The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (23 page)

On June 1, the
Lexington
embarked on its maiden voyage with streamers flying, its enormous wheels thrashing at the water on either side, its sharp nose slicing through the turbulent currents of Hell Gate into Long Island Sound. It made the 210-mile voyage to Providence in twelve hours—a marvel to travelers who regularly devoted eighteen hours or more to the trip. “
FASTEST BOAT IN THE WORLD
,” announced the
Journal of Commerce
. Though “elegantly fitted up,” the paper commented, “her superiority is in her firmness and ease in the water, and above all, in her speed, in which we suppose it is safe to say, she surpasses any boat in the world, and has in fact reached a degree which was supposed two years ago impossible.” The
Journal
voiced a broad consensus that Vanderbilt had achieved one of the great technical triumphs of the day. “Her construction exhibits great knowledge of mechanical principles,” it reported, “and a peculiarly bold and independent genius.”

The envious Captain Comstock watched it churn up the East River at the astonishing rate of twenty miles per hour. But his company had an advantage that Vanderbilt could not match. On June 15, precisely two weeks after the
Lexington's
first trip, the Boston & Providence Railroad began service. It promptly gave the Transportation Company exclusive rights to land at the railroad dock in Providence, and established coordinated through fares and schedules. The contract was signed by Charles H. Russell, president of the steamboat company, and William W. Woolsey president of the railroad. Both men were directors of both companies. As Comstock would say, the Transportation Company had “done up” Cornelius Vanderbilt.
²⁹

Except it hadn't. Vanderbilt prospered by drawing freight from the factories in and around Providence, but passengers were the most lucrative part of the trade—and passengers demanded speed, speed the
Lexington
had like no other boat. He slashed the fare, once as high as $10, to $3, and timed his arrivals in Providence to allow his customers time to walk from his dock and buy tickets for the Boston train. Philip Hone himself put the railroad together with Vanderbilt's boat as he marveled at the new swiftness of travel. “The time [of the first train trip] was 2 hours and a half, and the
Lexington
steam boat goes from New York to Providence in 12 hours,” he wrote in his diary, “so that persons leaving this city at 6 in the morning can unstrap their trunks at their lodgings in Boston by daylight on a summer day”
³⁰

Cheap fares and breathtaking speeds made steamboat travel on Long Island Sound a widely shared experience in the 1830s. The docks and decks of paddlewheelers began to turn up in stories, novels, and anecdotes. “The boat was ready to start—the second bell was ringing—every thing was in confusion,” went a typical tale, from the
Providence Journal in
1836. “Disconsolate old gentlemen were searching in vain for their baggage, and terrified young ladies were trembling, lest half their party were left on shore. Porters were flying backwards and forwards with trunks and band-boxes, and stumbling over nursery maids, with children in their arms. The heavy arms of the engine moved slowly up and down, and the boat, impatient of restraint, swayed to and fro, gathering up her energies for a mighty plunge.”
³¹

“Directly you have left the wharf, all the life, and stir, and bustle of a packet cease,” wrote Charles Dickens a few years later, after taking a Long Island Sound steamer. “The passengers, unless the weather be very fine indeed, usually congregate below.… There is always a clerk's office on the lower deck, where you pay your fare; a ladies' cabin; baggage and stowage rooms; engineer's room; and in short a great variety of perplexities which render the discovery of the gentleman's cabin a matter of some difficulty. It often occupies the whole length of the boat (as it did in this case), and has three or four tiers of berths [bunks] on each side.” The more commonplace steamboat travel became, the more that customers demanded creature comforts. “Passengers are now-a-days expected to have every thing extravagant,” grumbled Comstock. During the day, the crew set up two rows of long rectangular tables where stewards served drinks and luxurious meals.
³²

Transportation, not fledgling factories, captured Americans' imagination. It seemed to be the most strategic sector of the economy in this sprawling country, and Vanderbilt took a strategic view of it. His attack on the Transportation Company was only one part of an emerging campaign all along Long Island Sound. In the fall of 1835, for example, he shifted the
Lexington
to the run to Hartford to reinforce his assault on Menemon Sanford, another hard-edged steamboat captain who largely dominated shipping to New Haven and Hartford. Vanderbilt instinctively despised him, for he had a particularly untrustworthy reputation. “As to Sanford,” Comstock declared, “I believe him to be a person void of truth and character.” Vanderbilt advertised his offensive against him under the Jacksonian headline “
OPPOSITION TO IMPOSITION: NO MONOPOLY—FREE
TRADE & EQUAL RIGHTS
.”

With two business wars raging on Long Island Sound, he began to concentrate all his resources there. On August 27, 1835, he sold off the
Water Witch
and the
Cinderella
, along with his lucrative Elizabethtown ferry, to a group of six men for the hefty sum of $74,000—enough to build a fast and luxurious steamboat on the model of the
Lexington
, which he would christen
Cleopatra
.
³³

In 1836 he again sent the
Lexington
to Providence under the command of his brother Jacob. The Transportation Company retaliated with the
Rhode Island
, the new
Massachusetts
, and in October the
Narragansett
—all bigger but none so fast. Vanderbilt slashed his fare to $1 and added the beautiful new
Cleopatra
. But the
Lexington
remained the popular favorite. “The speed and excellence of this boat require no comment from us,” the
Providence Journal
observed. The
Providence Courier
called it “this far-famed water witch, which measures distances as fast as one can keep account of the miles.” Even Comstock grudgingly allowed that it was “the fastest boat on the route.”
³⁴

Not everyone celebrated the
Lexington
. Philip Hone, for one, went aboard Comstock's prize
Massachusetts
and was moved to write, “She is decidedly the finest vessel I ever saw.” He owned a large amount of stock in the Transportation Company, of course; but he was also a Whig. He and his party feared the destructive power represented by the
Lexington
. “The proprietors of steamboats… not unfrequently carry the spirit of competition to a ruinous and ridiculous extent,” wrote another Whig, the editor of the
New-York Mirror
. “Mr. Vanderbilt, a large capitalist, and doubtless an enterprising man, with a view of breaking down what has been denominated the ‘odious eastern monopoly’ has placed several swift and commodious steamers on the Boston line, and you may now take a trip from New-York to Providence for the trifling consideration of one dollar, lawful currency!” The editor feared that Vanderbilt would wipe out the established Transportation Company—annihilating its hard-to-come-by capital—and replace it with a chaotic world without social distinctions.

In a crowded steamer… whose deck and cabin are thronged with what the great bard calls “all sorts of people,” there is no more comfort than there is said to be in a badly governed family… when, the old ballad tells us, all is topsy-turvy and most admired confusion. Yet we would not be understood as raising our feeble voice in defence of any monopoly under the sun; but more especially that of steamboats. Far be it from us.

A feeble voice indeed. Conservative Whigs felt themselves losing their struggle against laissez-faire, as both an economic
and
a social phenomenon. As one paper declared, “OPPOSITION
is the very life of business
.,”
³⁵

But the Transportation Company still had its exclusive contract with the Boston & Providence Railroad. During the winter of 1836–37, Vanderbilt's agent in Providence, a popular businessman named John W. Richmond, devised a plan to destroy that advantage. Richmond detested monopolies with the passion of a full-blooded radical Democrat. He believed that he could convince the Rhode Island legislature that the contract violated the railroad's state charter, and he eagerly shared his ideas with Vanderbilt.

The no-nonsense captain responded in November 1836 in his hasty, erratic scrawl. “Your application to your legislator is received,” he wrote; “it looks well.” But he was more concerned with securing fuel supplies for the coming season. “In speaking about pine wood think you may ingage from 1 to 2 thousand cords for next season only let us have as good contracts as our
oponants,”
he scratched. Obsessed with information and control, he bombarded Richmond with a typical barrage of questions. “What progress have you made with your Legislator—how does the passengers get through on Sunday…—how does matters go ginerally—you did not say my preasance wood be nessessary theirfour I have made no calculation to go to your Place.”
³⁶

In January 1837, a committee of the legislature reported that, “by giving a preference to a line of steamboats, in which directors of said Rail Road company owning a controlling portion of the stock… [the Boston & Providence Railroad] departed from the spirit of their Act of Incorporation.” Richmond fired off a joyous account to Vanderbilt, telling him that he would now “enjoy… a location at the depot, & also the same rights of having passengers taken in the cars.”

Richmond saw the episode as part of the struggle against the tyranny of monopolistic corporations. The hearings attracted “an immense crowd of spectators,” he wrote proudly. He hailed the result as “a great victory. It is not only so in the consequences to you, but there is also some pride in the manner & circumstances of its attainment. It is the result of individual exertion against a mass of corporate wealth.… You will now stand on ground of fair competition.”

Vanderbilt's reply marked a subtle but profound turn in his life. It appeared in the careful penmanship of a clerk; its praise for Richmond's triumph marched in formulaic phrases that had the air of having been inserted by a more literate assistant, phrases that distanced the entire episode from Vanderbilt himself. “It must be extremely gratifying to you to succeed in spite of all the force of such a powerful combination of companies against you,” it began. “It will be a stroke that your opponents will not forget shortly.”

So much for Jacksonian platitudes. The rest of the letter was dedicated to practical business issues; though written in the clerk's hand, it breathed Vanderbilt's authentic voice. “I have not had any communication with the [Transportation Company] since my boats laid up [for winter], nor do I wish to have anything to do with them,” he said. “I am now repairing my boats, fitting them with state rooms.… I do not wish to start my boats until wood [for fuel] can be procured by the cargo. This single cord business will not answer.” The enemy, preparations for battle, logistics: these were Vanderbilt's obsessions. With the legal battle won, he brusquely dismissed it as Richmond's personal affair. When the lawyer who had argued before the legislature billed him, he refused to pay
³⁷

“Vanderbilt is building a splendid steamer to run on the Sound in opposition to the Transportation Company's boats to commence on the Ist of March,” announced the
New York Evening Post
on February 10, 1837. “He is the greatest
practical
anti-monopolist in the country.” High praise, coming from William Leggett, the radical Jacksonian prophet—but he was wise to stress
practical
. In the case of Cornelius Vanderbilt, circumstances made the idealist. When launching a high-speed raid on a fortified, established enemy, he very easily and naturally imagined his battles in the political terms of the day. It suited him to denounce his foe as an “aristocratic monopoly,” to sail under the banner of “Free Trade & Equal Rights.” He clearly believed it. But circumstances would change.

HE REALLY WAS GOING TO DIE THIS TIME
, Linsly thought. Seated at the side of Vanderbilt's bed in his house, now at 173 East Broadway, in December 1836, the doctor observed his shallow breaths and intense pain. The ailment had seized him abruptly; but the doctor believed it had been lying in wait since the railroad accident three years before. He diagnosed “pleuro-pneumonia” in the lung that had been punctured then. Most likely it was an infection of the pleura, the membrane outside the lung, or else pneumothorax, an air pocket there that constricted or collapsed the lung. In any case, Linsly believed it would be fatal.

“I advised him to settle up his business, as I thought he could not live,” the doctor later said. Vanderbilt sent for his attorney, and turned to Sophia. These were dark hours; a few weeks earlier, on November 16, their four-year-old son George had died. Nineteen-year-old Ethelinda was in the room with them as well, along with Daniel B. Allen, her husband of two years; the young couple had lived in the Vanderbilt house since their marriage. Allen listened to them discuss the will of Vanderbilt's late father, and saw them nod approvingly over its “equal distribution of property” But there was one provision of the will that Sophia did not approve of: the punitive one stipulating what would befall the widow if she remarried. Nonetheless, Vanderbilt would have the same terms in his own will.