The First Tycoon

by T. J. Stiles

  31 David R. Johnson identifies 1830 as a turning point in the response to professional criminals, in Policing the Urban Underworld: The Impact of Crime on the Development of the American Police, 1800–1887 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 12–15, 41–3. Allan Stanley Horlick, Country Boys and Merchant Princes: The Social Control of Young Men in New York (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1975), 45, 26, 89.

  32 Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution, 1–2; William Austin, Peter Rugg, the Missing Man (Worcester: Franklin P. Rice, 1882, orig. pub. 1824), 52–3.

  33 Royall, 243–4; Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 62. On the expansion of New York, see Burrows & Wallace, 429–528; Countryman, in Milton Klein, 295–316; Eric Homberger, The Historical Atlas of New York City: A Visual Celebration of Nearly 400 Years of New York City's History (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 68–72.

  34 Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 525–42. As L. Ray Gunn notes, 39, “Wherever its influence was felt, the transportation revolution literally remade society;” see also 19, 23–56. See also Martin Bruegel, Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780–1860 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 159; Wood, 305–47; EP, May 17, 1826. For the “Yankee principle” quote, see New York Illustrated Magazine of Literature and Art, September 20, 1845. An excellent summary of the impact of the transportation revolution on local economies, and the subsequent rise of manufacturing for national markets in New England, is provided by Douglass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1966), 156–76. On the relative lack of immigration in the 1820s, see 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), 42–3, who notes, “Immigration increased enormously after 1830.… The foreign-born population expanded from 9 percent of the city's total in 1830 to 36 percent in 1845.”

  35 Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 145; William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York: George Braziller, 1961), 47–8; Trollope, 302, 352, 370. The emphasis on being “smart” is also noted by Clifford Browder, The Money Game in Old New York: Daniel Drew and His Times (Lexington, K.Y.: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 38–9. On the New England migration to New York, see Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840–1857 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 7; Horlick, 69–72; and Dixon Ryan Fox, who observes in Yankees and Yorkers (New York: New York University Press, 1940), 198, “It is safe to say that by 1830 the Yankee strain was becoming predominant in New York blood.” On February 14, 1835, Philip Hone attended a meeting called to organize “a regular Knickerbocker society” to counter the influence of New Englanders; Hone, 148–9. On the impact of the decline of traditional authority and new geographical mobility on culture, see Confidence Men, esp. 1–15, 19–23. P. T. Barnum dedicated his book, The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself (New York: Redfield, 1855), to “the universal Yankee nation, of which I am proud to be one.” In understanding the rise of the Yankee stereotype, it is worth quoting Gunn again, 27, “Traditional community values declined and were replaced by those of the marketplace. Informal, face-to-face relationships gave way to more formal and impersonal modes of human interaction.”

  36 Lane, 50–1; Lane, Indian Trail, 196–201; George Henry Preble, A Chronological History of the Origin and Development of Steam Navigation, 1543–1882 (Philadelphia: L. R. Hamersly 1883), 58–9; NBF, July 29, 1829; Trenton Emporium and True American, July 11, 1829; Trenton and New Brunswick Turnpike Company Toll Book, fold. 11, box 3, NP; Abstracts of Licenses Enrolled, January 1, 1830, to September 30, 1832, vol. 13044, New York Custom House Records, RG 41, NA. The Bellona cost CV around $15,000; see WG to E. Hall, February 6, 1829, GP.

  37 On the Stevens family, see in particular Dorothy Gregg's excellent study, “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), 120–52. Robert L. Stevens introduced, among other things, the skeleton beam, a false bow, a hull-stiffening truss, and the placement of engines on platforms over the water; see Morrison, 29, 37–9, 48–51, 66. Hone visited Hoboken on May 21, 1831; Hone, 42. On the impending termination of the Citizen's Line, see WG to E. A. Stevens, November 30, 1828, GP.

  38 “The New Jersey Monopolies,” NAR, April 1867, 428–76; Lane, Indian Trail, 302–4; Gregg, 150–2. A fine survey is in Taylor, 74–90, esp. 89 and 101. For contemporary discussions of the Camden & Amboy monopoly, see Workingman's Advocate, August 16, 1834, and NYH, April 1, 1837.

  39 Lane, 51–2; HW, March 5, 1859.

  40 On WG'S anxiety about the railroad, see WG to Robert L. Stevens, January 16, 1829, and WG to Robert Baylies, February 2, 1829, GP Details of CVs previously unknown Sawpits venture appear in Charles Hoyt v. John Brooks Jr., May 8, 1833, file BM 2163-H, Court of Chancery, NYCC; see also an advertisement in the EP, June 15, 1831, which notes that the Fanny also worked as a towboat, and SEP, April 23, 1831. Contrary to Lane's account, CV moved to New York from New Brunswick between January and September 1830; see James Neilson to George Able, January 28, 1830, and Farm Diary, fold. 17, box 3, NP, and entry for September 19, 1830, Hiram Peck Diary, NYHS. On the location of Sawpits, I am indebted to Alice C. Hudson, chief of the Map Division at the New York Public Library. See, for example, Joseph R. Bien, Atlas of Westchester County, New York (New York: Julius Bien, 1893), plate 47. On CVs address at this time, see Croffut, 279.

  41 Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949, orig. pub. 1832), 301. Many historians discuss the commercialization of American society during this period, including Gunn, 23–56; Wood, 325–69; Maier, 51–84; Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution, 56–89.

  42 Entries for August 3, 11, September 17, 19, 21, October 13, 29, November 19, 1830, July 18, 1831, Hiram Peck Diary, NYHS. On Captain Brooks's relationship to CV see Charles Hoyt v. John Brooks Jr., May 8, 1833, Court of Chancery, BM 2163-H, NYCC. It is possible that Peck was writing of a different Vanderbilt, as later he specified “Captain C. Vanderbilt;” however, the reference to Captain Brooks, among other hints, strongly suggests that he meant CV in these entries. Lorena S. Walsh discusses the evolving domestic life of middling Americans during this period, including diet, hygiene, and table manners, in “Consumer Behavior, Diet, and the Standard of Living in Late Colonial and Early Antebellum America, 1770–1840,” in Robert E. Gallman and John Joseph Wallis, eds., American Economic Growth and Standards of Living before the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 217–61. On the new social dilemma of the untrustworthiness of one's fellow Americans, see especially Confidence Men, 31–53.

  43 On Cornelius J. Vanderbilt's birth, see Richmond County Advance, April 15, 1882. On the children's lingering resentment, see, for example, NYS, November 13, 1877; NYW, November 13, 14, 1877; NYTr, March 28, 1878.

  44 On the life of Jackson, see Robert V. Remini, The Life of Andrew Jackson (New York: Penguin, 1988). For an insightful account of Jackson's personality, see Andrew Burstein, The Passions of Andrew Jackson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).

  45 Entry for General Jackson, November 2, 1830, Abstracts of Licenses Enrolled, January 1, 1830, to September 30, 1832, vol. 13044, New York Custom House Records, RG 41, NA Heyl, 2:97–8; EP, June 8, 1831; New York Commercial Advertiser, June 20, 1831; SEP, June 11, 1831; Lane, 53–5. Lane mistakenly reads the EP article to mean that Jacob Vanderbilt himself had run to Peekskill for two years, whereas the Custom House records show that he enrolled as the General Jackson's captain in November 1830. />
  46 EP, June 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 1831; SEP, June 11, 1831; New York Commercial Advertiser, June 20, 1831; Workingman's Advocate, June 18, 1831; entry for June 8, 1831, Hone, 42–3; New York Illustrated Magazine of Literature and Art, September 20, 1845. For a useful summary of steamboat explosions during this era (including one on the Bellona, killing two, in 1825), see The American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge, 1835.

  47 SEP, June 25, 1831.

  48 SEP, April 23, 1831; Charles Hoyt v. John Brooks Jr., May 8, 1833, Court of Chancery, BM 2163-H, NYCC.

  49 SEP, April 23, June 25, 1831; Charles Hoyt v. John Brooks Jr., May 8, 1833, Court of Chancery, BM 2163-H, NYCC; entry for Cinderella, October 19, 1831, Abstracts of Licenses Enrolled, January 1, 1830, to September 30, 1832, vol. 13044, New York Custom House Records, RG 41, NA; Lane, 53; New York Gazette quoted in the Workingman's Advocate, September 10, 1831.

  50 CFA, “A Chapter of Erie,” NAR, July 1869; Henry Clews, Fifty Years in Wall Street (New York: Irving Publishing, 1908), 121; Smith, 131; Fowler, 127. It should be noted that this book will not cite the often-cited Book of Daniel Drew, a 1910 publication which purports to be a secret autobiography. I agree with Drew's biographer, Clifford Browder, who argues it is a fraud; see Browder's The Money Game in Old New York: Daniel Drew and His Times (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986). The Book of Daniel Drew was a hoax, and should be shunned by historians. Drew's son denounced the book on its publication, and declared that he had never seen his father write anything more than his signature; NYW, April 25, 1910.

  51 Walter Blair v. Daniel Drew, March 10, 1831, file 1831-#87, Court of Common Pleas, and Fitz G. Halleck v. Daniel Drew, March 15, 1820, file 1820-#479, Court of Common Pleas, NYCC. Drew's overlordship of the livestock market is demonstrated by a report he sent to the New York Farmer for its 1831 issue.

  52 HW, March 5, 1859; EP, August 12, 1831; Heyl, 3: 337–8. On Drew, see Browder, esp. 32–9, and J. M'Clintock, “Daniel Drew, Esq. of New York,” Ladies' Repository, September 1859. See entries for Water Witch, September 20, 1831, May 26, 1832, and Fanny, June 14, 1831, Abstracts of Licenses Enrolled, January 1, 1830, to September 30, 1832, vol. 13044, New York Custom House Records, RG 41, NA.

  53 Charles S. De Forest v. Tunis Egbert, Francis Perkins, Preston Sheldon, and Helmus M. Wells, March 5, 1852, box SI-68, Supreme Court, Richmond County, NYMA; entries for July 5, September 12, 15, 18, Hiram Peck Diary, NYHS; NR, July 28, 1832; EP, January 17, May 1, 2, 1832; NYS, November 14, 1877; NYW, November 14, 1877.

  54 Entries for July 5, September 12, 15, 18, Hiram Peck Diary, NYHS.

  55 Charles Hoyt v. John Brooks Jr., May 8, 1833, Court of Chancery, BM 2163-H, NYCC; Heyl, 5: 293–4.

  56 EP, June 12, 13, and 15, 1833; Trollope, 345; American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine, December 1833; Hone, 42. On CVs manner, see the testimony of Dr. Jared Linsly NYS, November 14, 1877. On New York's new elite, see Burrows & Wallace, 452–72.

  57 Ariel, April 16, 1831; NR, September 28, 1833. On December 18, 1832, Hone found it worth recording that the Camden & Amboy was complete; Hone, 85. On the early craze for railroads, see especially Taylor, 74–94.

  58 John H. White Jr., The American Railroad Passenger Car (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 3–6, 8; EP, November 9, 11, 13; NR, September 28, November 16, 1833; Hazard's Register, November 16, 1833; NYS, November 14, 1877; NYW, November 14, 1877. On early locomotives used by the Camden & Amboy (including, most famously, the John Bull), see John H. White Jr., American Locomotives: An Engineering History, 1830–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968).

  Four Nemesis

  1 In addition to other sources cited below, see NYT, August 7, 1876.

  2 NYW, November 14, 15, 1877; NYS, November 14, 15, 1877.

  3 Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 373–95; see also Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 313–32. Historians long debated whether Jackson and Jacksonian Democrats favored entrepreneurial capitalism or desired a primitive agrarian economy. The Consensus School claimed that Americans across the political spectrum were essentially in agreement that a market economy was good, as best argued by Bray Hammond in the still-valuable Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 326–457. Other scholars from the same era depicted Jackson as a forefather of New Deal policies; see especially Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950), 74–131. A later wave of scholarship claimed that Jacksonians resisted the market economy; see especially John Ashworth Sellers, “Agrarians” and “Aristocrats”: Party Political Ideology in the United States, 1837–1846 (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1983), and, with more specific focus, Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). More recent scholarship has to some degree returned to the view that Jacksonians favored a market economy, though with greater subtlety than the Consensus School. See in particular Michael J. Connolly, Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), as well as John M. McFaul, The Politics of Jacksonian Finance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), 1–15, and Peter Temin, The Jacksonian Economy (New York: Norton, 1969). I am very much in agreement with Howe, 364, who writes, “Economic enterprise generally became controversial only when government became involved.” For sources that document Jackson's financial policies, and his personal hostility to banking, see Herman E. Krooss, ed., Documentary History of Banking and Currency in the United States (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1965), 982–93, 1055.

  4 The literature on Jacksonianism is vast. Unfortunately, even some of the best historians display a tendency to frown on Jacksonians as regressive or reactionary; see, for example, John Lauritz Larson's otherwise superb discussion in Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 149–93, esp. 150, 192. In my claim that both Jacksonians and anti-Jacksonians favored markets, entrepreneur-ship, and development, I am in agreement with Howe, esp. 364, 501, and Connolly, 14. James L. Huston, Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765–1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 83–151, offers a very insightful discussion of American economic culture (the “republican theory of wealth distribution,” as he calls it), stressing that the antebellum economy was dominated by horizontal expansion and small producers, despite the attention given to industrialization. Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 438, argues, “The Jacksonians opposed large government not because it burdened business but because they believed it was a creature of the monied and privileged few.… They aimed not to liberate private business interests from a corrupt government, but to liberate democratic government from the corrupting power of exclusive private business interests.” This was unquestionably true, but they clearly wished to liberate individuals as economic actors from the unfair advantages of the wealthy “aristocracy;” laissez-faire was both an economic means to a political end and a desired economic end state. One of the most influential books to this day remains Marvin Meyers's The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), which argues, 7–15, that the Whigs and the Democrats were “fraternal twins” in their faith in the market economy, but that Democrats conjured up “moral plots” to rally their followers. I believe that Meyers, as insightful as he is, fails to appreciate how seriously Jacksonians took the threat that government action might give rise to a privileged class.

  5 “President Andrew Jackson's Veto Message Regarding the Bank of the United States, July 10, 1832,” in A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presi
dent (New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1897); Daniel Webster in Krooss, 787–8.

  6 Sellers, 324, 336; Huston, 134; William M. Gouge, A Short History of Paper Money and Banking in the United States (Philadelphia: T. W. Ustick, 1833), 42, 833–4; Gregory A. Mark, “The Personification of the Business Corporation in American Law,” University of Chicago Law Review 54, no. 4 (autumn 1987): 1441–83; Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Partnerships, Corporations, and the Limits on Contractual Freedom in U.S. History: An Essay in Economics, Law, and Culture,” in Kenneth Lipartito and David B. Scilia, eds., Constructing Corporate America: History, Politics, Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 29–65. For insight into the Jacksonian hatred of the artificial, see Lawrence Frederick Kohl, The Politics of Individualism: Parties and the American Character in the Jacksonian Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 35–8. Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 440–1, argues that hard-money Jacksonians were emphatically not economic primitivists who “aimed at turning back the clock,” and often were as sophisticated as their opponents. There is a great deal of truth to this, yet I believe that Wilentz downplays their discomfort with economic abstractions. Even corporate figures had difficulty grasping them, as will be seen in later chapters of this book. However, I agree with Wilentz's argument, 511, 513, that Jacksonians envisioned a commercial economy of agricultural small producers, and distrusted speculation and credit.