The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (131 page)

6
NYH
, December 26, 27, 1850; entry for December 26, 1850, Joseph N. Allen Diary (Allen Diary), BL. See also
LT
, January 21, 1851.

7
See Allen's obituary,
NYT
, March 15, 1883.

8
Allen Diary; Ephraim George E. Squier,
Nicaragua: Its People, Scenery, Monuments, and the Proposed Interoceanic Canal
(New York: D. Appleton, 1856), 56,
72–4; Harper's New Monthly Magazine
, December 1854. On CVs selection of Punta Arenas, see
NYH
, August 15, 1854.

9
Allen Diary. The
Orus
would soon be wrecked on the river; as a result, the vessel that CV piloted on this occasion has regularly been misidentified as the
Director
. See Lane, 92, and Folkman, 26. However, the Allen Diary makes clear that the
Director
was already on the lake.

10
Allen Diary;
HW
, March 5, 1859;
SA
, February 8, 1851;
NYH
, January 22, 1851.

11
Allen Diary;
NYTr
, March 21, 1851.

12
Squier, 136–8; Allen Diary.

13
Allen Diary;
NYTr
, March 21, 1851.

14
Allen Diary;
NYTr
, February 10, 1851;
NYH
, February 1, 27, 1851.

15
Allen Diary.

16
John Guthrie,
A History of Marine Engineering
(London: Hutchinson Educational, 1971), 17, 44, 60; Cedric Ridgely-Nevitt,
American Steamships on the Atlantic
(Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1981),
69
, 98–101, 105–6, 153, 223;
LT
, March 18, 1851.

17
NYH
, February 23, 1851;
LT
, March 18, 1851;
SA
, March 29, 1851. A Darius Davison supposedly accepted the bet; no more was ever heard of him.

18
SED 50, 32nd Cong., 1st sess., vol. 8;
Congressional Globe
, January 17, 1851.

19
NYH
, March 6, 1851.

20
NYT
, February 7, 1856; SED 50, 32nd Cong., 1st sess., vol. 8. Law also became a heavy investor in Aspinwall's Panama Railroad, the largest buyer of the company's bonds; see
NYTr
, June 16, 1851. For Law's efforts to improve the speed of the mail delivery under such threats as Vanderbilt's, see George Law to N. K. Hall, July 21, 1851, SR 326, 35th Cong., 1st sess., vol. 2. For details on the U.S. Mail and Pacific Mail assets and operations, see SR 292, 36th Cong., 2nd sess., vol. 1.

21
Daniel T. Rodgers,
The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850–1920
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1974), 19, notes, “As late as 1850 the centers of manufacturing remained the home and workshop.”

22
RGD, NYC, 316:48, 81.

23
Heyl, 1:123, 219, 307, 331; NYTr, February 10, 25, May 27, 1851;
LT
, June 30, July 16, 23, 1851; P. T. Barnum,
Struggles and Triumphs; or, Forty Years' Recollections of P. T. Barnum
(Buffalo, N.Y: Warren, Johnson, 1873), 362–3; John A. Butler,
Atlantic Kingdom: America's Contest with Cunard in the Age of Sail and Steam
(Washington, D.C.: Brassey's, 2001), 177–8. Tonnage figures tend to vary by source, and should be viewed as approximate.

24
LT
, August 28, 1851;
AltaC
, August 31, September 2, 1851; Folkman, 29–30.

25
LT
, August 28, 1851;
AltaC
, August 31, September 2, 1851; Folkman, 29–30. A debate raged over the Nicaragua route in the San Francisco newspapers in early September. Rabe's fellow passenger, Harris T. Fitch, found the crossing entirely satisfactory, and said that Rabe's complaints only started after he was forced to pay for the second half of his journey to California.

26
NYTr
, August 1, 1851. Diplomat John Bozman Kerr confirmed that in July 1851 the Nicaraguan government was discussing a plan to annul the charter of the canal company; Manning, 4:265.

27
Burns, 43, 47;
NYTr
, September 5, 6, 24, October 7, 1851; Manning, 4:228–9, 235.

28
NYTr
, October 7, 9, 1851. The bribe figure is from
NYTr
, December 2, 1851. Newspaper reporters in the mid-nineteenth century were not particularly exacting, but these accounts fit with other reports of White's methods. See also White's testimony,
NYH
, October 17, 1856.

29
Compilation of Executive Documents and Diplomatic Correspondence Relative to a Trans-Isthmian Canal in Central America
, vol. 2 (New York: Evening Post Printing, 1900), 714–7; Manning, 4:235–6;
NYTr
, September 5, 1851. Kerr's official correspondence is rife with racial judgments of the Nicaraguans; on March 15, 1852, for example, he wrote of “the ill-blood against each other, natural to mixed races;” Manning, 4:267.

30
NYTr
, September 26, 1851.

31
NYT
, November 15, 1851;
NYTr
, October 9, December 15, 1851; Manning, 4:256–7, 2
66-
7;
James H Quimby v. CV
, November 21, 1855, file 1855–1313, Court of Common Pleas, NYCC. On CVs percentage as ATC agent, see JLW's explanation in
George S. Salls v. CV
, November 17, 1856, file 1855-#1226, Court of Common Pleas, NYCC.

32
Soulé, 359–64, 379–85.

33
MM
, December 1854;
NYT
, July 3,
1860; Memoirs of William T. Sherman
(New York: Da Capo, 1984, orig. pub. 1875), 95–105, 118–24; Soulé, 626–30; Kemble, 71, 152–3, 206; Richard Maxwell Brown,
Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 123–40.

34
James P. Delgado,
To California by Sea: A Maritime History of the California Gold Rush
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990), 76–7.

35
CV to Jonas Winchester, October 15, 1851, Winchester Papers, California Historical Society. It is reported by two of William C. Ralston's biographers that CV asked him in 1851 to investigate a railroad proposed by a group of Californians; see David Lavender,
Nothing Seemed Impossible: William C Ralston and Early San Francisco
(Palo Alto: American West, 1975), 58, and Julian Dana,
The Man Who Built San Francisco: A Study of Ralston's Journey with Banners
(New York: Macmillan, 1936), 41.

36
People of the State of New York v. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Anthony Bird, Stephen Williams, Elias Butler, Jacob Van Cleef and Jacob Arnold
, November 22, 1851, New York Supreme Court, box SI-68, NYMA;
NYT
, March 16, 21, 1853, February 12, 1855; Lane, 71.

37
A Sketch of Events in the Life of George Law
(New York: J. C. Derby, 1855), 46; Kemble, 46–52, 55.

38
Kemble, 46, 54–7. As Kemble shows, the mail monopoly was immensely lucrative. In July 1850, Pacific Mail paid a dividend of 50 percent ($50 per share, with the par value of each share being $100). CVs competition cut fares from a high of $300 for first cabin to as low as $80.

39
CV v. the New York and Staten Island Steam Ferry Company, William B. Townsend, George Law, John J. Boyd, Levi Cook, Robert C Wetmore, Jeptha B. Parks, John Burgher, David Marfleet, Gottlieb Kiesele, and Henry M. Western
, August 23, 1851, New York Supreme Court, fold. 10, box 1, Ferry and Railroad Collection, Staten Island Institute of Arts & Sciences;
CV v. George Law and Others
, August 16, 1851, file CV-V-20, Supreme Court Pleadings, NYCC. The report of retaliation was published three decades later in an obituary of Jeremiah Simonson,
NYT
, February 13, 1887, which claimed that Simonson led the attack on Law's pier.

40
SR 326, 35th Cong., 1st sess., vol. 2;
LT
, October 25, 1851; Lane, 97; Kemble, 61.

41
NYT
, November 27, 1851; Folkman, 33–4. Kemble, 61, who displays a clear bias in favor of Pacific Mail, shows that workers on the Panama route genuinely believed that the Nicaragua route was much worse. It was not, at least until the completion of the Panama Railroad in 1855. For an example of passengers publicly protesting conditions on the Nicaragua route, see
AltaC
, January 15, 1852. See also the testimony in
James H Quimby v. CV
, November 13, 1854, file 1854-#1242, Court of Common Pleas, NYCC,
and James H Quimby v. CV
, November 21, 1855, file 1855-#1313, Court of Common Pleas, NYCC.

42
LT
, December 4, 1851.

43
NYTr
, October 23, 1851.

44
LW Dictation;
LT
, December 4, 1851;
NYTr
, December 2, 1851.

45
LT
, December 4, 1851;
NYTr
, December 2, 1851.

46
LT
, January 2, 1852; Manning, 7:420; Mario Rodriguez, “The ‘Prometheus’ and the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty,”
JModH
36, no. 3 (September 1964): 260–78.

47
CV quoted in Rodriguez, “The ‘Prometheus’ and the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty;” Mary Wilhelmine Williams,
Anglo-American Isthmian Diplomacy: 1815–1915
(New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), 119–20.

48
SED 6, 32nd Cong., 1st sess., vol. 4;
LT
, December 17, 1851, January 2, 1852.