The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (124 page)

58
John H. White Jr.,
The American Railroad Passenger Car
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 3–6, 8;
EP
, November 9, 11, 13;
NR
, September 28, November 16, 1833;
Hazard's Register
, November 16, 1833;
NYS
, November 14, 1877;
NYW
, November 14, 1877. On early locomotives used by the Camden & Amboy (including, most famously, the John Bull), see John H. White Jr.,
American Locomotives: An Engineering History, 1830–1880
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968).

Four
Nemesis

1
In addition to other sources cited below, see
NYT
, August 7, 1876.

2
NYW
, November 14, 15, 1877;
NYS
, November 14, 15, 1877.

3
Daniel Walker Howe,
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 373–95; see also Charles Sellers,
The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 313–32. Historians long debated whether Jackson and Jacksonian Democrats favored entrepreneurial capitalism or desired a primitive agrarian economy. The Consensus School claimed that Americans across the political spectrum were essentially in agreement that a market economy was good, as best argued by Bray Hammond in the still-valuable
Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 326–457. Other scholars from the same era depicted Jackson as a forefather of New Deal policies; see especially Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.,
The Age of Jackson
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1950), 74–131. A later wave of scholarship claimed that Jacksonians resisted the market economy; see especially John Ashworth Sellers,
“Agrarians” and “Aristocrats”: Party Political Ideology in the United States, 1837–1846
(New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1983), and, with more specific focus, Sean Wilentz,
Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). More recent scholarship has to some degree returned to the view that Jacksonians favored a market economy, though with greater subtlety than the Consensus School. See in particular Michael J. Connolly,
Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), as well as John M. McFaul,
The Politics of Jacksonian Finance
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), 1–15, and Peter Temin,
The Jacksonian Economy
(New York: Norton, 1969). I am very much in agreement with Howe, 364, who writes, “Economic enterprise generally became controversial only when government became involved.” For sources that document Jackson's financial policies, and his personal hostility to banking, see Herman E. Krooss, ed.,
Documentary History of Banking and Currency in the United States
(New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1965), 982–93, 1055.

4
The literature on Jacksonianism is vast. Unfortunately, even some of the best historians display a tendency to frown on Jacksonians as regressive or reactionary; see, for example, John Lauritz Larson's otherwise superb discussion in
Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 149–93, esp. 150, 192. In my claim that both Jacksonians and anti-Jacksonians favored markets, entrepreneur-ship, and development, I am in agreement with Howe, esp. 364, 501, and Connolly, 14. James L. Huston,
Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765–1900
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 83–151, offers a very insightful discussion of American economic culture (the “republican theory of wealth distribution,” as he calls it), stressing that the antebellum economy was dominated by horizontal expansion and small producers, despite the attention given to industrialization. Sean Wilentz,
The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 438, argues, “The Jacksonians opposed large government not because it burdened business but because they believed it was a creature of the monied and privileged few.… They aimed not to liberate private business interests from a corrupt government, but to liberate democratic government from the corrupting power of exclusive private business interests.” This was unquestionably true, but they clearly wished to liberate individuals as economic actors from the unfair advantages of the wealthy “aristocracy;” laissez-faire was both an economic means to a political end and a desired economic end state. One of the most influential books to this day remains Marvin Meyers's
The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), which argues, 7–15, that the Whigs and the Democrats were “fraternal twins” in their faith in the market economy, but that Democrats conjured up “moral plots” to rally their followers. I believe that Meyers, as insightful as he is, fails to appreciate how seriously Jacksonians took the threat that government action might give rise to a privileged class.

5
“President Andrew Jackson's Veto Message Regarding the Bank of the United States, July 10, 1832,” in
A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the President
(New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1897); Daniel Webster in Krooss, 787–8.

6
Sellers, 324, 336; Huston, 134; William M. Gouge,
A Short History of Paper Money and Banking in the United States
(Philadelphia: T. W. Ustick, 1833), 42, 833–4; Gregory A. Mark, “The Personification of the Business Corporation in American Law,”
University of Chicago Law Review
54, no. 4 (autumn 1987): 1441–83; Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Partnerships, Corporations, and the Limits on Contractual Freedom in U.S. History: An Essay in Economics, Law, and Culture,” in Kenneth Lipartito and David B. Scilia, eds.,
Constructing Corporate America: History, Politics, Culture
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 29–65. For insight into the Jacksonian hatred of the artificial, see Lawrence Frederick Kohl,
The Politics of Individualism: Parties and the American Character in the Jacksonian Era
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 35–8. Wilentz,
Rise of American Democracy
, 440–1, argues that hard-money Jacksonians were emphatically not economic primitivists who “aimed at turning back the clock,” and often were as sophisticated as their opponents. There is a great deal of truth to this, yet I believe that Wilentz downplays their discomfort with economic abstractions. Even corporate figures had difficulty grasping them, as will be seen in later chapters of this book. However, I agree with Wilentz's argument, 511, 513, that Jacksonians envisioned a commercial economy of agricultural small producers, and distrusted speculation and credit.

7
EP
, August 28, 1834; James Willard Hurst,
The Legitimacy of the Business Corporation in the Law of the United States, 1780–1970
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1970), 30–43.

8
Huston, 134, 251–5; Pauline Maier, “The Revolutionary Origins of the American Corporation,”
WMQ
, 3rd ser., vol. 50, no. 1 (January 1993): 51–84;
EP
, August 28, 1834; Gouge, 41–2. Ashworth notes correctly that Democrats embraced self-interest, Adam Smith, and laissez-faire, but argues incorrectly, in my view, that they could be summarized as “anti-entrepreneurial” and agrarian (e.g., 21, 51). Naomi R. Lamoreaux shows (as my own research does as well) that early corporations only slowly took on the characteristics cited here; see “Partnerships, Corporations, and the Limits on Contractual Freedom in U.S. History.” The abstraction of economic reality and the cultural shock it induced is one of my central themes. On this topic, see Daniel J. Boorstin,
The Americans: The Democratic Experience
(New York: Random House, 1973), 414–6, who discusses “a new mystery, a new unintelligibility” of corporations—“this new metaphysic of property,” as he calls it. Boorstin, however, focuses on the late nineteenth century, whereas I believe this was felt decades earlier. Joseph A. Schumpeter discusses the “evaporation of the substance of property” in
Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
(New York: Harper &Brothers, 1942), 156–8.

9
Krooss, 1026–7; Huston, 252; A. B. Johnson, “Advantages and Disadvantages of Private Corporations,”
MM
, December 1850, 626–31 (italics added); Gouge, 42. Taylor, 242, offers an excellent brief discussion of the controversy over corporations, as does Kohl, 66, 96, and Ashworth, 79. The law also insisted on the centrality of the persons behind corporations; see Mark, “Personification.” Meyers, 11, astutely notes, “Americans were boldly liberal in economic affairs, out of conviction and appetite combined, and moved their world in the direction of modern capitalism. But they were not inwardly prepared for the grinding uncertainties, the shocking changes, the complexity and indirection of the new economic ways.”

10
Burrows & Wallace, 571–5;
EP
, November 13, 1833;
NYW
, November 14, 1877; Sellers, 332–7; Hone, 110–2. See also
NR
, November 2, 1833.

11
Howe,
What Hath God Wrought
, 537–36, esp. 582–84; Daniel Walker Howe,
The Political Culture of the American Whigs
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), esp. 9–20, 181; Amy Bridges,
A City in the Republic: Antebelleum New York and the Origins of Machine Politics
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 19–24; Meyers, 12–5; Michael A. Bernstein, “Northern Labor Finds a Southern Champion: A Note on the Radical Democracy,” in William Pencak and Conrad Edick Wright, eds.,
New York and the Rise of American Capitalism: Economic Development and the Social and Political History of an American State, 1780–1870
(New York: New-York Historical Society, 1989), 147–67. As L. Ray Gunn notes in “The Crisis of Distributive Politics: The Debate over State Debts and Development Policy in New York, 1837–1842,” Pencak and Wright, 168–201, the Democratic Albany Regency made active use of the state to promote development. Ashworth offers an astute interpretation of the Whig orientation, 54–68, and the Federalist legacy, 117–8. My view that many Whigs were suspicious of competition will be developed over the succeeding chapters.

12
NYW
, November 14, 1877;
EP
, August 30, 1834, February 10, 1837. On CVs address at this time, see Croffut, 279.

13
EP
, August 30, 1834, September 10, 1833;
Albany Argus
, March 15, 1834;
Charles Hoyt v. John Brooks Jr. and Others
, May 8, 1833, file BM 2163-H, Court of Chancery, and
James Ingham and James Leslie v. CV
, December 15, 1834, file 1834-#756, Court of Common Pleas, NYCC. On the
Water Witch
, see also
New York Illustrated Magazine of Literature and Art
, September 20, 1845.

14
Robert Stevens's brother, John C. Stevens, remained a member of the association. See Articles of Agreement between Robert L. Stevens and John C. Stevens, Anthony N. Hoffman, et al., December 1, 1832, fold. 13, box 34, Stevens Family Papers, New Jersey Historical Society, Newark, N.J. The agreement was made with Anthony N. Hoffman, Michael Van Beuren, Smith Cutter, James Mason (owners of the
Ohio
, the
Constellation
, and the
Constitution)
, Alsop Weed, Griffith P. Griffith, Le Grande Cannon (owners of the
Erie
and the
Champlain)
, James A. Stevens (owner of th
e Albany)
, and Robert Dunlop (owner of the
DeWitt Clinton)
.