by T. J. Stiles
“Vanderbilt… was an ardent supporter of Henry Clay,” an old Staten Islander told the New York Times in 1877, “and organized and commanded a magnificent troop of horsemen composed of about 500 of the finest men in the Whig Party on the Island. When the grand… procession took place in New-York, Commodore Vanderbilt and his troop of horsemen occupied a very conspicuous position in it.” Yankee Sullivan, the man recalled, was drinking in his bar with “a gang of roughs” as Vanderbilt rode by. “Rushing out, he [Sullivan] seized the reins of his horse and tried to compel him to alight. The horse reared, the Commodore cut ‘Yankee’ Sullivan across the back with his whip, and then, leaping to the ground, so badly beat him that his friends took him [Sullivan] away in a nearly senseless condition.”
The story is too good not to repeat: one of the richest men in the city now fifty years old, bludgeoning the greatest boxer of the day in a street brawl. Vanderbilt loomed over six feet tall, and he was a seasoned fighter; he suffered none of the hesitation, the muscle-tensing slowness, that an inexperienced man feels when an exchange of blows is imminent. Less than a year earlier, he had beaten a man down on Staten Island. And the details the old Staten Islander provided fit perfectly with the events of the day. Unfortunately, there is no evidence for the fight beyond this anecdote, which first appeared decades later. Yankee Sullivan was a celebrity and the newspapers covered him closely. A beating at the hands of a prominent capitalist surely would have found some mention in the press. There were none. It most likely never happened.30
But the symbolism of the story says more than the facts. Despite ten years of lavishing Jacksonian rhetoric on the public, Vanderbilt would be remembered as a Whig. Long the darling of the Democratic press, he would be depicted as thrashing a working-class Irishman of Five Points—a Tammany Hall operative, no less. In memory, at least, the champion of scrapping, competitive individualism ascended into Whiggery into the party of social prejudice and Wall Street insiders. It is not an accurate portrait (in no other case was Vanderbilt portrayed as seriously engaged with either party), but this anecdote can be seen as a reflection of his slowly changing social status.
In later years it would often be said that New York's social elite snubbed Vanderbilt. Not only is this biographical cliché misleading, it also oversimplifies the extreme instability of fashionable society at this time. In the eighteenth-century culture of deference, the differentiations of rank could not have been more clear: wealth, social status, and political power had been wrapped in a bundle as tight as the leases that bound tenant farmers to manorial lords. But the destruction of that culture wiped out the rules of hierarchy, replacing them with a mad scramble for standing. The competitive individualism of the economy found its reflection even in Sara toga Springs.
“In this country, where a democracy on the broadest scale is supposed to exist, we discover at our watering places an eternal struggle for ascendancy,” the Herald observed in 1845.
Exquisites in broad-cloth and patent leather, and female miracles of elegance and taste—the posterity of some Irish washerwoman, turn up their noses at Mrs. Smith and Misses Smith, because their papa keeps a hardware store in Pearl street; and an effeminate and deteriorated specimen of humanity, descended from the loins of some poor porter, pronounces the whole company “decidedly vulgar, and shockingly low.”
The phenomenon of the newly rich caught the attention of many observers, as those who came into fortunes fought for social respect. Francis Grund derided them as “the mushroom aristocracy of New York” to underscore their lack of lineage, their reliance on mere wealth and pretension. “Do you observe that gentleman in tights, with large black whiskers?” he snidely asked. “He is one of the most fashionable and aristocratic gentlemen in the city. I believe he served his apprenticeship in a baker's shop, then went into an auction-room, then became a partner in the firm, and lastly took a house in Broadway, set up a carriage, and declared himself a gentleman.”
The Herald mocked these rivals in snobbery, who “calculated to a nicety the number of dollars which may enable them to ‘astonish the Browns’ at the Springs.” Few of the striving new toffs were truly self-made, despite the rhetoric of these observers; the point, rather, is that they struggled to invent social status in a culture that no longer depended upon hierarchy to function. A Livingston of 1800 did not desire distinction; she simply had it. But these latter-day climbers had to conjure up artificial ranks now that the organic ones were gone.31
This was the class that Vanderbilt never belonged to: an affected aristocracy, the patricians of puffery. And yet, he was a first-generation entrant into the ranks of the wealthy. To that extent, he had a fraught relationship with a distinctly different fashionable set—the remnants of the old knickerbocker elite, the descendants of those who had once stood atop the culture of deference. The onslaught of recently rich outsiders caused this group to rally around each other, to construct elaborate new forms of social exclusivity They had launched this campaign on February 27, 1840, with a “grand fancy dress ball at Brevoort Hall,” as the New York Herald called it. It was the first fancy ball held in a private residence in New York; it took place on Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street, at the grand home of Henry Brevoort, “a lineal descendent of the celebrated Dutch merchant, who… first settled Dutch colonies in North America.” More than five hundred of the oldest and most prestigious families in the country came in costume. “The dresses worn on this occasion must have cost, we verily believe, nearly half a million of dollars,” the Herald reported. The ball, the paper observed, marked the beginning of a new era, “as it is the first of its kind.”32
All this—the affectations of the newly rich and the closing of the ranks of the old patrician families—reflected the same phenomenon. For centuries, the social, political, and economic elite had been one and the same; power and influence had gone together with social standing and family prestige. The democratization of politics and the unleashing of the market, however, had destroyed the functional purpose of social standing. One no longer had to be a Jay, a Colden, or a Beekman to dominate business or politics. Money was no respecter of persons, and neither were voters any longer. Though the old patrician families still carried on in wealth and, to a lesser extent, in politics as well, they had no choice but to make room for those who could clamber up, now that family connections ceased to be a requirement for success.
In the early nineteenth century, for the first time, a distinction emerged between the social elite and the elite of true power and wealth. They overlapped, of course, but they also existed in a state of tension. Vanderbilt went to Saratoga Springs each August; he built a palace on Staten Island; he bought teams of expensive horses. These activities reflected his sense of his own importance, and they were necessary, to a certain extent, to allow him to engage in highly practical socializing. But he did not go to the balls at Brevoort Hall, nor did his children marry the Livingstons and Van Rensselaers. Instead, he moved in a special zone established by fashionable society, one that allowed the elite to engage social outsiders such as himself. In 1844, for example, John C. Stevens of the patrician railroad-and-steamboat family organized the New York Yacht Club, which immediately attracted the likes of Philip Hone, Moses Grinnell, Oroondates Mauran, Peter Schemerhorn, William H. Aspinwall, and August Belmont, among others, a mixed group of men from old and new families, united only in wealth and influence. And on July 2, 1846, they welcomed Cornelius Vanderbilt into the club.33
VANDERBILT MIRRORED THE CITY'S own struggle for respectability as its wealth and reputation for enterprise grew. It had long suffered from polluted water and runaway fires, but on June 23, 1842, it opened the Croton Aqueduct, carrying millions of gallons of pure water down from West-chester County. Other moves were less successful. In April 1844, a nativist movement played on fears of Irish Catholic immigrants (and the rampant violence of street gangs) to elect James Harper mayor. He tried to both close businesses and stop the sale of alcohol on Sunday, the only day most workers had free.
“In less than two months,” writes historian Edward K. Spann, “the crusade had broken down in a cloud of protest, recrimination, and frustration.” But 1844 also saw the birth of a professional police force that replaced the amateur constables and night watchmen who had worked under the venerable Joseph Hays.34
In the 1840s, New York rebounded from depression. One writer wryly called it “that town which it is the fashion of the times to call the Commercial Emporium of America—as if there might very well be an emporium of any other character.” As Vanderbilt took the ferry daily between his Staten Island mansion and Manhattan, he saw the buoyant scene that Dickens described in 1842, the “confused heaps of buildings, with here and there a spire or steeple, looking down upon the herd below; and here and there, again, a cloud of lazy smoke; and in the foreground a forest of ships' masts, cheery with flapping sails and waving flags.” Every time the Sylph or the Staten Islander chuffed closer to Whitehall Slip, Vanderbilt heard “the city's hum and buzz, the clinking of capstans, the ringing of bells, the barking of dogs, the clattering of wheels.” Walking up to his office at 34 Broadway, he entered a daily parade of fashion. “Heaven save the ladies, how they dress!” Dickens exclaimed. “What various parasols! what rainbow silks and satins! what pinking of thin stockings, and pinching of thin shoes, and fluttering of ribbons and silk tassels, and display of rich cloaks with gaudy hoods and linings!” Young clerks turned down their collars and grew whiskers under their chins, while Irish laborers marched by with “long-tailed blue coats and bright buttons.”35
As Vanderbilt thrived, the city thrived; as he conquered corporations and lines of travel, the republic looked to conquer as well. Polk defeated Clay and entered the White House in 1845, and territorial expansion became a national mission. “The movements for the annexation of Texas by the government of the United States, and the extraordinary sensation which it has produced,” the New York Herald wrote on July 2, 1845, “is only a strong manifestation of the spirit of the age.… At all hazards Texas will be annexed to this country. California will follow—Oregon will be occupied.”
Signs of trouble appeared, of course. “On all hands, you hear the question, will Mexico make war against the United States?” the Herald observed. “The merchant, the manufacturer, every man at all interested in the affairs of the country is asking.… Will there be war?” But Polk's plans proceeded heedless of such worries. So, too, with Vanderbilt, who rammed through all obstacles. On July 19, 1845, a huge fire destroyed some three hundred buildings along Whitehall and Broad streets, “occupied principally by importing and other merchants,” the press reported. The blaze burned down Vanderbilt's office, wiping out such records as the stock ledgers of the Elizabethport Ferry Company. He steamed ahead regardless, opening a new office at 8 Battery Place and re-creating the lost books, as he built a vast new ferry dock on Staten Island.36
Even before the fire, Vanderbilt decided to make a declaration of his rising status by moving into the heart of the great city. He purchased two adjacent lots that stretched the width of the block between Washington Place and Fourth Street, between Mercer and Greene streets east of Washington Square Park, for $9,500. Just a short distance away from the site where New York's social elite were building Grace Church, not far from the foot of Fifth Avenue, this was the heart of the most fashionable district. Typically, Vanderbilt dictated to mason Benjamin F. Camp every detail of the mansion to be built on the site. He called for stables and a carriage house in the back, facing Fourth Street; a paved courtyard; and a four-story double-wide house of “red brick, with brown-stone trimmings,” as the New York Times later described it, sixty-five feet deep and forty feet wide, with an entrance at 10 Washington Place. Camp went to work in May 1845. Rumors flew around the “splendid house,” as one newspaper called it, being built for “the well-known steamboat proprietor.” One account put the cost at an astronomical $180,000. Three decades later, the Times reported a figure of $55,000, noting, “It is reckoned to be one of the strongest and best constructed buildings in the City.”37
On Staten Island, the house of Vanderbilt echoed with conspiratorial whispers and angry shouts. In April 1844, Vanderbilt's hard-nosed mother, Phebe, foreclosed on a mortgage she had taken for a loan to her son-in-law, Charles Simonson (one of the builders of the Lexington). Charles had died a year earlier, so the property she seized belonged to her own widowed daughter. On May 10, Vanderbilt bailed out his brother Jacob and cousin John, who had been arrested for missing mandatory payments to the disabled sailors' fund. And Vanderbilt's daughters rallied around his son Cornelius Jeremiah, who aroused his wrath and scorn. Shortly before the move to Staten Island, the boy had suffered an epileptic seizure; though the condition had not reappeared, he lingered at home, thin and aimless, in the shadow of his robust patriarch. “My treatment by my father was rather rough,” he dryly recalled.
Vanderbilt was equally hard on Billy. He spoke to his elder son daily, often with “offensive” language, as Daniel Allen recalled. “The substance of the Commodore's remarks was that William was deficient in brains.” Afterward, Billy would stop at Allen's home to complain of his abuse by “the old man.”38
In 1846, Vanderbilt's children began to suspect that he had designs on the governess, a young woman who cared for the youngest siblings. He often took her on carriage rides as his offspring whispered about the “impropriety” of the relationship. Then, in June, the “old man” pulled Allen aside and suggested that he and Ethelinda take his wife on a trip to Canada. “She was at the change of life,” Allen remembered, “and had been afflicted with the ailments incidental to that period for about a year, although she was naturally a woman of strong mind and body.” She must have had a very strong body indeed, to have endured an unbroken string of pregnancies up to the start of menopause. Allen agreed to the proposal. Mrs. Vanderbilt “was more excitable than usual,” he thought. “The Commodore told me that her physician advised a change of scene.”39
With his wife away, Vanderbilt undertook the construction of the largest steamship ever built in the United States: the Atlantic, a 321-foot monster sidewheeler commissioned by the Norwich Railroad. Perhaps the most telling aspect of the vessel was not its size, but its aristocratic luxury. “On ascending the stairs, and reaching the upper saloon, one is almost bewildered with the variety of magnificent adornments which dazzle the eye,” the New York Herald reported. Elegant staterooms, “furnished like the chambers of European hotels,” surrounded the saloon, which featured “soft carpets, original settees, and courting couches… magnificent mirrors and rich curtains.” On the distant Rio Grande, war with Mexico began—“the war for the extension of slavery,” as the Tribune denounced it—but Vanderbilt abstained from politics, concerning himself with the Stonington, his liners, and his governess.40
After six weeks, Sophia returned and the governess left, to Vanderbilt's distress. Allen told him that the vacation had not improved Sophia's disposition. “During that journey she exhibited great excitability; her nervous system was apparently much shattered.” It is impossible to specify the cause of her anguish, but perhaps her husband's wealth did not compensate for the stress he strung like cobwebs across every open space in their household. With the mansion at 10 Washington Place nearly complete, Vanderbilt mused openly about sending Sophia to an insane asylum.
Perhaps he was simply unable to cope with her distracted state. Or perhaps he wished to make room for the return of the young governess, a prospect he discussed as the move to Manhattan approached. Billy told Allen “that the ‘old man’ had induced some of his daughters to write to the governness and ask her to come back there.”
Asked his daughters to write her? The maneuver seems strikingly uncharacteristic of an overweening titan who took what he wanted. Indeed, it is a rare glimpse of the vulnerability within the warrior. Though he blasted his eldest son—who only tried to please him—as a weakling and a “sucker,” he found himself unable to express his tenderness and need for the young woman who cared for hi
s children. From his earliest days, navigating the subtleties of the inner life escaped him, even if he could not escape its swirling emotions and compulsions. What attracted him to the governess? Was it sexual desire, a longing for youth, mere affection for a sweet girl his children loved? The unknowable answer may be less revealing than his response to her loss. He could not bring himself to demand her return, nor could he approach her directly and simply ask, so he delegated the emotional burden he found so bewildering.
Allen and Billy met to discuss the worsening family situation. They spoke as childhood friends and, in a way, as rival siblings. Allen cultivated a dignified air of efficiency and moral uprightness. He managed the details of Vanderbilt's businesses and served as his agent within Drew's brokerage firm. The blood son Billy, on the other hand, had been exiled from Wall Street to a farm. Slumping, sometimes whining, he had the disposition of someone accustomed to being beaten down. There is little sign that Billy resented Allen, but he had learned to be guarded in his dealings with his overbearing father.
“The old man was bound to have his way,” Allen remembered him saying, “and it was useless to oppose him. He (William) had made up his mind not to do so, as he thought his own interests were too much at stake.” Allen pointed out how angry Billy's sisters were. They had kept their mouths shut about their mother's forced vacation, but “her removal from home” would be too much. “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,” Allen recalled. He told Billy that Ethelinda had denounced, directly to Vanderbilt's face, the plan to send her mother away and bring back the governess. Even Corneil, the younger brother, had spoken out “manfully.”
Billy shook his head. He couldn't “justify the act,” he told Allen. “He had a great deal of sympathy for his mother.” And yet, “opposition would only provoke the old man's enmity.… The ‘old man’ would be ‘down on him’ forever and had at one time threatened to break up his family and go to Europe if his wishes were opposed.” It was better to approach the problem indirectly, Billy argued. Take the departed governess, for example. “If she don't come back I'll find some woman to take her place,” he said. “The old man is bound to fall under some woman's influence, and I'll have that influence.”