The First Tycoon

by T. J. Stiles

  About the time of this interview, Gould and Fisk secretly purchased some six thousand head of livestock in the West. Then, in late June, they announced that they were cutting the Erie's livestock rates to $1 per car. The move forced the Central to follow suit, as they knew it would. Shortly afterward, Gould and Fisk boasted to the press that they had shipped their livestock over the Central at these absurd rates, reaping a rich profit at the Commodore's expense. The Central instantly raised rates to $40 per car. It was one more example of why they irritated Vanderbilt so: they did not simply fight, they sought to humiliate him. And they succeeded.90

  In July, Vanderbilt took Frank to Saratoga. They checked into the Congress Hall, along with William, the Schell brothers, and some of his other captains. “Mrs. Vanderbilt is admired more for her hauteur and modest dignity than for any dazzling beauty” the New York Commercial reported from the Springs. As for the Commodore, he was “as hale, hearty, and spry as ever,” affectionate with Frank, relaxed and talkative with friends. Abstemious as always, he ate little and watered down his brandy91

  He was in good spirits at seven in the morning on August 10 when he went down to the Congress Spring for a draught of mineral water, along with William and Augustus Schell. There he happened across Jay Gould, seemingly by chance. They sat together on a bench, “but a few feet distant from the statue of Cupid,” noted a reporter, who thought that Gould and the Commodore actually seemed warm with each other. Before they stood again, they had agreed on the basic outlines of a comprehensive settlement—one that William had discussed with Gould the previous evening. The Erie would withdraw its lawsuit against the Commodore, and both lines would work with the Pennsylvania to create a comprehensive rate agreement, “the same as though a single individual owned all three roads,” as William wrote in a memorandum.92

  The seemingly personal spat that had been going on between the Commodore and Gould and Fisk had national repercussions, forcing yet another realignment of the emerging interregional railway systems. The rate cutting between the Erie and the Central inevitably forced the Pennsylvania to slash prices as well, starting a conflict that would only be settled at a grand trunk line conference in New York in November. Indeed, this rate war demonstrated that the Central's greatest competition for traffic between Chicago and New York was with the Pennsylvania rather than the Erie. During the fight, the Central and the Pennsylvania both ran fast trains to Chicago, the first getting through in thirty hours, the latter in twenty-seven. They were a gimmick, but one that pointed to the relative advantages of each line. The Pennsylvania had a superbly constructed railroad, as well as a more direct route west, saving from forty-nine to sixty-one miles over the Central, depending on the connection to New York. The problem was, it did not have such a connection of its own. To reach New York Harbor, it relied on the United Companies of New Jersey—the old Camden & Amboy, still the state's railroad monopoly—which refused to cut prices, forcing the Pennsylvania to absorb rate-war losses. The Pennsylvania also suffered from heavy grades as its tracks climbed up and over the Appalachians. The Central, on the other hand, had an almost level route the entire way to Chicago, whether by the Lake Shore or North Shore lines. If not quite as short, it allowed locomotives to use less fuel and haul more cars, creating huge savings.

  By launching a rate war in 1870, Gould prompted a scramble for control of track that lasted long after peace returned. The Pennsylvania entered into negotiations to lease the United Companies, which it succeeded in doing in 1871. The Central tried to block the Erie from building its own connection to the Niagara Suspension Bridge, until the courts forced it to relent. The New York & New Haven (soon to consolidate with the Hartford & New Haven, which would make Vanderbilt a major stockholder) leased the New England Shore Line, blocking the Erie's access to Boston. In December, the Central and the Lake Shore also made an exclusive contract to receive all the traffic of the Dunkirk, Warren & Pittsburgh, a new railroad being extended into Pennsylvania's oil region. Gould had thought to undermine his more robust rivals; instead he drove them to widen their already vast grip on the rail traffic between the West and the seaports.93

  Even with these great affairs—and expenses—weighing on him, Vanderbilt may have found the strength to pick up one of the most massive companies outside of the railroad industry: Western Union, the giant telegraph monopoly. On October 12, 1870, five men closely identified with the Commodore moved onto its board of directors: Horace Clark, Augustus Schell, James Banker, Daniel Torrance, and John Steward. Western Union was a classic target for a Vanderbilt takeover: it possessed immense strengths, but needed reform. “With a magnificent income and a constantly increasing business, they found it impossible to pay regular dividends, and the value of the stock had declined to about one third its par value,” an industry journal wrote. “The management of the company [will be] placed in the hands of new men.… It is intended to dispense with some of the sinecures… which have hitherto proved so lucrative to their holders.” As was the case in all of the Commodore's takeovers, Clark and associates organized an executive committee and took radical steps to put Western Union's finances in order. And yet, their presence on the board hardly proved that Vanderbilt took a personal stake in the company, at least at this time. Wall Street was ever murky94

  For all of the Commodore's power—his cunning, his nerve, his strategic vision—some things remained beyond his control. The federal government had decided to tax the scrip dividend issued by the Central in 1868 at the standard 5 percent, for a total of $1,150,000. Vanderbilt claimed that the dividend represented earnings made before the income tax had been created, and should be exempt. In May he had sent Clark, Schell, and William to Washington to argue his case, to no avail.95 On November 21 he went in person, taking Clark and Schell with him. The next day, he struck one observer in the Internal Revenue office as the “brightest and quickest” of the three. As Clark stated their case, Vanderbilt “did not hestitate to thunder out his opinion whenever he could get a word in edgeways, in a manner that would indicate he was used to driving everything before him.”

  As they got up to go, Vanderbilt said, “I am not very good at this kind of business. The last time I was here, it was on business. I said I could do better.” He referred to his gift of the Vanderbilt to the navy. Even now, he took pride in the vessel. “Why, they never gave me my vessel back,” he explained. Yes, he had made a gift of it, but the navy had abandoned it. “The finest ship ever built is now rotting at the wharves in San Francisco.” He felt mistreated, and now felt a personal stake in the dividend-tax question above and beyond the money. “We'll make war if I don't get justice,” he declared. The curious term “justice” speaks to his state of mind. This man of honor was accustomed to enforcing his idea of fairness on the world.96

  “THIS IS VANDERBILT, probably the most powerful individuality in America,” a reporter for the Chicago Tribune wrote in August 1870. “I saw him at Saratoga, sitting on the porch of the Congress Hall—a very tall, straight, graceful, and noticeable old man… surrounded by parasites—all of them coarser-looking men.” The writer reflected that Vanderbilt was a fine name for a tycoon, especially one so dignified, so careful and honest with his corporate interests. “He is a member of society a man of administration and not a thief.… On the other hand, what has this richest American done for any other motive than immediate gain?”97

  At that moment, a fifty-year-old Methodist minister named Charles F. Deems was answering the question. Four years earlier, he had come from the South to New York, where he felt “the weight of Andersonville around his neck,” his son wrote, in reference to the infamous Confederate prison camp. (That is to say, he felt ostracized because of Northerners' anger over Andersonville, rather than suffering guilt over its horrors.) He decided to establish a sanctuary for Southerners in Manhattan. On July 22, 1866, he began to rent the New York University chapel for weekly services. He called his flock the Church of the Strangers. One Sunday two new women attended, and became regula
r congregants: Frank Crawford Vanderbilt and her mother, who had moved into 10 Washington Place. In their chats with him, they strongly implied that he should call at the Vanderbilt home.98

  In the year since the Commodore's second marriage, he had gradually curtailed his evenings at the Manhattan Club. Now and then he would have a party of friends over to his house to play whist or, more frequently now, euchre (a card game played by four people, teamed in pairs). His companions included Joseph Harker, Chester W. Chapin, and Cornelius Garrison, whom Vanderbilt had grown to like a great deal. But the aging Commodore came to prefer quiet evenings at home with his wife and his mother-in-law. He welcomed Deems, whom he had met briefly before the war, and the minister became a regular dinner guest.99

  “The Commodore paid me special attention,” Deems recalled. Over dinner or in the parlor afterward, often with Daniel Drew as a guest, Vanderbilt questioned Deems closely “about my preaching, my past history, and my expectations of the future.” When the subject of “clerical beggars” came up—a sore point for Vanderbilt—Deems loftily pronounced to Frank that he delivered his sermons just a block from the Commodore's house, but he would never ask a dollar from him. Vanderbilt shot him “one of those steely looks of his which were very piercing and very subduing.” Deems realized that he had sounded rather like a beggar as well, so he continued in a lighthearted tone, “For, if he has lived to attain his present age and has not got the sense to see what I need and the grace to send it to me, he will die without the sight!” They all laughed, and the subject lapsed.100

  “I regarded him as an unscrupulous gatherer of money,” Deems recalled. “The few interviews I had had with him after his marriage had modified my opinions of the man. I discovered fine points of which I had had no suspicion. But I was still a little afraid of him.” One Saturday evening in July 1870, before Vanderbilt went to Saratoga, he called Deems up to a little office he kept next to his bedroom. He had heard that the minister was negotiating for the purchase of the Mercer Street Presbyterian Church for $50,000. “Doctor, I'll give you that church.”

  Deems flared indignantly. “There is not any man in America rich enough to have me for a chaplain.”

  “Doctor, I don't know what you mean. Lord knows I've got as little use for a chaplain as any other man you ever saw. I want to give you this church, and give it to you only. Now will you take it?”

  “Commodore,” Deems replied, “if you give me that church for the Lord Jesus Christ, I'll most thankfully accept it.”

  “Now, doctor, I would not give it to you that way, because that would be professing to you a religious sentiment I do not feel. I want to give you a church; that's all there is.”

  The two men stood up together. “Commodore, in whatever spirit you give it, I am deeply obliged, but I shall receive it in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

  At the beginning of August, Vanderbilt wired Deems from Saratoga that negotiations for the purchase of the church were complete. He instructed the minister to see Lambert Wardell, who handed him a package containing $50,000 in cash.101

  For a man so comfortable with financial abstractions, Vanderbilt was an extremely concrete thinker in other respects. He questioned Deems about his personal history and character, not his theology. As he remarked to the minister one summer evening, as Deems fanned himself in the heat, “Doctor, all you've said has had no more weight with me than that fan.”102 He focused on people, after studying them over a lifetime in business. He liked and trusted Deems, and that was what mattered. When the minister suggested a board of trustees for the church, Vanderbilt refused—he wanted to give the building to Deems, and only Deems. As far as his mission went, it was the outreach to Southerners, rather than the promise of salvation, that appealed to the Commodore. It planted the seed of a vastly larger project to heal the war-torn nation.

  THERE WERE SOME FAMILY AFFAIRS that were in Vanderbilt's control, and some that weren't. The most amenable to control was the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad. As early as 1871, his grandson Henry Allen heard him boast that he had put the Central in such good condition that it could run itself. His sometimes truculent daughters were another matter. Mary La Bau snubbed Frank, and Sophia Torrance sniped at her father's wife behind her back. When Vanderbilt mentioned it to young Allen, a particular friend of Sophia's, Henry made excuses. “I said to him that he knew how impulsive Mrs. Torrance was, and often said things she didn't mean,” Henry recalled. “He assumed a stern expression, as was usual with him when he was in earnest, and said, ‘Oh, no! They've all been talking. Billy has told me enough.’”103

  Frank did not need her husband's protection. Where he was fierce, she was elegant, dignified, and cultured. She dazzled patrician onlookers at the closing ball of the summer season in Saratoga in 1871. “Mrs. Commodore Vanderbilt,” a society columnist wrote, “was dressed in exquisite taste. She had a white satin-striped grenadine; train trimmed with ruffles of the same, bound with white satin; full overskirt, looped, and trimmed with ruffles of the same; corsage high, with point-lace trimmings; and very rare diamonds.” She promenaded at the clubhouse of the patrician Jerome Park with her husband at the opening of the fall races, and raised money for the Sisters of the Strangers, a volunteer group of aristocratic ladies, to which the Commodore contributed. Frank polished her husband's gold, as it were, until elite society began to forget that it had ever seen tarnish there.104

  Ellen Vanderbilt did her best to rescue the reputation of her husband Corneil with the Commodore. The couple struggled, as always. Corneil lost his Treasury job after his supervisor absconded with thousands of dollars. The pair lingered in New York, borrowing money from Greeley Ellen called at 10 Washington Place, alone. “I passed a very pleasant evening at the Commodore's & like Madame extremely,” she wrote to Greeley. “William & his wife took tea with us. I spoke of your calling to see me & I never heard the Commodore speak in such rapturous terms of anyone as he did of you. He said you were the best man in New York, the fairest & squarest, the most honest of anyone he knew.” It is striking that Vanderbilt should praise precisely those qualities that Corneil himself lacked.105

  The Commodore could never bring himself to turn completely away from his son. When one of Ellen's sisters visited Vanderbilt in May 1871, she reported that, despite his being preoccupied and “miserable” with a flare-up of rheumatism, he questioned her closely about Corneil, showing great concern. Corneil went to visit his father at his office one morning, interrupting a meeting with other railroad executives. Vanderbilt told him to come back for lunch, and they spent much of the afternoon together. “He raised my salary [sic] a hundred dollars & gave me his check for $300,” Corneil wrote to a friend, “and he said that he should do better as he became satisfied that I was continuing to improve.” Clearly Vanderbilt loved his son, but, to use one of the Commodore's favorite words, he was no sucker.106

  Corneil was always in over his head. But a crisis even overwhelmed Jacob Vanderbilt, the relative best equipped to take care of himself. On July 30, 1871, the Staten Island ferryboat Westfield exploded. Early reports put the death toll at ninety-three, with 113 injured. The Commodore himself had built the Westfield, which he had sold with all his ferryboats to the Staten Island Railroad, headed by Jacob, in 1863. To put it mildly, the city was outraged. A coroner's jury found criminal neglect, and a grand jury indicted Jacob for homicide. A long, difficult fight for Jacob's life ensued.107

  As one relic of Vanderbilt's career fatally disintegrated, a lasting tribute to his life arose on Forty-second Street. On June 30, the New York World announced, “The great railroad depot erected by Commodore Vanderbilt at Forty-second Street is at last completed and ready for its occupants. This building… is a magnificent ornament to the city and will doubtless prove a lasting monument to its builder. New York can now boast of the largest railroad depot in the country.” It was the second largest in the world, a brick bastion with white iron trim, standing three stories high (160 feet to the top of the central towe
r), 240 feet wide, and 692 feet deep, extending north from Forty-second Street. A huge train shed, or “car house,” stretched 650 feet long under an arched glass roof. The statistics of what went into the depot were staggering: eight million pounds of iron, ten million bricks, twenty thousand barrels of cement, plus eighty thousand feet of glass in the roof of the car house alone. Newfangled lights illuminated its vast interiors at night, and 75,000 feet of pipe carried steam to heat its expansive offices and waiting rooms.108

  Vanderbilt paid for the construction out of his own bank accounts. Grand Central belonged to the Harlem Railroad, in which he, William, and William's sons now owned almost all the stock, and which had not been consolidated into the New York Central & Hudson River. In May, William presented figures to the board showing that his father had paid $2,027,146.51 in cash, taking about $1.5 million in stock in return and loaning the rest. (The final cost, including real estate, would be $6,419,118.10.) It formally opened on November 1, receiving about fifteen passenger trains each day and sending another fourteen up the quadruple track that ran over the surface of Fourth Avenue.109

  The terminal had critics.*2 “The new ‘Grand Central Depot’ can only by a stretch of courtesy be called either central or grand,” the New York Times groused—unfairly. For one thing, city and state law dictated how far downtown it could be placed; for another, it sat on the inner edge of the East Side, where the city grew fastest—growth that Grand Central would accelerate. The comprehensive street and sewage construction that Tweed had started provided the infrastructure for rapid development up to the Harlem River. The Commodore had seen the city expand from a mere town to a global metropolis during his lifetime; he had every reason to expect it to swell past his new depot, as the population increased from 942,292 in 1870 to 1,206,299 in 1880.110