Fortune's Children

by Arthur T. Vanderbilt

  Such criticism never bothered the Commodore. On the contrary, he saw himself as something of a national hero for revolutionizing the nation’s transportation system, and contemplated creating a monument 625 feet high in Central Park dedicated to the joint glory of George Washington and Cornelius Vanderbilt.

  Yes, the Commodore was having the time of his life and was pretty proud of what a poor boy from Staten Island had accomplished. He named a New York Central locomotive the Commodore Vanderbilt and had his portrait painted on its headlights. It pulled a private railroad car called the Vanderbilt, which was painted yellow with red trim and decorated with scenes from along the route of the Central. He had his likeness engraved on each of the stock certificates of the New York Central. He told his friends that “numerous ladies bought the stock from him solely for the purpose of obtaining his likeness,” never failing to add that the likeness was a very fine one.91 Over the entrance of the St. John’s Park freight terminal on Hudson Street in Manhattan, he had constructed an elaborate fifty-ton bronze frieze of steamships and railroads. In the center was a colossal bronze Cornelius Vanderbilt, standing in a fur-lined overcoat.92

  The Commodore had always considered his fortune as his real monument, and now he was at an age when he had to begin considering what to do with it.

  The Commodore’s thirteenth, and last, child, George Washington Vanderbilt, born in 1839, had been well worth the wait, for here at last was just the type of son the Commodore wanted. He looked just like the Commodore, he had the Commodore’s strong physique, and he acted just like the Commodore. What a boy! Here at last was a son to step into his shoes. George was said to have been one of the strongest and most athletic men ever to attend West Point. There, on his twenty-second birthday, he made a name for himself by lifting nine hundred pounds. Commissioned as a lieutenant in the Union infantry during the Civil War, he contracted tuberculosis in the Shiloh campaign. The Commodore sent him to the Riviera to recuperate, accompanied by Billy to look after him. But George never recovered, dying in Nice on January 1, 1864, at the age of twenty-five.

  In his grief, the Commodore took stock of what he had left: a bunch of girls and two disappointing sons, Billy the blatherskite and crazy Corneel. This was not much to work with. To found a dynasty to perpetuate his fortune and name, Billy was clearly a better bet, blatherskite or not. The Commodore could trust his elder son, whom he was beginning to see as something of a kindred spirit. “Cornelius is generous but wasteful, and William is, like me, avaricious.”93

  He had to admit that Billy, now in his fifties, was showing some promise. The Commodore had arranged for him to be appointed receiver of the tiny Staten Island Railroad, whose three locomotives and six passenger cars ran along thirteen miles of track on the eastern shore of the island. Billy had very carefully cut its expenses, connected the road with the city by means of a line of ferryboats, and within a couple of years had paid off all the debts of the bankrupt line. Its stock had risen from next to nothing to $175 a share, and was paying a dividend of 10 percent.

  The Commodore bought Billy a large stone house at 459 Fifth Avenue and made him vice president of the Harlem and Hudson. While the Commodore planned his market strategies, he set Billy loose managing the day-to-day operation of the lines. “I tell Billy that if these railroads can be weeded out and cleaned up, and made ship-shape, they’ll both pay dividends.”94 Billy worked long and hard to master all the details of running the railroads, studying every train schedule, every bill and voucher, examining each engine, reviewing every piece of correspondence. His father was pleased and made him a vice president of the New York Central.

  The Commodore still found it great fun to see if he could take advantage of his son. Once, in casual conversation, he remarked to Billy that it was probably a good time to sell short any stock he was holding in the Hudson Railroad since it looked like the price of the stock was about to fall. Billy knew his father well enough not to take his advice on its face. He did a little investigation of his own and found that even though his father was telling him to sell the stock, he was buying it himself, obviously on the conviction that it would go even higher.

  When the Hudson’s stock hit 130, the Commodore asked his son how much money he had lost.

  “I went in at 110 on 10,000 shares,” Billy answered. “That ought to make me $260,000.”

  “Very bad luck, William, very bad luck this time,” his father said, shaking his head in sympathy.

  “But I bought and so made,” Billy responded.

  “Eh?”

  “I heard that was your line, and so concluded that you meant long instead of short.”95

  The Commodore beamed.

  “I suppose William is doing well, now,” a friend said to the Commodore.

  “Yes,” he replied. “Billy will make a good railroad man.”

  6.

  After his breakfast of six eggs, a lamb chop, toast, and a cup of tea with twelve lumps of sugar, topped off by a cheekful of Lorillard’s plug, the Commodore spent four or five hours a day at his office, managing the affairs of his railroad empire. He had no patience for details, leaving all that to Billy and Chauncey Depew, a bright young graduate of Yale who served as general counsel to the Vanderbilt lines. If he received a letter of more than half a page, he would struggle through part of it and then toss it to his clerk. “Here, see what this damned fool is driving at, and tell me the gist of it.”97

  The rest of the afternoon was devoted to driving a team of his prize steeds while sipping a tumbler of gin mixed with sugar. After a dinner of Spanish mackerel, woodcock, and venison, his evenings were spent at the Manhattan Club playing whist or five-point euchre. (Once he returned from the club chuckling in amazement. “I have just seen the funniest thing. Horace Clark and three grown-up men playing cards for nothing!”98)

  The Commodore was lonely. Sophia had died of a stroke on August 17, 1868, at the age of seventy-three. All his children, married and with their own children, had left home. He was alone in the big house at 10 Washington Place. The Commodore spent each evening at the Manhattan Club with the few remaining friends of his generation whom he had not outlived. He had even taken to inviting home Uncle Dan’l Drew to reminisce about the good old days when they had tried to ruin each other.

  Into his world of lonely old age descended two young sirens, remarkably good-looking sisters, Victoria and Tennessee Claflin.

  The two sisters were the seventh and ninth children of a white-trash family from Homer, Ohio. Their father, Buck Claflin, was a small-town swindler who passed poor-quality counterfeit money and burned down his gristmill to recover the insurance money. When he was driven out of Homer, he and his illiterate wife gathered up their children and organized a traveling medicine show, enlisting their two beautiful daughters, Victoria and Tennessee, to tell fortunes, call up spirits in seances, hawk cancer cures, and do some faith healing, and if that didn’t work, to throw in a little prostitution for good measure. One of their popular patent medicines had Tennessee’s picture on the label: “Miss Tennessee’s Magnetio LIFE ELIXIR,” it was called, “for Beautifying the Complexion and Cleansing the Blood.” Each bottle sold for two dollars and the directions instructed that for best results, a teaspoonful was to be taken three times a day, one half hour before each meal. Those two remarkable daughters could sell anything.

  The ragtag family never stayed long in any town. Victoria, in one of her trances, was visited, she said, by the Greek orator Demosthenes, who told her that if she went to New York City, she would emerge from poverty into a life of great wealth and would become the ruler of her country. She faithfully followed these spiritual orders and in 1868 arrived in New York with her sister, Tennessee.

  Victoria Woodhull (she, like her sister, had married and divorced) held herself out as a clairvoyant. At seventy-four, the Commodore was at an age when he was thinking more and more of the hereafter, and realized he needed some spiritual assistance. In addition, he was always hopeful that he would receive advice
from his beloved mother, or at least learn what the stock market would do in the week ahead. It was therefore inevitable that he met thirty-year-old Victoria, who promised messages from the other world.

  An acquaintance with one sister invariably led to an acquaintance with the other. Twenty-two-year-old Tennessee held herself out as a magnetic healer. By touching and massaging a patient’s body, she could, she claimed, transmit vital forces, with one hand transmitting positive force and the other hand negative force. This, too, was just what the Commodore needed. The Commodore could feel it, he felt the vital forces enter him, he felt the wonders that Tennessee was able to perform on his tired old body. He began spending more and more time with the young girl, bringing her with him to his office, sitting her on his knee and bouncing her up and down as he talked railroad business with his associates and she pulled on his side whiskers. She called him “old boy.” He called her “little sparrow.”

  There were a couple of things these two young girls wanted, and maybe the Commodore could help them. They wanted to be stockbrokers. Brokers! Well, if that was it, why not? With the Commodore’s financial backing, they rented a suite of offices at 44 Broad Street and opened Woodhull, Claflin and Company.

  It was quite a sensation. Women were not supposed to be interested in business. Yet here were two striking young women, whose curly brown hair was cut short, who wore their dresses daringly short, ending at their shoe tops, and who sported jackets with a masculine cut set off with bright-colored neckties. The “Lady Brokers of Wall Street,” the newspapers called them; the “Bewitching Brokers.” The curious mobbed the streets around their office. Those who made it inside saw on one wall a portrait of the Commodore, and on another a sign: ALL GENTLEMEN WILL PLEASE STATE THEIR BUSINESS AND THEN RETIRE AT ONCE.” How would the ladies make their investment decisions? That was easy, the Commodore responded. Mrs. Woodhull would go into a trance and predict the course of railroad stocks. “Do as I do,” he told one young man asking for stock advice, “consult the spirits.”100 The stock of the New York Central would be rising, he told another. How did he know? “Mrs. Woodhull said so in a trance.”101

  Whether Victoria Woodhull was receiving stock tips from the beyond, or whether the Commodore was whispering tips into Tennessee’s cute little ear, within a few months the sisters had made over $500,000. Demosthenes had been right! The sisters had emerged from poverty.

  If the first part of Demosthenes’ prophecy had been correct, why not the second? Victoria Woodhull was destined to be the leader of her country.

  With the Commodore’s money, the two lively young ladies published the first edition of their newspaper, Woodhull Ö Claflin’s Weekly, on May 14, 1870. And what a paper it was! PROGRESS! FREE THOUGHT! UNTRAMMELED LIVES! BREAKING THE WAY FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS? heralded the masthead. The paper, whose articles were written by a number of gentlemen admirers, engaged in muckraking, exposed stock and bond frauds and political corruption, advocated women’s rights, promoted clairvoyant healing and free love, and in each issue advanced Victoria C. Woodhull’s candidacy for the presidency of the United States. The Equal Rights party nominated her as its candidate for president in the election of 1872, her running mate being Frederick Douglass, the black reformer.

  Not to be outdone, young Tennessee ran for Congress in the Eighth Congressional District of New York, but what she really wanted was to marry her “old boy.” The Commodore found the idea appealing and promised to marry his “little sparrow,” telling her he would take care of her and make her a queen when he died. But before any wedding arrangements were made, the seventy-four-year-old Commodore fell in love with an older woman.

  The Commodore was infatuated with a relative, Frank Crawford, the thirty-year-old great-granddaughter of his mother’s brother. Tall, graceful, and well educated, stunning Frankie and her mother had left Mobile, Alabama, after the Civil War to seek a new beginning in New York City. As distant relatives, they had stopped in to see the Commodore.

  The Commodore was hooked. In June of 1868, two months before she passed away, Sophia was planning a trip south. The Commodore issued an order to one of his servants: “Get her out of the way as soon as possible!”102 Several hours after his wife had left the house, the Commodore, his son Billy, Mrs. Crawford, and daughter Frank were aboard a special palace car of the New York Central headed for Saratoga Springs. The day after Sophia’s death that August, the Commodore began squiring Mrs. Crawford and Frank around New York City, and invited them to live at his house, free of rent, as visitors. They accepted his kind offer.

  A year later, in August of 1869, the Commodore proposed to Frankie. “You are making a great sacrifice in marrying me. You have youth, beauty, virtue, talent, and all that is lovely in a woman, and I have nothing to give you in return!”103 Well, yes, perhaps: A seventy-five-year-old grandfather was marrying a beautiful thirty-one-year-old woman. However, a prenuptial agreement giving Frank $500,000 of first mortgage bonds of his Hudson River Railroad Company went a long way toward balancing the match, and the odd couple married on August 21, in Ontario, Canada. “I didn’t want to raise a noise in the United States,” the Commodore explained, “so I slipped over to Canada and had it done in a jiffy, and I guess the knot was well tied.”104

  When the newlyweds returned to the city, there were many questions. Why hadn’t he married Frank’s mother, for instance, of whom he seemed fond? “Oh, no! If I had married her mother, Frankie would have gone off and married someone else. Now I have them both!”105

  He was obviously happy. Frank called him “Com” and fawned all over him. Acquaintances noted in amazement that, quite uncharacteristically, on occasion the choleric old Commodore would “giggle foolishly without provocation.”106

  Frank saw it as her duty to improve her husband’s life. She did not approve of cards, so the Commodore gave up his games of whist at the Manhattan Club. A deeply religious woman, she scoffed at his belief in seances and spiritualism, so the Commodore was careful not to talk about his attempts to communicate with the other world. Once, and only once, he put his arm around Tennessee Claflin’s narrow waist and kissed her in front of his wife.

  “Did you not promise to marry me before you married your wife?” Tennessee pouted.

  “Certainly I did. I intended to have done so, but the family otherwise arranged it. You might have been Mrs. Vanderbilt.”107

  Frankie saw to it that that was the last he saw of the Claflin sisters.

  Frank tried to instill some religion in his life and urged him to stop swearing. That was all but impossible after a lifetime around New York’s waterfront, but he gave it a good try. Frank’s pastor came visiting one day and found the Commodore on the sofa, obviously distraught.

  “Why, what’s the matter, Commodore?”

  “Oh, damn!” he replied. “I’ve been a-swearing again, and I’m sorry. I’d ought to stop it, my wife being such a pious woman and you and other religious folks coming to see us, and it’s a shame that I don’t.”108

  Yes, Frank was working miracles with Com, even getting him to loosen up the purse strings a bit for a good cause or two. The Commodore had never had much respect for people who sought charitable contributions. “Let others do as I have done and they need not be around here begging.”109 Clerical beggars were the worst. He once presented a parson seeking a donation for his church with a one-way ticket to the West Indies. Another time, a Catholic priest from Albany came to him with twenty dollars that a parishioner had stolen from the railroad and wished to return. The Commodore took the twenty-dollar gold piece and handed it to his bookkeeper to put into the proper account. The priest remained a while, talking to the Commodore about the poverty of his church. The bookkeeper expected the Commodore to ask for ten dollars back to give to the priest, but no such request was forthcoming. “There’s considerable good in religion after all,” the Commodore told the bookkeeper after the priest had left.110

  Despite his feelings about clergymen seeking contributions, Frank convinced h
im to give $50,000 to her favorite pastor, the Reverend Charles F. Deems, for the purchase of a building for the Church of Strangers.

  “Commodore, if you give me that church for the Lord Jesus Christ, I’ll most thankfully accept it,” the grateful pastor told him.

  “No, Doctor, I wouldn’t give it to you that way,” the Commodore replied, “because that would be professing to you a religious sentiment I don’t feel. I want to give you a church. That’s all about it. It is one friend doing something for another friend. Now, if you take it that way, Γ11 give it to you.”111

  When the Commodore again began thinking about the construction of a 625-foot-high monument to be erected in Central Park to the joint glory of his two heroes, George Washington and Cornelius Vanderbilt, his wife plotted with Dr. Deems to dissuade him.

  “I’d give a million dollars to-day, Doctor, if I had your education!” the Commodore said to Dr. Deems one evening after dinner.

  “Is that your honest sentiment, Commodore?” Dr. Deems asked him.

  “It is. Folks may say that I don’t care about education, but it ain’t true; I do. I’ve been among educated people enough to see its importance. I’ve been to England, and seen them lords, and other fellows, and knew that I had twice as much brains as they had maybe, and yet I had to keep still, and couldn’t say anything through fear of exposing myself.”

  “If these are really your sentiments, then you must let me tell you that you are one of the greatest hindrances to education that I know of.”

  “Why, how so?” the Commodore demanded.