by T. J. Stiles
RG Record Group
RGD Records of R. G. Dun & Co., Baker Library, Harvard Business School (“NYC” indicates volumes for New York City, followed by volume and page numbers)
RWG Richard Ward Greene Papers, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.
SctDP Deposition of Joseph N. Scott, David Colden Murray v. Cornelius Vanderbilt, fold. 1, box 1, Costa Rican Claims Convention of July 2, 1860, RG 76, National Archives, College Park, Md.
VFP Vanderbilt Family Papers, New-York Historical Society
WFP Williams Family Papers, Watkinson Library, Trinity College, Hartford, Conn.
WDLP William D. Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, New York Public Library
WLMP William L. Marcy Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress
GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS
HsR United States House of Representatives Report
HED United States House of Representatives Executive Document
NYSAD New York State Assembly Document
NYSSD New York State Senate Document
OR The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901), 128 vols.
OR Navy Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office, 1894–1922), 30 vols.
SR United States Senate Report
SED United States Senate Executive Document
NEWSPAPERS
AltaC San Francisco Alta California
ARJ American Railroad Journal
AtlC Atlanta Constitution
BE Brooklyn Eagle
BG Boston Globe
BM Bankers' Magazine and Statistical Register
CT Chicago Tribune
EP New York Evening Post
HC Hartford Courant
HW Harper's Weekly
JoC New York Journal of Commerce
LT London Times
MM Merchant's Magazine; also Hunt's Merchant's Magazine
NAR North American Review
NBF New Brunswick Fredonian
NR Niles' Register
NYH New York Herald
NYT The New York Times
NYTr New York Tribune
NYS New York Sun
NYW New York World
ProvJ Providence Journal
PS Pitt field Sun
RT Railway Times
RG Railroad Gazette
SA Scientific American
SEP Saturday Evening Post
USMDR United States Magazine and Democratic Review
PUBLISHED PRIMARY SOURCES
Fowler William W. Fowler, Ten Years in Wall Street (Hartford: Worthington, Dustin, & Co., 1870)
Hone Allan Nevins, ed., The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828–1851 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1936)
Manning (3, 4, or 7) William R. Manning, ed., Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States: Inter-American Affairs, 1831–1860 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), vol. 3 (1934); vol. 4 (1934); vol. 7 (1936)
Medbery James K. Medbery, Men and Mysteries of Wall Street (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870)
Smith Matthew Hale Smith, Twenty Years Among the Bulls and Bears of Wall Street (Hartford: J. B. Burr, 1870)
Soulé Frank Soulé, John H. Gihon, and James Nisbet, The Annals of San Francisco (New York: D. Appleton, 1855)
Staten Island Church Tobias Alexander Wright, ed., Collections of the New York Records, Genealogical and Biographical Society, vol. 4: Staten Island Church Records (New York: n.p., 1909)
Stonington Reports Annual Reports of the New York, Providence, and Boston Rail Road Company, 1833 to 1874 (Westerly, R.I.: 1874); copy in Library of Congress
Strong (1, 2, 3, or 4) Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong (New York: MacMillan, 1952), vol. 1: Young Man in New York, 1835–1849, vol. 2: The Turbulent Fifties, 1850–1859, vol. 3: The Civil War, 1860–1865, vol. 4: Post-War Years, 1865–1875
SECONDARY SOURCES
AHR American Historical Review
Albion Robert G. Albion, The Rise of New York Port (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1984, orig. pub. 1939)
ANB John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
Baughman James P. Baughman, Charles Morgan and the Development of Southern Transportation (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968)
BHR Business History Review
Burns E. Bradford Burns, Patriarch and Folk: The Emergence of Nicaragua, 1798–1858 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991)
Burrows & Wallace Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
Confidence Men Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982)
Croffut William A. Croffut, The Vanderbilts and the Story of their Fortune (New York: Belford, Clarke, 1886)
Folkman David I. Folkman Jr., The Nicaragua Route (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1972)
Foner Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988)
Gunn L. Ray Gunn, The Decline of Authority: Public Economic Policy and Political Development in New York, 1800–1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988)
Heyl (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6) Erik Heyl, Early American Steamers (Buffalo: n.p.), vol. 1 (1953); vol. 2 (1956); vol. 3 (1964); vol. 4 (1965); vol. 5 (1967); vol. 6 (1969)
HAHR Hispanic American Historical Review
JAH Journal of American History
JEH Journal of Economic History
JER Journal of the Early Republic
JModH Journal of Modern History
Kemble John Haskell Kemble, The Panama Route, 1848–1869 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943)
Klein Maury Klein, The Life and Legend of Jay Gould (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986)
Lane Wheaton J. Lane, Commodore Vanderbilt: An Epic of the Steam Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942)
McPherson James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)
Morrison John H. Morrison, History of American Steam Navigation (New York: Stephen Daye Press, 1959, orig. pub. 1903)
NYHis New York History
NYHSQ New-York Historical Society Quarterly
Stokes I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909 (New York: Robert H. Dodd, 1915–1928), vols. 1–6
Taylor George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York: Rinehart, 1951)
WMQ William and Mary Quarterly
Wood Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1993)
INDIVIDUAL AND COMPANY NAMES
AO Aaron Ogden
AS Augustus Schell
ATC Accessory Transit Company
CFA Charles Francis Adams Jr.
CM Charles Morgan
COH Charles O. Handy
CtP Courtlandt Palmer
CJV Cornelius J. Vanderbilt
CKG Cornelius K. Garrison
CV Cornelius Vanderbilt, 1794–1877
DDT Daniel D. Tompkins
EC Erastus Corning Sr.
EMS Edwin M. Stanton
HFC Horace F. Clark
HG Horace Greeley
HR Hudson River Railroad Company
HRR New York & Harlem Railroad Company
JB James Buchanan
JHB James H. Banker
JMC John M. Clayton
JLW Joseph L. White
JMD John M. Davidson
JRL John R. Livingston
JWR John W. Richmond
LS&MS Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway Company
NYC New York Central Railroad Company
NYC&HR New York Central
& Hudson River Railroad Company
TG Thomas Gibbons
WG William Gibbons
WGM William Gibbs McNeill
WDL William D. Lewis
WHV William H. Vanderbilt
WLM William L. Marcy
WmC William Comstock
PART ONE CAPTAIN
One The Islander
1 NYT, November 13, 1877. For reporting on the opening of the trial, see almost any New York newspaper starting on this date.
2 Annual Report of the Comptroller of the Currency (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1876), 45–69. I am including national, state, and private banks in calculating this figure, but I am leaving out savings banks. Even so, this figure somewhat exaggerates money stock, as it includes all coin and bullion, much of which was not in circulation. Note that the New York Times, July 15, 2007, calculated that Vanderbilt was the second-wealthiest figure in American history by comparing his estate to the size of the national economy. Such estimates are questionable, due to the poor quality of economic statistics in the nineteenth century.
3 CFA, “A Chapter of Erie,” NAR, July 1869.
4 Mark Twain, “Open Letter to Com. Vanderbilt,” Packard's Monthly, March 1869.
5 On the emergence of the term “business man,” see Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 256–7.
6 Isaac Lea to Horatio King, September 26, 1859, SED 45, 36th Cong., 1st sess., vol. 11; NYT, February 9, 1859.
7 See, for example, NYH, April 17, 1855.
8 Lane, 4–10; Staten Island Advance, June 29, 1907.
9 Burrows & Wallace, 50–89, 122–35; Michael Kammen, Colonial New York: A History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975), 128–60, 241; Oliver A. Rink, “Before the English (1609–1664),” in Milton M. Klein, ed., Empire State: A History of New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 21–3; Joyce D. Goodfriend, “Writing/Righting Dutch Colonial History,” NYHis 80, no. 1 (January 1999): 5–28; Cathy Matson, Merchants & Empire: Trading in Colonial New York (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1998), 4–10; Richard Middleton, Colonial America: A History, 1607–1760 (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), 82–8; NYH, January 14, 1877.
10 Firth Haring Fabend, “The Synod of Dort and the Persistence of Dutchness in Nineteenth-Century New York and New Jersey,” NYHis 77, no. 3 (July 1996): 273–300; Peter O. Wacker, “The Dutch Culture Area in the Northeast, 1609–1800,” New Jersey History 104, nos. 1–2 (spring and summer 1986): 1–22; Martin Bruegel, Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780–1860 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 38; Goodfriend, 26; Rink, 61, 105–7.
11 Fabend; Wacker; Goodfriend, 26; Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810 (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 4–27, 189–90.
12 Fabend; Bruegel, 38; Rink, 61, 105–7; White, 4–27, 189–90; Edward Countryman, “From Revolution to Statehood (1776–1825),” in Klein, 229–305, esp. 248; Goodfriend, 26; Rocellus S. Guernsey, New York City and Vicinity During the War of 1812–15 (New York: C. L. Woodward, 1889–95), 1:47–50; First Census of the United States, Richmond County, New York; Ira K. Morris, Morris's Memorial History of Staten Island, New York, vol. 2 (Staten Island: Ira Morris, 1900), 4–6; Burrows & Wallace, 51–89. As Allan Kulikoff notes, The Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 30–3, it is important not to go too far in describing American agriculture as “subsistence farming.” Early on, Northern farmers took part in both local and extended market exchanges. James A. Henretta, “The ‘Market’ in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 18 (spring 1998): 289–304, observes, “Clearly the United States economy during the early republic was primarily a market-based, price-driven system. But… that economy also included elements of an older barter economy that was imbedded in the social structure of many communities.” The Dutch-English contrast in market orientation must be considered relative, not absolute.
13 Numerous informal periauger ferries ran from Staten Island to New York (and often to New Jersey). CVs appears to have started in about 1800, competing with the Van Duzer family which began to run boats across the harbor as early as 1788; Ira K. Morris, Morris's Memorial History of Staten Island (New York: Memorial Publishing, 1898), 1:391–5. Periauger was pronounced as well as spelled in various ways; the most common alternate was pettiauger (used in the New York Custom House registration books). The name appears to be related to “periagua” or “pirogue,” a sea going canoe common to Central and South America, first encountered by the Spanish in the sixteenth century. See Peter Kemp, ed., The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 651.
14 The earliest published stories about CVs family and early life appeared in the 1850s. See SA, June 18, 1853; HW, March 5, 1859; MM, January 1865; James Parton, Famous Americans of Recent Times (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867), 377–90; Lane, 9–13; Croffut, 10–17 (including the quote about Phebe Hand Vanderbilt); Bruegel, 54. Regarding Phebe's apparent career as a moneylender, see Phebe Vanderbilt v. Charles M. Simonson et al. April 17, 1844, file D-CH 177-V, Court of Chancery, NYCC. The best evidence that Phebe did indeed store her money in the clock is a reference to it in a poem by CVs son-in-law James M. Cross in 1863; see Memorial of the Golden Wedding of Cornelius and Sophia Vanderbilt, December 19, 1863 (New York: Baker & Godwin, 1864), 27, copy at Duke.
15 Bruegel, 54–5; Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Travels Through the United States of North America, the Country of the Iroquois, and Upper Canada, in the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797; with an Authentic Account of Lower Canada (London: R. Phillips, 1799), 561–2.
16 Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, 230.
17 First Census of the United States; Taylor, 6–8; Walter Licht, Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1995), xiii-xiv.
18 Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, quotes on 460, 462, 463, 474, 476; for his perceptive discussion of economics and Americans' attitudes toward commerce, see 439–76. John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 37, stresses that the founding generation of the republic saw the need for transportation improvements. The trade ratios are imprecise at best, and reflect registered tonnage engaged in foreign and domestic trade; see Allan R. Pred, Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities, 1790–1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 7, 104–9; Doug lass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1961), 24–35, 43, 250; Elisha P. Douglass, The Coming of Age of American Business: Three Centuries of Enterprise, 1600–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), 39; Dorothy Gregg, “John Stevens: General Entrepreneur, 1749–1838,” in William Miller, ed., Men in Business: Essays in the History of Entrepreneurship (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), 121; Diane Lindstrom, Economic Development in the Philadelphia Region, 1810–1850 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 3–18; Kulikoff, 30–3; Countryman, 314. For key arguments in the debate over the emergence of capitalism in the American countryside, see Allan Kulikoff, “The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America,” WMQ, 3rd ser., vol. 46, no. 1 (January 1989): 120–44; Henretta, “The ‘Market’ in the Early Republic,” 289–304; Joyce Appleby “The Vexed Story of Capitalism Told by American Historians,” Journal of the Early Republic 21, no. 1 (spring 2001): 1–18; and Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 1–25, 56–90, 250–66. Appleby in particular argues forcefully and well that Americans embraced the market as a force of liberation.
19 Taylor, 6–8; Licht, xiii-xiv; Edmund M. Blunt, Blunt's Stranger's Guide to the City of New-York (New York: Edmund M. Blunt, 18
17), 43; Guernsey, 1:133; John Lambert, Travels Through Canada, and the United States of North America, in the Years 1806, 1807, and 1808 (London: C. Cradock, 1814), 2:55; David H. Wallace, ed., “‘From the Windows of the Mail Coach’: A Scotsman Looks at New York State in 1811,” NYHSQ 40, no. 3 (July 1956): 264–96.
20 Lambert, 2:49.
21 Albion, 19, 30, 220–1; Lambert, 2:63–4; Bayrd Still, “New York City in 1824: A Newly Discovered Description,” NYHSQ 46, no. 2 (April 1962): 137–70.
22 Diary of John Adams, excerpted in T. J. Stiles, ed., Founding Fathers (New York: Berkley Publishing Group, 1999), 42; Wallace, “From the Windows.”
23 Guernsey, 32–9, 47–8; Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, 227–30; Lambert, 2:56, 63; Burrows & Wallace, 359–60, 371–4; Blunt's Stranger's Guide, 34–41, 43, 45; Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum (New York: Free Press, 2001), 14–15; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 25; Howard B. Rock, “A Delicate Balance: The Mechanics and the City in the Age of Jefferson,” NYHSQ 43, no. 2 (April 1979): 93–114.
24 Taylor, 3–14; Ratner et al., 212–3; Robertson, 82–4; Nettels, 292–304; Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Banks, Kinship, and Economic Development: The New England Case,” JEH 46, no. 3 (September 1986): 647–67; Burrows & Wallace, 338; Doug lass, 73–9; John Denis Haeger, John Jacob Astor: Business and Finance in the Early Republic (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 62–6; Geoffrey Gilbert, “Maritime Enterprise in the New Republic: Investment in Baltimore Shipping, 1789–1793,” BHR 58, no. 1 (spring 1984): 14–29; Janet A. Riesman, “Republican Revisions: Political Economy in New York after the Panic of 1819,” 1–44, and Gregory S. Hunter, “The Manhattan Company: Managing a Multi-Unit Corporation in New York, 1799–1842,” 124–46, in William Pencack and Conrad Edick Wright, eds., New York and the Rise of American Capitalism: Economic Development and the Social and Political History of an American State, 1780–1870 (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1989); Wilentz, 23–35. Stuart M. Blumin notes the highly personal nature of the eighteenth-century urban economy in The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 26.