The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (11 page)

Vanderbilt stepped forward and said he could cut the
Elizabeth
loose in one night, and he'd do it for $100. With the
Mouse
and the
Bellona
undergoing winter refitting, he had been spending much of his time in New York, where he and Sophia still lived (now in a low wooden building at 58 Stone Street, a twisting, crowded lane close to the waterfront). The ship's agents agreed to Vanderbilt's price. He then took three sailors from the USS
Cyane
, the ship's escort, in a small boat alongside the trapped vessel. He balanced an anchor on the end of a long board and pushed it out onto the ice, then used another board to push it farther, then another, until the anchor sank on the outside edge. He and his men hauled on the anchor line and cut a path through the ice. De Forest brought the
Nautilus
around and swiftly towed the ship out.
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The city itself felt frozen in as 1820 began. The previous year, a devastating financial panic had cut short the heady expansion that had followed the peace of 1815, depopulating the countinghouses faster than a plague. Politics still sank beneath the weight of the old order—the limited franchise, the mercantilist monopolies, the political favoritism bestowed upon the privileged few. And Gibbons's boats were barred from New York by Ogden and Livingston's injunctions, a matter of rising gossip and debate.

As the year progressed, the frozen crust began to crack. A state constitutional convention convened, holding out hope for a more democratic government. In Trenton, the New Jersey legislature passed a retaliatory act that allowed Gibbons to impound the boats of anyone who impounded his own under the New York monopoly law. He promptly seized Ogden's and Livingston's vessels, which forced them to allow the
Bellona
to run to New York while his appeal crept toward the Supreme Court and the business war raged on.
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Vanderbilt fought this war at water level, lashing his crew ahead in a literal race for business. On the Delaware River landings, stages for Gibbons's and Livingston's lines swallowed passengers from Philadelphia, then pounded up the turnpike in a bouncing, careening charge to New Brunswick. Frances Trollope later described one such chaise as “the most detestable stage-coach that ever Christian built to dislocate the joints of his fellow men. Ten of these torturing machines were crammed full of the passengers who left the boat with us.… Every face grew grim and scowling.” At New Brunswick, riders poured onto the pier as porters hurled their luggage onto associated steamers. “No sooner were we in the boats,” wrote passenger Anne Royall, than “the steam was liberally plied to the wheels, and a race… commenced for New-York.”

Down the Raritan and into the kills the
Bellona
and the
Olive Branch
plunged, paddlewheels beating the water, smoke trailing behind, as their pilots fought for any advantage. “It was quite an interesting sight to see such vast machines, in all their majesty, flying as it were, their decks covered with well-dressed people, face to face, so near to each other as to be able to converse,” Royall thought. “It is well calculated to amuse the traveller.” Speed was indeed everything: in a world where news generally traveled only as fast as people, first access to information from Philadelphia might mean a fortune to a speculator in New York. More than that, Americans were discovering a love of speed entirely for its own sake.

The daily race did nothing to mar the beauty of the Raritan. “For two or three miles the banks are pretty high,” wrote
Bellona
passenger Sam Griscom, “and covered mostly with shrubs of pine and cedar with here and there a neat farmhouse to vary and give greater beauty to the scene. Beyond this the salt marsh commences.… The river winds its way thro this to the Bay.” After more than an hour on board (with some three more hours left in the journey), Griscom sat down to “an excellent dinner,” noting with curiosity that New Yorkers referred to their change as shillings and sixpence. Then the passengers rushed back on deck as they steamed out of Kill Van Kull into the bay.

“In a short time, the numerous spires of New York suddenly make their appearance,” Griscom observed. “All around us the Bay is crowded with sails and Steam Boats with their long trails of smoke, crossing the Bay in all directions.… Directly ahead is the Battery… with the numerous masts of the shipping that line the wharves on each side of the city, the whole conspiring to render it the most delightful scene imaginable.” The view took away the breath of the most cosmopolitan passenger. “I have never seen the bay of Naples,” wrote Trollope, “but my imagination is incapable of conceiving any thing of the kind more beautiful than the harbour of New York”
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The
Bellona
—unlike the wedding-cake paddlewheelers that would soon teeter down every western river—ran low, sleek, and slender through the water. Ninety feet long and twenty-two wide, it had a low foredeck covered in an awning and dominated by a boxy pilothouse. Amidships loomed the paddlewheels sealed in arching wooden housings, a clanking working beam overhead that transmitted power from the piston, a pair of smokestacks, and dual copper boilers with blazing fireboxes, plus mounds of pine wood. Aft sat the main cabin, with its kitchen, dining room, and lounge.
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Lean and muscular, the twenty-six-year-old Vanderbilt remained very much the man of action, as the
Elizabeth
incident showed; but this enormous machine elevated him to another level of command. He presided as chief mariner, mayor, and magistrate of a temporary town, as he dealt with difficult passengers, tended to technical matters of the engine and hull, gave orders regarding navigation and speed, secured stocks of food and fuel, negotiated with harbormasters and customhouse officials, and coordinated with stagecoach drivers.

Then there were the lists he drew, the ledger entries that laid out line by line the complexity of this operation: the monthly payments made to the pilot, engineer, three firemen, four deckhands, “boy” cook, steward, chambermaid, three waiters, and “bar boy;” the equipment for the kitchen, the dutch oven, fish steamer, a pair of forty-gallon water casks, coffee boilers, frying pans, milk pails, and meat skewers; the payments for the lobsters, oysters, duck, and salmon, the veal, lamb, pork, and beef, plus fruits and roots and vegetables. Indeed, the
Bellona
was a floating restaurant serving nearly fifty diners at a time, who ordered glasses of brandy, claret, madeira, and gin from the bar. Trollope, writing later in the decade, marveled at this mobile social scene, describing the “gentlemen who… lounged on sofas, and balanced themselves in chairs… with all the conscious fascinations of stiff stays and neck-cloths… while doing to death the rash beauties who dared to gaze” from under “expansive bonnets.”
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And so the few days that Gibbons had asked for multiplied into a year, and then two, and then another. Vanderbilt's service, rather than compressing him into another's lackey, stretched his stature and business knowledge. And with knowledge came ambition. That same year he built the
Thorn
, described in the press as a schooner, and began construction of his own little steamboat, the
Carolina
, as a speculative venture. When Gibbons could not find a buyer for the
Mouse
, Vanderbilt decided to take it himself and sell it at a profit, handing Gibbons two promissory notes for a total of $1,500 (signed “Van Derbilt,” as usual, to contrast himself with his father).
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More and more, Vanderbilt acted as Gibbons's general agent, wandering the streets of New York to pay bills, collect intelligence, and visit lawyers. The experience lifted him from the world of deckhands, tides, and machinery breakdowns to that of quills and cravats, and he studied it carefully. Indeed, he now demonstrated an intensity and quickness of intellect that belied his coarse exterior. “Capt. V. is well acquainted with my case,” Gibbons tellingly wrote to one of his lawyers.
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In February 1821, Vanderbilt volunteered to go to Washington to hire the attorneys who would represent Gibbons before the Supreme Court: Daniel Webster and William Wirt, the attorney general of the United States. (In yet another example of the blurring of private interests and public office, Wirt maintained a private practice before the high court.) “I do not know a better way to present the fees… than by a special messenger,” Gibbons wrote, “and C.V. has a desire to hear the argument.”

Barely schooled but keen and shrewd, this blunt, bare-knuckled sailor rushed off to Washington to meet Wirt and Webster, two of the republic's foremost figures. He spent a couple of days going from one plush office to the next, shoving a meaty fist containing $500 into the hands of each man. The long-awaited day came on March 8, when the Supreme Court finally took up the steamboat case. The result was a crushing setback: the justices turned down the appeal on the grounds that New York's Court of Errors had not yet delivered a final verdict. Afterward Vanderbilt chatted with Webster, who promised to report to Gibbons about the case. The final battle would have to wait.
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VANDERBILT RETURNED TO NEW YORK
to his wife and the daughters who multiplied in their rooms on Stone Street. Phebe Jane had been born in 1814, Ethelinda in 1817, and Elizabeth (or Eliza) in 1819—and Sophia waddled under the weight of yet another pregnancy, which she no doubt planned to see to term with family on Staten Island.
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What passed between the captain and his cousin wife on his homecoming went unrecorded, whether it was tenderness, a stern insistence on a son, or simple neglect. What is known is that he once again began a frenzy of activity.

Soon afterward he launched the
Bellona
on a new season of high-speed competition, powered by another cut in the fare to Philadelphia. The repeated price reductions were a stark departure from the past. They delivered a competitive advantage, of course, but also showed that Gibbons and Vanderbilt believed in a growing market—that more and more people wanted to travel between the two cities, and would do so by steamboat if rates were cheap enough. This notion of an expanding economy was surprisingly new. The Livingstons' North River Steam Boat Company had kept the same number of boats running to Albany at the same fare for years, and saw ridership steadily
drop
. They believed there was a natural number of passengers, and that competition was destructive, robbing them of their due.

Increasingly, the belligerent John R. Livingston shoved aside Ogden as Gibbons's chief opponent. He seethed at the “mortification, trouble, & expence” resulting from the attack on the monopoly. “My right,” he stormed, using consummately patrician language, had been “invaded.” His son, R. Montgomery, felt the need to ask Ogden to “lend your aid” against Gibbons, writing, “We can destroy him.”
⁴⁵
Unable to impound the
Bellona
without having his own boat seized in New Jersey, Livingston came up with a new strategy: to file a lawsuit against Vanderbilt directly in the Marine Court, a minor bench limited to suits for $100 or less.

On May 29, 1821, two days after Vanderbilt's twenty-seventh birthday the lanky captain squinted from the deck of the
Bellona
up the North River pier where his boat was docked, and saw High Constable Jacob Hays approach. Hays announced that he had an arrest warrant from the Marine Court, and Vanderbilt erupted. “I was mad enough to defy the whole Livingston tribe, Old Hays included,” he later recalled, “but when I caught a glimpse of his calm and smiling face, and a twinkle in his eye, which… said as plain as words could express it, ‘If you don't obey the order of the court, and that damn soon, I'll make you do it, by God,’ I concluded to surrender.”

Forty-nine years old, stout, and quite bald, the heavy-eyed Hays had earned a fearsome reputation as the city's calm but inexorable chief law enforcement officer. He possessed considerable skill in subduing criminals; rather than tussle with a brawler, for example, he would knock off the offender's hat with his staff, and then send him sprawling on the ground the moment he bent over to retrieve it. “I didn't want to back down, however, too hurriedly,” Vanderbilt explained, “and I said that if they wanted to arrest me, they should carry me off the boat; and don't you know old Hays took me at my word, and landed me on the dock with a suddenness that took my breath away.”

The Marine Court quickly found Vanderbilt guilty of violating the monopoly law, and he appealed. Heady with the experience of meeting Webster and Wirt, flushed with anger at Livingston, he decided to take his own case to the Supreme Court. If Gibbons did not destroy the monopoly, then he would.
⁴⁶

If Livingston didn't destroy him first, that is. Just as the fare cuts heightened the competition, this legal clash intensified the animosity of the daily race, adding a growing sense of danger that soon became evident. On October 27, the
Bellona
churned up the Raritan at top speed alongside Livingston's
Olive Branch
, engines straining, paddles battering the water. Suddenly the
Branch's
captain spun the wheel. The vessel smashed into the
Bellona;
the sound of cracking wood reverberated as rails snapped off and part of the superstructure collapsed. Vanderbilt himself may have been at the helm, for his boat came through the harrowing collision with no serious damage.
⁴⁷

His response reflected a combination of technical and tactical mastery. One of the key problems for both competitors was the shallowness of the Raritan at New Brunswick; at low tide the rival steamboats had to row their passengers to the dock in scows. He could fix that, he thought, if the
Bellona
were cut in half and extended. “You will reccolect the Bellona must be halled up weather you have hir 12 feet longer or no, in order to repair hir bottom; that is, if you do hir justice,” he told Gibbons. Lengthening the boat would give it a proper forward cabin and reduce its draft, “which will enable us to go to the dock at all times.… That will do over all that besides a number of othair advantages we would gain.” Gibbons agreed.
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