The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (112 page)

Dr. William Bodenhamer would later talk about his treatment of Vanderbilt during the month when Linsly was bedridden. He spoke at length about Vanderbilt's faith in Spiritualism and his short-tempered explosions. He said that he explained to Vanderbilt that his enlarged prostate was likely the result of gonorrhea or “excessive venery”—too much sex. As for Vanderbilt's mental state, “I do not know that I ever did know a more clear-headed man under such suffering,” Bodenhamer declared. “I never saw him when his mind was not clear. In my opinion, he was at all times capable of transacting any business he was accustomed to.”
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Knowing the public impact of his illness, Vanderbilt pulled himself together to see a reporter in early May. He sat up in his sickbed and explained that he was recovering, though still weak, and he knowledgeably discussed the ongoing rate war. He explained that the New York Central “is placed on the defensive by all the other trunk lines—one road demanding the right to reduce fares because it is a longer route, and the other roads demanding the same right because they are shorter routes.” The natural superiority of New York as a port, he said, gave the Central a critical advantage. All it had to do was defend itself. “‘In other words,’ said he, as he turned to look through some letters just brought him, ‘since I have been a railroad man it has always been my practice to let my opponents make the rates, and I follow them so long as they do not put the rate so high as to be an imposition on the public’”
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A few days later, a reporter for the
New York Herald
called at 10 Washington Place. As a servant held the door open, the reporter saw Frank striding toward him when “the well known voice of the Commodore came rolling vigorously after her, saying, ‘Tell the gentleman from the Herald that even my slight local disorder is now almost entirely removed.… Even if I were dying I could knock all the truth that there is in the wretches who start these reports out of them, and that, as vigorous as I am at present, I would, were they within easy reach, knock all the lies for hereafter out of them.” Frank, now at the door, said “the Commodore's declaration was quite in accordance with her view of the case.”
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William often came to consult with his father, as did Worcester. On one occasion, Worcester found the Commodore stretched out on a kind of bed set up over a bathtub—presumably so he could sit in steam—smoking a cigar. Vanderbilt said that he wished to establish a home for disabled employees, and endow it with $500,000 of second-mortgage Lake Shore bonds. He wanted it to serve New York Central workers first, and later those of the Lake Shore as well. He ordered Worcester to draw up a plan but keep it from William until he was finished. Also, Worcester recalled, “the Commodore said he did not want the lazy to be assisted by the institution.”
¹¹⁶

All the while, he suffered. At the end of May, Frank began to keep a diary, a grim record of his agony, his bowel movements (or lack of them), his fevers, his explosions, his despair, his love for her. “Regrets so any hard expressions he uses during the painful paroxysms,” she wrote on June 4. “Com. strained
all
day. Had a natural passage from the bowels in the night,” she wrote on June 17. “So tempted to temper & hard words. Dr. says disease makes him so,” she wrote on June 26. On days when he was feeling better, he laughed and joked and teased his nurse and doctors mercilessly
¹¹⁷

Often he received visits from his sister Phebe, who was close to the Crawfords. Speaking of Frank, he told her, “She has been so good to me, so true, so pure. I know she will never do dishonor to your
name
, Phebe. Say to my family too no matter how they do, they will always find her a Lady.… She may be like other women, but I have never detected any selfishness in her.” This combination of honest affection, keen searching of character, and harsh characterization (“like other women”) was vintage Vanderbilt. As he told Frank after a particularly bad night, “Tho' my manner had been rough to you, there was always love beneath my rough exterior to protect you from all harm.” His capacity for love did not contradict his famously domineering nature; it simply made him more complex. Frank wrote,

He never lost the habit of controlg others. Lizzie his nurse was disposed to argue for what
she
thought would make him comfortable. He would say, “Quick quick Lizzie not a word but do the work.” Asked for his spectacles & put them on with great deliberation & took Dr. Eliot's hand & examined his nails, ran his fingers over them very closely & carefully to see if they could possibly hurt him. His flesh was so sensitive. Dr. had trimmed his nails fortunately
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Both sides of his personality came out when dealing with his daughters. One day Martha Crawford asked if Frank really had to speak to Sophia Torrance, who had snubbed Frank so often. Some in the family said she should, Crawford said. “Who said so?” Vanderbilt asked.
“No
. She [Sophia] misused [Frank] & let her make the first advances.” At his insistence, Sophia apologized and shook hands with Frank in his presence. On August 4, he spoke to Mary La Bau, who demanded that he redraw his will. “Now don't be stubborn & give trouble,” he said. “I have left you all enough to live like ladies.” Frank wrote, “When she began to argue that she was not stubborn, he merely waved his hand at her, as if he could not hear more.”
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He frequently received visitors, ranging from old steamboat captains to Thurlow Weed. He sent telegrams to Bishop McTyeire. He read and criticized Worcester's lengthy report on the home for railroad workers. He listened to Frank, her mother, and Phebe sing. On September 12, Frank wrote, “He sent to the sitting room for me, kissed me, & asked me when I was going to the Centennial.” The national centennial fair in Philadelphia was the great cultural event of the age. Vanderbilt said, “You ought to go one day at least, & come home at night.” It took weeks before she was willing to leave his side, even for so short a time. When she read him the news of Braxton Bragg's death, he snapped, “Yes, I know about
that.”
(Someone had told him earlier.) Frank wrote that he “remarked how well it [was] he had not taken him [Bragg] in his business as he once wished he had (that was when we were married). Head still so clear.” His memory was sharp, she noted; he often corrected others, saying, “I don't forget what I remember.”
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His condition rose and fell, his pain swelled and subsided. In August, he endured an unspecified operation. Frank could tell it was
“awfully painful.…
It was heart-rending to witness his agony.” The doctors felt certain that he would die in its aftermath, but he rallied. On September 27, she noted, “He agrees with Dr. Linsly ‘No cure.’ Com seems oppressed but I played the piano for him & he revived wonderfully”
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Vanderbilt faced eternity. “He has queer dreams occasionally,” Frank wrote. “He dreamed he had been away down to the bottom but was coming up again & that it took all the power of the steamer
Vanderbilt
to pull him out but she did.” On October 5, he discussed business with Amasa Stone for half an hour, then met with Worcester. Afterward he called Frank to his bedside. “This morning he was trying to express himself to me about his soul & salvation & said for the first time, ‘Why don't you talk to me?’” she wrote. “I did & afterwards read him some beautiful prayers & he would say amen & ‘How sweet’ & showed plainly he enjoyed & felt them.” He actually prayed to Jesus for salvation. “I asked, ‘Dear, is it because you love him or is it to be relieved of the pain?’ He replied, ‘To be candid—both.’” He turned to Linsly and said, “Dr., it may be selfish, but I would take Frank with me, if I could.” He even said farewell to Corneil. After many refusals, he allowed him in for a last chat. “Poor unfortunate boy,” he said. “You make good resolutions but are not able to keep them from here to Broadway”
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Almost every day during his long illness, the nation's leading newspapers published reports on Vanderbilt's condition, what he had eaten, how he had slept, what visitors said of his condition. This extraordinary attention underscored Vanderbilt's unique, self-made position in American society—the personification of the otherwise faceless corporations that increasingly overshadowed the land. But the death watch also prepared the public and the markets for his demise, assuring that there would be no collapse of his stock prices. Vanderbilt's long agony was his final gift to William.

On December 16, William attended a conference at the Windsor Hotel that ended the rate war on favorable terms. Two days later, he went to 10 Washington Place, along with Worcester and the auditor of the Lake Shore. The Commodore spoke to them at length about the proper relationship of the Canada Southern to his other railroads.
¹²³

By this time, Vanderbilt's diverticulitis had resulted in a perforated colon. Fecal matter squeezed out of the intestine. Peritonitis set in.

At 9:12 a.m. on January 4, 1877, William sent a telegram to Bishop McTyeire at Vanderbilt University “Father is very low. Be prepared for the worst.” At 11:41 a.m., he sent a second telegram. “Commodore passed away at nine minutes to eleven this morning.” At 9:55 p.m., he sent a third. “Father passed away at nine minutes of eleven o'clock this morning without a struggle, surrounded by his entire family,” he wrote. “Dr. Deems offered up prayers a few minutes before, all of which he perfectly understood and responded acquiescence by motions.… Mrs. V. is very much depressed & we all feel very sad. A great loss which we hardly realize.”
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EPILOGUE

T
hey never learned his secrets. Starting on November 12, 1877, crowds of onlookers filled the seats in Surrogate Court, watching the lawyers of William H. Vanderbilt and Mary La Bau battle over the sanity of Cornelius Vanderbilt. The trial dragged on for week after week, month after month. The attorneys called as witnesses the great and the marginal, the convincing and the convicted, whose testimony was sometimes insightful, often salacious, and frequently misleading. The result was a bizarre, fragmented mosaic of true and false moments in the Commodore's life, lacking context, missing vast stretches of his activities or inner life. This image would harden in memory until it formed a kind of shield, blocking any deeper penetration of the man.
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The great will contest went on for two years, two months, and four days. At various points, Ethelinda Allen and Cornelius Jeremiah fought alongside their sister. In the end, William won, but he also doubled their shares of the estate. He gave Ethelinda Allen the interest on an additional $400,000 in U.S. bonds, for example, and added $200,000 to Corneil's trust fund. William retained control of their father's empire.
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William's words to McTyeire said everything about his father's death. Sons are notoriously prone to exaggerate the importance of their fathers, as are biographers with their subjects, yet few nineteenth-century businessmen equaled Vanderbilt in his impact on American history. A handful of rival candidates come to mind—-John Jacob Astor, John D. Rockefeller Sr., Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, perhaps Jay Gould and Thomas A. Scott—but arguably none proved to be so influential at so fundamental a level over a period so formative or so long. His accomplishments bear repeating. With his role in
Gibbons v. Ogden
, he helped to transform the Constitution by tearing down state-erected barriers to trade and shattering the remnants of the eighteenth-century culture of deference. Vanderbilt epitomized the commercial, individualistic society that emerged in the early nineteenth century, and contributed to the creation of a culture in which competition was a personal, economic, and political virtue. With his leading part in the transportation revolution, he helped to shape America's newly mobile society, and to foster long-distance trade and the early textile industry of New England. With the gold rush, Vanderbilt's impact on the geography of the United States grew even more marked. Since steamship travel via Central America was the primary channel of migration, commerce, and finance with the Pacific coast, his Nicaragua line and related ventures fed the growth of San Francisco and the state of California. He also sped the flow of high-powered money to Manhattan, feeding the boom of the 1850s. Indeed, all his enterprises contributed to the rise of New York as America's financial capital.

With the approach of the Civil War, the Commodore's influence on history continued undiminished. Though he transformed Nicaragua into a target for filibusters, he delivered the decisive blow against William Walker, one of the most dangerous international criminals of the nineteenth century, in the face of Washington's inaction and hostility. Vanderbilt played a significant role in the Union war effort—one perhaps best measured by the Confederates' failure to interrupt the shipment of gold from California. More important, he took on the role of railroad king as railways became central to American life. Step by step, he overcame the fragmentation of the system and built unprecedented new infrastructure. With his son as operational manager, he reduced costs and introduced new efficiency into long-distance transportation, helping to integrate the national economy and transform it into an industrial empire.

All this formed a legacy that would remain central to the United States into the twenty-first century—from its individualistic, opportunity-minded culture to its sprawling, continental scale to its dense transportation networks. And yet, he may have left his most lasting mark in the invisible world, by creating an unseen architecture which later generations of Americans would take for granted. The modern economic mind began to emerge in Vanderbilt's lifetime, amid fierce debate, confusion, and intense resistance. The imagined devices of commerce gradually abstracted the tangible into mere tokens, and then less than tokens. Money transformed from gold coin to gold-backed banknotes to legal-tender slips of paper and ledger entries of bank accounts. Property migrated from physical objects to the shares of partnerships to par-value stock to securities that fluctuated according to the market, that could be increased in number at will. Like a ghost, the business enterprise departed the body of the individual proprietor and became a being in itself, a corporation with its own identity, its own character, its own personhood.

Over the course of his career, Vanderbilt lived out the history of this abstraction, the invention of this imagined world. More than that, he took it to a new level by pioneering the giant corporation. By consolidating his New York lines into the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad, he constructed something larger than himself, not to mention virtually every other enterprise that had ever existed. It was a massive organization, one that served to depersonalize, to institutionalize, American business and life. It helped to lead the way to a future dominated by large enterprises possessing wealth and power that changed not only the economic landscape, but the political one as well. A new matrix began to emerge, as radicals began to think of the state as the natural counterweight to the business corporation. This, too, is Vanderbilt's legacy.

The Commodore's life left its mark on Americans' most basic beliefs about equality and opportunity. He epitomized the Jacksonian ideal of every man being free to compete and rise on his merits, and that ideal remains a bright thread in the fabric of American thought. Yet his unprecedented wealth—and with it, unprecedented power—signaled that inequalities were exploding in size with the new corporate economy. Mark Twain's term “gilded age” came to stand for the extreme polarization of riches and poverty in the late nineteenth century, a polarization that Vanderbilt led. His life marks the start of the Era of Great Fortunes. And when he handed down the bulk of his fortune to one son and his sons, he created something that his fellow citizens had long thought to be the corrupt artifact of the aristocratic societies of Europe—that is, he started a dynasty. His example would be followed by Rockefeller and Ford and others. The inheritance of such fortunes had been roundly condemned in the early republic; indeed, early critics of the corporation feared that it would undermine the natural process by which estates were broken up upon death. Vanderbilt and the dynasts who followed him not only created a Gilded Age, they caused their fellow Americans to reexamine the place where opportunity and equality collided.

But Vanderbilt's admirers as well as his critics demand attention. On January 5, 1877, the directors of the U.S. railroads Vanderbilt had led as president—the New York & Harlem, the New York Central & Hudson River, and the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern—met and issued a joint tribute to their chief. It was hagiography of course, but it spoke to how his followers saw him at the moment of his death. An excerpt:

The truest monument to CORNELIUS VANDERBILT is the fact that he so organized his creation that the work will go on, though the master workman is gone.…

His career was a dazzling success. In an age and a country distinguished for their marvelous personal triumphs, his achievements rank among the most extraordinary and distinctive of all. Thoroughly practical and faithfully wrought out, their splendor yet gives them the tinge of romance.… He was essentially the creator, not the creature, of the circumstances which he moulded to his purposes. He was the architect of his own fortune. Beginning in a humble position, with apparently little scope of action and small promise of opportunity, he rose, by his genius, his indomitable energy and his clear forecast, to the control of vast enterprises involving millions of property and connected with the interests of millions of people.…

It is to his lasting honor that his uniform policy was to protect, develop, and improve the interests with which he was connected, instead of seeking a selfish and dishonorable profit through their detriment and sacrifice. The rights and welfare of the smallest stockholder were as well guarded as his own. In a period of crafty devices for sinister ends, he taught the way of success through legimate means.…

With all his brilliant success, his frank simplicity of character and habits remained unchanged. In the height of his rare fortune he was the same direct, provident, unostentatious man as before he had mounted to his large opportunities. The sterling qualities of his strong and commanding individuality were deeply appreciated by all who were associated with him. He was firm and true in his friendships.
³

It was no wonder that the press devoted massive attention to his death. It was as if a head of state had died—the self-made chief executive of a country that he himself had invented, rather like a cross between George Washington and Genghis Khan. Generations had come of age in his shadow. At his funeral on Sunday, January 7, 1877, the great and powerful, past and present, came to salute him: Peter Cooper, Charles O'Conor, Thurlow Weed, Edwin D. Morgan, Cyrus W. Field, Daniel Drew, Marshall O. Roberts, Frank Work, William E. Dodge, and Augustus Schell, among many others. After a viewing of the body at 10 Washington Place and a ceremony at the Church of the Strangers, a line of carriages carried his casket down to Whitehall Slip, where he had first set foot in New York three-quarters of a century before. It crossed the harbor on the ferry he had created, to be buried in the family tomb.
⁴

His children would agree that he was a hard man. They often suffered from his imperious manner, most pronounced when among his family. When his onetime friend John Morrissey heard of his death, he said, “Well, he died without making a bad debt or leaving a friend. See how all of them went to bed happily last night.” Later Morrissey would declare, “I have known in the course of my life burglars, fighting men, and loafers, but never have I known such a bad fellow as Commodore Vanderbilt.”
⁵

But Morrissey was one of those who had hoped to get rich quickly and effortlessly from his association with Vanderbilt. So were all of the Commodore's bitterest enemies, including Joseph L. White and John M. Davidson. Most of those foes who met him in open combat—Cornelius Garrison, Charles Morgan, Marshall Roberts, William Aspinwall, Erastus Corning, and his quondam partner Daniel Drew—admired him, and socialized with him after their conflicts ended. It is a fact of human nature that one need not be nice to be liked and respected, and so it was with Vanderbilt. His fellow businessmen appreciated his forthrightness, capability, honesty, dignity, sense of honor, and force of personality. They felt that he had earned his pride in himself. More than that, they knew that Vanderbilt was as accomplished and patient as a diplomat as he was fierce and unrelenting as a competitor. More and more over the years, he sought compromise, common ground, accommodation. As a railroad leader, he fought each war of conquest only as a last resort, after repeated negotiations had failed.

The image of Vanderbilt as the man of force is powerful, so much so that it can easily be forgotten that he was a man, emotional and complicated. Here and there, his vulnerabilities and sensitivities poke through the cracks of the stony historical record. He was often difficult with both his wives, yet he loved and needed them. He was disgusted with Corneil's weaknesses, yet he agonized over his own inability to bring about his reformation, and he cherished Corneil's wife, Ellen, and her family. He was a difficult father for all of his sons. With his immense personal capabilities, he set an impossibly high standard. Even William suffered in his father's huge, dark shadow, yet Vanderbilt also respected William's decisions once he had given his son the authority to make them. The Commodore browbeat the younger generations of his clan, too, yet he gave his sons-in-law the highest positions of responsibility in his businesses, and repeatedly sought favors from presidents and associates for his nephews and grandsons.

His family loved him in return, as could be seen even in the pain he sometimes caused them. The Thorns, for example, felt wounded by the Commodore's remark that their children were not Vanderbilts—because his opinion mattered to them. Corneil, too, deeply loved his father. During the Commodore's final hours on his deathbed, Corneil wrote to George Terry, “I fear the time is at hand & God knows I regret it.” But Corneil would not last much longer than his father. With his inheritance he reportedly repaid his debt to Greeley's estate, then managed to fall into bankruptcy once more. On April 2, 1882, with Terry in the next room, he put a revolver to his temple and shot himself to death. Frank followed on May 4, 1885, falling dead of a stroke at 10 Washington Place. Her letters and diary make clear that she loved her husband deeply; though more than four decades younger than he, she lasted barely eight years without him.
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The Commodore did value one family member more than the others in a most important respect. He intended to found a dynasty, and he planned for William to lead the next generation. The fortune he passed down largely to his eldest son is impossible to calculate. The press guessed that it was worth anywhere from $85 million to $115 million, based on the par value of what his holdings
might
have been in his railroads and Western Union. On the day that Vanderbilt died, Worcester—who handled many of his personal affairs—told a reporter, “About $100,000,000 is as near to a fair valuation as can be put upon the estate of Mr. Vanderbilt.” Three problems make it impossible to find a more exact figure. First, the market value of his stock fluctuated. At the start of 1877, in the midst of the depression, it was low compared to recent years, though not at the absolute bottom; prices would rise as the economy improved. Second, up to almost the moment of Vanderbilt's death, he hid his shares under others' names, as his notes to James Banker and Worcester's testimony show. Worcester himself may not have known the full story. Finally, Vanderbilt transferred much of his wealth to William and his sons before his death. He gave all of his real estate, worth many millions, to William at about the time of his marriage to Frank, and transferred tens of thousands of railroad shares at various times. When William died on December 8, 1885, his estate was estimated at $200 million, and he was admired for doubling his inheritance in just a few years. In fact, there is good reason to believe that, had the Commodore lived eight years longer, and left his estate just as it was but kept it together as a single unit, his fortune would not have been worth much less than William's was when he died.
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