The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (22 page)

Vanderbilt's mind was not on beauty, but the pain he inflicted on his opponents. Even a fare of $
i
—half that charged by the
Westchester
, the ostensible cause of this war—did not strike him as ruthless enough. Within days, he reduced it to fifty cents. Meanwhile he ordered his captains to beat the monopoly's boats at all costs.

Philip Hone witnessed the resulting struggle on the Hudson. “We left Albany at ½ past 6 this morning in the Steam Boat
Champlain,”
he wrote in his diary on September 14. “There is a violent opposition between two lines of boats.” He meant
violent
literally. The rival crews hated each other, and public opinion was inflamed. “We were contending with the
Nimrod
all the way down, and for five or six miles before we reached Hyde Park Landing, the boats were in contact, both pushing furiously at the top of their speed. And we and our trunks were pitched ashore like bundles of hay. The people at the landing being all in favour of the opposition… nobody would take a line, and we might have drowned without an arm being reached to save us.”

Hone was a commercially savvy merchant, yet he loathed such cutthroat competition, even when he had no personal interests at stake. Two days later, he took Vanderbilt's
Champion
to New York; the experience caused his social prejudices to rise up in his throat like bile. “Our boat had three or four hundred passengers, and such a set of rag-tag & bobtail I never saw on board a North River Steam Boat—the effect of the 50 cent system,” he sniffed into his diary. “If the people do not rise in their might and put a stop to the racing & opposition it will be better to return to the primitive mode of travelling in Albany sloops.”

If the people do not rise?
Against what—cheap travel? Hone saw firsthand the popularity of Vanderbilt's fierce competition, but he did not believe his own eyes. Indeed, his visceral distaste illuminates America's social and political divisions. The Democrats derided Hone and his fellow Whigs as “aristocrats,” and not entirely without cause. Though political and economic institutions no longer depended upon distinctions in social rank, New York's old patrician families had carried on into this more competitive, egalitarian era, carrying their wealth and prejudices with them. Their elitism blended with the Whig faith in an entreprenurial but orderly economy. Hone's disgust at being forced to mingle with his social inferiors was inseparable from his disaste for competitive anarchy. After complaining of the “rag-tag and bobtail,” he added, “I would rather consume three or four days in the voyage than be made to fly in fear and trembling, subject to every sort of discomfort, with my life at the mercy of a set of fellows whose only object is to drive their competitors off the river.”
¹⁹

Vanderbilt pressed the war into November. He added the
Union
to the line. He offered overnight service. He ran ads in Albany newspapers headlined “
PEOPLE'S LINE.—FOR NEW-YORK.—NO MONOPOLY
.” He battled on until fingertips of ice began to poke down the Hudson, until finally the freeze clasped its hands shut over the river.
²⁰

In the spring, steamboats began to churn again to Albany—and again charged $3 per person. The war was over; Vanderbilt had withdrawn. The public, which had cheered Vanderbilt's boats at every dock and landing, must have been mystified. Where had he gone? The answer would not come for another five years, when a careful investigation by the
New York Herald
revealed that Vanderbilt had fought not for a principle, but for revenge. On those terms, he had won a resounding victory. He had forced the “odious monopoly,” as the
Herald
called it, to call Peck off the Sing Sing route and to pay Vanderbilt the astronomical fee of $100,000 to leave the line to Albany, plus an annual payment of $5,000 to stay away
²¹

It was becoming a pattern with him. In the emerging code of conduct for steamboat men, the first proprietor to occupy a line assumed a sort of natural right to the route. A challenger who lasted long enough could expect an offer of a bribe to abandon the market and, should he accept it, would be expected to abstain from further competition. Vanderbilt had now repeatedly preyed on existing lines—to New Brunswick, to western Long Island Sound, and now to Albany—and each time had taken money to stay away. Like his late mentor Thomas Gibbons, he often acted out of a sense of self-righteous outrage, but always in ways that suited his material interests. To say that his Jacksonian rhetoric was deliberately deceitful is, perhaps, to suggest that he was more self-aware than he actually was. He made himself his first and last cause, but never the subject of study.

The public, however, had no inkling of who Vanderbilt was as a man, or why he had left the Albany line. The people looked for his next fare-cutting offensive as he unerringly hunted out the next great channel of commerce. To them, he was not a self-serving capitalist, but a lone proprietor, an avenging entrepreneur, the monopolists' nemesis.

VANDERBILT PRESENTED THE MODEL
to Joseph Bishop and Charles Simonson in their office down by Corlears Hook. The two men were among New York's most experienced shipbuilders, but—as Bishop remarked as he pored over the model—they had never seen a design quite like it. On this winter day of early 1835, Vanderbilt could boast of seventeen years in the steamboat business. He had built or owned perhaps fifteen paddlewheelers, and had worked closely with almost every steamboat man but Fulton himself. All his experience had led him to this new departure—the first of “an entirely new class of steam vessels,” as one expert would declare.
²²

“Make her as strong as possible,” Vanderbilt ordered. Bishop and Simonson could only nod; it would have to be very strong indeed. The captain wanted the twin paddlewheels enlarged dramatically from any previous design, to twenty-four feet in diameter. To drive them, he would have a new engine constructed, more powerful than any ever put into a steamboat. The piston in the
North America
, Robert L. Stevens's famous “rather-faster-than-lightning steamer,” pulsed at a rate of 384 feet per minute; Vanderbilt envisioned one that would pound away at six hundred feet per minute. He foresaw a single engine that could do the work of two, saving as much as 50 percent on fuel while driving the wheels around at twenty-three revolutions per minute.

“Her shape was very peculiar,” Vanderbilt later remarked. The hull was unusually long and narrow—205 feet from stem to stern post, with a beam of only twenty-two feet, less than the diameter of her wheels (though the guards outside the wheels extended her deck to forty-six feet). She was literally built for speed. The problem was that such a narrow, extended hull would “hog,” or bend in the middle. To correct it, he called for an arched deck, “built on the plan of [a] patent for bridges,” as he explained his inspiration, to shift the pressure to the ends of the deck planks.

Bishop and Simonson agreed to build it. “There was no written contract, no price agreed upon beforehand,” Bishop recalled. Simonson was Vanderbilt's brother-in-law, and the three trusted one another implicitly. In the days that followed, as Bishop erected the gallows frame in their shipyard, Vanderbilt decided on a name: the
Lexington
, after the place where the Revolution began.
²³

He ordered the
Lexington
for a very simple reason: cotton. As the 1830s rushed past, cotton powered the American economy forward. Demand from British textile mills had already caused a westward-moving land rush across the South by cotton planters, dramatically expanding slavery into new territories. Slave-owning Americans had even settled the Mexican province of Texas. “Funds from the Northeast and England financed the transfer of slaves, purchase of land, and working capital during the period of clearing the land,” writes economic historian Douglass C. North. Once cultivated, harvested, and pressed into bales, the cotton enriched not only the planters, but also the merchants, shippers, and financiers of New York. Much of it was transshipped to Britain through Manhattan; even after most of it came to be exported directly from the South, it was in New York-based ships that would return to Manhattan with cargoes of British goods. Then there were loans, commissions, and insurance charges, until one committee of Southern legislators concluded that one-third of each dollar paid for cotton went to New York—a percentage that continued to rise.
²⁴

But not all of it crossed the Atlantic. Every year, ever more thousands of dirty white bales were unloaded on New York's slips, then reloaded onto vessels bound for New England. That cotton fed the first real factories in the United States, the waterwheel mills that increasingly crowded the rivers and streams of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, in a great arc centered on Boston. New York took back much of the finished fabric, to be made into clothing in the city's workshops and distributed by the city's merchants. By the time the
Lexington
took shape in its shipyard, New York had emerged as capital of the commercial revolution, Boston as capital of the industrial. Businessmen, craftsmen, and messengers, cargoes of cotton and kegs of gold, all passed between them in rising numbers. It was the aorta of the American economy
²⁵

The question of transportation between the two cities attracted the attention of the nation's greatest minds and richest men. In 1830, those rich men organized corporations to construct railroads radiating out of Boston. If ever corporations were necessary, it was now, for railways were far more costly and far more complex than textile mills (almost all of which were owned by individual proprietors or partnerships). Curiously, their organizers never wanted to create those corporations in the first place. Historian John Lauritz Larson argues that New England's first railroad promoters initially planned their lines as public works, to be built and owned by the state (as they sometimes were in other regions, as in the case of the Michigan Central). But the state governments refused, due to the failure of various canals and turnpikes to replicate the success of New York's Erie Canal. “Thus it was in frustration (not appreciation for the corporate form) that Massachusetts's railroad pioneers turned to private corporations,” Larson writes. This very specific political history set the pattern for American railroads nationwide. Though they were public works in the broadest sense—increasingly important as the common carriers of commerce—they were also private property, owned by individuals who pursued their own interests. In the end, these circumstances would define Vanderbilt's historical role as public figure and private businessman.
²⁶

A group of influential New Yorkers organized one of the first of these pioneering railways: the Boston & Providence Railroad, a forty-three-mile line that would link its eponymous cities and allow passengers and freight from Boston to connect to Long Island Sound steamboats, bypassing the long sea trip around Cape Cod. It would prove typical of New England's railroads: short, and specifically designed as part of a combined land-sea route to New York. A continuous railway between Boston and Manhattan was just too expensive to build with the available capital.

In early 1835, the construction crews on the Boston & Providence worked steadily southward. Their destination was the India Point dock in Providence, where the trains would meet the steamboats of the Boston & New York Transportation Company. “The stockholders in both are principally the same,” Philip Hone observed in his diary; he himself owned $6,000 in shares in the railroad, and $5,000 in the Transportation Company. The railway connection would cement the latter's near monopoly on steamboat traffic down the length of Long Island Sound.
²⁷

The
Lexington
threatened that imperium. With the sleek vessel nearing completion, the Transportation Company's directors decided to build a new steamer, the
Massachusetts
, in order to defeat it. They also dispatched Captain William Comstock, their general agent, to examine the
Lexington
more closely. A tough-minded forty-eight-year-old veteran of the trade, Comstock had to be careful in sneaking aboard, as Vanderbilt himself constantly prowled the yard. (“My instructions in building the
Lexington
were given from day to day,” Vanderbilt explained. “All my boats were thus built under my directions.”) Comstock waited until just after the engine was installed, then slipped in to take a quick look around.

He viewed the
Lexington
with skepticism—“I did not like her build,” he said—but he had to admit that it represented a remarkable departure. “I had no doubts of her strength and of the plan of securing her deck,” he confessed. “In the structure of her keelsons [beams lining the hull to strengthen it], I think them stronger than any boat I ever saw.” It was perfectly suited to the rough seas around Rhode Island's Point Judith. Hurrying back to the shipyard of Brown and Bell, Comstock modified the design of the
Massachusetts
accordingly. The new boat would be the same length as the
Lexington
, but far bigger (676 tons to 488), and he wanted it just as strong and fast.

That would prove difficult. When the
Lexington
finally slid into the East River in April 1835, Vanderbilt had good reason to exult. He had spent some $75,000 on it, to brilliant effect. He had insisted on “first-rate materials—chestnut, cedar, oak, yellow and white pine,” he boasted. “I think she has 30 percent more fastenings than any other boat.” Bishop, who was well acquainted with the Transportation Company's steamers, thought “none of them are stronger than the
Lexington.”
Theodosius F. Secor said, after helping to install the vast new piston (measuring eleven feet by two), “I consider her as perfect an engine as ever was built.” Vanderbilt put it simply: “I should have thought her one of the best boats in New York.… I had so much confidence in her strength, that I always instructed my captains never to stop for foul weather, but if they could see to go ahead, to always go.”
²⁸