the federal government would pay him a total of $303,589.10 for the use of that vessel alone—approximately one-third of its original cost. Yet even this fee was not as unreasonable as it might seem. Vanderbilt paid all costs of operation, which could amount to $600 a day under ordinary circumstances, and bore all risks except for actual combat; the peculiar demands of wartime operations could raise that operating cost far higher. (Boiler fires had to be kept burning at all times, for example, to allow for a quick escape or to avoid collision in a dense fleet.) The charge of extortionate pricing would prove persistent, but it was not well founded. In any case, he never wanted to charter his steamers in the first place. “The fact is, I would rather sell every ship I have,” he testified. “I, myself, am not a fair criterion for other men. I would rather sell my ships than let them remain in the government employ until they earn their whole value and then have the ships and the money too.”

  He did finally sell two boats to the navy in 1861—two boats he did not want to let go: the Clifton and the Westfield, of the Staten Island Railroad ferry, for $90,000 each. The navy's agent was George D. Morgan, cousin to Governor Edwin D. Morgan of New York and brother-in-law to Gideon Welles—who took his 2.5 percent. As Vanderbilt wisely observed, New York had thieves in every shape and direction.25

  WAR BROUGHT George Washington Vanderbilt home.

  On July 1, 1860, he had graduated from West Point after the standard five years. (George Custer graduated in 1861 in the first four-year class.) The regular army was stingy with promotions—so stingy that it did not even grant him the rank of second lieutenant, the very lowest for commissioned officers. Instead, it named him brevet (honorary) second lieutenant. He was dispatched to Fort Dalles in Oregon, where there recently had been hostilities with Indians. He had arrived on December 4, 1860, only to be recalled on January 28. Posted to Fort Columbus on Governors Island, he finally received the full rank of second lieutenant in the 10th Infantry Regiment on February 27, 1861. With the outbreak of war, the army assigned him to the unglamorous task of training the recruits who signed up by the thousands.26

  Of the Commodore's three sons, George remains the most mysterious. William was dutiful, diligent, and dull, the colorless farmer and manager whose profile steadily rose higher without ever seeming any larger. Corneil flared fitfully into public view, with his epileptic fits, episodic gambling, and artful begging from prominent men. But George exists in the historical record as little more than a shadow, defined largely in contrast to his brothers. He was brave and strong and manly, legend tells us, the pride of a father who wanted so much to have a Vanderbilt to be proud of. This comes to us as more an impression than even an anecdote, but perhaps it is true; William named a son after his brother, after all. But hidden by the warm glow of the honored memory of a Civil War veteran is lurking disappointment.

  For one thing, George seems to have struggled at the Military Academy, where he graduated thirty-ninth out of forty-one, only one step above his lowest point. Custer, of course, graduated last in his class and still went on to fame in the war. Bu
t the two Georges had different fates. Hardly had the hostilities begun than the Commodore's son found himself standing before a court-martial. On the afternoon of May 16, he had disappeared from his training duties at Fort Columbus. He had returned the next day without explanation. At his trial on May 29, he made no defense, and was sentenced to one month of confinement to the fort, after which he returned to duty.

  The conviction seems to have marked him. Though it is always difficult to understand why a military bureaucracy treats any individual the way it does, the army shunted him aside, despite its need for every regular army officer it could find, as it created hundreds of new regiments of U.S. Volunteers (temporary units for the duration of the war). Men such as Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, West Pointers who had retired after rising no higher than captain or lieutenant, returned to service and rapidly became generals. But the army sent George to Boston. There, on September 1, he took charge of the recruiting station, replacing an officer who was given command of his own regiment. It appeared that if the Vanderbilts were to gain any glory in the Civil War, the aged Commodore would have to win it for himself.27

  IT HAD BEEN A YEAR of defeat upon defeat. Bull Run, Wilson's Creek, Ball's Bluff, and Lexington, Missouri: such was the legacy that Edwin M. Stanton inherited when he took office as secretary of war in January 1862. Overbearing, incisive, and fiercely honest, this former U.S. attorney general brought a determination to reform a department demoralized by the inefficiency and corruption that had prevailed under his predecessor, Simon Cameron. “Stanton impresses me and everybody else most favorably,” wrote Strong. That ubiquitous observer met Stanton in Washington on January 29. “Not handsome, but on the contrary, rather pig-faced. At lowest estimate, worth a wagon load of Camerons. Intelligent, prompt, clear-headed, fluent without wordiness, and above all, earnest.”28

  As his secretaryship began, Stanton could count a rising number of victories and advantages. Even before he came into office, amphibious expeditions had captured key fortifications along the Southern coastline. In February, General Ulysses S. Grant won rousing twin victories at forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee. And General George B. McClellan now commanded the Army of the Potomac, which he organized, trained, and equipped superbly. McClellan planned a new offensive against the Confederate capital, Richmond, Virginia. He would land his army at Fortress Monroe, at the tip of the peninsula that extended east from Richmond between the York and James rivers. From Monroe (still in federal hands), he would strike west. In March, swarms of men loaded dozens of ships with arms and supplies as the great expedition prepared for departure.

  On March 8, it seemed that the Confederates would stop McClellan's Peninsula Campaign before it could begin—indeed, that they would annihilate Union maritime power at will. That day, a strange craft steamed out of Norfolk harbor at the creeping speed of about four knots. It resembled a turtle or, as someone at the time described it, the roof of a submerged barn. It was the salvaged hull of the Merrimack, a U.S. frigate scuttled at the Norfolk naval yard that the Confederates had salvaged, covered in iron plate, and renamed the CSS Virginia. (The Union persisted in calling it the Merrimack.) It steamed straight for the Union blockade squadron at Hampton Roads, the waters at the mouth of the James River, where it sank two ships. A third, the Minnesota, ran aground in shallows where the deep-draft Virginia could not go with its deadly ram. During the fight, solid shot ricocheted off its armor shell. The Virginia suffered internal damage, but outwardly it seemed invincible.29

  “Stanton was the most frightened man that I ever saw,” Gideon Welles afterward reflected in his diary. When news arrived of the Virginia's rampage, “I called at once on the President, who had sent for me,” he wrote a few years later. “Several members of the Cabinet soon gathered. Stanton was already there, and there was general excitement and alarm.” The secretary of war, he recalled, “was almost frantic.… The Merrimac, *1 he said, would destroy every vessel in the service, could lay every city on the coast under contribution, could take Fortress Monroe—McClellan's mistaken purpose to advance by the Peninsula must be abandoned.” Both Lincoln and Stanton, he added, “went repeatedly to the window and looked down the Potomac—the view being uninterrupted for miles—to see if the Merrimac was not coming to Washington.”

  Welles's spies had followed the progress of the Merrimack turned Virginia all along. In fact, the navy secretary had multiple ironclads of his own under construction; one had just been completed in New York, and it departed immediately for Hampton Roads. It was a small, raft-like craft with a revolutionary rotating turret that mounted two guns. It was called the Monitor. On March 9, it battled the Virginia to a standstill.30

  So ends one of the set-piece stories of the Civil War: the historic first clash of ironclads, the tale of the Monitor steaming onto the scene just in time to prevent the complete destruction of the Union fleet. Certainly that was the story that set itself firmly in the memory of Welles, who felt a deep antipathy toward Stanton. But history went on after the indecisive battle of March 9. The Monitor had not defeated the Virginia; it had merely stood off the enemy. The rebel ironclad still lurked. If the Monitor simply suffered a breakdown—a commonplace occurrence in a newly launched ship—then nothing could stand in the Virginia's way.

  On March 14, five days after the clash between the two armored vessels, General John E. Wool, commander of Fortress Monroe, sent a frightened telegram to Stanton, arguing that the Virginia might “overcome the Monitor.” The next day, Stanton had an aide telegraph Vanderbilt in turn: “The Secretary of War directs me to ask you for what sum you will contract to destroy the Merrimac or prevent her from coming out from Norfolk—you to sink or destroy her if she gets out? Answer by telegraph, as there is no time to be lost.”31 Welles later mocked Stanton's anxiety. “He had no faith in the Navy officers nor me, nor anyone else,” he wrote long afterward, “but he knew Vanderbilt had big steamers.” Welles apparently forgot that, on March 14, he himself assigned Gustavus V. Fox, the assistant secretary of the navy, to get the Vanderbilt from New York.32

  The Commodore seems to have been away from home, but William B. Dinsmore, president of the Adams Express Company, tracked him down. Vanderbilt wired Stanton, through Dinsmore, that he would come to Washington on March 17.33 On that Monday morning, “I called at the War Department, where I saw for the first time Mr. Stanton, the Secretary of War,” the Commodore wrote four years later. “He requested me to accompany him to the Executive Mansion.” Vanderbilt and Stanton were similar men in many ways, both tough-minded, demanding, and immensely capable. They clearly got on well as they walked together to the White House, “where,” the Commodore went on, “I was introduced to Mr. Lincoln, to whom I was then personally a stranger.”34

  Now approaching the age of sixty-eight, Vanderbilt experienced the rare sensation of meeting a much taller man. Lincoln asked if Vanderbilt could do anything to keep the enemy vessel from steaming out of Norfolk once more. “I replied to him,” the Commodore wrote, “that it was my opinion that if the steamship Vanderbilt was there properly manned, the Merrimac would not venture to come out; or if she did, that the chances were ten to one that the Vanderbilt would sink and destroy her.” Then the president asked his price. “I at once informed Mr. Lincoln that I was determined that I would not allow myself to do anything by which I could be ranked with the herd of thieves and vampires who were fattening off the Government by means of army contracts,” Vanderbilt recalled, “that I had no vessels to sell or bargains to make, except one.” He would give the Vanderbilt to the government on the condition that he, the Commodore, should control its preparations for battle. Lincoln replied, “I accept her.”

  “They asked what my plan was,” Vanderbilt recollected, “and I said, to keep steam up and protecting my vessel as much as possible by various means; to run right into the rebel and drown him; that no vessel had been, or could be, made by the rebels that could stand the concussion or stand before the weight of the Vanderbilt.” Lincoln aske
d how soon he could have the great steamship at Hampton Roads. “The Vanderbilt should be at Fortress Monroe properly equipped and officered, under my direction, within three or four days at the farthest,” he answered. Vanderbilt then left immediately for New York. With the fate of McClellan's planned expedition in peril, with fears for the entire blockading fleet, he had no time to spare.35

  During those rushed few days, Vanderbilt directed the refitting of his flagship in the Simonson shipyard at Greenpoint. His primary effort was to equip it as a ram. Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase inspected it soon afterward. “She was already strengthened [about] the bow with timbers,” he wrote, “so as to be little else for many feet (say 50) from the prow than a mass of solid timber plated outside with iron.” On March 20, the Commodore telegraphed Stanton to ask for formal authority to hunt for the Virginia. “The ship leaves to-morrow,” he wrote. The war secretary promptly wired back to Vanderbilt's office at 5 Bowling Green, “The President and this Department are highly gratified at your promptitude, and that you are so far forward.” In the formal order, Stanton wrote, “Confiding in your patriotic motives and purposes, as well as in your skill, judgment, and energy, full discretion and authority are conferred upon you to arm, equip, navigate, use, manage, and employ the said steamship Vanderbilt, with such commander and crew and under such instructions as you may deem fit.” The next day, Vanderbilt departed for battle.36

  “Commodore Vanderbilt,” Stanton commented to General Henry Halleck on March 25, “is now at Norfolk to meet the Merrimac, and although not armor-clad, he is very confident of being able to run her down.” Many observers shared his optimism. “The immense size, great weight, and speed of the Vanderbilt especially would seem to make her a terrible opponent in an encounter of that kind,” remarked the Journal of Commerce. “An unwieldy floating battery, lying low on the water, could not survive many blows from a vessel of her weight.” The Vanderbilt was “put in fighting trim,” the London Times reported. “Her steam machinery has been protected by rails in the most ingenious way, and also by cotton bales and hay. Her prow has been armed with a formidable nose, with the intention to poke it right into the side of the Merrimac.… Its edge is made of steel, and very sharp.”37