Blatherskite! What could the Commodore do with such a disappointing son? He certainly wasn’t about to give him a job with his steamboat lines; Billy was too dumb for that. The Commodore told a friend that “Billy was good for nothing but to go on a farm.”25 He bought him a worn-out seventy-acre farm on Staten Island near New Dorp, between the old Moravian church and the bay, with a small two-story house and attached lean-to kitchen, gave him an allowance of $3,000 a year, and sent him into exile.
One day Billy went to see his father. He needed manure to use as fertilizer to improve the sandy, barren soil of his farm. He knew his father would never give him the horse manure from his Fourth Avenue stables since he was selling it to other farmers. So Billy offered to buy the manure for four dollars a load.
The Commodore was delighted. Billy’s offer was well above the going price of manure. What a blockhead! He shook hands with his naïve son; a deal, after all, was a deal.
The next day down at the docks he saw his son with a scow piled high with manure, ready for the trip across the bay to his Staten Island farm.
“How many loads have you got on that scow, Billy?” he asked him, already multiplying the number of loads he thought were aboard by the four dollars he would make on each load.
“How many?” William asked. “One, of course! I never put but one load on a scow.”26
A worker who was at the docks and overheard the conversation remembered that “the Commodore wa’n’t no gret hand to stan’ around, and I never seen him stan’ so long before as he stood that afternoon on the dock, looking at that scow goin’ across the harbor.”27 The Commodore was speechless, grinning with a new pride in his son who had just pulled one over on him. Maybe there was something to that blatherskite after all.
After carefully surveying his land and weighing his options, Billy decided that he would have to buy more acreage and make substantial improvements to the farm to make it pay. The land and improvements would, of course, cost money, something that he didn’t have, but of which his father had a surfeit. William complained to his friends about his father’s treatment of him, telling them that “the old man treated him harshly,” that he had asked the old man for money and been refused, that the old man was niggardly toward him and it was hard work to get money out of him.28 He dreaded the scene he knew would ensue if he asked his father to loan him money for the farm, so he had a friend intercede on his behalf. When the Commodore was approached, his answer was very simple: no. So Billy mortgaged his farm and used the $6,000 he received to buy surrounding acreage and to purchase the equipment he needed.
The Commodore was furious when he learned what his son had done, telling a friend that he could not believe William would do such a thing. William had “told him he was making $10,000 a year off that farm, now what has he done with that money?”29 The Commodore sent for his son and took him for a drive.
“William, you don’t amount to a row of pins anyway. You won’t never be able to do anything but bring disgrace upon yourself, your family and everybody connected with you. I’ve made up my mind to have nothing more to do with you.”
William was stunned. What had precipitated this latest outburst?
“Didn’t you mortgage your farm for $6,000?” his father asked him.
“I did. I had to do it. The farm required considerable investment and I had no money. My object in life has been always to please you, and I am profoundly grieved to see that I am unable to do so. I can assure you of one thing, and that is, not one cent of this money has been diverted to my personal comfort. The transaction is perfectly businesslike. I engaged to pay the mortgage off at a certain date. I shall do so. I cannot see that I have done anything to be ashamed of.”30
The next morning, the Commodore had delivered to his son a check for $6,000, ordering him to pay off the mortgage that day. “There’s something in that boy, Bill, after all,” the Commodore told his friends.31
Billy often began his day at five o’clock in the morning, setting out for the city and returning to the fields by seven o’clock. He planted crops of timothy, corn, potatoes, and oats for the New York market. Dressed in blue-jean overalls, heavyset Billy rarely did much plowing himself. He hired farmhands and sat on a fence watching them closely during their first day on the job when they tried to make a good impression. Then he required them to do the same amount of work on every succeeding day. None of them ever balked at this or felt that Billy was taking advantage of them. He “was a downright square man,” one of his farmhands who had worked with him for twenty years recalled, “social, reliable, honest, prompt to pay, quick to recognize merit.”32
Possessing those Dutch Protestant virtues of industry, frugality, and sobriety, Billy increased his fields to 350 acres, developing Staten Island’s most profitable farm, and there raised his four sons and four daughters, seeing to it that each received a good education. The Commodore, however, could not have cared less about what his son had accomplished, and never considered offering Billy a position with his profitable steamboat operations. In his eyes, his son wasn’t bright enough to work with him. He belonged on the farm; once a blatherskite, always a blatherskite.
After Billy was born, the Commodore suffered through the birth of four more daughters before Sophia presented him with another son. This boy he named for himself—Cornelius. If Billy was a disappointment, Cornelius Jeremiah was an embarrassment.
Unlike his older brother, Corneel, according to acquaintances, “asserted his rights to his father manfully.”33 This, to a limited extent, the Commodore admired. He often stated that Corneel had more brains than Billy. But those brains could easily get Corneel into trouble with his father, who on occasion became fed up with his defiant son and beat him with a horsewhip. Once, in a rage, the Commodore caught hold of him and tried to hurl him over the banister and down the stairs. Corneel eluded his father’s grasp and fled bareheaded from the house into the woods until things quieted down.
Though Corneel was not strong or handsome—he was tall and lanky and always looked a little undernourished—his intelligence might have carried the day with his father, except for one problem. When he was eighteen, Corneel had his first epileptic seizure, an affliction that his father regarded as an inappropriate weakness for a Vanderbilt, if not a clear sign of mental derangement. (Every so often, the Commodore was seized with guilt, believing his son’s epilepsy to be a punishment for having married his cousin, Sophia.34) When Corneel collapsed in a convulsion, his face twisted and red, his arms and legs jerking violently, his father was convinced that he belonged in a lunatic asylum. “He’s a very smart fellow, but he’s got a cog out,” he would tell his friends.35 “I’d give a hundred dollars if he’d never been named Corneel.”36
To try to make a man out of him, in 1849 the Commodore sent nineteen-year-old Corneel off as a sailor on a three-masted schooner that was rounding the Horn to the gold fields of California. Corneel was sick when he arrived in San Francisco and drew a draft on his father to pay his expenses for a return voyage to New York. Drawing a draft on the Commodore! Never was there a clearer sign of insanity! When his son reached home on November 20, 1849, the Commodore had him arrested and committed to the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum. His records there stated: “Form of mental disorder—dementia. Supported by father.”37 He was discharged from the asylum on February 20, 1850.
The Commodore believed his son would never be able to earn a living on his own, and so gave him an allowance of $100 a month. This, for Corneel, was just a beginning. Realizing that he could never win his father’s respect and that, despite repeated entreaties to give him a chance to show what he could do, his father would never let him work with him, Corneel turned to his wiles to find his way. He bragged to his friends that he could make a living out of the name Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., and set about showing them how. He talked his way into procuring free passes on his father’s lines and traveled widely. With his name and glib talk and flattery, he borrowed money for gambling from the Commodore’s friends
and from complete strangers, writing checks on banks in which he had no funds and forging his father’s name. That he would forge his father’s name and expect him to pay was a clear indication to the Commodore that his son was demented. The Commodore sent word out to all his business acquaintances: “There is a crazy fellow running all over the land calling himself my son. If you come in contact with him, don’t trust him.”38 On January 24, 1854, he again had his son arrested on the grounds of “confusion” and “loose habits,”39 and taken again to the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum. “Mr. Vanderbilt,” Dr. Brown, the director of the asylum, said to Corneel after talking with him a while that evening, “I have received your commitment. I am satisfied that you are no more crazy than I am. You may go home.”40 Corneel left the asylum the next morning and rode to town to get a writ of habeas corpus, since under the terms of the commitment he could be arrested again at any time and sent to another institution. Appearing against him in the court proceedings was brother Billy on behalf of their father. “William told me that he had only had this done to save me from State Prison. I told him that I would rather be considered a damned rascal than I would a lunatic.”41
Corneel could always count on a loan, no questions asked, from his friend Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune. When the Commodore learned that Greeley was lending his son large amounts of money, he dropped what he was doing and hurried to Spruce Street to the Tribune Building, storming up the narrow creaking wooden stairs to Greeley’s office.
“Greeley,” he bellowed, “I hear you are lending Corneel money.”
Greeley raised his head from the high desk at which he was writing and looked at the Commodore. Then he went back to his work, remarking, “Yes, Commodore, I’ve let him have some money.”
“You have, eh? You have! Well, I want you to understand that I ain’t responsible for it, and I shan’t pay you a cent of it.”
Greeley stopped writing, pushed his spectacles up on his forehead, and stared at the Commodore.
“You won’t, eh? Well, who the devil asked you to pay it? I didn’t, did I?”42
He went back to his work, as the Commodore stomped out of the office.
When the Commodore learned that another friend of his had loaned money to Corneel, he was flabbergasted. “Why, I didn’t think you was such a damn fool as to invest your money that way. Now you’ll have to wait for your money until after I am dead, then Corneel will pay you. Corneel has many indiscreet friends and the only revenge I can take is to let you all wait for your money until after I am dead.”43
What, the Commodore wondered, was such a son good for? He had worked in a law office copying papers and then quit. He had worked for a while in a leather business and left. Hoping to see as little of him as possible, the Commodore bought Corneel a ten-acre fruit tree farm—not on Staten Island, but rather in East Hartford, Connecticut.
The Commodore was pleased when at the age of twenty-five, Corneel told him that he was going to marry Miss Ellen Williams, the daughter of a Hartford minister. “I have a divine mission to save that young man,”44 Miss Williams had told her friends in explaining why she had agreed to marry the charming young hustler, and the Commodore believed she could. He had such respect for the young lady that he felt duty-bound to make sure she knew just what she was getting into. The Commodore went to call on her father.
“Has your daughter plenty of silk dresses?” the Commodore asked Mr. Williams.
“Well, my daughter, as I told you, is not wealthy. She has a few dresses like other young ladies in her station, but her wardrobe is not very extensive nor costly.”
“Has your daughter plenty of jewelry?” the Commodore continued.
“No, sir. I have attempted to explain to you that I am in comparatively humble circumstances, and my daughter cannot afford jewelry.”
“The reason I ask you is that if she did possess these articles of value, my son would take them and either pawn or sell them, and throw away the proceeds at the gaming table. So I forewarn you and your daughter that I can’t take any responsibility in this matter.”45
When Corneel came to his father to ask for money to build a house in Hartford for his new bride, his father was adamant. “No, Corneel, youv’e got to show that you can be trusted before I trust you.”
Several days later, Corneel’s wife tried her luck with her new father-in-law.
“How much can you get along with?” the Commodore asked her.
“Ten thousand dollars.”
He wrote a check, advising her to stretch it as far as possible, since there would be no more.
Several months later, she again went to see her father-in-law. The Commodore braced himself, knowing what was coming: a request for more money.
“Well, what now?” he demanded.
“Nothing, papa; only I’ve brought back $1,500. It was more than we needed, and I’ve brought you what’s left.”46
The Commodore could hardly believe it. Corneel had been saved. He raised his son’s allowance to $150 a month, and then $200 a month. But unlike his brother, Corneel was never able to make his farm pay. He continued living well beyond his means, frequenting gambling dens and brothels in Manhattan, borrowing money from professional gamblers, assigning his allowance as security, writing bad checks, landing in debtors’ prison on a number of occasions and depending on his mother to bail him out, until it reached the point that the Commodore would not give Sophia any money, in the belief that she would simply turn around and give it to her wanton son. Finding himself in 1868 with outstanding indebtedness of $80,000 and no assets, Corneel declared bankruptcy.
Faithful wife and tireless worker Sophia fared no better than her children in the Commodore’s eyes.
In the summer of 1846, when the Commodore was fifty-two and Sophia was fifty-one, he fell in love with his children’s comely young governess, the latest of an endless series of dalliances, but the first within his house. It was difficult having Sophia at home, so he sent her on a trip to Canada with one of his daughters. When the beleaguered governess quit, it fell to obedient Billy to secure another buxom maid to fill her position.47 “I’ll find some woman to take her place,” Billy noted. “The old man is bound to fall under the influence of some woman, and I’ll have that woman appointed.”48
While his wife was away, the Commodore was busy indeed. Having decided that he had to be closer to the center of business, he began constructing a four-story brick and brownstone townhouse in New York City at 10 Washington Place, a quiet street between Washington Square and Broadway. Complete with stables in the rear, the house cost the Commodore $55,000. Upon her return, Sophia for the first time in her life stood up to her husband and refused to leave her home on Staten Island and move to the city. The Commodore could not believe what he was hearing. Clearly the poor woman was out of her mind! The Commodore told his children that their mother, who steadfastly refused to leave her friends on Staten Island, was in poor health and “was at the change of life,” which obviously had affected her sanity.49 Against the protests of all his children—all except Billy—he had her committed to Bloomingdale Insane Asylum. When the physicians at the asylum insisted upon her return, Sophia reluctantly gave in once again to the wishes of her domineering husband and left her home on Staten Island.
4.
From his small office on Battery Place, the Commodore watched during 1848 as hundreds of ships sailed from New York, packed with adventurers racing by way of Panama to California, where gold had been discovered in the Sacramento Valley. For hours, he stood examining large colored maps of Central America spread on the table before him. There, smack in the middle of Nicaragua, lay Lake Nicaragua, 100 miles long and 50 miles wide. From the Caribbean, the San Juan River snaked 119 miles to the lake. Between the lake and the Pacific coast lay but 12 miles of jungle. The logic seemed irrefutable. If this route across Central America through Nicaragua was passable, the eager prospectors racing to the gold fields could cut 500 miles and several days off their trip, and avoid the
disease-ridden isthmus of Panama. In 1851, the fifty-seven-year-old Commodore organized the Accessory Transit Company, and for $10,000 secured from the Nicaraguan government a charter to cross the country by river and lake.
To test his new route, the Commodore sailed to Nicaragua aboard one of his new large steamships, the Prometheus, with a small steamboat, the Director, in tow. The San Juan River, the natives warned him, was filled with rapids and rocks, boulders, fallen trees, and hidden bars, and was navigable only by dugout canoe. The Commodore took the helm of his steamer and announced that he was going up to the lake “without any more fooling.” One of the men on board remembered that on this first trip “the Commodore insisted upon “jumping’ all the obstacles, and tied down the safety valve, put on all steam, and compelled the little steamer to scrape and struggle over the obstructions into clear water again.”50 What was the matter with these natives? Of course the river was navigable! He arranged for part of the San Juan River to be dredged and for obstacles to be blasted out, for docks to be built at the Atlantic and Pacific ports, and for twelve miles of macadam road to be laid through the jungle from Lake Nicaragua to the Pacific.
On July 3, 1851, the papers advertised “the New and Independent Line for California, via Nicaragua.” Every two weeks, one of the Vanderbilt steamships sailed from New York, headed for San Francisco by way of Nicaragua. It was a horrendous journey of 4,531 miles that took four weeks to complete. Large steamships brought the passengers down the Atlantic coast through the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean to the mouth of the San Juan River. Smaller iron-hulled steamboats then transported them up the river to Lake Nicaragua. A lake steamboat took them across the lake, and then stagecoaches drawn by mule teams brought them through the jungles to San Juan del Sur, the small port Vanderbilt had built on the Pacific coast, from which another steamship took them up the coast to the gold fields. The trip itself was hard enough; conditions aboard the Vanderbilt ships made it agonizing. A group of passengers who had traveled on his line from California to New York purchased space in the New York Times to vent a number of their criticisms:
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