The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
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It was his final act that brought everyone into that courtroom, an act that combined the personal and the corporate. He had built something that he meant to last and remain in the hands of his own bloodline—to found a dynasty in the most literal sense. To that end, he had drafted a will that left 95 percent of his estate to his eldest son, William. William's sister Mary meant to break that dynasty by breaking the will, to force a distribution of the estate equally among the ten surviving children.
Would she succeed? Each side would fight to define Vanderbilt; each side would seek out its own answer to the enigma of a man who left few letters and no diaries. Lord began to speak, and the crowd bent forward to listen, straining to learn who the Commodore really was.
A CHILD, IT IS SAID, CHANGES EVERYTHING. For Phebe Hand Vanderbilt, another child meant more of the same. In May 1794, during the last month of her fourth pregnancy, her first three children, Mary, Jacob, and Charlotte, ran about their humble house. Knowing the Vanderbilt tradition, she could expect many more to follow the unborn infant in her womb. Continuity not change, defined everything about her existence, an existence that differed little from that of her parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents. She sat in wooden furniture hand-cut from hand-hewn lumber. She wore clothes hand-sewn from hand-spun wool. She washed cups and plates that had been spun on a wheel, and bottles blown by a craftsman's mouth. Looking out a window, she would see hand-built wagons harnessed to teams of horses. Peering a little farther, she could watch the sloops and ships that sailed by the shore just steps from her door. And at night she would light the room with a mutton-fat candle or a whale-oil lamp.
Phebe lived in a close wooden world made by human hands, powered by winds and horse and human strength, clustered at the water's edge. Most of the technology she knew had been first imagined thousands of years before. Even the newest inventions of her time—the clock, the printing press, the instruments of navigation—dated back to the early Renaissance. The “Brown Bess” muskets stored in U.S. arsenals and carried by British redcoats had been designed in the 1690s, a full century before. Revolutions were a matter for politics; the constructed world merely crept ahead.8
Phebe lived in Port Richmond, that most ancient kind of community—a farming village, its air pungent with the smell of animal manure and open fires, its unpaved paths sticky with mud from the season's rains. It sat on the northern edge of Richmond County better known as Staten Island, a sprawling, sparsely occupied landscape of not quite four thousand souls who still governed their affairs with town meetings. The islanders tilled the steep green hillsides, let pigs wander and forage for themselves, and built their houses close to the soft, swampy shores that crumbled into the kills—the tidal creeks that wrapped around the island's edges. Staten Island sat like a stopper in the mouth of New York Harbor, separated from Long Island by the two-mile-long Narrows, where the ocean decanted into the bay. West of Staten Island stretched the mainland of New Jersey, and across the length of the harbor sat Manhattan, a long and narrow island that extended between the deep East and Hudson (or North) rivers like a natural pier of bedrock.
An island is defined by its edges. Phebe looked across the water for her husband's return whenever he was gone, until he sailed up in his boat and tied it fast. His name was Cornelius. It was a solid Dutch name, as was Vanderbilt, and both were common around New York Bay. The first of his family had arrived in America in 1650, when Jan Aertsen Van Der Bilt settled in the Dutch colony of New Netherlands. In 1715, long after the English had conquered the province and renamed it New York, one of Jan's descendants had crossed the water to sparsely populated Staten Island. That one move was change enough, it seems, for the family that dispersed and multiplied there. The ensuing generations lived out their lives as farmers or tavern keepers, unmoved by the climactic North American war with France in the 1750s, the outbreak of revolution two decades later, the British occupation of their island, the triumph of independence, the ratification of the Constitution, and the swearing in of President George Washington in Manhattan.
On May 27, 1794, Phebe gave birth to her fourth child. She underscored the sense of continuity by naming him Cornelius, too, though they called the boy Cornele. She cooed over him in English. Phebe had first met her husband in Port Richmond, a heavily Dutch village, where she had been working as a servant in the home of a minister, but she herself came from an old English family in New Jersey.
In the town of New York this sort of intermarriage surprised no one. There the Dutch had fallen to less than half the population as early as 1720; now they were less a minority than an interbred strand among its 33,000 residents. As early as the rule of Petrus Stuyvesant in 1647, the village then named New Amsterdam had grown into a rather cosmopolitan place. Stuyvesant governed under the authority of the Dutch West India Company, created to mobilize merchant capital to advance Dutch interests in the New World. Under his administration, the little seaport came to reflect the commercial orientation of the Netherlands, the most industrious nation of seventeenth-century Europe. As in the mother country, the primacy of trade, foreign trade in particular, had fostered a tolerance of strangers and disparate creeds (at a time when being a Quaker was a hanging offense in Massachusetts), and that tradition persisted.9
On Staten Island, a slightly different legacy prevailed. Most of the original Dutch settlers in New Netherlands, including Jan Aertsen Van Der Bilt, came to farm. They spread out on either side of New York Bay and the Hudson River (known as the North River well into the nineteenth century) from Staten Island to Albany. Theirs was an inward-looking, rural society and Americans of British descent often viewed them with distaste. “Nothing can exceed the state of indolence and ignorance in which these Dutchmen are described to live,” wrote traveler William Strickland in the 1790s. “Many of them are supposed to live and die without having been five miles from their own houses.” Outsiders generally considered the Dutch rude; one English-speaking Hudson Valley resident, for example, complained about “what I call Dutch politeness.” At times suspicion boiled over into blows.10
These great-great-grandchildren of the Netherlands carried on old customs for decade after decade. As late as 1836, a diarist wrote, “It is difficult to turn the Dutch population from their old established ways.” Women in high caps continued to serve “oely-coeks,” sweetened balls of deep-fried dough; men often went about in traditional clothes, including the broad-brimmed beaver hat. And they preferred to speak “Laeg-Duits,” or “Low Dutch.” By 1790, this dialect had evolved into a tongue that was incomprehensible to natives of the Netherlands, but it was heard all along the North River and New York Harbor. In one telling measure, three-quarters of 1,232 runaway slaves in the region at the beginning of the nineteenth century spoke Low Dutch.
Those slaves point to another difference between the Dutch and their English-speaking neighbors. In 1799, the state of New York passed the Gradual Manumission Act, phasing out slavery over twenty-eight years. Opposition to the law came largely from rural Dutch areas. In 1790, only 11.3 percent of English families owned slaves, compared to 27.9 percent of the Dutch—and one out of every three families in northern Staten Island. As international merchants, the Dutch had played a central part in introducing slavery to North America; as New York-area farmers, they carried on the institution to the last.11
Slavery, in addition to being an oppressive social system, was a commercial institution, providing both labor and property. Its presence revealed another distinctive feature of the rural Dutch: they farmed for profit. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this was a notable fact. Even into the 1800s, many English-speaking farmers in New York and New England devoted much of their effort to subsistence—though not necessarily by choice—whereas Dutch farming “was market-oriented,” in the words of one historian, “and derived its distinct regional characteristics from Dutch tradition.”
The rural Dutch, then, shared much of the commercial consciousness of their urban brethren. They clattered their wago
ns into Albany, New Brunswick, and New York to sell their produce with a savvy that became proverbial. When a cobbler refused to return a man's shoes until he made full payment, for example, the frustrated customer wrote in his diary, “He is too Dutch by half.” These perceptions led to such coinages as “Dutch treat.” A more charitable observer linked this shrewdness, this market orientation, to a detachment from public life. “The low Dutch are a quiet, frugal people,” he wrote in 1786, “possess considerable property, are afraid to run into Debt, without being fond of law, or Offices of Government.”
There was, perhaps, one more inheritance from the land of dikes and tulips for the newborn boy on Staten Island: independent women. Dutch law extended substantial autonomy to women, compared to British custom, and the fact was reflected in society “Strong and assertive Dutch wives were commonplace,” observe two historians of New York City. Even after the English conquest, the tradition persisted, and Dutch women conducted business in their own names.12
Cornelius and Phebe Vanderbilt carried on these folkways faithfully, giving them no more thought than Staten Island's trails and landings, established long ago by their ancestors. Cornelius's own parents had died when he was young, leaving him no estate worth the name. Within a few years of the birth of his namesake, he achieved sufficient prosperity to move his family—little Cornele and his three older siblings, along with younger sisters Phebe, Jane, and Eleanor—to a roomier house east of Port Richmond, in what would become the village of Stapleton. This two-story wooden structure, with a steep-sloped roof, chimneys at either end, three dormer windows, and a porch that ran its width, sat amid pear and cherry trees, just two hundred feet from the shores of the Narrows.
They were pulled to the water's edge by the gravity of commerce. Living across the bay from New York, the Vanderbilts enjoyed a year-round market for their produce, something rare for American farmers. The longstanding trade between the crowded town and its neighboring shores had led the Dutch to develop a specialized vessel, a large, two-masted boat known as a periauger (or pettiauger).13 In an act that spoke volumes about Cornelius's commitment to accumulation, he built or bought his own periauger and began to sell his services, ferrying his neighbors and their produce across the bay. As other work for the boat presented itself, he began to attend to the water as much as to his farm.
In some ways, it would be Phebe who would prove to be the more Dutch of the two. Like the classic wife of New Netherlands tradition, she radiated strength of personality. “She was not only the family oracle,” one nineteenth-century writer declared, “she was the oracle of the neighborhood, whose advice was sought in all sorts of dilemmas, and whose judgment had weight.” She was also as much a creature of the marketplace as her husband, as she sent her vegetables and sewing and whatever else she produced to town in her husband's boat. When cash came in, she would count the silver coins, march to her tall grandfather clock, and stow them within. Her shrewdness outshone that of her husband at times. According to tale, Cornelius once mortgaged the farm to finance a deal that then failed utterly. Phebe heard his confession, went to the clock, and came back with the entire amount. It was a legend, but one with a basis in fact: later court records show that she lent money at commercial rates of interest, and once foreclosed on a widow's mortgage—the widow being her own daughter. It seems that silver rarely stayed in the clock for long before Phebe found a better place to invest it.14
Ambition and inventiveness, practicality and toughness: the mixture of virtues that emerged from the marriage of these two people lifted them out of the poverty in which they had begun their lives together. They created a household where, far earlier than in more remote communities, the marketplace strode in the door and shaped their lives. Farmers living up the Hudson straggled along with much more haphazard connections to the world of commerce; one study found that the average household made just one delivery of crops and handicrafts to riverside merchants in an entire year. How different it was in the Vanderbilt house, where daily life was filled with buying and selling, borrowing and lending, earnings and debt. “The desire of riches is their ruling passion,” a French observer wrote of Americans at this time, “and indeed their only passion.” He could easily have been describing Phebe and Cornelius.15
But where would their passion take them? The future they could envision was in keeping with past generations of Vanderbilts, a set of possibilities confined within the water's edge that wrapped around them: a farm, a boat, perhaps a tavern, perhaps more land. The thin dispersal of people in a rural landscape dispersed opportunity as well. But unlike most country folk, the Vanderbilts lived within sight of the place of the most densely concentrated possibilities in North America: the city of New York.
THE DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD-LIANCOURT stared in wonder across the bay. Standing at the Battery, the plaza marking Manhattan's southern tip, he gasped at the view. “In this promenade,” he wrote, “the eye embraces at once all the outlets of this great port, and sees all its shipping come in and go out.” In a glance, he saw the marshy shores of New Jersey, the bluffs of Brooklyn, and directly across the green hillsides of Staten Island, looming above the Vanderbilt farm. In between billowed the sails of ships and sloops passing up and down the rivers, sailing to and from the ocean, mooring and unmooring from the piers that fingered the water. The scene, he sighed, made the Battery “incomparably the most delightful public walk anywhere to be found.”16
In 1795 he had sailed across the ocean to North America, where he wandered as an exile for three years. They were years spent very much on the edge of civilization. The United States was a nation with grass between its toes. Only five cities held more than ten thousand residents; the percentage of the nation's four million citizens who lived in towns of at least 2,500 people languished in the single digits, and would linger there for decades to come. Most lived in farms, villages, and landings scattered along the long Atlantic coast.17
Across the Atlantic, Europe burned. In France, the king had been executed, thousands more had been guillotined during the Terror, and the massed armies of the surrounding monarchies marched in to crush the revolution. How different the United States was: during Rochefoucauld-Liancourt's three years there, the nation's military hero, George Washington, voluntarily stepped down from the presidency, declining to stand for a third term. Despite some pointed political debate, no heads rolled when John Adams assumed the office in 1797. Here was a peaceful, stable republic, whose white-wigged leaders spoke of honor, service, and the example of classical Rome.
What captured the Frenchman's imagination, as he looked out over the ships crowding New York Harbor, was not politics but economics. Again and again, Rochefoucauld-Liancourt had observed the Americans' “ardour for enterprise.” When he turned and strolled up Broadway, past bustling stores and workshops, under the ringing hammers and shouts of workmen erecting new buildings, he marveled that every inhabitant seemed to cherish “the project of making an ample and rapid fortune.… Few of them are contented with what they have.”
It was that sense of the public mood, of the emerging American character, that illuminated Rochefoucauld-Liancourt's vision of this country. The United States, he wrote, “is destined by nature for a state of strength and greatness, which nothing can prevent her from attaining.” The prophecy was far from obvious: despite the enormous geographical size of the republic, it was desperately underpopulated, with only a skeletal military establishment. And yet Rochefoucauld-Liancourt boldly predicted that it would attain “a degree of prosperity, which must in future render this part of the world the rival, perhaps the fortunate [i.e., more successful] rival, of Europe.”
There was, however, an obstacle standing between the young republic and its destiny. A sophisticated as well as inquisitive traveler, Rochefoucauld-Liancourt saw that New York's busy harbor spoke of weakness as well as strength. A momentary disarrangement of the world—the war between France and its enemies—had allowed American merchants to step in as shippers to all nations.
European ports once closed to Americans now stood open; competing merchant fleets now sat at their piers or were impressed into naval service. But Americans traded comparatively little with each other; merchantmen sailed from New York for Europe or the Caribbean rather than Baltimore or Boston. And fully half of American exports, in terms of value, were re-exports of goods arriving from overseas, rather than sales of U.S. products.
“The prosperity of a nation's commerce cannot be durable, unless it be founded upon a solid basis,” Rochefoucauld-Liancourt warned; “and the solid basis of a nation's commerce is the produce of its soil, of its manufactures.” But Americans manufactured little that they could sell to each other, beyond the confines of a local community. For a century and a half, London's imperial policies had molded the North American colonies into suppliers of raw materials and consumers of British manufactured goods. As a result, foreign trade had been at least four times greater than domestic during the colonial era, as each port gathered in crops and raw material from its immediate hinterland and shipped them abroad. Even now, foreign trade remained two or three times greater. The ports of the United States were an unstrung line of pearls, shining with Europe's trade but with little to hold them together when peace returned.18
If there was any place where that would start to change, where the republic would begin to grow into a cohesive nation and so grow great, it must be New York. When Rochefoucauld-Liancourt arrived in August 1797, the advantages of its location could hardly be missed. “The situation of this city in point of commercial importance,” observed a foreign visitor, “is surpassed by none in the United States.” Centrally placed between New England and the rest of the states, sitting on a large and sheltered deep-water harbor at the junction of the Hudson River, Long Island Sound, and the sea lanes to Europe, New York drew an ever-greater portion of American trade. By 1807, an Englishman could describe it as “the first city in the United States for wealth, commerce, and population.”