The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (19 page)

Vanderbilt claimed that he was abandoning “the run between the city of New York and Norwalk because he considered it a hazardous run and not desirable in itself.” There was some truth to this: in April, the
Citizen
had struck a rock off New Rochelle, sank, and had to be raised. But the money came at a critical moment.

With the
General Jackson
sitting on the bottom of the Hudson, Vanderbilt quickly leased the
Flushing
to take its place. Meanwhile he built a new steamboat, the
Cinderella
, to take over the route permanently. It seems he chose the name to charm a public disenchanted with the Vanderbilt family. “A fine little steamboat, of the fairy order, and appropriately ycleped [called] the ‘Cinderella’ was tried in our waters,” the
New York Gazette
reported in September. “She sat buoyantly on the stream, gaily decked out in her best attire, and… she is ‘swift as the flash.’ The new Cinderella is decidedly in the field as a resolute competitor.”
⁴⁹

By the time the
Cinderella
began to run, she already faced a rival, and a big one: the 207-ton, 134-foot
Water Witch
. Even more dangerous than the boat was the leading spirit behind it. He was a grim-faced man of thirty-four, with dark hair parted on one side, narrow eyes, and such a crimped jaw and sharp cheekbones that it looked as if his collar had compressed the lower half of his head—but then, he did make an art of keeping his mouth shut. His name was Daniel Drew.

A native of landlocked Carmel, New York, Drew had started his working life by driving cattle down to the meat markets of Manhattan. It would later be said—inaccurately—that he invented the “watering” of livestock, the trick of preventing them from drinking on the drive to market, then encouraging them to gorge, once they arrived, to inflate their weight. Incorrect as the attribution was, it speaks to the formidable reputation Drew developed for sharp dealing—which stood in odd juxtaposition with his eventual standing as a devout Methodist in an age of revivalism. Drew was “shrewd, unscrupulous, and very illiterate,” Charles F. Adams Jr. would later write, “a strange combination of superstition and faithlessness, of daring and timidity—often good-natured and sometimes generous.” Sly, silent, and stoop-shouldered, he seemed to take pleasure in passing down the street unnoticed by the crowd. One man thought that he resembled “a cross between a cartman and a small trader.” But if you should catch his eye, “you will observe a sharp, bright glance in it, with a look penetrating and intelligent.” As a another writer later remarked, “We have said his intellect was subtle. The word
subtle
does not altogether express it. It should be
vulpine.”
⁵⁰

Drew's peculiar character, and his background in cattle, led to his rise as a figure of street-level finance. In 1830, he took over the Upper Bull's Head Tavern, located on Third Avenue at the Two-Mile Stone (according to the street grid plotted in 1811, this was at Twenty-fourth Street, still far above the settled portion of the city). A large three-story wooden building, the Bull's Head was described by one stagecoach driver as “the common resort for all travellers (and particularly drovers)” on the main route down Manhattan. Drew became a central figure in the cattle business, trading promissory notes and lending money, establishing himself as “a man of sufficient and ample means,” in the driver's words.
⁵¹
It was natural enough, then, that an old friend, circus proprietor Heckaliah Bailey, should approach him in the summer of 1831 to ask him to buy a share in the
Water Witch
, and to take charge of its affairs on behalf of himself and a group of Westchester investors who had built it.

Vanderbilt soon realized that he faced a worthy foe in Drew. Inevitably, a rate war erupted, driving fares down to a shilling—only now, unlike his war against the Livingstons, the public was against him. “In the midst of the storm of indignation” over the
General Jackson
, “the very name of Vanderbilt aroused execrations deep and loud all along the North River,” declared
Harper's Weekly
in an 1859 profile. “The exasperated river towns and villages… would not allow his boat to make fast to their piers.… When he ran to a wharf he could get no hand to take the ropes he threw ashore to make fast. As to business, it is recorded that more than once his daily receipts did not exceed
$0.12
½. When a solitary passenger did take passage in his boat he hid himself from the public gaze, as though he had been doing a guilty thing.” The
Water Witch
, on the other hand, “was welcomed daily with huzzas and uproar from the thronging crowds at the landings,” according to another 1859 profile—this one of Drew.

Drew, it was later said, often slouched on the dock as the
Cinderella
steamed up, Vanderbilt looming tall at its bow, confidently riding out the public's rage. “You have no business in this trade,” Vanderbilt told him. “You don't understand it, and you can't succeed.” But Drew understood it all too well. He didn't need to make a profit; he simply had to make his opponent suffer to the point that he was willing to make a deal. The same tactics that Vanderbilt had employed against Hoyt and Peck—to drive down fares until the established line bought him out of the market—now worked against him. If he wanted the
Water Witch
to go away, he would have to purchase it at a hefty premium. And so, in 1832, the people of Westchester were startled to discover that their champion boat had been bought by Vanderbilt, who promptly raised the fare again.

It was the beginning of a long and peculiar friendship. For the first time in Vanderbilt's life, he had been forced to pay for what was already his, and he couldn't help admiring the man who had done it to him. Over the course of their lives, these starkly contrasting businessmen would mix partnership and rivalry in a bewildering dance of mutual respect and self-interest.
⁵²

ON MAY 20, DEATH HAUNTED
the Vanderbilt family. Three years before, on May 20, 1829, Cornelius's brother-in-law and old partner, Captain John De Forest, had died, leaving his sister Charlotte a widow. Now, on May 20, 1832, Cornelius Vanderbilt senior died, pulling his son back to Staten Island for the Moravian Church funeral, the settlement of the will, and attendance on his bereaved mother.

Death defined not only the date, but the year as well. Rumors began to spread of an epidemic. “Some considerable said about the Cholera,” noted Hiram Peck in his diary on July 5. Soon the newspapers began to track the disease's daily harvest—one hundred dead on July 20, 104 on July 21, ninety on July 22—as quarantines and a general panic shut down intercity travel. Then a fever struck Vanderbilt himself in September. Dr. Jared Linsly treated him with quinine, but the “ague,” as the doctor called it, forced him to bed repeatedly for three months.
⁵³

Bankruptcies shadowed Vanderbilt as well—though this was not entirely a bad thing. Like Drew, he lent money to his fellow businessmen, drawing on reserves created by his cash-based steamboat trade; bankruptcies brought him collateral. In September, one debtor handed the keys to a store over to Vanderbilt, who thought of young Hiram Peck. For two years he had cultivated the friendship of this earnest churchgoer; now he had just the right use for him. “I have also today been negotiating with Capt. C. Vanderbilt to take charge of the business assigned to him by Mr. John Coten,” Peck wrote in his diary on September 12. “Was at his house at noon and down to the store in the afternoon and at his house in the evening.” Three days later he added, “Attended at the store again and came to the conclusion to have the business transacted in my name and Capt. Vanderbilt is to endorse for me. I am to get books and such things as necessary. I have not quite finished bargain about my salary but am to be liberally paid.… We commence taking an inventory this afternoon.” Ultimately Vanderbilt granted him a salary of a thousand dollars a year, plus $250 if he returned “a good profit.”
⁵⁴

Peck, then, served as the front man, while Vanderbilt lurked behind as the silent partner. It was hardly an unusual arrangement, but it underscored the uncertainties and suspicions that now ran through every business transaction. On March 29, 1833, for example, Vanderbilt sold his steamboat
Westchester
for $30,000 to John Brooks, former captain of the
Citizen
, and two other men; they put the boat on Vanderbilt's old line to Connecticut. The move outraged Charles Hoyt, who believed that Vanderbilt was using Brooks as a front man. Even Curtis Peck was ready to think the worst of the man whose word had been good enough a year before. The two filed a lawsuit, asking the court to enforce their unwritten understanding that Vanderbilt would not compete against them on this route.

Vanderbilt indignantly denied that he was behind Brooks's move, but it is difficult to know the truth. He proudly imagined himself to be a man who stood by his agreements, but he also possessed a Gibbons-like streak of self-righteousness that looked suspiciously like duplicity to others, when he interpreted agreements in what appeared to be self-serving ways. Was he a force for businesslike order or competitive anarchy? Even his contemporaries struggled to understand him.
⁵⁵

Vanderbilt's proud idea of himself soon clashed again with his public image. On June 12, 1833, President Jackson visited New York, sparking what the
Evening Post
called “one of the most striking public ceremonies ever witnessed by the people of this city.… The inhabitants of the city seemed to have deserted all the other quarters for the Battery and Broadway.” On June 14, he toured northern New Jersey, and returned to New York on the
Cinderella
, commanded by Vanderbilt himself.

It was a striking moment, this convergence of two iron-willed men, one who gave his name to the age and the other who in many ways typified it. But Vanderbilt was merely Jackson's pilot, not his peer. In New Jersey, the president met with the still-famous Aaron Ogden, and most likely with Colonel Stevens and his sons, but he probably had no idea who Vanderbilt was.

Pride is often the door to humiliation. The contrast between the captain's ambitions and his actual status must have scraped his thin skin like sandpaper. Frances Trollope had come away highly impressed by New York's refined, wealthy elite—the “Medici of the Republic,” as she called them—but Vanderbilt was not one of them. Though always unpretentious, he sorely wanted respect. On October 30, for example, he entered a four-year-old colt in races at the Union Course in Long Island against horses belonging to the patriarchs of transportation, past, present, and future: William Gibbons, Robert L. Stevens and his brother John, and Robert F. Stockton. It was a symbolic race—and Vanderbilt's horse was disqualified.
⁵⁶

If he had been disposed to dwell, he might have stewed gloomily on all that had happened in the previous two years: the death of his father, his defeat by Drew, his humiliation at the racetrack. By temperament and necessity however, he was given not to reflection, but to movement. The
Legislator
had exploded in his face, and he had gone ahead; his brother had barely survived a steamboat explosion, and he had gone ahead; he himself had narrowly overcome a deadly fever, and he had gone ahead. He saw no point in mulling over dangers when a world of competition demanded that he seize the next opportunity. Like one of his paddlewheelers caught in the currents of Hell Gate, he had to drive forward or be wrecked.

Fortunately for Vanderbilt, whose entire business was transportation, transportation was precisely where the next opportunity appeared. The first rattling, chuffing, clanking trains of steam-drawn railway cars captured the public imagination—and no better example could be found than the Camden & Amboy the special project of the Stevens family. It set off what one magazine called a “fever,” for both the faster travel and the rich profits it promised to bring. “If any doubt existed as to the excitement about railroads,” it argued in 1831, “it could have been removed by a view of the crowds thronging for stock to the… Camden.” With the line now complete, the national press breathlessly reported that it carried passengers thirty-five miles in one hour and forty-six minutes, cutting the passage from New York to Philadelphia to just seven hours and forty-five minutes.
⁵⁷

On November 8, 1833, Vanderbilt sailed over to South Amboy to examine it for himself. The locomotive resembled an oversize barrel with a smokestack in front; the engineer and fireman stood on a rear platform with no shelter from the elements. Three passenger carriages trailed behind, linked by heavy chains. Each car looked as if three stagecoaches had been fused together, with three compartments, each of which had a side door, topped by one continuous flat roof for baggage. The whole rested on a leaf spring, set high above the large cast-iron wheels with wooden spokes—two pairs of wheels connected by iron axles. Vanderbilt stepped up into the middle car (the last being reserved for baggage). The engine began to chug, building to twenty-five miles per hour.