by T. J. Stiles
Even calculating Cornelius found himself swept up in the enthusiasm over the hero's visit. On September 24, the mariner joined a delegation of New Brunswick's dignitaries that awaited Lafayette's arrival at the bridge into town, along with a crowd of some eight thousand citizens. At length the old soldier appeared, and a battery of artillery fired a sixty-nine-gun salute. Vanderbilt presented a fine carriage pulled by four white horses, and personally drove Lafayette on a parade through the streets.16
Curious, this regard for the past: in so many other ways, Vanderbilt disdained the delicacy of cultured men, the sentiment that caramelized in the diaries and letters of the literate. “I love you? dearest—Ay, do I love you—and when I love you not, chaos is come again,” Attorney General William Wirt wrote to his wife, in a typical note of the era. Vanderbilt would sooner start writing in Russian than write such things. He was the most commercial creature of a society that was throwing away the traditional social bonds—a self-made man, where the Founders themselves mostly had been old patricians. And yet, his patriotism was sincere, his veneration authentic. His heroes can be identified by the names he gave to his sons: William Henry (after General William Henry Harrison, hero of the War of 1812), George Washington—and Cornelius.17
As Vanderbilt rose, Thomas Gibbons declined. The old Tory who had helped unlock the “radicalism of the American Revolution,” in Gordon Wood's phrase—the dueling aristocrat who had overthrown aristocratic privilege—faded in the twilight of his generation. His sense of purpose seemed to evaporate in the heat of victory, and the flood of letters that poured from his pen dwindled. His chronic ailments overcame him, and he moved to the elegant patrician enclave of St. John's Park in New York. Vanderbilt largely ran Gibbons's steamboat enterprise, tracking income and expenses on large spreadsheets, boat by boat, month by month. Tension rippled through their relationship as days, even weeks passed between the captain's visits to his employer. “I used to do some things without his knowledge,” Vanderbilt later testified, “and he used to bear me out in them, though sometimes he said he would not do so.”18
And yet, despite their equally headstrong personalities, the seemingly inevitable conflict between the two never came to pass, thanks in large part to Vanderbilt's admiration for Gibbons. His regard for this impossible old man seemed to run together with his reverence for the Founders, mingling his esteem for the men who had made the nation with that for the former Tory who had helped reshape it.
Often bedridden, Gibbons played no part in the festivities of those years, in the farewell to the old and the heralding of the new. He shriveled as John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams, entered the White House in March 1825, in a literal transition to the Founders' children. He remained out of sight for the eventful week between October 26 and November 4, 1825, the grand celebration of the completion of the Erie Canal, that final gift from the aristocrats who had launched the project back when they still ruled the state. This historic achievement of engineering, cutting through a curtain of mountains, was all the more important for Gibbons's courtroom victory, yet his name was left unsaid throughout the ceremonies. Finally, on the afternoon of May 16, 1826, he wobbled out of his house to the corner of Hudson and Beach streets, where he collapsed and died.
Though the public scarcely noticed, Gibbons's death was also part of the passing of the founding generation. For all his acquisitive, competitive fervor, he was, to the end, an aristocratic, slave-owning Southerner who was obsessed with honor. A little over a month later came the deaths of both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams—on July 4, 1826, the very moment of the Jubilee.19
Gibbons's vast estate now passed into the hands of his son, William. But where the whip-wielding Thomas had effortlessly straddled the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, his son remained somewhat ill at ease in these new times. Given to quarreling with his partners and dimly suspicious of competition, he seemed even more a product of the plantation South than his father.
In many ways, William represented the opposite of generational change—and therein lay a serious problem. When he inherited the Thistle, he also inherited its hard-driving captain; but Vanderbilt brusquely dismissed William's business acumen and, even more important, his strength of will. “I do not know that William Gibbons ever started a project which his father did not originate,” he later claimed. “When they disagreed, the old man would have his own way.” By contrast, Vanderbilt himself often had carried his point with “the old man.”
The undertone of sibling rivalry is unmistakable. Cornelius had fondly sent Thomas Gibbons bushels of oysters and other tokens of affection; for the son (who was a year younger than himself) he felt no such admiration. Rough-edged, hard-muscled, and self-made, Vanderbilt couldn't quite bring himself to hate William, but he seemed to suspect that this rich boy lacked the drive, even the mental machinery, to cope with the age of commerce. Was it not Cornelius himself who best resembled Thomas Gibbons, in his energy, his entrepreneurial creativity his sheer force of personality?20
Vanderbilt seemed to be nothing but energy as he burned through the year on the hunt for every possible source of profit. On summer Sundays, when William had the Thistle sitting idle, Vanderbilt leased the Bellona to take New Yorkers to the Union Garden on Staten Island. He even arranged to sell the manure from Bellona Hall's stables to James Neilson, a self-styled gentleman farmer. Meanwhile he supervised the construction of a new vessel for the Union Line. Christened the Emerald, it was a “splendid new steam boat,” as it was advertised, and he proudly took command. But not for long.21
At half past one o'clock in the morning on November 5, 1826, Vanderbilt awoke in his bed at Bellona Hall to the cries of his crewmen. The Emerald had caught fire. He raced out the door to the wharf, where “the vessel was found to be one enormous sheet of flame,” the New York Gazette reported. The captain sent for help and hurried with his men to set up pumps to hose down the fire. They accomplished nothing. The flames crackled and burned along the length of the boat, eating down to the waterline. Seeing that the cause was hopeless, Vanderbilt ordered the men to cut its lines and set it adrift, lest a sloop at the dock catch fire as well. As the enormous torch floated into the current, he helplessly watched the destruction of much more than his employer's asset. “Capt. Vanderbilt lost considerable property in papers, &c.,” the Gazette reported, “and every article of clothing.”22
A shame, to be sure—almost a tragedy, in fact, though no lives were lost. But the press report begs a fistful of questions. Every article of clothing? Was he living entirely on the boat? What about Bellona Hall? What about his wife and children? Thomas Gibbons had largely abandoned his family in his self-absorption and his greed; was Vanderbilt doing the same?
FIFTY YEARS LATER, in a courtroom packed with spectators and reporters, in a city home to more than a million, “a gentleman with silvery white hair and iron gray moustache” took the stand, the New York Times reported, and testified about Vanderbilt's wife, Sophia. The witness was Daniel B. Allen; he was married to Sophia's second child, Ethelinda, and had heard hours of conversation among the siblings who had lived in Bellona Hall—Phebe (born in 1814), Ethelinda (1817), Eliza (1819), William, or Billy (1821), Emily (1823), and Sophia (1825). Their reverence for their mother knew no bounds. “The fact that Mrs. Vanderbilt had fulfilled the duties of a mother more completely than any woman they had ever known, had been talked over,” he testified. “In everything that interested her children she had full control. During a considerable portion of her life she had not only taken care of them, but fed, clothed, and educated them at her own expense, without getting a cent from [Cornelius].”
But what did they know of their father? As the Emerald disaster showed, he lived on his boats, starting his runs as early as six in the morning, sometimes even working on Sundays. He spent his leisure hours in the stables with his horses, training them for future races. He did spend enough time at Bellona Hall that his wife was with child for nine months out of every twenty-four through the 1820s and
′30s. Baby Sophia was followed by Mary in 1827, Frances in 1828, Cornelius Jeremiah at the end of 1830, George Washington in 1832, Mary Alicia in 1833, Catherine Juliette in 1836 (the year George died), and a second George Washington in 1839. All the children eventually found their father remote, stern, at times antagonistic. As Allen recalled, they later asked each other “what the children would have been, or even [their] father, had it not been for the exertions of [their] mother.”23
The trial that brought Allen to the stand in 1877 was staged to settle the fate of the Vanderbilt fortune, so his testimony ranged far beyond those early days in New Brunswick. But one more thing he said shed light on the man his father-in-law was back in the 1820s. “The Commodore was determined to have his own way, always, to a greater extent than any man I ever saw,” Allen asserted, using a title as yet undreamed of in 1827. “It was his most prominent characteristic.” In Bellona Hall, Vanderbilt's busy, harried, and pregnant wife could only have agreed, for she saw that trait expressed in every relationship, public and private.
During these years, the health of Vanderbilt's own father began to decline; he had accumulated a good-sized estate, worth some $40,000, and his will came under discussion whenever the family gathered on Staten Island. Cornelius senior wanted his wife to inherit everything. Cornelius junior, however, insisted on a particular provision: if his mother remarried, the estate would be divided immediately among the children; only if she remained single would she have the property for the duration of her life. “That feature of the will, Mrs. [Sophia] Vanderbilt said, had been a source of great discomfort to the Commodore's mother,” Allen reported.24
A day would come when Vanderbilt's love for his wife and children would become apparent, suggesting that he had always harbored affection for them out of historical view. In the early hours of his rise, though, his ambition seems most striking, defining both his personal and historical role. Alexis de Tocqueville later would observe that the “respect, attachment, and service” that held men together in aristocratic societies had disappeared in America; now they were bound by “money only”25 In Vanderbilt's case, that ever-present calculation, and competition, seeped into his own family relations. In place of the duel, the elaborate ritual for protecting the honor that defined a patrician society, he substituted brute force—emotional, and sometimes physical.
On the morning of May 9, 1827, the thirty-two-year-old Captain Vanderbilt started the new Union Line steamboat, the Swan, on its morning run; satisfied that the pilot had matters well in hand, he retired to the dining room for breakfast. In his customary chair sat Patrick Rice, whom he knew to be a difficult passenger. Vanderbilt tersely ordered him out. Rice refused. With the swing of a meaty hand, he sent Rice flying. The next morning, court papers dryly report, “without the permission of [Vanderbilt], and without any right to do, [Rice again] took possession of the seat of [Vanderbilt] at the breakfast table.” In the hilariously understated legal language of Vanderbilt's account, he “gently laid his hands upon the said plaintiff to remove him.” Too gently, it appears, for Rice (possibly drunk) sneaked back into the chair. At that, Vanderbilt curled his fingers into a pair of practiced fists “and did then and there beat, wound, and ill treat him so that his life was greatly despaired of,” as Rice complained. The infuriated Vanderbilt dragged the apparently unconscious Rice up to the pilothouse, hurled him onto the floor, and locked him inside. Rice not only lost his ensuing lawsuit, but had to pay damages to the man who had pummeled him.26
In the year since Thomas Gibbons's death, Vanderbilt's aggressiveness—his will to dominate—had grown fierce to the point of danger for those around him. At the same time, William Gibbons seemed to contract. In 1827 he leased to Vanderbilt the ferry rights to Elizabethtown Point (once rented by Aaron Ogden). In early 1828, Vanderbilt launched the first steamboat that was entirely his: the Citizen, a speedy 106-foot, 145-ton sidewheeler. With cousin John Vanderbilt and little brother Jacob alternating as captain, the Citizen connected Elizabethtown to New York with stops on Staten Island's northern shore. Cornelius also bought shares in the New Brunswick Coal Mining Company (a hint that he was interested in new sources of energy for steamboats), again demonstrating his ease with the complexities of the new economy27
Gibbons, on the other hand, had difficulty adjusting to the world that his father had helped make. He fell into a series of squabbles with the Stevens family of Hoboken, who owned the Union Line boats on the Delaware River. He reacted with exaggerated alarm to the appearance of competing lines. Unlike Vanderbilt, he feared that still-uncommon, still-mysterious form of business organization, the corporation; when rival lines obtained corporate charters from the New Jersey legislature, he protested wildly. It was a “swindle,” he complained, that would “check individual enterprise.” Gibbons was hardly alone in such suspicions. Indeed, his response reveals how unfamiliar the corporation remained to the American mind in general, even as it shows how unsophisticated he himself was as a businessman.
On July 8, 1828, Gibbons gave in to despair and offered for sale his three vessels (the Bellona, the Thistle, and the Swan). Then he thought better of it—then he gave up again. The final blow was the incorporation of yet another rival company. With that, Gibbons abandoned the field with all the dispatch of Darius in his chariot, fleeing before Alexander's army. “I intend to retire from the employment of steamboats,” he wrote on February 6, 1829, “as soon as I can dispose of my boats.” Before the end of the month, he had sold his paddlewheelers, rented out his docks, and ended the enterprise that had sealed his family name in history28
So began Vanderbilt's career as an independent steamboat entrepreneur. It was probably a relief. He had never been comfortable working for this younger, less acute man. Vanderbilt leaped into the race that William Gibbons had abandoned, sending the Citizen on shilling-a-head runs to New Brunswick. But the stress he now faced was unmistakable. It is not too much to say that Thomas Gibbons had been a second father to him, complete with father-son conflict. No matter how many businesses Vanderbilt had kept going for himself, he had remained within Gibbons's house, which gave him both shelter and a sense of purpose. Now the old man was dead, the house closed up. Vanderbilt would have to find his own way forward, to use what he had learned from Gibbons to shape his enterprises, to develop his own vision of his future. In his solitary steamboat, he sailed off to fight the economic war.29
ON THE EVENING OF APRIL 24, 1829, the Citizen pulled into its berth on New York's North River shore, at the hour when the glow of the setting sun reflected in a thousand orange points off the rippling waters. The deckhands tied up the boat, and the passengers began to debark. Vanderbilt joined them, as did Sophia, and together they walked into the crowded, dirty streets that ran between the low brick and wooden buildings of lower Manhattan. The Vanderbilts still lived in Bellona Hall, but had come to spend a Friday night in the city.
Someone bumped against Vanderbilt's side, then disappeared into the river of people pouring off the dock. Vanderbilt jammed his hand into his coat pocket. His wallet was missing. He pushed through the crowd, then sprinted after the man he believed to be the thief. In a moment he tackled him and held him fast as he searched his coat. The pocketbook contained “about $200 in money,” the press reported, “and certificates for several thousands in [New] Brunswick Bank stock.” None of it appeared in the man's pockets. Regardless, Vanderbilt hauled him off to High Constable Jacob Hays.
The high constable must have rubbed his bald head in delight when his former rival burst into his office. The man Vanderbilt dragged along was “identified there by Hays as one of the most noted pickpockets in the country,” the New York Gazette explained. “Hays says he has passed by the name of Henry Baptiste Lambert, and he graduated in the Pennsylvania State Prison. It is probable that he had an accomplice, to whom he handed Captain V's property, as soon as he got out of his reach. The Captain is positive he is the thief.” The now-incarcerated criminal had the perverse fortune to have picked a rich target
—a rapidly rising businessman—who was also as big and tough as any thug on the waterfront.30
The city where his pocket was picked was far from the “overgrown seaport village” that he had moved to from Staten Island during the War of 1812. It swarmed with people, swelled with people, was bulging from every door and window with people who poured in from the schooners, steamboats, and ships that clogged the slips. “New York was changing with disruptive speed,” writes historian Allan Horlick. “It was becoming strange where it had been familiar, and mysterious where it had been predictable.” At mid-century Joseph Scoville looked back to his youth and recalled a time when an average New Yorker “of no very extended acquaintance” could point out all the leading merchants, even direct a visitor to their homes.31 That memory faded rapidly as new faces arrived daily to rent apartments, find work, or start businesses.
The most popular story of the day, Joyce Appleby notes, was Peter Rugg, the Missing Man, about a farmer who disappeared before the Revolution, only to reappear in the mid-1820s. “Poh, New York is nothing,” Rugg scoffs to his contemporary guide. “No, sir, New York I assure you is but a sorry affair, no more to be compared to Boston than a wigwam to a palace.” Then Rugg wanders down Broadway, and he cannot believe his eyes. “There is no such place as this in North America,” he stammers. “Here is seemingly a great city, magnificent houses, shops and goods, men and women innumerable, and as busy as real life, all sprung up in one night from the wilderness.”32
It virtually had. In 1790, Manhattan's population had barely topped 33,000; in 1820, it reached 123,700; by 1830, it would pass 202,500. In just another five years, seventy thousand more people would cram into the city, pushing the population density to more than 25,000 per square mile. New York, then, remained tightly packed, but it was obviously expanding geographically as well. In 1811, the city extended only to Houston Street; by 1828, Broadway reached Tenth Street, and work began on Fourteenth Street from river to river. “Here the earnest merchant steps,” observed Anne Royall in the mid-1820s, “there the gay cook and merry chambermaid, with some scores of honest tars, hucksters, rude boys, and chimney sweeps, with the rolling coaches, the rattling carts, may give some idea of this life-inspired city.” As with every visitor, she reserved most of her astonishment for the island's watery edges, where the city met the world: