The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (18 page)

No sooner had the thousand or so residents of Yerba Buena renamed their village San Francisco than the gold rush began. This 1848 engraving shows the sleepy town on the eve of the deluge, looking into San Francisco Bay.
Library of Congress

If the Stevens brothers did bribe him, then he proved himself a tricky god indeed. He never intended for the Dispatch Line to last. He knew all along that the railroad, when complete, would destroy rivals who depended on stagecoaches. (This threat had weighed heavily on William Gibbons as early as January 1829.) Hardly had he launched his line than he began to plan a full-scale assault on an entirely different route, to the coastal towns of Westchester County and western Connecticut. Charles Hoyt and Curtis Peck currently ran a boat there with little or no opposition, making them vulnerable to an attack by a hardened fighter like Vanderbilt.

He carefully scouted the passage, and spotted a strategic spot for a new landing—an outcropping known as Jay's Rock near the shore of Sawpits, a cluster of lumber mills on the Westchester border with Connecticut (later dubbed Port Chester). On June 8, 1829, when the Dispatch Line had just started, he signed a ten-year lease to the rock with Mary De La Montaigne and Susan Moore, “for all docking privileges…; the said Vanderbilt is to [bear] all the expense of building such wharf or wharves as he may think proper from said rock to the mainland for steam boat purposes.” Soon he had a crew of workmen driving in piles and pouring in cartloads of dirt to build a dock to Jay's Rock. He put the
Citizen
and his old
Fanny
on daily runs between New York and Norwalk, Bridgeport, and New Haven with a stop at his Sawpits pier.

In early 1830, with the Dispatch Line's fare war still raging, Vanderbilt began his retreat from New Jersey. He and Sophia packed up Bellona Hall and loaded one of the steamboats with their belongings, their horses, and their children. They debarked in New York and made for a narrow town-house at 134 Madison Street, near gritty Corlears Hook.
⁴⁰

The disappearance of the Dispatch Line, then, should be no mystery, bribe or no bribe. Vanderbilt did retain an interest in New Jersey, however, with his lucrative ferry to Elizabethtown. Nor was his brief fare war his last contact with the Stevens brothers. He would encounter them again—and next time it would end in bloodshed.

“I HEARD AN ENGLISHMAN
… declare,” reported Frances Trollope in 1832, that “in the street, on the road, or in the field, at the theatre, the coffee-house, or at home, he had never overheard Americans conversing without the word DOLLAR being pronounced between them.”
⁴¹
Who better exemplified this mania for money, this frenzy for calculation, than Vanderbilt? And yet, as he acquired more boats and hired more employees, as he grappled with the growing complexity of his business, he faced the fundamental problems of this new nation of self-serving strangers. How could a man earn a profit in a world where anything could come under attack at any time? How could you know whom to trust?

The anarchy of the new competitive culture naturally prompted a reaction. The Stevenses, by securing a legal monopoly for their railroad, had refashioned some of the tools of the culture of deference to bring order to their world. Vanderbilt drew on far more ancient concepts: family and reputation. As his stature grew, he made a determined effort to polish his image as a man who stayed true to his word. And as his business grew, he spent more and more time thinking about how he could find trustworthy people, and bind them to himself.

On his steamboat trips to Norwalk in 1830, he fell into conversation with an earnest twenty-five-year-old man from Danbury, Connecticut, named Hiram Peck. Peck, Vanderbilt learned, was intensely devout, an eager participant in a wave of religious fervor known as the Second Great Awakening. Being a good Yankee, Peck also intended to make his fortune; for that, he was moving to New York to open a shop. Vanderbilt (himself just thirty-six) gave Peck a temporary home until he found permanent quarters; afterward he frequently invited him to his house for tea or supper. There Peck mingled with Vanderbilt's family and senior employees, such as John Brooks Jr., captain of the
Citizen
.

The robust social scene in New York among such men of go-ahead startled the pious Peck. An oyster dinner hosted by his landlord, for example, featured “wine, some songs, & some stories,” he reported to his diary. “I left about 11:00. Some staid much later. I do not enjoy myself well in such places. I prefer solitude with my book or some few included in company which we can be social without indulging in those love songs and dirty stories some of which would be debasing for a beast to express in language.” He found Vanderbilt's company more agreeable, but the captain's energy pointed up a contrast with himself. “Called at Mr. Vs in the evening with Sister Harriet & husband,” he wrote on September 22, 1830. “I often have to regret that I have not more perseverance in doing any kind of business because I almost daily see that a man may attain to almost anything with sufficient application.”

Vanderbilt kept his eye on Peck. The young man's earnestness marked him as a useful tool, should an appropriate use present itself. Peck observed him in return as he played father to his children, a role Vanderbilt had long neglected. In the heat of August, Vanderbilt invited the young man to join them on an outing to the shore. “I have been down to the Steam Boat to see Mr. V. & his family.… It is a very pleasant thing to have a pleasant companion and a little group of lovely offspring,” Peck scribbled in his diary. “To be sure there is much trouble with them sometimes. But then there is I can well conceive a satisfaction which repays for all four fold and whatever I may argue in favor of a life of celibacy my own feelings do not at all respond to it.”
⁴²
The “trouble” with the children was obvious, and Peck had to talk himself into believing that there must be emotional compensation for it all.

Indeed, there must have been some, as the couple had still more children. In 1830, Sophia returned to Staten Island, pregnant, to lie in with her family, and gave birth to Cornelius Jeremiah. For Vanderbilt, the role of patriarch was hardly at odds with that of the clever businessman. There was, perhaps, no better way to exert control in a city of strangers, a city of tricksters, than through friends and family. As Vanderbilt cast his eyes across the dinner table, he saw more than a pious companion and various relatives—he saw assets.
⁴³

WAS THERE EVER A PRESIDENT
like Andrew Jackson? This lean and predatory Tennessean, with his bristling mane of gray hair, resembled nothing so much as a hungry wolf, a creature of ferocious passion and territorial instincts, whether defending his inner landscape of honor or the physical boundaries of the United States. The only chief executive to have killed a man in a duel, this former general had defeated the British at New Orleans in 1815, crushed Indian tribes, and essentially conquered Florida. His presidency saw the last conflict with Native Americans in the Old Northwest (the Black Hawk War in 1832) and the forced removal of five Indian nations on the infamous Trail of Tears. A cloud of danger hung about the age of Jackson.

There was also a scent of triumph. When the general took the oath of office in 1829, at the age of sixty-two, he and his followers saw it as a vindication. Four years before, he had won the popular vote but been denied the office by maneuvers in the House of Representatives (which decided the election in the absence of an Electoral College majority). His sweeping victory in 1828, they thought, rang in what would be hailed as “the era of the common man”—a romantic and partisan title, to be sure, but one that reflected his supporters' fervent beliefs. To them, Jackson's rise epitomized the rise of the West, the triumph of the millions who had poured across the Appalachians; Jackson represented the victory of an expanded electorate, a rebuke to the old elite. In a famous and telling incident, average folks mobbed the White House for his inaugural reception, spitting tobacco and trampling on the furniture.
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To many Americans, the president embodied the energy, mobility, and enterprise that they believed defined their nation. So it makes perfect sense that the name
General Jackson
appeared on the side of the Hudson River steamboat commanded by Jacob Vanderbilt, Cornelius's younger brother. At 175 tons, it was fast and successful on its route between New York and the Westchester town of Peekskill. Jacob, just twenty-four, had bought a half share at the end of 1830 and took over as captain. He would continue to loyally aid Cornelius's enterprises, but he, too, was in business for himself. A broad-faced man with a wide smile, a round nose, and friendly eyes, he made a stark contrast with his brother (though they shared a receding hairline and abundant, cheek-filling sideburns). Jacob seemed to be warm where Cornelius was brusque, collegial as much as commanding. He rapidly became a popular figure in Peekskill.
⁴⁵

That changed abruptly at half past three in the afternoon on June 7, 1831. Coming down from Peekskill, the
General Jackson
chuffed across the river to Grassy Point, where the Hudson begins to widen into the expanse of Haverstraw Bay. The pilot guided the vessel to the crowded pier and Jacob jumped ashore to help load the luggage and boxes of merchandise. Then the engine detonated. “Such was the force of the explosion,” noted one newspaper, “that the boiler was blown entirely from its place.” The hot, expanding gas turned the boiler into a rocket. A wave of steam blasted through the hull as the apparatus roared into the air, then splashed heavily into the space that opened between the boat and the dock. The explosion “shivered to splinters” the bow and upper decks, the press reported. “In about 20 minutes the boat sank, the stern only being visible above the surface of the water.”

Shattered pieces of wood, metal fragments, and shreds of clothing showered the water and the dock as some forty passengers screamed in panic or pain. At least nine would die from the scalding shock wave of steam, and two more were sealed in the sunken hull. Jacob was knocked to the ground, miraculously uninjured, with the dead and dying all around him. He then boarded a passing steamboat, the
Albany
, and left the bloody scene for New York. It was a public relations disaster.

“The public mind is painfully aroused to the subject of steamboat explosions,” observed the
New York Evening Post
. The urge to “go ahead” as rapidly as possible increasingly strained against the daily fear of a horrible death. “I had never been on board a steamboat before,” a New Englander recalled, describing his move to New York around that time. “As I heard the whizzing and puffing of steam, and the splashing of water—‘Heavens!’ thought I, 'sposin' the
biler
should
bust
, what in the deuce would become of me?’ So I stationed myself at the extreme bow of the boat, as far, I thought, as I could get from the boilers.” After disasters, safety barges would proliferate, allowing nervous passengers to ride in a raft towed behind the steamer.

But nothing could quell the fury of the victims and their families. As outrage spread, Jacob defended himself in a letter to the New York newspapers. “I was one half owner of the
General Jackson”
he wrote, “and by her destruction found myself in one moment stripped of my property and ruined in my prospects.” He only went to New York to get help, he said. He anchored his defense with one of the best-respected men in the business: his brother Cornelius. The engineer, he wrote, had been “strongly recommended by the owner of the steam boat
Citizen
, whose great experience in steam navigation is well known to the public.”
⁴⁶

No one knows where Cornelius was at the time of Jacob's narrow escape from death, but it would not be surprising if he was in Huntington, Long Island, where his prize horse Bullcaff ran the races on these cool June days.
⁴⁷
With his customary hard-eyed calculation, he saw an opportunity in his brother's misfortune, a chance to seize for himself the market that Jacob had lost. The endeavor would open a window on the customs that steamboat entrepreneurs were devising to bring order to the new chaos of the marketplace.

Six days before the
General Jackson
sank, Cornelius had received an influx of capital from his competitors on Long Island Sound, Charles Hoyt and Curtis Peck. The pair had desperately wanted him to go away, and eagerly accepted the deal he offered. On June 1, they agreed to buy the
Citizen
, along with the rights to his Sawpits pier and wharves at Stamford and Catherine Street in New York, for the inflated price of $30,000.

As they closed the deal, a visibly irate Hoyt snapped that he and Peck “were paying [Vanderbilt] a large sum of money for the route.” Vanderbilt shook his head, and “distinctly requested… Hoyt to understand that all [he] sold them was the steam boat with the leases and docks.” It was
understood
that he would not compete against them, he told Hoyt. They needed no formal deal on that score, because it was part of the steamboat man's code of conduct, the unwritten rules that had arisen to regulate competition after
Gibbons v. Ogden
. As Vanderbilt told a court, “In cases of sales of steamboats which are expected to run on a particular route, it is generally understood that the vendor would be considered as acting unfairly were he to oppose the purchaser with steamboats on the same route, except and unless in self defense.”
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Monopoly on a line was the standard, the assumed state of affairs, and a sale by a competitor confirmed it. If the seller violated the code, the buyer could fairly counterattack against one of the seller's other routes. Vanderbilt made it a point of pride to refuse to make any formal agreement. Tellingly, Curtis Peck, an experienced steamboat man, “did not consider it worth his while to require or exact any stipulation… on the subject.” Vanderbilt, he believed, would keep his word.