The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (140 page)

83
NYH
, March 5, 1879;
NYTr
, March 18, 1878;
NYW
, November 14, 1877. William's love of driving fast horses would later be well publicized; see, for example,
NYS
, January 26, 1878.

84
NYH
, March 5, 1879;
NYT
, April 6, 1857, August 20, 1860; NYSAD 75, February 15, 1861.

85
HW
, September 3, 1859; SED 2, part 2, 36th Cong., 1st sess., vol. 2.

86
CV to Oliver Williams, May 5, 1860, WFP.

87
McPherson, 206; Strong, 2:473–4.

88
McPherson, 200–1;
CT
, December 19, 1859.

89
Letters and excerpts from minutes reprinted in Pacific Mail Steamship Co.,
Proceedings
.

90
NYH
, December 1, 1859. For discussions of these negotiations in the press, see the New York newspapers for November 26 through December 5, 1859. On the vagueness of distinctions between shareholders and corporations, see 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; Gregory A. Mark, “The Personification of the Business Corporation in American Law,”
University of Chicago Law Review
54, no. 4. (autumn 1987): 1441–83.

91
SctDP.

92
NYTr
, January 30, February 2, 1860;
NYT
, January 25, 1860; HFC to Samuel L. M. Barlow, January 16, 1860, BW box 36 (14), Samuel L. M. Barlow Collection, HL.

93
NYTr
, February 16, 17, 21, 29, 1860;
NYH
, August 12, 1859, February 16, 17, 20, March 1, 1860;
Seventh Annual Report of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, May 1861
(New York: G. F. Nesbitt & Co., 1861);
Proceedings in Connection with Negotiations with C Vanderbilt
, BL; CV to Samuel L. M. Barlow, February 20, 1860, BW box 36 (14), Samuel L. M. Barlow Collection, HL; Kemble, 93–7.

94
Kemble, 93–7;
NYTr
, February 29, 1860.

95
CT
, July 12, 1858. With five thousand shares with a par value of $100 each, CV owned one-eighth of the forty thousand shares of Pacific Mail, with a total par value of $5 million; NYSAD 210, 90th sess., 1867.

96
NYT
, June 23, July 3, 4, 9, 10, November 15, December 8, 1860;
NYH
, June 30, July 11, 12, September 13, October 17, 1860;
RT
, January 7, 1860; Edward Harold Mott,
Between the Ocean and the Lakes: The Story of Erie
(New York: Ticker Publishing, 1908), 129–36. Congress did retroactively pay him $175,000 for his service during the remainder of 1860, followed by payments of $61,249.99 and $113,750 in 1861, and finally $58,725 for the rest of his career in steamships to California, making a total federal subsidy to CV of $596,224.99 for the California mail; SED 44, 41st Cong., 3rd sess., vol. 1.

97
Manning, 4:762;
HW
, October 13, 1860; Cyril Allen, “Felix Belly: Nicaraguan Canal Promoter,”
HAHR
37, no. 1 (February 1957): 46–59.

98
NYT
, February 4, 1861.

99
NYT
, November 9, 1859. The paper reprinted the article at issue on October 18, 1859. It was full of errors and innuendo; it claimed, for example, that Walker would depart for Central America on the
Philadelphia
, saying it was one of Vanderbilt's “mail steamers.” It was not.

100
NYT
, May 26, 1858.

101
Burrows & Wallace, 679.

102
HW
, February 19, 1859.

103
HW
, March 5, 1859.

104
For an example of CV's approach to management of a geographically sprawling enterprise, see his instructions to his San Francisco agents, CV to John T. Wright and William S. Freeman, October 19, 1859, CV-NYHS. Richard Franklin Bensel,
Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), argues that the failure of the federal government to develop bureaucratic regulatory competence turned Northern capitalists in an antistate direction. James L. Huston,
Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765–1900
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1998), 144–9, argues that only after 1880 did Americans abandon their belief in the essentially horizontal nature of the economy, and abandon older Jack-sonian mental constructs. As early as 1859, however, we see public intellectuals struggling with the problem of bigness, in the form of CV My discussion of CVs role is informed by 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).

105
NYT
, December 27, 1858;
H W
, January 9, 1859.

106
Leo Tolstoy
The Sebastopol Sketches
(London: Penguin, 1986), 152.