The First Tycoon

by T. J. Stiles

  But he was still a boy. Though it is reasonable to believe that he knew the marketplace better than the typical child, it is just as reasonable to believe that he reveled in his physicality—that he was moved by a “pride in action for action's sake” that a later friend attributed to his youth. That trait drew him to New York's waterfront, with all its furious activity: the strutting captains and mates; the insolent pilots, idling as they waited to take vessels back out to the ocean; and the packs of free-living sailors—many of them black—pushing into saloons or staggering drunkenly under the bowsprits that thrust like rafters over South Street. These were men whose lives were all action.33 Cornele learned this scene well as he entered his teenage years, for he took on more and more responsibility for his father's periauger. As he sailed past fat merchantmen or sleek navy frigates, as he talked with ships' officers along South Street, he began to dream of possibilities beyond those on Staten Island.

  At the end of 1807, the possibilities grew smaller. The city's frenzied trade abruptly halted when Congress passed the Embargo Act, at President Jefferson's urging, in a vain attempt to force Britain to lift restrictions on American ships and cease the impressment of American sailors amid its long war with France. The act prohibited the nation's vessels from sailing for foreign ports. “Not a box, bale, cask, barrel, or package was to be seen upon the wharfs,” John Lambert observed. “The few solitary merchants, clerks, porters, and labourers that were to be seen were walking about with their hands in their pockets.”34 In March 1809, when Congress finally repealed the act, joy swept New York, and ships were again readied for distant ports.

  After James Madison assumed the presidency in 1809, Congress continued to tinker with the idea of using trade to influence Britain and France—especially Britain, so detested by Madison and most Republicans. The Royal Navy, meanwhile, swept down on American ships with rising ferocity, seizing vessels and sailors under the notorious Orders in Council, which required neutral vessels to abide by Britain's blockade of Napoleon's empire. A crew could make enormous profits by running a ship to continental European ports, but at a tremendous risk that grew almost by the day.

  In that tense and warlike world, young Cornele made a momentous decision. Early in 1810, after bringing passengers and goods to the city, he strode down South Street to see a captain he knew. The captain's ship was a fast-sailing merchantman, about to make the dangerous run to France with a cargo of silks—a luxury that would sell for a high price in the blockaded ports of Napoleon's Europe. Cornele was just fifteen, but he was tall and strong and an able sailor; when he applied for a place, the captain agreed to take him on as a member of the crew, with a regular share of the fortune they would gain. The act marked an abrupt end to Cornele's already tenuous childhood. Once he stepped onto that ship, he would depart the gritty marketplace and enter into a life of action for action's sake. He sailed the boat home that night, determined to tell his parents that he would be leaving Staten Island for good.35

  “IT IS AS IF WE ALL CARRY in our makeup the effects of accidents that have befallen our ancestors,” writes V. S. Naipaul, “as if we are in many ways programmed before we are born, our lives half outlined for us.”36 For a farm-born fifteen-year-old in 1810, it was nearly impossible to shrug off the weight of time. Cornele had acted forcefully when he signed on to that blockade runner, yet he still faced a formidable obstacle: his mother. She “found out,” he later said, “and begged him so earnestly not to go.”

  There were dangers enough to startle her, from storms and disease to the threat of impressment into the British navy. More to the point, Phebe and her husband relied heavily on their oldest son as she continued to bear children. Cornele, who would become legendary for his ruthlessness, listened to his mother's pleading and was moved. He reluctantly told his father, he later recalled, “If he could get him honorably released from his engagement he would remain.” The senior Cornelius promptly went to see the captain and settled the matter. It was a fortunate decision. Cornele later learned that the British captured the ship in the English Channel on that very voyage.37

  The weight of the past pushed him back onto Staten Island, but it also subtly bent this would-be turning point in another direction. Cornele would return to the periauger as his own commander. But here, as so often in his childhood, the truth has been polished. According to an oft-repeated account, he learned of a periauger for sale at Port Richmond and agreed to purchase it for $100. Phebe would loan the boy the money if he cleared, plowed, and sowed an eight-acre lot that belonged to the family, a plot “so hard, rough, and stony,” according to nineteenth-century biographer W. A. Croffut, “that it had never been ploughed.” And he had to do it by his sixteenth birthday.

  They agreed to the terms on May 1, so he had little time to spare. He gathered his friends and promised them a summer on the water in his boat, filled with fishing, sailing, and excursions to the city which induced them to help him finish the job in the allotted time. His mother inspected the plot, then went to her clock and drew out the hundred dollars. Her son hurried down to Port Richmond, silver jingling in his pocket, knowing that he would not use the boat for fun, as he had told his friends, but for profit.38

  Here again we have a tale from Vanderbilt's early life offered to us by his later admirers as a record of his virtues, a parable of the enterprising American spirit. But the earliest published account of his life, in an 1853 issue of Scientific American, puts the same events in another light. “He found himself with a growing desire to make his livelihood by following the sea,” the story ran. “He therefore left the farm, and commenced running a small sail boat between Staten Island and New York, which was owned by his father.”39 This simpler version makes more sense than the legend. Cornele's parents told him that he could run his own boat, but it would belong to them. They grudgingly allowed him to keep half of what he earned after dark.

  It would not be wise, then, to exaggerate Cornele's sixteen-year-old sophistication. But both versions of the story reveal something important: at the very beginning of his working life, he sought to be his own master. Through all of his later achievements, Vanderbilt recalled, “I didn't feel as much real satisfaction… as I did on that bright May morning sixty years before when I stepped into my own periauger, hoisted my own sail, and put my hand on my own tiller.” He pulled away from the dock and immediately heard a sickening crack. The boat had collided with a large rock under the surface. He barely had time to run the boat ashore before it foundered. He soon repaired the damage.40

  Eighteen cents per passenger, or a quarter per round trip: that, tradition has it, was the fare Cornele charged between Staten Island and New York. More likely it was a shilling each way (twelve and a half cents), the customary ferry charge in New York Harbor. At that price, in a boat that seated just twenty people, with only half of the nighttime fares going into his own pocket, revenue piled up slowly. Yet in those daily handfuls of silver shillings he discovered his hunger for money, an ache that would mingle with his pride and longing for control to shape his life at every turn.

  Despite his youth, there was nothing childish about the trade he had entered. Cornele faced bare-knuckled competition—literally bare-knuckled. On the harbor's waterfront, he would find few boundaries to define a fair fight; and if no other means of beating a rival would do, then a beating it would be. Ten years earlier, Rochefoucauld-Liancourt had observed that absolutely everyone in America called himself a gentleman—“except,” he had added, “the laborer in ports, and the common sailor.”41

  Cornele seemed suited to the battle. As he grew to his adult height of around six feet, he stood far taller than the average man (sixteen-year-olds then averaged perhaps five feet six, and full-grown adults about five feet eight). Above his strong chin and prow-like nose, under his high forehead, his eyes acquired a peculiar sailor's squint, the outer edges sloping down to dim the sun reflected on the water. His sandy hair swarmed on his head, and he began to cultivate thick sideburns that crawled down t
o his jawline.

  “There are many still living who remember ‘Corneil the boatman,’” declared Harper's Weekly in 1859, “how skillful he was in managing his craft; how daring in encountering the roughest weather; how perfectly reliable in every respect.” Such references to common knowledge hint that the mirage of anecdotes was not merely an illusion. It would be said that he approached his work with the eye of a strategist. Rather than waiting for a full load before sailing, as most boatmen did, he ran on a schedule—operating a “packet” ferry, to use the technical term. “His life was regulated by self-imposed rules,” claimed one admirer in 1865, “and with a fixedness of purpose as invariable as the sun in its circuit. Among other things he determined to spend less every week than he earned.” Even allowing for exaggeration, it seems clear that the boy boatman did credit to his early education in the ways of business.42

  Legend has it that he developed a reputation for an especially Dutch temper as he cursed at passengers who got in his way. One morning, the story goes, he was enraged to see his main rival, from the neighboring Van Duzer family, pull slowly ahead on the run to New York, as Cornele sat becalmed in shallow Buttermilk Channel between Governors Island and Brooklyn. Cornele ran out his long setting pole, pressed the end to his chest, and leaned into it to force the craft ahead, again and again. By the time he reached New York—ahead of his rival—the wooden pole had torn through to his breastbone, leaving a permanent scar.

  Between and after his scheduled ferry runs, Cornele looked for whatever work he could get, even sleeping in his boat at Whitehall Slip in order to be on hand when a job came up. When autumn arrived and blinding sheets of sleet and snow crashed across the harbor, many nervous merchants who hurried from Pearl Street countinghouses to the waterfront trusted the boy to deliver messages to their vessels out in the bay.

  But the image of young Vanderbilt as a cursing, isolated water rat cannot be entirely accurate. If he had learned anything from his parents, it was that business was a matter of relationships. Though he developed callused hands from hauling the spun-hemp sheets and twisting the wooden tiller, the work also brought him friendships. As he accumulated his modest portion of the periauger's earnings over the course of 1810, 1811, and 1812, he purchased shares in other boats, whose profits he did not share with his parents. This small act says as much about the boy as any anecdote. He had become an investor—or, to put it another way, a capitalist.43

  WAR WAS COMING—so went the talk along South Street. As Britain's war with Napoleon moved toward a climax, the pace of impressments of American sailors accelerated, and the Royal Navy's seizures of American ships under the Orders in Council seemed to take on added brutality In 1811, the USS President traded broadsides with the Royal Navy's Little Belt, and workmen completed a series of fortifications around New York Harbor.44 In February 1812, President Madison reimposed the ban on imports from Britain. On June 18, Congress declared war.

  For a time the war seemed to go well. America's oversize frigates (carrying forty-four guns to Britain's standard thirty-eight) won a series of small but dramatic victories against the fabled Royal Navy. On January 1, 1813, the triumphant United States sailed into New York Harbor with the captured Macedonian, to the cheers of immense crowds. Cornele may even have found additional work in the first two years of the war. Britain imposed a blockade on American ports, and masters of coastal merchant craft feared capture if they sailed along the New Jersey coast. Instead, cargoes shipped between New York and points south passed along Cornele's accustomed route between Manhattan and Staten Island, then down the Arthur Kill and Kill Van Kull, where the British fleet did not penetrate. (Goods passed overland across New Jersey and along the protected waters of the Delaware River.) In November 1813 alone, some 1,500 wagons plied the route, offering abundant work for New York's boatmen.

  Generally speaking, however, 1813 brought setbacks both military and commercial. In May, the Royal Navy tightened the blockade, and even landed a raiding party at Sandy Hook. The U.S. Army suffered reversals all along the frontier with Britain's colony of Canada. Some rare good fortune—the grand victory over the British fleet on Lake Erie on September 10—sparked a citywide outburst of joy. A celebration on October 4 saw candles in every window, a band playing on the balcony of city hall, and gunboats in the harbor swinging colored lanterns and firing rockets into the night sky.45

  During this time Cornele was said to be unstintingly courageous, unfailingly skillful, and unflinchingly competitive. According to one of the flattering tales, he was hired to transport troops from Fort Richmond to Manhattan. A competitor's boat pulled alongside, and an army officer stepped out into Cornele's hull. The officer ordered all of the troops into the other boat “for inspection.” Cornele, believing it to be a trick to steal his business, refused to let them go. Enraged, the officer began to draw his sword. The boy smashed his knuckles into the officer's face, chucked his limp body into the other boat, and continued on his way.

  This story depicts a lad who was cunning and combative—traits later seen by all the world—and so it was readily believed when it circulated decades later. Other tales are more questionable. One describes the Royal Navy's attempt to sail past the outer fortifications of the harbor in the fall of 1813. A raging storm swept down on the bay, but Fort Richmond's commander felt it was urgent to notify the headquarters in New York of a skirmish that had taken place. Knowing Cornele's reputation, he took a few men to see him. Can a boat get through this storm? he asked. “Yes,” the young man replied, “if properly handled,” adding, “I shall have to carry them underwater part of the way.” He made it through.46

  Less than five years later the press would testify to Cornele's skill and courage when sailing into another storm, but the tale does not quite ring true. For one thing, the British navy did not attack New York in 1813. For another, Cornele was still a boy in a harbor full of skilled sailors—sailing a boat that was legally his father's property—and the idea that his reputation outshone all others' is hard to believe. If anything, he was then struggling to emerge from his father's shadow, to start to build a reputation.

  By 1813, he took the steps that would finally establish him as a boatman in his own right. First, he ordered his own periauger, to be built in New Jersey, using the money he had so painstakingly saved. On Sundays, he often sailed up the Passaic River to the boatyard to examine the construction with the girl he was courting, Sophia Johnson. She was his pride, the realization of his hopes—the boat, that is; the girl was another matter. A nineteenth-century writer described this quiet woman as “lovely and industrious,” a hint at her beginnings as a common servant. For young Cornele, neither her loveliness nor her industry was so important as her ring finger, for marriage was the essential second step in his plan to go out on his own.

  He had not gone far in searching for a bride. Sophia was his cousin. The daughter of his father's oldest sister, Eleanor, she “was more typically Vanderbilt than Cornele himself,” according to a later biographer. She, too, belonged to a large family and had little education. She had grown up nearby in Port Richmond, and Cornele had known her from early childhood; given his working habits, one must wonder if he had ever had the chance to meet anyone else. When he spoke of marrying Sophia, however, his mother reportedly objected, primarily because she would no longer be able to demand a share of the boy's earnings if he married.

  To Cornele, that was much the point. How deeply he loved Sophia can never be known; how much he needed her, financially speaking, could not be more clear. On December 19, 1813, the couple married, then retired to the ferry dock to a small house that Vanderbilt had rented. There they began a life of suppressed turmoil and muffled intimacy. Within a year Sophia gave birth to the first of many babies to come, and one of her sisters moved into the household to help during the weeks that followed. In these early days, Vanderbilt relied heavily on Sophia's capacity for hard work and her tolerance for living lean; but legend has it that he often turned to his shrewd mother to discuss
his plans, leaving his wife to wonder what he was thinking. He even insisted to Sophia that they name their first child Phebe.47

  IN 1814, THE UNITED STATES stood on the brink of losing the war. On April 6, Napoleon abdicated the imperial throne of France, allowing Britain to reinforce its armies in North America. Of particular concern for New York was a possible thrust down the Hudson from Canada, an attack that would avoid the heavy fortifications on the harbor. On July 15, Brigadier General Joseph Swift began construction of a line across upper Manhattan and the western end of Long Island. On August 26, terrified New Yorkers snatched up copies of a special edition of the Evening Post, announcing that Washington had been captured and sacked by a British force. “Your capital is taken!” the press declared. “In six days the same enemy may be at the Hook!… Arise from your slumbers!” Thousands of residents took up shovels to dig trenches as 23,000 militiamen reported for duty48

  Military disaster meant economic windfall for the strapping twenty-year-old Vanderbilt. One of the canonical stories of his early life describes a moment of great excitement among the harbor's boatmen, as the military headquarters offered a contract to carry supplies to the forts and construction sites. Vanderbilt, at his father's urging, put in a bid at a price that he considered fair, but was far from the lowest. He was startled when he learned he had won. “Don't you know why we have given the contract to you?” the officer reportedly asked. “It is because we want this business done, and we know you'll do it.” No evidence has ever surfaced to support the tale, but, if true, it hints at the moment when a subtle transition began, when he started to acquire a reputation in this slippery, low-caste society.49

  That year Vanderbilt took his wife from their rented house in Staten Island to the city of New York, settling into rooms at 93 Broad Street. Their new home spoke eloquently of the young man's social standing: it was an artisans' boardinghouse, where there also lived a carpenter and a gunsmith, along with their wives and children. Broad Street boasted some countinghouses, but it was also home to grocers, drapers, and cabinetmakers, along with other boatmen—craftsmen and shopkeepers all.50