The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (17 page)

Young Vanderbilt inhabited the lower social and economic tiers of a world captured in Francis Guy's 1820 painting of the corner of Wall and Water streets. To the right, the ships can be seen moored along South Street. On the left, with flag, is the Tontine Coffee House, the city's first financial market.
Collection of the New-York Historical Society

An aristocratic Southern planter who settled in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, Thomas Gibbons was Vanderbilt's mentor and only employer. He turned a personal dispute into an attack on the Livingston family's monopoly on steamboats in New York waters. That culminated in
Gibbons v. Ogden
, the U.S. Supreme Court's first commerce-clause case and a legal landmark to this day.
Drew University

Legal complications stemming from the battle against the steamboat monopoly led Vanderbilt to move his family to New Brunswick, New Jersey, the southern end of the ferry line he operated for Gibbons. His wife Sophia managed an inn in their home, dubbed Bellona Hall, through the 1820s. She used the proceeds to feed, clothe, and educate the children, without her husband's aid.
Library of Congress

Vanderbilt emerged as one of the leading maritime architects of the paddlewheel era, a distinction perhaps first earned in 1835 with the revolutionary
Lexington
. Faster and more fuel-efficient than any steamboat afloat, it inaugurated his competition in the combined steamboat-and-railroad routes between New York and New England. On January 13, 1840, cotton bales piled on the deck ignited and started a tragic fire.
Library of Congress

In the late 1840s, at the height of Vanderbilt's career as a steamboat entrepreneur, New York swelled with immigrants and bustled with commerce as the city became the nation's primary seaport and emporium. Vanderbilt's most famous steamboat, the
Cornelius Vanderbilt
, is seen here behind the rival
Bay State. Museum of the City of New York

One of the earliest daguerreotypes of Cornelius Vanderbilt, made in 1845. At the age of fifty or fifty-one, he now dominated steamboat traffic on Long Island Sound. Within two years of the making of this image, he would engineer his election to the presidency of the Stonington Railroad.
Library of Congress

Famous as Vanderbilt's enemy in the Erie War of 1868, an epic fight over the Erie Railway Daniel Drew spent most of his life as Vanderbilt's secret partner. Drew used his experience with street-level finance to become a steamboat entrepreneur financier and stock operator. He went bankrupt shortly before Vanderbilt's death.
Library of Congress

Canal contractor, steamboat entrepreneur, and political manipulator, George Law represented both the business energy and corruption of the antebellum era. For twenty years he loomed as one of Vanderbilt's most notorious enemies. In 1847 Law's steamboat
Oregon
defeated the
Cornelius Vanderbilt
in a famous race on the Hudson, watched by thousands of spectators.
Library of Congress

William Henry, Vanderbilt's oldest son, was born in 1821. As a young man he went to work in the Wall Street office of Daniel Drew. William suffered an emotional breakdown, and his father sent him and his wife, Maria Kissam, to live in this farmhouse near New Dorp, Staten Island. Vanderbilt took notice as his son built his farm into a successful operation.
Library of Congress

Nathaniel Jocelyn of New Haven painted this portrait of Vanderbilt in 1846, when the entrepreneur was starting to look for social respectability. That year he moved to Washington Place, in the heart of New York's most aristocratic district. The merchant elite trusted and feared him, but did not yet accept him as a social equal.
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution