The problem, Corneel’s attorney Mr. Lord told Surrogate Calvin, was that the detectives had been following the wrong man! One of the detectives several years later had been strolling down Broadway with a friend when his friend pointed out Cornelius J. Vanderbilt. That’s impossible, the detective said. That’s not Cornelius Vanderbilt. I should know what he looks like; I shadowed him for several weeks a few years ago. The detective learned he had not been trailing the right person. The man who had been followed by the detectives, Mr. Lord asserted, had been paid by William H. Vanderbilt to impersonate his brother.
Mr. Lord assured Surrogate Calvin that he could prove these allegations. Yet after weeks of promises and delays, he failed to produce the detectives who could substantiate the story, implying they had been paid by William Vanderbilt to stay far away from New York during the trial.
When Mr. Lord had taken this conspiracy theory as far as he could, he brought Mrs. Lillian Stoddard to the stand, the attractive thirty-five-year-old widow of Dr. Charles Stoddard, a medical clairvoyant the Commodore had met at a spiritualists’ meeting in the fall of 1874. Mrs. Stoddard lost no time in getting to the heart of her tale. “It was early in September, 1874, about 11 o’clock in the morning,” she testified. “William came up to Mr. Stoddard and says, That gentleman is my father and you’re his medical clairvoyant that’s attending him. I’ve been wanting to speak to you, but I’ve never had the opportunity till now.’ Mr. Stoddard was surprised and said, “Any time that you say I can see you—make it at some hotel.’ So they made it at the Cosmopolitan Hotel, on the corner of Chambers Street and West Broadway next morning.”
The reporter for the New York Times looked across the courtroom at William and observed that “Mr. Vanderbilt was flushed so that the bald portions of his head were crimson, and he nibbled on the head of his cane and pulled at his side whiskers.” He seemed very upset “and his face underwent a constant succession of changes from burning blushes to his natural complexion.”
“Did you see him again?” Mr. Lord questioned Mrs. Stoddard.
“Yes, Sir, the next day at the Cosmopolitan Hotel. Mr. Stoddard and myself and William H. Vanderbilt were the only persons present. The hour fixed was 10 o’clock, and we were there before 10 and it was about 10 when Mr. Vanderbilt came in. William H. Vanderbilt says, “I want you to control the old man—he has great belief in you and you can do it. I want you to make him think more of me, so I can influence him.’ Mr. Stoddard then said that he didn’t know about that—that he should have a day for reflection, and would let him know the next day. They were to meet there again at the same time. So they met there again, and when he came in Mr. Stoddard says, Τ have thought well of your proposition provided you make it satisfactory.’ Mr. Vanderbilt then gave him a roll of bills and Mr. Stoddard counted them over and says: This will do; this is satisfactory. Now I am ready for business. What’s your proposition?’ He says: Τ want you to go to the old man’s office and tell him you have a message from his dead wife, that she is now in the spirit world and has a much clearer knowledge of affairs than she ever had before, and that he should make his will, and make William H. his successor, and that he’ll make no mistake.’ And then William was to come in. He said to Mr. Stoddard, “And you impress upon him that all the rest of them hate him and that I am the only one that should have the business, and that he should only think of me.’”
“You went to the office?” Mr. Lord asked.
“Yes, Sir, Mr. Stoddard and myself.”
“Who was there?”
“The Commodore. It was between 12 and 1 o’clock and the Commodore wanted him to give him an examination, so he went into a trance.”
“Who went into a trance?”
“Mr. Stoddard.”
“State what occurred at the Commodore’s office.”
“Mr. Stoddard went into a trance and said there was the spirit of an elderly lady around him—the spirit of his wife—and that she in the spirit land had a much clearer sight of things than ever upon earth and that he should make William H. his successor, and that he would make no mistake, and the Commodore said, “I’ll do as the spirit wants me to.’”
“Was anything else said before William came in?”
“No, Sir. Then William H. came in and Mr. Stoddard had come out of the trance, and he looked at him surprisingly and said, “Who is that man? That’s the man I saw in my trance,’ and the Commodore said: “That’s William H., my son.’ And then William H. said he had had a spirit message and had come to tell him about it. He said that he should make him his successor and he says, “You shall have all, Billy.’ Then the Commodore asked Mr. Stoddard if anything was going to happen to him, and Mr. Stoddard said no, he would live long after his will was made—be easy in his mind, and the Commodore says, “I believe it.’”
“Anything else that you remember? Anything said on the subject of the children?”
“When Mr. Stoddard was in a trance he said the spirit told him that he was the only one that should be depended on in the business and that all the rest hated him and wished him dead. The Commodore and Mr. Stoddard made another appointment and…Mr. Stoddard and me went there again about two days afterward, and the same conversation took place—that he should make William his successor, and that was at the direction of the spirit. This took place about five times and William was present.”
“Did you count the money that William gave to Mr. Stoddard?”
“No, Sir. I saw Mr. Stoddard count it, and they were big bills. I saw 10’s, 50’s, 5’s and so on.”23
Whether or not there was some foundation for the theory of undue influence raised at the trial, this prolonged washing of dirty linen was embarrassing the new head of the House of Vanderbilt. How long must he sit there and hear how the Commodore had put pans of salt under the four legs of his bed as “health conductors” to cure his aches and pains; how he had giggled like a schoolgirl after his second marriage; how his brother had been thrown in jail time and again between his visits to gambling dens and brothels; how he, William H. Vanderbilt, had been conspiring for years to have his brother disinherited? How long must he sit there and listen to doctors testify as to the number of hardened feces they’d found in the Commodore’s intestines when they performed the autopsy? He had had enough. In the spring of 1879, a year and a half after the trial began, William reached a settlement with his brother and sister, giving Corneel an extra $200,000 in cash and a trust fund of $400,000 in addition to the income from the $200,000 trust fund he had received under the will. He reached the same settlement with his sister Marie Alicia. For a man who had inherited $95 million and the ownership of the nation’s greatest corporation, the New York Central, these sums were scraps. William Vanderbilt had been stubborn enough to fight for eighteen months to preserve his inheritance and he had been wise enough to know when to settle. He had emerged again the victor.
One evening William Vanderbilt set out in his carriage to distribute the bonds each of his sisters was to receive under the Commodore’s will. One of his brothers-in-law counted the bonds and then shook his head.
“William, these bonds fall $150 short of the $500,000 according to the closing prices on this day’s market.”
“All right,” William patiently responded, “I will give you a check for the balance.” He wrote out a check for $150 and handed it to him.
Another brother-in-law followed William to the door as he left.
“If there is anything more in this line, I hope we shall not be forgotten.”24
“Well,” William thought to himself, chuckling at what money did to people, “what do you think of that?”25
After the settlement, Corneel took a trip around the world in the grand style, returning to New York City in March 1882 to arrange for the construction of a new house in Hartford. He spent most of Saturday night, April 1, 1882, gambling, returning to his room at the Glenham Hotel at 319 Fifth Avenue at six o’clock the next morning. Had his losses that night been staggering? Had he lost
all he had won in the settlement? Had he come to the realization that he had wasted his life dreaming of a fortune that would never be his? Was he consumed by envy of his brother’s undeserved luck? At two o’clock that Sunday afternoon in his room at the Glenham, fifty-one-year-old Cornelius Jeremiah Vanderbilt, the Commodore’s younger living son, took his .38 caliber Smith and Wesson revolver from a bureau drawer and shot himself.
There is no evidence that Corneel’s tragedy had any effect on brother William, who by then was preoccupied again with managing the New York Central. Whatever the real story behind the Commodore’s will, whatever one might choose to call William Vanderbilt, blatherskite did not now seem the right word for a man who, by merit or design or a little of each, had been successful in cutting his brother and eight sisters out of their father’s will.
3.
Like the Commodore, William H. Vanderbilt was never shy about letting it be known that he controlled 87 percent of the New York Central, the nation’s biggest business. But unlike his father, he did not revel in the publicity and endless controversy that the ownership brought with it.
By the time of the Commodore’s death, the railroads were all-powerful. “These railway kings are among the greatest men, perhaps, I may say, are the greatest men, in America,” wrote James Bryce, an Englishman, in his treatise The American Commonwealth, which he published after a tour through the United States. “They have wealth, else they could not hold the position. They have fame, for everyone has heard of their achievements; every newspaper chronicles their movements. They have power, more power—that is, more opportunity of making their personal will prevail—than perhaps any one in political life, except the President and the Speaker, who after all hold theirs only for four years and two years, while the railroad monarch may keep his for life.”26
For one man to control a railroad system as vast as the New York Central was an awesome responsibility. By the routing of his tracks and the setting of his rates, William Vanderbilt could use his power to make or ruin major businesses and entire cities. As an English paper observing the Vanderbilt lines reported: “Their hands are upon the traffic of Northern Canada, and according to their pleasure, for half the year at least, the farmers of the great grain growing and cattle rearing half of the Central and Northwestern States find their occupations profitable or not. In some essential ways the family holds the trade of New York in the hollow of their hands, and no business worth the name can be started anywhere along the railways they command without their support and sanction. They can within these limits bring a meat exporter into a great fortune or strip him bare. It is much a matter of their favor whether a man flourishes or becomes bankrupt.”27
Having this much power was an uncomfortable experience for a man like William Vanderbilt. He wanted to be liked, this man who, as his friends agreed, “had a heart as tender as a woman and as big as an ox.”28 Because every action of the New York Central had such major consequences, and because he was the New York Central, municipal councils and state legislatures assailed every move he made; resolutions were drawn up opposing some action he had taken or urging some action he had not taken; laws were enacted changing the rules under which his railroads operated. Petitioners pleaded with him; editorials condemned him; cartoonists had a field day portraying the heavyset executive as a rapacious brigand, intent only on satisfying his insatiable appetite for more—more railroads, more business, more money. Even rival railroad tycoons had little trouble lining up public support behind their schemes when they opposed Vanderbilt. When there were train wrecks—when boilers burst, engines derailed, bridges crumbled, drawbridges were left open; when lines of cars burst into flames or engines ran away; when there were head-on collisions or rear-end collisions, which the newspapers featured with sensational coverage, accompanied by graphic artistic representations of the horror and gore and mangled bodies—William H. Vanderbilt was blamed. Regularly, he received threatening letters, informing him of the exact hour and location at which he would be stabbed or shot, though he never changed the established route or times he walked alone between his home and the Grand Central Depot. Once smoke was seen pouring from a leather mail pouch at the Central Post Office. The pouch was emptied out, and there amid the blackened mail was a pasteboard box containing a half-pound gunpowder canister, the top of which had exploded prematurely. This “infernal machine” had been addressed to:
W. H. Wanderbilt,
Esq.
459 5th Avenue,
City
Frequently he was called upon by emissaries from Tammany Hall asking for favors.
“Some of the boys need to go up to Albany Wednesday, and we’d like to have a special train.”
“I’m afraid I can’t promise that,” Vanderbilt would explain. “We can give you a private car on a regular train, if you like, but I don’t see how we can spare a whole train.”
The political emissary would not seem to mind. Several minutes later when he rose to say good-bye, he would say, “Oh, by the way, Mr. Vanderbilt, that ordinance comes up in Council again tomorrow.”29 The ordinance was invariably one that the New York Central had long opposed. Vanderbilt would rearrange his schedules to provide a train for “some of the boys.”
The final straw was added in 1879 when the New York City Chamber of Commerce called on the state legislature to investigate the railroads, and the resulting Hepburn Commission began hearings to look into the workings of the New York Central. It probed secret agreements between the railroads and oil refineries, the frequent gyrations in freight rates, the slow speed of rail service, the difference between long-haul and short-haul rates, even the effect of the railroads on the price of milk in the city. The New York legislature, it was rumored, was about to impose heavy taxes on railroad property in order to cut down Vanderbilt’s power.
By that summer, William Vanderbilt had had enough. “We get kicked and cuffed by congressional committees, legislatures, and the public,” he complained to Chauncey Depew, “and I feel inclined to have others take some of it, instead of taking it all myself.”30 To take some of the heat off himself, he was willing to do something that never would have crossed his father’s mind. He was ready to give up part of the golden goose. He was ready to sell part of the New York Central.
Vanderbilt went to see financier J. P. Morgan of Drexel, Morgan and Company. “A public sentiment has been growing up opposed to the control of such a great property by a single man or a single family,” Vanderbilt told Morgan. “It says we rule by might. We certainly have control of this property by right. But no matter, this public feeling exists.”31 Morgan arranged a private sale to English investors of three hundred thousand shares of New York Central stock at between $120 and $130 per share. By November 26, 1879, the stock had been placed. Under the terms of the sale, Vanderbilt agreed that }. P. Morgan would sit on the board of directors, as would representatives of Jay Gould, who had been part of Morgan’s syndicate, a startling move to end the competition with the Commodore’s old nemesis.
“Some people talk about my getting out of the road—selling my interest—and that sort of thing,” Vanderbilt explained. “It’s all nonsense. I have sold considerably less than half my interest—considerably less than half. That does not look like getting out of the road, does it?”32
Vanderbilt immediately invested the $35 million he made from the sale in government bonds that paid a 4 percent return. With that, the weary railroad tycoon heaved an almost audible sign of relief. “It can no longer be said that I am the owner of the New York Central.”33
In his flight to the safety and security of his government bonds, William Vanderbilt had sacrificed the potential for boundless growth that had bewitched his father. A railroad executive with the Commodore’s instincts would have continued expanding the scope of operations of the New York Central. Why stop growing just because it was already the biggest and the best? Why shouldn’t it buy up more major lines? Why shouldn’t the road go right to the west coast, becoming a transcontinent
al line? Why shouldn’t the Central build its own cars, make its own track, have its own iron and coke and steel mills? Why shouldn’t the Central integrate its operations just as John D. Rockefeller was doing with his oil business?34 The simple answer was that William Henry Vanderbilt was tired of it all and didn’t want any more. “I would not walk across the street to make a million dollars,” he told a friend.35 All he wanted to do was hold on to what he had in the face of the attacks that seemed to be launched at him from every side. “Any fool can make a fortune. It takes a man of brains to hold on to it after it is made.” He was trying to hold what he had with everything in him. What he never understood was that by being concerned solely with preserving his fortune, he was putting an end to the days of risk taking, of expansion and empire building for the Vanderbilt family. He was braking the growth of the fortune.
4.
The sale of the New York Central stock did not, however, bring William Vanderbilt the peace he sought. Another threat to his empire arose when speculators formed syndicates to build railroad lines that paralleled parts of the Vanderbilt system. Since there was never enough business to support two competing roads, the only reason the rival lines were built was to force Vanderbilt to buy them, or if he would not, to engage in a rate war that could break the Vanderbilt line.
Construction began on the so-called Nickel Plate road in 1881. The work was done so quickly and carelessly that in fewer than six hundred days, more than six hundred miles of track had been laid alongside Vanderbilt’s profitable Lake Shore rails from Buffalo to Chicago to St. Louis. Vanderbilt scoffed at the new road, calling it “a poor piece of work” and stating that “no railroad can parallel us that will not starve to death. We will starve it, not maliciously, but by superiority of our position, before it can get in a condition to live.”36
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