The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (15 page)

But what did they know of their father? As the
Emerald
disaster showed, he lived on his boats, starting his runs as early as six in the morning, sometimes even working on Sundays. He spent his leisure hours in the stables with his horses, training them for future races. He did spend enough time at Bellona Hall that his wife was with child for nine months out of every twenty-four through the 1820s and ′30s. Baby Sophia was followed by Mary in 1827, Frances in 1828, Cornelius Jeremiah at the end of 1830, George Washington in 1832, Mary Alicia in 1833, Catherine Juliette in 1836 (the year George died), and a second George Washington in 1839. All the children eventually found their father remote, stern, at times antagonistic. As Allen recalled, they later asked each other “what the children would have been, or even [their] father, had it not been for the exertions of [their] mother.”
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The trial that brought Allen to the stand in 1877 was staged to settle the fate of the Vanderbilt fortune, so his testimony ranged far beyond those early days in New Brunswick. But one more thing he said shed light on the man his father-in-law was back in the 1820s. “The Commodore was determined to have his own way, always, to a greater extent than any man I ever saw,” Allen asserted, using a title as yet undreamed of in 1827. “It was his most prominent characteristic.” In Bellona Hall, Vanderbilt's busy, harried, and pregnant wife could only have agreed, for she saw that trait expressed in every relationship, public and private.

During these years, the health of Vanderbilt's own father began to decline; he had accumulated a good-sized estate, worth some $40,000, and his will came under discussion whenever the family gathered on Staten Island. Cornelius senior wanted his wife to inherit everything. Cornelius junior, however, insisted on a particular provision: if his mother remarried, the estate would be divided immediately among the children; only if she remained single would she have the property for the duration of her life. “That feature of the will, Mrs. [Sophia] Vanderbilt said, had been a source of great discomfort to the Commodore's mother,” Allen reported.
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A day would come when Vanderbilt's love for his wife and children would become apparent, suggesting that he had always harbored affection for them out of historical view. In the early hours of his rise, though, his ambition seems most striking, defining both his personal and historical role. Alexis de Tocqueville later would observe that the “respect, attachment, and service” that held men together in aristocratic societies had disappeared in America; now they were bound by “money only”
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In Vanderbilt's case, that ever-present calculation, and competition, seeped into his own family relations. In place of the duel, the elaborate ritual for protecting the honor that defined a patrician society, he substituted brute force—emotional, and sometimes physical.

On the morning of May 9, 1827, the thirty-two-year-old Captain Vanderbilt started the new Union Line steamboat, the
Swan
, on its morning run; satisfied that the pilot had matters well in hand, he retired to the dining room for breakfast. In his customary chair sat Patrick Rice, whom he knew to be a difficult passenger. Vanderbilt tersely ordered him out. Rice refused. With the swing of a meaty hand, he sent Rice flying. The next morning, court papers dryly report, “without the permission of [Vanderbilt], and without any right to do, [Rice again] took possession of the seat of [Vanderbilt] at the breakfast table.” In the hilariously understated legal language of Vanderbilt's account, he “gently laid his hands upon the said plaintiff to remove him.” Too gently, it appears, for Rice (possibly drunk) sneaked back into the chair. At that, Vanderbilt curled his fingers into a pair of practiced fists “and did then and there beat, wound, and ill treat him so that his life was greatly despaired of,” as Rice complained. The infuriated Vanderbilt dragged the apparently unconscious Rice up to the pilothouse, hurled him onto the floor, and locked him inside. Rice not only lost his ensuing lawsuit, but had to pay damages to the man who had pummeled him.
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In the year since Thomas Gibbons's death, Vanderbilt's aggressiveness—his will to dominate—had grown fierce to the point of danger for those around him. At the same time, William Gibbons seemed to contract. In 1827 he leased to Vanderbilt the ferry rights to Elizabethtown Point (once rented by Aaron Ogden). In early 1828, Vanderbilt launched the first steamboat that was entirely his: the
Citizen
, a speedy 106-foot, 145-ton sidewheeler. With cousin John Vanderbilt and little brother Jacob alternating as captain, the
Citizen
connected Elizabethtown to New York with stops on Staten Island's northern shore. Cornelius also bought shares in the New Brunswick Coal Mining Company (a hint that he was interested in new sources of energy for steamboats), again demonstrating his ease with the complexities of the new economy
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Gibbons, on the other hand, had difficulty adjusting to the world that his father had helped make. He fell into a series of squabbles with the Stevens family of Hoboken, who owned the Union Line boats on the Delaware River. He reacted with exaggerated alarm to the appearance of competing lines. Unlike Vanderbilt, he feared that still-uncommon, still-mysterious form of business organization, the corporation; when rival lines obtained corporate charters from the New Jersey legislature, he protested wildly. It was a “swindle,” he complained, that would “check individual enterprise.” Gibbons was hardly alone in such suspicions. Indeed, his response reveals how unfamiliar the corporation remained to the American mind in general, even as it shows how unsophisticated he himself was as a businessman.

On July 8, 1828, Gibbons gave in to despair and offered for sale his three vessels (the
Bellona
, the
Thistle
, and the
Swan)
. Then he thought better of it—then he gave up again. The final blow was the incorporation of yet another rival company. With that, Gibbons abandoned the field with all the dispatch of Darius in his chariot, fleeing before Alexander's army. “I intend to retire from the employment of steamboats,” he wrote on February 6, 1829, “as soon as I can dispose of my boats.” Before the end of the month, he had sold his paddlewheelers, rented out his docks, and ended the enterprise that had sealed his family name in history
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So began Vanderbilt's career as an independent steamboat entrepreneur. It was probably a relief. He had never been comfortable working for this younger, less acute man. Vanderbilt leaped into the race that William Gibbons had abandoned, sending the
Citizen
on shilling-a-head runs to New Brunswick. But the stress he now faced was unmistakable. It is not too much to say that Thomas Gibbons had been a second father to him, complete with father-son conflict. No matter how many businesses Vanderbilt had kept going for himself, he had remained within Gibbons's house, which gave him both shelter and a sense of purpose. Now the old man was dead, the house closed up. Vanderbilt would have to find his own way forward, to use what he had learned from Gibbons to shape his enterprises, to develop his own vision of his future. In his solitary steamboat, he sailed off to fight the economic war.
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ON THE EVENING OF APRIL
24, 1829, the
Citizen
pulled into its berth on New York's North River shore, at the hour when the glow of the setting sun reflected in a thousand orange points off the rippling waters. The deckhands tied up the boat, and the passengers began to debark. Vanderbilt joined them, as did Sophia, and together they walked into the crowded, dirty streets that ran between the low brick and wooden buildings of lower Manhattan. The Vanderbilts still lived in Bellona Hall, but had come to spend a Friday night in the city.

Someone bumped against Vanderbilt's side, then disappeared into the river of people pouring off the dock. Vanderbilt jammed his hand into his coat pocket. His wallet was missing. He pushed through the crowd, then sprinted after the man he believed to be the thief. In a moment he tackled him and held him fast as he searched his coat. The pocketbook contained “about $200 in money,” the press reported, “and certificates for several thousands in [New] Brunswick Bank stock.” None of it appeared in the man's pockets. Regardless, Vanderbilt hauled him off to High Constable Jacob Hays.

The high constable must have rubbed his bald head in delight when his former rival burst into his office. The man Vanderbilt dragged along was “identified there by Hays as one of the most noted pickpockets in the country,” the
New York Gazette
explained. “Hays says he has passed by the name of Henry Baptiste Lambert, and he graduated in the Pennsylvania State Prison. It is probable that he had an accomplice, to whom he handed Captain V's property, as soon as he got out of his reach. The Captain is positive he is the thief.” The now-incarcerated criminal had the perverse fortune to have picked a rich target—a rapidly rising businessman—who was also as big and tough as any thug on the waterfront.
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The city where his pocket was picked was far from the “overgrown seaport village” that he had moved to from Staten Island during the War of 1812. It swarmed with people, swelled with people, was bulging from every door and window with people who poured in from the schooners, steamboats, and ships that clogged the slips. “New York was changing with disruptive speed,” writes historian Allan Horlick. “It was becoming strange where it had been familiar, and mysterious where it had been predictable.” At mid-century Joseph Scoville looked back to his youth and recalled a time when an average New Yorker “of no very extended acquaintance” could point out all the leading merchants, even direct a visitor to their homes.
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That memory faded rapidly as new faces arrived daily to rent apartments, find work, or start businesses.

The most popular story of the day, Joyce Appleby notes, was
Peter Rugg, the Missing Man
, about a farmer who disappeared before the Revolution, only to reappear in the mid-1820s. “Poh, New York is nothing,” Rugg scoffs to his contemporary guide. “No, sir, New York I assure you is but a sorry affair, no more to be compared to Boston than a wigwam to a palace.” Then Rugg wanders down Broadway, and he cannot believe his eyes. “There is no such place as this in North America,” he stammers. “Here is seemingly a great city, magnificent houses, shops and goods, men and women innumerable, and as busy as real life, all sprung up in one night from the wilderness.”
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It virtually had. In 1790, Manhattan's population had barely topped 33,000; in 1820, it reached 123,700; by 1830, it would pass 202,500. In just another five years, seventy thousand more people would cram into the city, pushing the population density to more than 25,000 per square mile. New York, then, remained tightly packed, but it was obviously expanding geographically as well. In 1811, the city extended only to Houston Street; by 1828, Broadway reached Tenth Street, and work began on Fourteenth Street from river to river. “Here the earnest merchant steps,” observed Anne Royall in the mid-1820s, “there the gay cook and merry chambermaid, with some scores of honest tars, hucksters, rude boys, and chimney sweeps, with the rolling coaches, the rattling carts, may give some idea of this life-inspired city.” As with every visitor, she reserved most of her astonishment for the island's watery edges, where the city met the world:

But all that is only a drop in the bucket compared to that on the wharves or slips (as they are called here), the warehouses, docks, ship-yards, and auction stores, which occupy South, Front, and Water streets, pouring a flood of human beings. Here the sound of axes, saws, and hammers, from a thousand hands; there the ringing of the blacksmith's anvil; hard by the jolly tar with his heavo; the whole city surrounded by masts; the Hudson, East river, and the bay covered with vessels, some going out and some coming in, to say nothing of the steam-boats; in short, imagine upwards of an hundred thousand people, all engaged in business; add to these some thousand strangers which swarm in the streets and public houses; such is New-York.
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They were coming not so much from the impoverished districts of Europe (not yet, at least) as the fields and towns of the United States itself, especially New England and rural New York State. And that, to some small degree, was Vanderbilt's doing, for he had stood on the barricades of the transportation revolution and commercial expansion that were transforming American life. The northeastern states felt the effects first, due to both their access to tidewater and their proximity to capital-rich merchants of the seaports, who bought produce from farmers, sold them goods, and built the first cotton and woolen mills in their villages. Semi-subsistence farming disappeared; country folk left home as never before, looking for opportunities or simply some kind of cash income. Between 1820 and 1850, the percentage of the U.S. population living in towns and cities rose from 7 to 18 percent, and the absolute numbers increased fivefold. Uprooting oneself to find one's fortune became a new way of life; one Bostonian described his move to New York in 1833 as the product of “the general principle of Yankee roam-all-over-the-worlditiveness.”

Now all depended on the marketplace, which linked together once-isolated communities. “Ten years ago we had
nothing”
exclaimed the
Catskill Recorder
in 1828, “now we have
everything.”
In 1826, the
New York Evening Post
announced—in the same issue that marked Thomas Gibbons's death—the first shipment of Michigan pork through the Erie Canal. With such humble items new eras are made.
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