The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (116 page)

PART ONE CAPTAIN

One
The Islander

1
NYT
, November 13, 1877. For reporting on the opening of the trial, see almost any New York newspaper starting on this date.

2
Annual Report of the Comptroller of the Currency
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1876), 45–69. I am including national, state, and private banks in calculating this figure, but I am leaving out savings banks. Even so, this figure somewhat exaggerates money stock, as it includes all coin and bullion, much of which was not in circulation. Note that the
New York Times
, July 15, 2007, calculated that Vanderbilt was the second-wealthiest figure in American history by comparing his estate to the size of the national economy. Such estimates are questionable, due to the poor quality of economic statistics in the nineteenth century.

3
CFA, “A Chapter of Erie,”
NAR
, July 1869.

4
Mark Twain, “Open Letter to Com. Vanderbilt,”
Packard's Monthly
, March 1869.

5
On the emergence of the term “business man,” see Sven Beckert,
The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 256–7.

6
Isaac Lea to Horatio King, September 26, 1859, SED 45, 36th Cong., 1st sess., vol. 11;
NYT
, February 9, 1859.

7
See, for example,
NYH
, April 17, 1855.

8
Lane, 4–10;
Staten Island Advance
, June 29, 1907.

9
Burrows & Wallace, 50–89, 122–35; Michael Kammen,
Colonial New York: A History
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975), 128–60, 241; Oliver A. Rink, “Before the English (1609–1664),” in Milton M. Klein, ed.,
Empire State: A History of New York
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 21–3; Joyce D. Goodfriend, “Writing/Righting Dutch Colonial History,”
NYHis
80, no. 1 (January 1999): 5–28; Cathy Matson,
Merchants & Empire: Trading in Colonial New York
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1998), 4–10; Richard Middleton,
Colonial America: A History, 1607–1760
(Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), 82–8;
NYH
, January 14, 1877.

10
Firth Haring Fabend, “The Synod of Dort and the Persistence of Dutchness in Nineteenth-Century New York and New Jersey,”
NYHis 77
, no. 3 (July 1996): 273–300; Peter O. Wacker, “The Dutch Culture Area in the Northeast, 1609–1800,”
New Jersey History
104, nos. 1–2 (spring and summer 1986): 1–22; Martin Bruegel,
Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780–1860
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 38; Goodfriend, 26; Rink, 61, 105–7.

11
Fabend; Wacker; Goodfriend, 26; Shane White,
Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810
(Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 4–27, 189–90.

12
Fabend; Bruegel, 38; Rink, 61, 105–7; White, 4–27, 189–90; Edward Countryman, “From Revolution to Statehood (1776–1825),” in Klein, 229–305, esp. 248; Goodfriend, 26; Rocellus S. Guernsey,
New York City and Vicinity During the War of 1812–15
(New York: C. L. Woodward, 1889–95), 1:47–50; First Census of the United States, Richmond County, New York; Ira K. Morris,
Morris's Memorial History of Staten Island, New York
, vol. 2 (Staten Island: Ira Morris, 1900), 4–6; Burrows & Wallace, 51–89. As Allan Kulikoff notes,
The Origins of American Capitalism
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 30–3, it is important not to go too far in describing American agriculture as “subsistence farming.” Early on, Northern farmers took part in both local and extended market exchanges. James A. Henretta, “The ‘Market’ in the Early Republic,”
Journal of the Early Republic
18 (spring 1998): 289–304, observes, “Clearly the United States economy during the early republic was primarily a market-based, price-driven system. But… that economy also included elements of an older barter economy that was imbedded in the social structure of many communities.” The Dutch-English contrast in market orientation must be considered relative, not absolute.

13
Numerous informal periauger ferries ran from Staten Island to New York (and often to New Jersey). CVs appears to have started in about 1800, competing with the Van Duzer family which began to run boats across the harbor as early as 1788; Ira K. Morris,
Morris's Memorial History of Staten Island
(New York: Memorial Publishing, 1898), 1:391–5.
Periauger
was pronounced as well as spelled in various ways; the most common alternate was pettiauger (used in the New York Custom House registration books). The name appears to be related to “periagua” or “pirogue,” a sea going canoe common to Central and South America, first encountered by the Spanish in the sixteenth century. See Peter Kemp, ed.,
The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 651.

14
The earliest published stories about CVs family and early life appeared in the 1850s. See
SA
, June 18, 1853;
HW
, March 5, 1859;
MM
, January 1865; James Parton,
Famous Americans of Recent Times
(Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867), 377–90; Lane, 9–13; Croffut, 10–17 (including the quote about Phebe Hand Vanderbilt); Bruegel, 54. Regarding Phebe's apparent career as a moneylender, see
Phebe Vanderbilt v. Charles M. Simonson et al
. April 17, 1844, file D-CH 177-V, Court of Chancery, NYCC. The best evidence that Phebe did indeed store her money in the clock is a reference to it in a poem by CVs son-in-law James M. Cross in 1863; see
Memorial of the Golden Wedding of Cornelius and Sophia Vanderbilt, December 19, 1863
(New York: Baker & Godwin, 1864), 27, copy at Duke.

15
Bruegel, 54–5; Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt,
Travels Through the United States of North America, the Country of the Iroquois, and Upper Canada, in the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797; with an Authentic Account of Lower Canada
(London: R. Phillips, 1799), 561–2.

16
Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, 230.

17
First Census of the United States; Taylor, 6–8; Walter Licht,
Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1995), xiii-xiv.

18
Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, quotes on 460, 462, 463, 474, 476; for his perceptive discussion of economics and Americans' attitudes toward commerce, see 439–76. John Lauritz Larson,
Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 37, stresses that the founding generation of the republic saw the need for transportation improvements. The trade ratios are imprecise at best, and reflect registered tonnage engaged in foreign and domestic trade; see Allan R. Pred,
Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities, 1790–1840
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 7, 104–9; Doug lass C. North,
The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860
(New York: Prentice-Hall, 1961), 24–35, 43, 250; Elisha P. Douglass,
The Coming of Age of American Business: Three Centuries of Enterprise, 1600–1900
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), 39; Dorothy Gregg, “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), 121; Diane Lindstrom,
Economic Development in the Philadelphia Region, 1810–1850
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 3–18; Kulikoff, 30–3; Countryman, 314. For key arguments in the debate over the emergence of capitalism in the American countryside, see Allan Kulikoff, “The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America,”
WMQ
, 3rd ser., vol. 46, no. 1 (January 1989): 120–44; Henretta, “The ‘Market’ in the Early Republic,” 289–304; Joyce Appleby “The Vexed Story of Capitalism Told by American Historians,”
Journal of the Early Republic
21, no. 1 (spring 2001): 1–18; and Appleby,
Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 1–25, 56–90, 250–66. Appleby in particular argues forcefully and well that Americans embraced the market as a force of liberation.

19
Taylor, 6–8; Licht, xiii-xiv; Edmund M. Blunt,
Blunt's Stranger's Guide to the City of New-York
(New York: Edmund M. Blunt, 1817), 43; Guernsey, 1:133; John Lambert,
Travels Through Canada, and the United States of North America, in the Years 1806, 1807, and 1808
(London: C. Cradock, 1814), 2:55; David H. Wallace, ed., “‘From the Windows of the Mail Coach’: A Scotsman Looks at New York State in 1811,”
NYHSQ
40, no. 3 (July 1956): 264–96.