The First Tycoon

by T. J. Stiles

  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 week 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

  But the seriousness of the crisis could not be denied. A panic seized Wall Street as stocks fell, banks called in loans, and depositors withdrew money and hoarded gold. “I believe my assets to be reduced fifty per cent, at least,” Strong wrote in his diary. “But I hope I can still provide wholesome training for my three boys. With that patrimony they can fight out the battle of life for themselves.”16

  Soon the battle of life would seize Vanderbilt's own sons in ways that he could not have predicted in April 1861. For the time being, he had to attend in person to the battle with the Confederacy. Curiously, William C. Jewett (Cornelius Garrison's son-in-law) wrote to Vanderbilt about a “report you are disposed to aid the South.”17 Quite the opposite was true—but purely selfish interests, not patriotism, first propelled him into wartime affairs. After consulting with William Aspinwall, Vanderbilt wrote to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles on April 16, under the letterhead of the Atlantic & Pacific Steamship Company, 177 West Street. “The shippers of specie by our lin
e,” he observed, “are apprehensive that our steamers may be seized or robbed on their voyage from Aspwinall to New York, unless some special provision be made for their safety.” Vanderbilt wanted the government to equip each of the company's ships with a cannon, along with one hundred rifles. “These arms, in the hands of passengers such as ordinarily travel over this route, will be a sufficient protection against any pirate or privateer,” he wrote, thinking perhaps of the hardened Californians who had gone straight from the gold fields to Walker's army.

  His concern was well founded. The next day, a group of New York's merchants and bankers begged Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase to place guns on Vanderbilt's ships, noting that they carried “$40,000,000 of gold annually from San Francisco to this port.… The capture of even one of these steamers,” they argued, “would stop shipments of gold from San Francisco, or at any rate divert the flow of treasure from New York to foreign countries.”

  The Commodore's quick response to the crisis prevented the capture of one ship, the Daniel Webster; he diverted it from its voyage to New Orleans, where the rebels had planned to seize it on April 22. But the danger remained. On April 17, Confederate president Jefferson Davis authorized Southern privateers to attack Northern merchantmen. In June, Captain Raphael Semmes escaped the blockade of Southern ports in the CSS Sumter, the first Confederate commerce raider. It would not be the last. Indeed, Semmes would become a personal problem for Cornelius Vanderbilt.18