The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (14 page)

The
Legislator
, meanwhile, suffered from its crew's inexperience. Several days after it began to run, schoolteacher Sam Griscom boarded it in New York. “We were getting along very fast, and were in hopes of getting to New Brunswick nearly as soon as the other Boat,” he wrote in his diary; “then thro want of skill the pilot ran the boat on a bar in Raritan Bay.… The captain was very much mortified. I believe that neither he nor his pilot was acquainted with this passage; to add to his mortification, a steam boat passed us, which would carry the tidings of our disaster to N. York”
¹¹

As a teacher, Griscom had no reason to fret about a few minutes' difference in the journey to Philadelphia, but he was caught up in the craze for competition. “The sport arising from ‘boat racing,’” the
Evening
Post
observed, captured the public imagination, as each vessel attracted dedicated adherents. English actress Anne Royall witnessed a race from aboard the
Legislator;
referring to the boat as “our heroine,” she recounted the chase with breathless excitement. “Although she seized upon the middle of the channel, her rival drew up alongside somewhat boldly, and sometimes had the presumption to run ahead,” she wrote, with a fan's attention to technical detail, “which her ability to sail in shoal water enabled her to do.” Here was everything exciting about the age, captured in a moment: the power of the new machines, the ease and rapidity of travel, the thrill of the daily duel. And the benefits of this competition were clear to see: the passage between Philadelphia and New York shrank to less than ten hours, and fares had never been cheaper.
¹²

To Vanderbilt's consternation, the
Legislator's
captain, Lawrence Fisher, rapidly got better, and soon began to beat the
Thistle
with alarming frequency. On September 3, Vanderbilt won the race to New York; as the
Thistle
churned up to the pier that was used by both vessels, he ordered his deckhands to tie up in the middle, leaving no room for the enraged Fisher. Harbormaster John Minugh ran out on the dock and ordered Vanderbilt “to haul ahead in order to accommodate the…
Legislator.”
With characteristic contempt for empty authority, Vanderbilt “refused so to do,” Minugh reported. Vanderbilt continued to block out Fisher whenever he could, snorting at the threat of a $250 fine. The battle was all that mattered.
¹³

Shortly before six o'clock on the morning of June 2, 1825, Vanderbilt and Fisher ordered their engineers to build up steam for the morning race to New Brunswick. Men and women bound for New Jersey and Philadelphia lined up on the dock, boarding the boats at their berths. Vanderbilt glowered at his rival as Fisher strutted on his deck with pride. “He had beaten the
Thistle
yesterday,” a passenger remembered Fisher saying, “and [he] intended to go ahead of her still farther today.” The
Legislator's
engineer was new, but he understood his mission well. “She
must beat the
Thistle,” he told his assistant (one of many black men who worked the harbor's ferries), who accordingly held down the safety valve to build up extra pressure. The two captains ordered their deckhands to cast off the lines.

An enormous roar split the air. In the center of the
Legislator
, the superheated boiler exploded, disintegrating into a shock wave of scalding steam and metal fragments that shattered decks, windows, wheels, bulkheads, and bodies. In horror, Vanderbilt and his passengers watched splinters of the rival vessel shower the water and the dock amid the screams of the wounded. Four died in the blast: two black men (one a slave), one white man, and a boy who worked as a waiter. The new American ethic, to win at all costs, was proving costly
¹⁴

THE TIME HAD COME
to say farewell to the age of the Founders. The Jubilee—the fiftieth anniversary of independence—approached, and the ever forward-moving Americans chose to look backward. “It is a moment that American history has forgotten,” writes Andrew Burstein, “a moment when two critical generations reaffirmed their connection.” It was a moment of tribute to the last few survivors of that founding generation, in a world that had changed radically since 1776, and changed still more with each passing day.

The long good-bye began two years early, with the arrival of Marquis de Lafayette, the French nobleman who had thrown himself into the cause of American independence. At the invitation of President Monroe, he sailed to the United States in 1824, making landfall on Staten Island on Sunday, August 15. The
Nautilus
steamed out to greet him, and he spent his first night in Vice President Tompkins's mansion. The next day Lafayette sailed to Manhattan, where the entire city turned out to welcome him. “It is impossible to describe the majesty of this procession,” wrote one of his companions. “The water was covered with vessels of all descriptions, elegantly decorated.… At length we could perceive the crowds which everywhere covered the shore.” The mayor of New York led squads of troops and public officials in making a formal salute. Lafayette, once the symbol of youthful rebellion, had become the aged emblem of the venerable past to a nation that was joyously sentimental about the Revolution.
¹⁵

Even calculating Cornelius found himself swept up in the enthusiasm over the hero's visit. On September 24, the mariner joined a delegation of New Brunswick's dignitaries that awaited Lafayette's arrival at the bridge into town, along with a crowd of some eight thousand citizens. At length the old soldier appeared, and a battery of artillery fired a sixty-nine-gun salute. Vanderbilt presented a fine carriage pulled by four white horses, and personally drove Lafayette on a parade through the streets.
¹⁶

Curious, this regard for the past: in so many other ways, Vanderbilt disdained the delicacy of cultured men, the sentiment that caramelized in the diaries and letters of the literate. “I love you? dearest—Ay, do I love you—and when I love you not, chaos is come again,” Attorney General William Wirt wrote to his wife, in a typical note of the era. Vanderbilt would sooner start writing in Russian than write such things. He was the most commercial creature of a society that was throwing away the traditional social bonds—a self-made man, where the Founders themselves mostly had been old patricians. And yet, his patriotism was sincere, his veneration authentic. His heroes can be identified by the names he gave to his sons: William Henry (after General William Henry Harrison, hero of the War of 1812), George Washington—and Cornelius.
¹⁷

As Vanderbilt rose, Thomas Gibbons declined. The old Tory who had helped unlock the “radicalism of the American Revolution,” in Gordon Wood's phrase—the dueling aristocrat who had overthrown aristocratic privilege—faded in the twilight of his generation. His sense of purpose seemed to evaporate in the heat of victory, and the flood of letters that poured from his pen dwindled. His chronic ailments overcame him, and he moved to the elegant patrician enclave of St. John's Park in New York. Vanderbilt largely ran Gibbons's steamboat enterprise, tracking income and expenses on large spreadsheets, boat by boat, month by month. Tension rippled through their relationship as days, even weeks passed between the captain's visits to his employer. “I used to do some things without his knowledge,” Vanderbilt later testified, “and he used to bear me out in them, though sometimes he said he would not do so.”
¹⁸

And yet, despite their equally headstrong personalities, the seemingly inevitable conflict between the two never came to pass, thanks in large part to Vanderbilt's admiration for Gibbons. His regard for this impossible old man seemed to run together with his reverence for the Founders, mingling his esteem for the men who had made the nation with that for the former Tory who had helped reshape it.

Often bedridden, Gibbons played no part in the festivities of those years, in the farewell to the old and the heralding of the new. He shriveled as John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams, entered the White House in March 1825, in a literal transition to the Founders' children. He remained out of sight for the eventful week between October 26 and November 4, 1825, the grand celebration of the completion of the Erie Canal, that final gift from the aristocrats who had launched the project back when they still ruled the state. This historic achievement of engineering, cutting through a curtain of mountains, was all the more important for Gibbons's courtroom victory, yet his name was left unsaid throughout the ceremonies. Finally, on the afternoon of May 16, 1826, he wobbled out of his house to the corner of Hudson and Beach streets, where he collapsed and died.

Though the public scarcely noticed, Gibbons's death was also part of the passing of the founding generation. For all his acquisitive, competitive fervor, he was, to the end, an aristocratic, slave-owning Southerner who was obsessed with honor. A little over a month later came the deaths of both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams—on July 4, 1826, the very moment of the Jubilee.
¹⁹

Gibbons's vast estate now passed into the hands of his son, William. But where the whip-wielding Thomas had effortlessly straddled the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, his son remained somewhat ill at ease in these new times. Given to quarreling with his partners and dimly suspicious of competition, he seemed even more a product of the plantation South than his father.

In many ways, William represented the opposite of generational change—and therein lay a serious problem. When he inherited the
Thistle
, he also inherited its hard-driving captain; but Vanderbilt brusquely dismissed William's business acumen and, even more important, his strength of will. “I do not know that William Gibbons ever started a project which his father did not originate,” he later claimed. “When they disagreed, the old man would have his own way.” By contrast, Vanderbilt himself often had carried his point with “the old man.”

The undertone of sibling rivalry is unmistakable. Cornelius had fondly sent Thomas Gibbons bushels of oysters and other tokens of affection; for the son (who was a year younger than himself) he felt no such admiration. Rough-edged, hard-muscled, and self-made, Vanderbilt couldn't quite bring himself to hate William, but he seemed to suspect that this rich boy lacked the drive, even the mental machinery, to cope with the age of commerce. Was it not Cornelius himself who best resembled Thomas Gibbons, in his energy, his entrepreneurial creativity his sheer force of personality?
²⁰

Vanderbilt seemed to be nothing but energy as he burned through the year on the hunt for every possible source of profit. On summer Sundays, when William had the
Thistle
sitting idle, Vanderbilt leased the
Bellona
to take New Yorkers to the Union Garden on Staten Island. He even arranged to sell the manure from Bellona Hall's stables to James Neilson, a self-styled gentleman farmer. Meanwhile he supervised the construction of a new vessel for the Union Line. Christened the
Emerald
, it was a “splendid new steam boat,” as it was advertised, and he proudly took command. But not for long.
²¹

At half past one o'clock in the morning on November 5, 1826, Vanderbilt awoke in his bed at Bellona Hall to the cries of his crewmen. The
Emerald
had caught fire. He raced out the door to the wharf, where “the vessel was found to be one enormous sheet of flame,” the
New York Gazette
reported. The captain sent for help and hurried with his men to set up pumps to hose down the fire. They accomplished nothing. The flames crackled and burned along the length of the boat, eating down to the waterline. Seeing that the cause was hopeless, Vanderbilt ordered the men to cut its lines and set it adrift, lest a sloop at the dock catch fire as well. As the enormous torch floated into the current, he helplessly watched the destruction of much more than his employer's asset. “Capt. Vanderbilt lost considerable property in papers, &c.,” the
Gazette
reported, “and every article of clothing.”
²²

A shame, to be sure—almost a tragedy, in fact, though no lives were lost. But the press report begs a fistful of questions.
Every
article of clothing? Was he living entirely on the boat? What about Bellona Hall? What about his wife and children? Thomas Gibbons had largely abandoned his family in his self-absorption and his greed; was Vanderbilt doing the same?

FIFTY YEARS LATER
, in a courtroom packed with spectators and reporters, in a city home to more than a million, “a gentleman with silvery white hair and iron gray moustache” took the stand, the
New York Times
reported, and testified about Vanderbilt's wife, Sophia. The witness was Daniel B. Allen; he was married to Sophia's second child, Ethelinda, and had heard hours of conversation among the siblings who had lived in Bellona Hall—Phebe (born in 1814), Ethelinda (1817), Eliza (1819), William, or Billy (1821), Emily (1823), and Sophia (1825). Their reverence for their mother knew no bounds. “The fact that Mrs. Vanderbilt had fulfilled the duties of a mother more completely than any woman they had ever known, had been talked over,” he testified. “In everything that interested her children she had full control. During a considerable portion of her life she had not only taken care of them, but fed, clothed, and educated them at her own expense, without getting a cent from [Cornelius].”