On that first day of May in 1810, a few weeks before his sixteenth birthday, Cornelius announced to his mother that he was running away to sea. His mother protested: He was too young; he was needed to work in the fields and to help his father bring the produce to market. Phebe Vanderbilt knew her son well enough to sense that he did not really want to run away to be a sailor; he was negotiating. What he truly wanted was a boat of his own so he could become a boatman on New York Harbor. After a while, they struck a deal: If Cornelius successfully completed what seemed an impossible task, his mother would loan him $100 to buy a boat.
“On the 27th of this month is your birthday. If by that time you have ploughed, harrowed and planted that field with corn,” she said, pointing to an eight-acre tract that had never been cultivated, so full of rocks and stumps was its poor soil, “I’ll give you the money.”
“It’s a bargain. I’ll do it.”
“No boat if you don’t do it.”
It seemed like a good deal to both of these tough traders.
“All right. I understand; and I’m going to do it.”
He did. His mother went to the grandfather clock in the kitchen and counted out one hundred old dollar bills. “Mother thought she had the best of me on that eight acre lot,” he recalled many years later, “but I got some boys to help me, and we did the work, and it was well done, too, for mother wouldn’t allow any half way of doing it. On my birthday I claimed the money, got it, hurried off, bought a boat, hoisted sail and was the happiest boy in the world.”16
What dreams and visions swirled through his thoughts that warm spring day as he took the tiller and hauled in the sail and felt his flat-bottomed periauger, which he named the Swiftsure, buck through the waters of New York Bay!
With boundless energy and ambition, Cornelius went to work. The tan, six-foot teenager, broad-shouldered and strong, with a shock of sand-colored hair and bright blue eyes that squinted from the sun on the bay, soon became a familiar sight on the waterfront, as he hustled for business, racing the other ferryboats back and forth to the Battery. The boatmen laughed at this eager kid, who swore and cursed like an old sea dog as he poled his scow across the waters of the harbor. They nicknamed him Commodore in jest, but the moniker stuck for life. Tough, boisterous, profane, he earned a reputation for being fair and, above all, capable and reliable. Whatever the weather, whatever the winds, passengers could count on Cornelius Vanderbilt’s periauger being first to the city, whether he sailed it or, if the wind died down, poled it.
By his next birthday, he had ferried enough passengers at eighteen cents a trip (a round trip for a quarter) to repay his mother the $100. And since he was still a minor, he turned over to her his profits for the year—$1,000—a rather satisfactory return on her wise investment.
A year later, during the War of 1812 when the British fleet blockaded New York Harbor, Cornelius’s business boomed. He transported workmen and building supplies to construct fortifications and won a contract to carry provisions to the six military garrisons around the harbor and the Narrows. When he had a few spare hours, he brought food down from farms on the Hudson River and sold it from his boat to the starving city. He promptly bought an interest in two other periaugers with his profits.
At the age of nineteen, Cornelius married his eighteen-year-old neighbor and cousin Sophia Johnson, the daughter of his mother’s sister, on the evening of December 19, 1813. To Cornelius, Sophia was more than a woman, more than a wife. Quiet, plain, a prodigiously hard worker, Sophia in his eyes was as good as an employee, a servant, a slave, someone willing to labor endless hours to further his consuming ambitions. Early the next morning after the wedding, he was back down at the docks waiting for passengers.17
At the end of the war, Cornelius bought a condemned flat-bottomed schooner from the government for $1,500. His decrepit vessel was the first to arrive at the oyster beds of Chesapeake Bay at the start of that year’s harvest. Loaded dangerously full of oysters, it was the first to return to New York City. The profits from that one cargo paid for his schooner. This was better than ferrying passengers at eighteen cents a trip! He put his periaugers under the supervision of a friend and concentrated on the coastal trade, carrying cargoes of oysters, watermelons, whale oil, and shad, and trading cider and beer with the ships anchored in the bay. Frugal Cornelius did not fritter away his money like other boatmen. By 1818, at twenty-four, he had saved $9,000 and owned interests in several periaugers and coasting schooners.
Like most of the boatmen who worked in New York Harbor and on Long Island Sound, Cornelius had no use for the awkward, newfangled steamboats that emerged after Robert Fulton’s remarkable feat in 1807 of running his Clermont up the Hudson, against the current, from New York to Albany, at a steady four miles an hour. But when his income suddenly dropped because a steamboat outran his periauger between Staten Island and the city, he was clever enough to foresee that this new mode of transportation—“b’ilers,” he always called them, for the steam boilers that powered them—was the wave of the future. In 1818, he sold his schooners, put his father in charge of his periaugers, and, to learn all about this modern method of transportation, began working for Thomas Gibbons, who owned a small steamboat.
A wealthy sixty-year-old Georgian attorney and plantation owner, Gibbons had purchased a summer residence in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and, as a hobby, had acquired a little steam ferry, the Bellona. It ran from Elizabethtown Point up the Raritan River to New Brunswick, completing the transportation network that brought passengers from New York City to Elizabethtown Point and, once they had been taken along the river to New Brunswick, overland by stagecoach from New Brunswick to Trenton and then across the Delaware River to Philadelphia.
Gibbons agreed to pay Cornelius Vanderbilt sixty dollars a month, plus half of the profits from the ship’s bar, to serve as “captain, pilot and engineer.”18 In addition, Gibbons agreed to give him a run-down wayside inn, Bellona Hall, located right at his New Brunswick landing. Cornelius put his wife in charge. Sophia went to work with a vigor equal to her husband’s, cleaning and fumigating the old structure and running a tavern that became known for its good food and courteous service.
Sophia had her hands full at Bellona Hall. Not only did she do all the cooking and cleaning and serving, but she was also raising several young children, and more often than not was pregnant with her next. Between 1815 and 1839, she gave birth to thirteen children. The older ones helped around the inn as soon as they were able, carrying travelers’ bags and waiting on tables. Frugal, parsimonious, downright miserly, her husband never gave her a penny for the children’s necessities. Sophia fed them, sewed their clothes, and bought them shoes with money she earned at the inn.
Once he had learned the tricks of operating a steamboat, Cornelius was no longer satisfied with taking the Bellona up and down the Raritan estuary, and began running Gibbons’s steamboat as a ferry from Elizabethtown across the Kill Van Kull and New York Bay to the Battery. The trouble was that this run was illegal: Robert Fulton and Robert Livingston had secured a monopoly to operate steamboats on New York waters from the New York legislature. Not only did Cornelius Vanderbilt begin running Gibbons’s steamboat on the same route without any authorization from the monopoly, but he also cut his rates from the four dollars the monopoly was charging to one dollar a trip, covering his losses by raising the price of food and drink at the steamboat’s bar.
Day after day, every day for two months, the New York monopoly sent out constables to arrest him. He outwitted them every time. His passengers loved the thrill of watching him challenge the law. One time he left his crew in New Jersey and tied up at the New York wharf with a woman at the helm while he managed the engine belowdecks. On many occasions he hid in a secret closet he had built in the steamer’s hull. One day as he was preparing to pull away from the New York wharf, an officer came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder. Cornelius spun around. “Let go the line!” he ordered his men.19 The officer, afraid of being carried
away to the New Jersey side where he, in retaliation, would have been imprisoned, jumped ashore.
This cat and mouse game might have continued indefinitely had not Aaron Ogden, another New Jersey steamboat owner who had purchased a license to run steamboats between Elizabethtown Point and Manhattan from the monopoly, sought an injunction against Thomas Gibbons to prevent him from running his line. The New York courts upheld the monopoly. Gibbons appealed to the United States Supreme Court, where Daniel Webster argued his cause, challenging the constitutionality of the monopoly. In deciding this case of Gibbons v. Ogden, Chief Justice John Marshall established the principle that only Congress had the authority to regulate commerce on the navigable waters of the United States, a landmark decision that helped build a unified nation and a national economy, and that, incidentally, helped Cornelius Vanderbilt become an independent steamboat operator.
In the eleven years under Vanderbilt’s management, the Gibbons line had grown from the twenty-five-ton Bellona, running up and down the Raritan River, to seven three-story steamboats of two hundred tons each, working the New York-New Brunswick run as well as a new line on the Delaware. By 1829, thirty-five-year-old Vanderbilt had saved $30,000 and wanted again to be working for himself. He sold Bellona Hall, moved his family to a modest house on Stone Street in Manhattan near the Battery, bought one of the older steamboats from the Gibbons family, and set off on his own, immediately slashing his rates for the New York-Philadelphia run. The other steamboat operators blanched. He was, of course, bluffing; he was competing with established lines that easily could have outlasted any rate war this upstart chose to commence, but everyone assumed that the Gibbons fortune was still behind him, an assumption that he did nothing to dispel and quite a bit to encourage. Before long, several lines joined together and paid him handsomely not to compete on their route.
With his steamboat, his new extortion capital, and his limitless ambition, Cornelius Vanderbilt was quite happy to shift his operations to the Hudson, establishing a line from the city up the river to Peekskill. Here he came up against another grasping, sharp-witted young man, Daniel Drew, who had made himself some money driving cattle from the Hudson and Mohawk valleys to New York City. It was Drew’s scheme to salt the feed of his herds and deprive them of water until just before they reached the city, when he would let the cattle drink their fill, thus adding to their weight, and his profits, when he sold them to unsuspecting purchasing agents in Harlem. Seeing how much money steamboat operators like Cornelius Vanderbilt were making, Drew decided to see what he could do. He acquired a small steamboat, the Water Witch, and launched a competing line. Vanderbilt immediately cut his rates. The Water Witch lost $10,000 in its first season.
“You will soon fail in this business,” the Commodore warned Daniel Drew. “You don’t know anything about running boats. You know a good deal about judging cattle. That’s your line. Boats is my line. You don’t understand it.”
Drew responded by cutting his rates.
“Do you think, Commodore, that I understand the steamboat business?” Drew asked him some weeks later.
“I don’t think anything about it, Uncle Dan’l. You do.”20
The Commodore thereupon purchased the Water Witch to eliminate a pesky competitor whom he was beginning to admire as an equally ruthless operator.
So began a strategy that the Commodore would follow throughout his career: cut rates, drive away the competition (or sell out), raise rates, cut service, cut expenses (he never insured his boats, and life preservers were never considered a necessary safety precaution), raise profits. It was a winning strategy.
Vanderbilt took on the powerful Hudson River Steamboat Association, a consortium of steamboat owners that controlled the route up the Hudson River from New York to Albany. He immediately cut the fares for the twelve-hour run aboard his two steamboats from three dollars to one dollar, and then to ten cents, and finally to nothing. Free passage for all! (The price of meals was increased.) Vanderbilt’s People’s Line, as he called it, was obviously losing money, as was the Hudson River Steamboat Association, which had been forced to cut its rates to the bone, though the association, with many more steamboats, was losing money faster. After prolonged negotiations, Vanderbilt was delighted to agree to leave the Hudson River for ten years. For being so amenable, he was paid $100,000 on the date the agreement was signed, and $5,000 a year for the next ten years.
On a warm hazy day in September of 1609, the Half Moon, a small ship owned by the Dutch East India Company under the command of Henry Hudson, had poked along “the River of the Steep Hills,” exploring the broad waters of the Tappan Zee, sailing past the Catskills up to Albany, trying to locate the fabled Northwest Passage to the riches of Cathay. Two centuries later, the Hudson River, which had frustrated the Dutch East India Company, yielded up its riches to a young Dutch entrepreneur, the Commodore. Now being paid not to operate a New York-Philadelphia route and a New York-Albany route, the Commodore established lines on the North River, the East River, the Connecticut River, around Long Island Sound, up to New Haven, Hartford, Stonington, New London, Providence, Newport, Boston; south along the coast to Washington, Charleston, Havana. By the 1840s, when he was in his mid-forties, he operated a fleet of more than one hundred steamboats, which employed more men than any other business in the country. The Commodore was now worth several million dollars.
3.
This steamship millionaire was difficult to ignore yet even more difficult to accept. It was hard to know what to make of this rough-hewn character, perennially dressed in an out-of-style costume consisting of a long frock coat, high collar, and luxurious white cravat, with top hat, cane, and cigar. (He always carried his cigars loose in a side pocket rather than in a cigar case. “When I take one cigar out of my pocket, my friends don’t know whether there are any left,” he explained, and therefore he never had to share them.21) Henry Adams wrote that the steamboat king was “not ornamental” and “lacked social charm.”22 Adams was exceedingly charitable. When the Commodore was invited to the home of one of the city’s leading families, his startled hosts discovered that he used atrocious grammar, interlaced his talk with the profanity of the wharves, always had a plug of Lorillard’s tobacco in his mouth, expectorated a stream of tobacco juice on his hostess’s rugs, and pinched the bottoms of whichever of the pretty maids caught his fancy. The Staten Island water rat never received a return invitation to the same home. Polite society banished him.
Spurned by the social elite of New York City, he returned to Staten Island when he was forty-five, the local boy coming home after making his fortune. On a tract of land on the farm where he had grown up, he built a mansion with a commanding view of the bay and the flags of his fleet. It cost $27,000. With a Grecian facade set off by six enormous fluted columns, entered through a front door in whose colored glass was etched the outline of his favorite steamer, the Cleopatra, revealing an interior decorated with mantelpieces of Egyptian marble, plate glass from France, and a grand staircase with carved mahogany rail, the Vanderbilt mansion became the great house of Staten Island. Here the Commodore received the respect and accolades he needed.
The Commodore had built his fortune by his single-minded devotion to business. Other than as captive workers, his wife and ten living children were extraneous to his life.
His first three children, Phebe Jane, Ethelinda, and Elizabeth, shared a tragic flaw: They were girls, and would marry and no longer be Vanderbilts.
His fourth child and first son, William, born on May 8, 1821, at Bellona Hall, was a disappointment, too. He did not have the Commodore’s sturdy frame and robust constitution, or handsome appearance. Heavyset, slow, and clumsy, Billy had a large head; the features of his broad Dutch face were coarse, his complexion red and rough, his eyes small and dull. He often squinted. He looked slow-witted, and so his father concluded that he was.
The Commodore had a choice collection of epithets he barked at his son whenever something went wrong. “Blatherskite!” he
would yell. “Sucker! Stupid blockhead! Chucklehead! Beetlehead!” Terrified of his apoplectic father, William never spoke back to him. “I never saw William resent any of the many ill-natured speeches of his father,” a friend noted many years later. “He would call him a blatherskite and a sucker; that word sucker was a very common epithet with the Commodore. William said nothing, and took it with meekness, whiningly. Well, there was a falling down of his jaw, peculiar to him, and a peculiar noise of a whine without words,”23 This meek subservience further infuriated his father.
When Billy was twelve, the Commodore sent him to the Columbia College Grammar School, where his dogged, plodding work confirmed his father’s belief that there was little hope for the boy. At eighteen he left school and the Commodore placed him in Daniel Drew’s new brokerage house, Drew, Robinson and Company, in the financial district of New York. Uncle Dan’l paid young Billy a salary of $150 a year.
The next year, Billy informed his father that he was going to marry. Although the Commodore had wed Sophia when he was nineteen, he believed his son was too young and too weak to marry and raise a family. It was bad enough that the woman he had chosen to be his wife, Maria Louisa Kissam, was poor, the daughter of a clergyman of the Dutch Reformed Church. Even worse, his son was poor. How did he think he would support himself on the pittance Uncle Dan’l was paying him?
“What are you going to live on?” the Commodore demanded of Billy.
“Nineteen dollars a week.”
“Well, Billy, you are a fool, just as I always thought!”24
If there was one person harder to work for than his father, it was Daniel Drew. Night and day, Billy pored over the books, adding columns of figures, learning his trade. Three years later, Drew offered him a partnership in his brokerage house. The Commodore assumed that his son would spend the rest of his life seated on an accountant’s stool, but Billy declined Drew’s offer. His health had been broken by three years in the counting house; not surprisingly, with a father like the Commodore and a boss like Uncle Dan’l, he was suffering from chronic dyspepsia. Billy’s doctor advised him to move to the country.
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