The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
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This defense of the Commodore sounds more logical to the mind-set of later centuries, but it, too, drew upon an earlier generation's political rhetoric—that of Jacksonian Democrats. Harpers argued that he had championed the fight against the aristocratic elite, against those artificial monsters the Whigs loved so much: “powerful corporations, who enjoyed a monopoly of the traffic, and whose wealth and obvious soullessness were a terror to steamboat men.” It praised Vanderbilt, on the other hand, specifically as an individual, in battle against such devils. “We have heard it said that no man in this country gives employment directly or indirectly to so many persons,” the Herald wrote. “He began life by working to live, he now lives to work.”103
The truth is that neither Andrew Jackson nor Daniel Webster, nor anyone else who had helped to create the Democratic and Whig parties, had imagined a man like Vanderbilt. Few previously had accumulated so much wealth, in either absolute or relative terms; and there was probably no one who had ever possessed such sway over public affairs—over the survival of a railroad, or a government, or over the great corridor to California. Nor did he exist in some kind of polar opposition with corporations and monopolies. By 1859, he operated almost entirely through corporations; he proved himself an expert at using the stock market to concentrate capital or avenge himself on his enemies, and emerged as a master of corporate structure. He saw the corporation as just another type of business organization. For many old Whigs and Democrats, on the other hand, the corporation remained a political animal. Whigs had approved of it as a means of harnessing private enterprise for the public good; since corporations remained few in number, they may not have imagined that they one day would become commonplace. On the other side, Democrats who praised Vanderbilt's competition failed to grasp that he was using the corporate form to create enterprises on an unprecedented scale, gaining control over vast channels of commerce. He represented a new creature on the American scene, and political language and logic had not yet come to terms with him.
Vanderbilt was clearly an unsurpassed competitor, and the good he thereby wrought was well described by Harper's Weekly. He was a fighter by nature, a cunning and proud warrior. He always felt that he could take care of himself, under any circumstances. He seems to have believed the Jacksonian rhetoric he so often repeated, a creed of laissez-faire individualism, a vision of a world in which any man might get ahead by his natural gifts rather than government favors. And yet, in pursuing his private interests wherever they took him, he felt no obligation to act in the public interest; when competition had served its purpose, he freely sold out or constructed new monopolies. As he operated on a vast new scale, he brought to a head the contradiction inherent in the private ownership of public works—a paradox that would grow starker when he moved from steamships into railroads in the climactic phase of his life.
Raymond's attack on Vanderbilt, for all its incoherence, spoke to a budding sense that this increasing concentration of wealth and power in the hands of one man posed a challenge to democratic, egalitarian society. Unions could not restrain Vanderbilt from slashing wages and firing strikers; no federal or state laws prohibited his inside trading on Wall Street; few taxes touched his wealth; no regulatory agencies examined his vast affairs or rendered them transparent. It is true that Vanderbilt created tremendous wealth in this environment; it is also true that the limited government deliberately crafted by the Jacksonians—staffed by political appointees, without any kind of professional civil service—lacked the means to check any abuse of his power. And his power would grow dramatically in the next decade and a half. But before Vanderbilt died, a new political matrix would begin to emerge.104
So much for the meaning; but there remains the man himself. In December 1859, a fierce Atlantic storm smashed the Ariel, threatening it with destruction. Its captain, a man named Ludlow, went out on deck to direct the construction of a drag, or emergency sea anchor, to save the ship. “A tremendous sea broke upon her forward deck,” the Times reported. Ten feet of water swept over Ludlow, and “the heavy drag, composed of plank and timbers, struck him on the side.” He lived long enough to gasp, “Tell the Commodore I died at the post of duty.”105
Those words deserve to be the last about the Commodore as commodore. They call to mind Tolstoy's observation in The Sebastopol Sketches, a soldier's view of the Crimean War. Discipline and obedience, he wrote, ultimately depend upon “the subordinate's recognition that those placed in authority over him are possessed of a higher degree of experience, military prowess, or—not to beat around the bush—moral development.”106 But a superior who lacks real ability—or character—draws only scorn. In a quasi-military (or, more properly, quasi-naval) culture such as that of the merchant marine, a commander need not be sweet-tempered to be admired; rather, he had to be skilled, knowledgeable, fair, and preferably tough.
Beyond all analysis of Vanderbilt's historical role, it is worth remembering that men willingly followed this difficult, profane titan, even at the risk of their own lives. It was not because he was generous or kind, but because he was a man of genuine prowess. No one, they knew, understood steamships better; no one, they knew, was more willing to face personal danger; no one, they knew, was truer to his word. Vanderbilt was many things, not all of them admirable, but he was never a phony. Hated, revered, resented, he always commanded respect, even from his enemies.
* A Basque name, Yrisarri is also spelled with an initial I in Castillian Spanish. I am following the most common contemporary spelling, which followed the Basque custom.
Chapter Thirteen
WAR
They came to tell his secrets. Starting at the appointed hour of two o'clock in the afternoon on November 12, 1877, dozens of witnesses took the stand, one by one, week after week, in that courtroom in lower Manhattan. They included friends and relatives of the deceased Commodore, of course, as well as businessmen and acquaintances. But many of the men and women who took the stand were mediums, magnetic healers, and outright confidence artists. They told tales of séances, outbursts, and high emotion—and attorney Scott Lord tried to introduce even more, as he sought to undermine the last will and testament of Cornelius Vanderbilt. It was a burlesque parade of the marginal and untrustworthy (including one woman who had shot a druggist in Baltimore),1 whose stories left a nearly ineffaceable imprint on Vanderbilt's image.
Most of the witnesses spoke of the Commodore's last years—years of triumph and of loss, years when he outlived so many of his contemporaries, years when he accumulated his greatest achievements. The testimony that best illuminated his final decade and a half, though, came on the first two days of the trial; and it was spoken not by a medium or mesmerist, but by Daniel B. Allen. He had managed the Commodore's businesses from the 1830s onward, tending to bills, organizing corporations, and relaying messages to presidents in Nicaragua and the White House. He was elderly now, and dignified. “A gentleman with silvery white hair and iron gray moustache,” the New York Times described him; “a man who would be noticeable in any assemblage.”2
As he looked out from the witness box at the high, inlaid ceiling, the fluted columns, the bearded faces of the attorneys, he named two years that defined the ultimate phase of Vanderbilt's life: 1864 and 1873. They marked the end of Allen's ties to the Commodore—first of their business, then of their personal relationship. Those two years also defined Vanderbilt's historical role and overarching significance.
The first was a year of transformation, the second of crisis. In 1864, at the age of seventy, Vanderbilt abandoned his lifelong career in shipping as he amassed a railroad realm. Nine years later, he faced the Panic of 1873, an economic cataclysm that forced him to call up all his aged strength and ingenuity to protect what he had built. How he handled these two moments defined his legacy. In the end, he would not only build an empire, he would found a dynasty And his family would never be whole again.
OUTSIDE, THE MASSES WERE MARCHING. Inside, the Commodore mourned.
On the evening
of November 2, 1860, a procession of young men advanced on Union Square. They carried torches, waved lanterns, and fired rockets and Roman candles into the night sky. They were Wide Awakes, members of Republican Party clubs that marched in towns across the North as the presidential election approached. As the parade approached the New York Hotel on Broadway, Southern guests gathered on the sidewalk to hiss and make catcalls; across the street, cheers echoed from the Lincoln campaign headquarters. “The din was deafening,” an observer remarked.3
That single scene captured the times: a panorama of mobilization and mutual hostility lit by fire. Everyone remarked on the gathering crisis, except when it seemed to require no comment at all. The Republicans had nominated the Illinois railroad lawyer Abraham Lincoln on a platform of firm opposition to any spread of slavery. The Democrats had splintered. The round-faced and wide-eyed Horace F. Clark stood by his friend, Senator Stephen A. Douglas, who infuriated Southern “fire-eaters” with his insistence on the right of settlers in Kansas to reject slavery; Douglas was nominated by a largely Northern fragment of the Democratic Party. Border-state Whigs and moderate Democrats had created the pro-slavery-yet-Unionist Constitutional Union Party running John Bell for president. The fire-eaters demanded the right to carry slaves into any federal territory; they nominated John C. Breckinridge, who ran on less a platform than an ultimatum. His supporters warned that the South would secede if Lincoln won; as Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia declared, they would “never permit this Federal government to pass into the traitorous hands of the Black Republican party.” But Northern resolve arose in turn, as seen by the torch-waving Wide Awakes.4
Away from conventions and parades, inside the four-story brick mansion with brownstone trim at 10 Washington Place, Cornelius Vanderbilt was up to date about the irrepressible conflict. The crisis posed serious questions for the future of his shipping lines between New York and New Orleans, Havana, and Aspinwall. But never far from the front of his mind was a sense of mourning, a sense of loss. It had been six years—nearly seven—since his mother had died on January 22, 1854.5 Even for the steely Commodore, the pain endured.
“That irreparable change a death makes in the course of our daily thoughts can be felt in a vague and poignant discomfort of mind,” Joseph Conrad writes.6 This modest observation aptly describes Vanderbilt's response to the passing of the eighty-seven-year-old Phebe. Unquestionably he always had revered her, as shown by the rockets he fired in tribute from the North Star in 1853. But after her death a vague and poignant discomfort compounded in his mind like interest on a debt, piling up year after year, until his love publicly manifested itself as it rarely had during her lifetime. Writers who interviewed him began to note his adoration of the flinty old woman who had educated him in the ways of the market. Over a meal in the dining room at 10 Washington Place, Vanderbilt would tell of how, back around 1820, he had invited his mother aboard the first steamboat he had built and owned entirely on his own. “I escorted her aboard and showed her the gay decks and the engine, and the galley,” he would recall. “I was mighty proud of her, I tell you!” (Meaning the boat, not his mother.) Then he took her down to the saloon for a celebratory banquet. “Cornele,” she snapped, “where the devil did you git this dinner?” Even amid the grandeur of his very own steamboat, the food had struck her as an extravagant waste of money7
Conrad also notes, “Action is consolatory.… Only in the conduct of our action can we find a sense of mastery over the Fates.”8 Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the long-bereaved Vanderbilt—with all his battles seemingly won, with virtual ownership of the America's sea lanes to Panama and Europe—should undertake a project that took him back to Staten Island. Both his brother Jacob and his son William had taken an interest in the thirteen-mile Staten Island Railroad, in which Billy served as treasurer. “They had very bad accommodations to get to it,” Vanderbilt testified in 1861. “I said I would build a ferry.… It was a kind of hobby of mine.”
A hobby to the Commodore, of course, would have been a major investment to most other men. On June 1, 1860, he began construction at the Simonson shipyard of two new boats to connect with the railroad: the Clifton and the Westfield, costing roughly $90,000 apiece. By the end of the year he had them running from Whitehall Slip to a new railhead at Vanderbilt's Landing; soon he added a third boat, the Southfield. “They cost me an immense sight of money,” Vanderbilt noted. “They run along and did very well; but I never made any money out of them.… The boats I built as a matter of pride.”9
It was an inward turn of mind, this hobby of Vanderbilt's, for a man of transoceanic, transcontinental enterprises. It was, perhaps, the turn of a sixty-six-year-old mind increasingly attuned to family and home, to the places of birth and death. But the crisis enveloping the world around him would penetrate even here.
ON NOVEMBER 7, 1860, the New York Herald announced, “END OF THE GREAT NATIONAL CONTEST.” Abraham Lincoln was elected by a plurality of the popular vote, though without a single ballot from the South in the electoral college. Of course, the great national contest had only begun. Immediately the slave states began to convene special conventions to consider the question of departing from the Union. South Carolina voted to secede on December 20, followed by Mississippi on January 9, 1861, followed in rapid succession by Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. On February 4, delegates gathered for a constitutional convention at Montgomery, Alabama, in order to form the Confederate States of America.10
Lincoln would not take the oath of office until March 4. In the meantime, attempts to hold the Union together centered in the outgoing Congress and, to a considerable extent, in the ranks of the great merchants of New York. On both counts Vanderbilt found the storm swirling around him. Horace F. Clark (who had not stood for reelection) argued for a constitutional amendment to protect slavery, “to bribe the slaveholders to remain” in the Union, as the Chicago Tribune scornfully remarked.11 On January 7, 1861, Mayor Fernando Wood (who had returned to office after organizing Mozart Hall as a rival organization to Tammany) proposed that, if the South seceded, New York should too, and stand as a free city. No one of note supported him, but the very idea demonstrated how closely the city's economy was tied to the cotton trade, and why so many of its merchants and financiers fought for a compromise. In December, a group led by August Belmont, William Astor, William Aspinwall, Moses Grinnell, Hamilton Fish, and Richard Blatchford had gone to Washington to plead for appeasement. At the end of January, Aspinwall led another elite group to the capital, bearing a petition with thousands of merchants' signatures, asking that the South be placated. “We fear,” Mayor Wood admitted, “that if the Union dies, the present supremacy of New York may perish with it.”12
The division of the republic proceeded inexorably; but the question of whether it would result in war centered on Fort Sumter, a federal post on an island in Charleston Harbor. The South Carolinians wanted it. Soon after the new year, the aged General in Chief Winfield Scott dispatched men and supplies from New York to reinforce the slender garrison. The ship he chartered for the job was Vanderbilt's old Star of the West. On January 9, the rebels opened fire on the steamer and drove it out of the harbor. On March 4, Lincoln delivered his inaugural address, appealing to the “mystic chords of memory stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone.” The next day he learned that Fort Sumter had barely six weeks before its besieged men would run out of supplies.
General Scott and many in the cabinet argued that Lincoln should withdraw the garrison. Instead, the president decided to resupply the fort, but without blasting his way into Charleston. So far, no shots had been fired at Sumter; some border states still wavered between Union and secession. Lincoln wanted to force the Confederates to fight for the fort, but to place the onus of starting hostilities squarely on them.13
On April 5, New Yorkers observed an extraordinary bustle in the army and navy facilities around the harbor as the resupply expedition set sail. A wee
k later, newsboys poured into the evening streets, crying, “Extra—a Herald! Got the bombardment of Fort Sumter!” Walt Whitman, George Templeton Strong, and countless others anxiously read the freshly printed sheets in the glare of corner gaslights. War had begun.14
War deserves its reputation as the most serious event in national life. It is a grimly wasteful enterprise: the expenditure of resources on materiel that can only destroy, not create, wealth; the termination of lives, usually of young men, at the moment of their greatest energy and potential; the gradual, bitter realization that, as Wellington famously declared, the only thing worse than a battle won is a battle lost. But the Civil War was more extraordinary than most, and more horrible. It brought to a head decades of animosity that had grown into suspicion and flowered into paranoia. Perhaps most important, it was a war for national survival. For the people of the North, the republic they loved had been torn in two. When Virginia joined the Confederacy (along with North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas), the enemy stood across a river from Washington, D.C. Seemingly as one, Northerners decided this could not stand.
On April 15, the day after Fort Sumter was forced to surrender, Lincoln called 75,000 state militiamen into national service to suppress the rebellion. It soon became clear that he would get many more. In New York, once the scene of so much sentiment for compromise, a patriotic frenzy seized the people. Recruiting offices opened, tents popped up at the Battery, rough wooden barracks rose in Central and City Hall parks. “The city seems to have gone suddenly wild and crazy,” one man wrote. On April 20, platoons of recruits practiced marching up and down Broadway to the cheers of onlookers, under flags that hung from almost every building. Some 250,000 citizens packed Union Square for a rally. On Staten Island, Jacob and William Vanderbilt helped organize a mass Union meeting where Horace Clark spoke.15