The First Tycoon

by T. J. Stiles

  Indeed, there must have been some, as the couple had still more children. In 1830, Sophia returned to Staten Island, pregnant, to lie in with her family, and gave birth to Cornelius Jeremiah. For Vanderbilt, the role of patriarch was hardly at odds with that of the clever businessman. There was, perhaps, no better way to exert control in a city of strangers, a city of tricksters, than through friends and family. As Vanderbilt cast his eyes across the dinner table, he saw more than a pious companion and various relatives—he saw assets.43

  WAS THERE EVER A PRESIDENT like Andrew Jackson? This lean and predatory Tennessean, with his bristling mane of gray hair, resembled nothing so much as a hungry wolf, a creature of ferocious passion and territorial instincts, whether defending his inner landscape of honor or the physical boundaries of the United States. The only chief executive to have killed a man in a duel, this former general had defeated the British at New Orleans in 1815, crushed Indian tribes, and essentially conquered Florida. His presidency saw the last conflict with Native Americans in the Old Northwest (the Black Hawk War in 1832) and the forced removal of five Indian nations on the infamous Trail of Tears. A cloud of danger hung about the age of Jackson.

  There was also a scent of triumph. When the general took the oath of office in 1829, at the age of sixty-two, he and his followers saw it as a vindication. Four years before, he had won the popular vote but been denied the office by maneuvers in the House of Representatives (which decided the election in the absence of an Electoral College majority). His sweeping victory in 1828, they thought, rang in what would be hailed as “the era of the common man”—a romantic and partisan title, to be sure, but one that reflected his supporters' fervent beliefs. To them, Jackson's rise epitomized the rise of the West, the triumph of the millions who had poured across the Appalachians; Jackson represented the victory of an expanded electorate, a rebuke to the old elite. In a famous and telling incident, average folks mobbed the White House for his inaugural reception, spitting tobacco and trampling on the furniture.44

  To many Americans, the president embodied the energy, mobility, and enterprise that they believed defined their nation. So it makes perfect sense that the name General Jackson appeared on the side of the Hudson River steamboat commanded by Jacob Vanderbilt, Cornelius's younger brother. At 175 tons, it was fast and successful on its route between New York and the Westchester town of Peekskill. Jacob, just twenty-four, had bought a half share at the end of 1830 and took over as captain. He would continue to loyally aid Cornelius's enterprises, but he, too, was in business for himself. A broad-faced man with a wide smile, a round nose, and friendly eyes, he made a stark contrast with his brother (though they shared a receding hairline and abundant, cheek-filling sideburns). Jacob seemed to be warm where Cornelius was brusque, collegial as much as commanding. He rapidly became a popular figure in Peekskill.45

  That changed abruptly at half past three in the afternoon on June 7, 1831. Coming down from Peekskill, the General Jackson chuffed across the river to Grassy Point, where the Hudson begins to widen into the expanse of Haverstraw Bay. The pilot guided the vessel to the crowded pier and Jacob jumped ashore to help load the luggage and boxes of merchandise. Then the engine detonated. “Such was the force of the explosion,” noted one newspaper, “that the boiler was blown entirely from its place.” The hot, expanding gas turned the boiler into a rocket. A wave of steam blasted through the hull as the apparatus roared into the air, then splashed heavily into the space that opened between the boat and the dock. The explosion “shivered to splinters” the bow and upper decks, the press reported. “In about 20 minutes the boat sank, the stern only being visible above the surface of the water.”

  Shattered pieces of wood, metal fragments, and shreds of clothing showered the water and the dock as some forty passengers screamed in panic or pain. At least nine would die from the scalding shock wave of steam, and two more were sealed in the sunken hull. Jacob was knocked to the ground, miraculously uninjured, with the dead and dying all around him. He then boarded a passing steamboat, the Albany, and left the bloody scene for New York. It was a public relations disaster.

  “The public mind is painfully aroused to the subject of steamboat explosions,” observed the New York Evening Post. The urge to “go ahead” as rapidly as possible increasingly strained against the daily fear of a horrible death. “I had never been on board a steamboat before,” a New Englander recalled, describing his move to New York around that time. “As I heard the whizzing and puffing of steam, and the splashing of water—‘Heavens!’ thought I, 'sposin' the biler should bust, what in the deuce would become of me?’ So I stationed myself at the extreme bow of the boat, as far, I thought, as I could get from the boilers.” After disasters, safety barges would proliferate, allowing nervous passengers to ride in a raft towed behind the steamer.

  But nothing could quell the fury of the victims and their families. As outrage spread, Jacob defended himself in a letter to the New York newspapers. “I was one half owner of the General Jackson” he wrote, “and by her destruction found myself in one moment stripped of my property and ruined in my prospects.” He only went to New York to get help, he said. He anchored his defense with one of the best-respected men in the business: his brother Cornelius. The engineer, he wrote, had been “strongly recommended by the owner of the steam boat Citizen, whose great experience in steam navigation is well known to the public.”46

  No one knows where Cornelius was at the time of Jacob's narrow escape from death, but it would not be surprising if he was in Huntington, Long Island, where his prize horse Bullcaff ran the races on these cool June days.47 With his customary hard-eyed calculation, he saw an opportunity in his brother's misfortune, a chance to seize for himself the market that Jacob had lost. The endeavor would open a window on the customs that steamboat entrepreneurs were devising to bring order to the new chaos of the marketplace.

  Six days before the General Jackson sank, Cornelius had received an influx of capital from his competitors on Long Island Sound, Charles Hoyt and Curtis Peck. The pair had desperately wanted him to go away, and eagerly accepted the deal he offered. On June 1, they agreed to buy the Citizen, along with the rights to his Sawpits pier and wharves at Stamford and Catherine Street in New York, for the inflated price of $30,000.

  As they closed the deal, a visibly irate Hoyt snapped that he and Peck “were paying [Vanderbilt] a large sum of money for the route.” Vanderbilt shook his head, and “distinctly requested… Hoyt to understand that all [he] sold them was the steam boat with the leases and docks.” It was understood that he would not compete against them, he told Hoyt. They needed no formal deal on that score, because it was part of the steamboat man's code of conduct, the unwritten rules that had arisen to regulate competition after Gibbons v. Ogden. As Vanderbilt told a court, “In cases of sales of steamboats which are expected to run on a particular route, it is generally understood that the vendor would be considered as acting unfairly were he to oppose the purchaser with steamboats on the same route, except and unless in self defense.”48

  Monopoly on a line was the standard, the assumed state of affairs, and a sale by a competitor confirmed it. If the seller violated the code, the buyer could fairly counterattack against one of the seller's other routes. Vanderbilt made it a point of pride to refuse to make any formal agreement. Tellingly, Curtis Peck, an experienced steamboat man, “did not consider it worth his while to require or exact any stipulation… on the subject.” Vanderbilt, he believed, would keep his word.

  Vanderbilt claimed that he was abandoning “the run between the city of New York and Norwalk because he considered it a hazardous run and not desirable in itself.” There was some truth to this: in April, the Citizen had struck a rock off New Rochelle, sank, and had to be raised. But the money came at a critical moment.

  With the General Jackson sitting on the bottom of the Hudson, Vanderbilt quickly leased the Flushing to take its place. Meanwhile he built a new steamboat, the Cinderella, to take over the route
permanently. It seems he chose the name to charm a public disenchanted with the Vanderbilt family. “A fine little steamboat, of the fairy order, and appropriately ycleped [called] the ‘Cinderella’ was tried in our waters,” the New York Gazette reported in September. “She sat buoyantly on the stream, gaily decked out in her best attire, and… she is ‘swift as the flash.’ The new Cinderella is decidedly in the field as a resolute competitor.”49

  By the time the Cinderella began to run, she already faced a rival, and a big one: the 207-ton, 134-foot Water Witch. Even more dangerous than the boat was the leading spirit behind it. He was a grim-faced man of thirty-four, with dark hair parted on one side, narrow eyes, and such a crimped jaw and sharp cheekbones that it looked as if his collar had compressed the lower half of his head—but then, he did make an art of keeping his mouth shut. His name was Daniel Drew.

  A native of landlocked Carmel, New York, Drew had started his working life by driving cattle down to the meat markets of Manhattan. It would later be said—inaccurately—that he invented the “watering” of livestock, the trick of preventing them from drinking on the drive to market, then encouraging them to gorge, once they arrived, to inflate their weight. Incorrect as the attribution was, it speaks to the formidable reputation Drew developed for sharp dealing—which stood in odd juxtaposition with his eventual standing as a devout Methodist in an age of revivalism. Drew was “shrewd, unscrupulous, and very illiterate,” Charles F. Adams Jr. would later write, “a strange combination of superstition and faithlessness, of daring and timidity—often good-natured and sometimes generous.” Sly, silent, and stoop-shouldered, he seemed to take pleasure in passing down the street unnoticed by the crowd. One man thought that he resembled “a cross between a cartman and a small trader.” But if you should catch his eye, “you will observe a sharp, bright glance in it, with a look penetrating and intelligent.” As a another writer later remarked, “We have said his intellect was subtle. The word subtle does not altogether express it. It should be vulpine.”50

  Drew's peculiar character, and his background in cattle, led to his rise as a figure of street-level finance. In 1830, he took over the Upper Bull's Head Tavern, located on Third Avenue at the Two-Mile Stone (according to the street grid plotted in 1811, this was at Twenty-fourth Street, still far above the settled portion of the city). A large three-story wooden building, the Bull's Head was described by one stagecoach driver as “the common resort for all travellers (and particularly drovers)” on the main route down Manhattan. Drew became a central figure in the cattle business, trading promissory notes and lending money, establishing himself as “a man of sufficient and ample means,” in the driver's words.51 It was natural enough, then, that an old friend, circus proprietor Heckaliah Bailey, should approach him in the summer of 1831 to ask him to buy a share in the Water Witch, and to take charge of its affairs on behalf of himself and a group of Westchester investors who had built it.

  Vanderbilt soon realized that he faced a worthy foe in Drew. Inevitably, a rate war erupted, driving fares down to a shilling—only now, unlike his war against the Livingstons, the public was against him. “In the midst of the storm of indignation” over the General Jackson, “the very name of Vanderbilt aroused execrations deep and loud all along the North River,” declared Harper's Weekly in an 1859 profile. “The exasperated river towns and villages… would not allow his boat to make fast to their piers.… When he ran to a wharf he could get no hand to take the ropes he threw ashore to make fast. As to business, it is recorded that more than once his daily receipts did not exceed $0.12½. When a solitary passenger did take passage in his boat he hid himself from the public gaze, as though he had been doing a guilty thing.” The Water Witch, on the other hand, “was welcomed daily with huzzas and uproar from the thronging crowds at the landings,” according to another 1859 profile—this one of Drew.

  Drew, it was later said, often slouched on the dock as the Cinderella steamed up, Vanderbilt looming tall at its bow, confidently riding out the public's rage. “You have no business in this trade,” Vanderbilt told him. “You don't understand it, and you can't succeed.” But Drew understood it all too well. He didn't need to make a profit; he simply had to make his opponent suffer to the point that he was willing to make a deal. The same tactics that Vanderbilt had employed against Hoyt and Peck—to drive down fares until the established line bought him out of the market—now worked against him. If he wanted the Water Witch to go away, he would have to purchase it at a hefty premium. And so, in 1832, the people of Westchester were startled to discover that their champion boat had been bought by Vanderbilt, who promptly raised the fare again.

  It was the beginning of a long and peculiar friendship. For the first time in Vanderbilt's life, he had been forced to pay for what was already his, and he couldn't help admiring the man who had done it to him. Over the course of their lives, these starkly contrasting businessmen would mix partnership and rivalry in a bewildering dance of mutual respect and self-interest.52

  ON MAY 20, DEATH HAUNTED the Vanderbilt family. Three years before, on May 20, 1829, Cornelius's brother-in-law and old partner, Captain John De Forest, had died, leaving his sister Charlotte a widow. Now, on May 20, 1832, Cornelius Vanderbilt senior died, pulling his son back to Staten Island for the Moravian Church funeral, the settlement of the will, and attendance on his bereaved mother.

  Death defined not only the date, but the year as well. Rumors began to spread of an epidemic. “Some considerable said about the Cholera,” noted Hiram Peck in his diary on July 5. Soon the newspapers began to track the disease's daily harvest—one hundred dead on July 20, 104 on July 21, ninety on July 22—as quarantines and a general panic shut down intercity travel. Then a fever struck Vanderbilt himself in September. Dr. Jared Linsly treated him with quinine, but the “ague,” as the doctor called it, forced him to bed repeatedly for three months.53

  Bankruptcies shadowed Vanderbilt as well—though this was not entirely a bad thing. Like Drew, he lent money to his fellow businessmen, drawing on reserves created by his cash-based steamboat trade; bankruptcies brought him collateral. In September, one debtor handed the keys to a store over to Vanderbilt, who thought of young Hiram Peck. For two years he had cultivated the friendship of this earnest churchgoer; now he had just the right use for him. “I have also today been negotiating with Capt. C. Vanderbilt to take charge of the business assigned to him by Mr. John Coten,” Peck wrote in his diary on September 12. “Was at his house at noon and down to the store in the afternoon and at his house in the evening.” Three days later he added, “Attended at the store again and came to the conclusion to have the business transacted in my name and Capt. Vanderbilt is to endorse for me. I am to get books and such things as necessary. I have not quite finished bargain about my salary but am to be liberally paid.… We commence taking an inventory this afternoon.” Ultimately Vanderbilt granted him a salary of a thousand dollars a year, plus $250 if he returned “a good profit.”54

  Peck, then, served as the front man, while Vanderbilt lurked behind as the silent partner. It was hardly an unusual arrangement, but it underscored the uncertainties and suspicions that now ran through every business transaction. On March 29, 1833, for example, Vanderbilt sold his steamboat Westchester for $30,000 to John Brooks, former captain of the Citizen, and two other men; they put the boat on Vanderbilt's old line to Connecticut. The move outraged Charles Hoyt, who believed that Vanderbilt was using Brooks as a front man. Even Curtis Peck was ready to think the worst of the man whose word had been good enough a year before. The two filed a lawsuit, asking the court to enforce their unwritten understanding that Vanderbilt would not compete against them on this route.

  Vanderbilt indignantly denied that he was behind Brooks's move, but it is difficult to know the truth. He proudly imagined himself to be a man who stood by his agreements, but he also possessed a Gibbons-like streak of self-righteousness that looked suspiciously like duplicity to others, when he interpreted agreements in what appeare
d to be self-serving ways. Was he a force for businesslike order or competitive anarchy? Even his contemporaries struggled to understand him.55

  Vanderbilt's proud idea of himself soon clashed again with his public image. On June 12, 1833, President Jackson visited New York, sparking what the Evening Post called “one of the most striking public ceremonies ever witnessed by the people of this city.… The inhabitants of the city seemed to have deserted all the other quarters for the Battery and Broadway.” On June 14, he toured northern New Jersey, and returned to New York on the Cinderella, commanded by Vanderbilt himself.

  It was a striking moment, this convergence of two iron-willed men, one who gave his name to the age and the other who in many ways typified it. But Vanderbilt was merely Jackson's pilot, not his peer. In New Jersey, the president met with the still-famous Aaron Ogden, and most likely with Colonel Stevens and his sons, but he probably had no idea who Vanderbilt was.

  Pride is often the door to humiliation. The contrast between the captain's ambitions and his actual status must have scraped his thin skin like sandpaper. Frances Trollope had come away highly impressed by New York's refined, wealthy elite—the “Medici of the Republic,” as she called them—but Vanderbilt was not one of them. Though always unpretentious, he sorely wanted respect. On October 30, for example, he entered a four-year-old colt in races at the Union Course in Long Island against horses belonging to the patriarchs of transportation, past, present, and future: William Gibbons, Robert L. Stevens and his brother John, and Robert F. Stockton. It was a symbolic race—and Vanderbilt's horse was disqualified.56