The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (26 page)

The Stonington sank ever lower. During the summer, Vanderbilt's old agent, John W. Richmond, ran an opposition boat at reduced prices. “She is a sure scourge to us, causing us to lose heavily,” Palmer noted. In October, Palmer negotiated a disastrous new contract with the Transportation Company, giving it 70 percent of the through fare between New York and Boston. Meanwhile the line issued more bonds, going deeper into debt.

In the middle of November, with the leasing agreement terminated, Vanderbilt approached Robert Schuyler, the president of the Transportation Company. If the company did not buy the
Lexington
, he declared, he would run it to Providence at a fare of $1. Even adding the cost of a ticket on the Boston & Providence Railroad, this would allow travelers to go from New York to Boston for far less than the $5 (or more) that the Stonington demanded. “Our losses will probably be $30,000 in consequence,” Palmer fretted, “while the Trans. Co. would lose twice that or more.” He and Schuyler immediately opened negotiations. All the while turmoil reigned within the Stonington, as stockholders angrily protested the extraordinary debt that would soon place the corporation in the bondholders' hands (as they held a mortgage on the railroad's physical stock of rails, locomotives, cars, and depots).

At the beginning of January, the Transportation Company agreed to pay $60,000 for the
Lexington
, and the Stonington added a $10,000 bonus, thus matching the original demand. No one had any illusions about the reason for the purchase. They were “buying off Vanderbilt,” wrote banker Joseph Cowperthwait, a Stonington trustee. As Palmer put it, they were paying for the
Lexington
“to get rid of her as an opposition boat.” He estimated her worth at $30,000, making a bribe, or “bonus,” of some $40,000. “We found it unprofitable [to fight Vanderbilt],” explained Captain William Comstock, the Transportation Company's general agent, “and concluded that it was better to be at peace than at war, on any terms.”
¹⁰

Such was Vanderbilt's reputation that he not only forced his enemies to buy his too-small boat, but extracted $10,000 from a railroad even as it went bankrupt—and all without a single trip at a reduced fare. But a reputation is a slippery thing. “Before paying it, I sent for Mr. Vanderbilt and received from him a most positive
pledge
that he would never again in any way interfere with the Line,” Palmer wrote. “I asked it in writing but this he declined to give, remarking that I knew his verbal promise could be fully relied on.” The hard-bitten Captain Comstock, on the other hand, had “no confidence in him,” as he told Schuyler. He was sure that, before long, Vanderbilt would be back
¹¹

ON THE WARM SUNDAY AFTERNOON
of September 2, 1838, a very angry man with the very peculiar name of Oroondates Mauran stepped aboard the
Samson
, a steam ferryboat as large and powerful as its namesake. The fare collector greeted him respectfully, perhaps with the salutation “Commodore.” The
Samson
belonged to the Richmond Turnpike Company, and Mauran was its president and largest stockholder, as he had been for the previous seven years. “We always understood him to be the general agent as well as the President,” the collector explained. “That is what we call ‘Commodore.’ His word was will there.”
¹²

Shrewd and tough, Mauran was a merchant with a long history at sea. Twenty years earlier, when Vanderbilt first had met Vice President Daniel D. Tompkins, the founder of the Richmond Turnpike Company, Mauran had owned a three-masted ship, the
Maria Caroline
, and he still invested heavily in the Havana trade. But most of his money was in the Richmond Turnpike corporation, which ran a ferry between Staten Island and Manhattan's Whitehall Slip—as it had when John De Forest took command of the
Nautilus
, the first steam ferry between the two islands, in 1817. Now he was having trouble with another of Vanderbilt's relatives: his cousin Oliver Vanderbilt.

Mauran stood on the deck of the
Samson
as it floated at its Staten Island dock, and gave some last-minute instructions to its master, Captain Braisted. He wanted the boat to get an early start that day. Usually Oliver took the lead with his own ferryboat, the
Wave
, and delighted in taunting the
Samson
. “She generally started first and she would often stop opposite our dock and ring her bell to coax us off,” explained Braisted's son. “We would sometimes wait 15 minutes to let the
Wave
get off.”

The harassment enraged Mauran—but then everything about Oliver Vanderbilt enraged him. Oliver had once been a Richmond Turnpike ferry captain and shareholder; on October 19, 1835, he had sold his stock with the explicit understanding that he would not compete against the corporation. “He meant to live on a farm,” Cornelius remembered him saying, “and have nothing more to do with a life on the water on account of his health.” Instead, Oliver had launched the
Wave
and began carrying passengers for sixpence, half the company's shilling fare. The rivalry had rapidly escalated to much more than the typical racing, as the boats crowded and nudged each other. “It was a common occurrence for the boats to come together 3 or 4 times a day,” one man observed.

The collisions had grown more dangerous. In late August, just three or four days before this particular Sunday afternoon, Captain Braisted had come down to the deck to tell Mauran that the
Wave
was “crowding him out of his course.… She was a much smarter boat than the
Samson.”
Mauran had glared back at him. “If she ever does that again,” he had barked, “damn her, run into her, sink her.”

On this day, September 2, Braisted took the
Samson
out with a good head start, but the
Wave
came up fast on her starboard side. Belowdecks, the bartender heard an enormous crack; he ran out and discovered that Oliver had nosed his boat against the side of the
Samson
, buckling wood for twelve feet behind the starboard paddlewheel. “This made the captain of the
Samson
much excited,” he blandly observed.

On the return trip from Whitehall, Braisted angrily ordered his engineer to put on all the steam he could. As the
Wave
passed Governors Island, passenger Stephen W. West looked over at the
Samson's
pilothouse. “The
Samson
was about twice her length ahead of the
Wave
when I noticed the Captain throw her wheel around,” he recalled, “and the
Samson
run directly into the
Wave.”
The
Wave
was packed with passengers, including numerous women and children, who began screaming in terror as wood splintered in the collision. Only a last-minute maneuver by Oliver Vanderbilt prevented the blow from striking square amidships and likely sinking his boat. “The
Samson
turned round again and came for another attack,” West added. “I saw he was determined to destroy the boat I was in.… I told the captain of the
Samson
he would have company in the wheelhouse if he came near enough to us. Myself and some 15 or 20 others made preparations to attack. We got hold of sticks of wood and what loose things we could, 15 or 20 of us to get aboard of her.”

The
Samson
sheered off before West and his boarding party could capture it, but on landing at Staten Island the
Wave's
frenzied passengers stormed the ferry house of the Richmond Turnpike Company. “Mr. Mau-ran was on the dock when the people were destroying the property and he was much excited as were also the people,” declared the fare collector, “and I think if he had gone 10 feet further he would have been killed or thrown into the water.”

“Immediately after landing,” West said, “when on the wharf at Staten Island, I asked Mr. Mauran whether he did not think it was unpardonable to allow his boat to run into and try to sink the
Wave
, when so many people were on board of her.” Mauran replied, “Damn him I wish he had sunk him.” West had had his young son aboard the
Wave
, and Mauran's heartlessness infuriated him.
¹³

The steamboat trade had always been the most aggressively competitive business in America. Its fare wars, populist advertising, and highspeed racing embodied the nation's individualistic, unregulated society. It also embodied its mechanized, unregulated violence, with its deadly boiler explosions and reckless desperation to defeat the opposition. “
ANOTHER, AND YET ANOTHER
,” declared one newspaper in late 1837. “It is hardly worthwhile to attempt keeping any account of the steamboat disasters which are daily and almost hourly occurring, for no one seems to feel any interest in the subject.” Conservative Whigs such as Philip Hone found the mayhem “shocking in the extreme, and a stigma on our country. We have become the most careless, reckless, headlong people on the face of the earth,” he wrote. “‘Go ahead’ is our maxim and password; and we do go ahead with a vengeance, regardless of consequences and indifferent about the value of human life.” It was the Democratic newspapers that made a point of praising “the incalculable benefits of competition” which helped “the people at large, by causing great and permanent reductions of fare on several of the most important routes.” The Whig press, on the other hand, warned that it could go too far, and lead not only to bloodshed, but to “the utter ruin of one or both the competitors. When this occurs, the community must of course suffer in turn.”

Yet the Whigs were coming to terms with competition. In 1838, they won control of New York's state government under the leadership of a triumvirate composed of Governor William H. Seward, newspaper editor Horace Greeley, and Albany party boss Thurlow Weed, who sought to wed active government with equality of opportunity. In an Independence Day address in 1839, Seward attacked special privileges, saying it was the Whigs' mission to “break the control of the few over the many, extend the largest liberty to the greatest number.” In other words, government would aid the enterprising but not protect the elite. Even the Whiggish
Niles' Register
admitted, rather reluctantly, that competition “has its advantages. Community is generally benefitted—monopoly is suppressed, and the utmost perfection and economy is insured.”
¹⁴

Cornelius Vanderbilt, on the other hand, took a step in the other direction. He heard of the disastrous ramming of the
Wave
almost immediately, for he maintained close ties to Staten Island, where his mother still lived and where he had many friends and business associates. He learned that Mauran's fellow stockholders—principally Dr. John S. Westervelt, a son-in-law of Daniel Tompkins—wanted out. Oliver's opposition and the terrible publicity had destroyed the value of their shares. Vanderbilt snapped them up, fully half of the total, “upon the express condition that he should have the sole control and management,” according to Oliver.

Sole control
. It would be a recurring theme in Vanderbilt's life. Always dominating, he increasingly lost interest in investment unless he had power over what was done with his money.
Sole control
. Oliver differentiated it from “management,” and for good reason. Cornelius wanted independence, not only from Mauran and the other directors, but from legal obligations and political authorities. The Richmond Turnpike Company's special charter was a relic of mercantilism, requiring it to provide ferry service at uneconomical times—a requirement Oliver, as an independent competitor, did not have to meet. Cornelius chose to ignore the mandate. “Cornelius Vanderbilt has frequently given out that he intends running the boats upon said ferry with the sole view of profit,” Oliver complained, “and without regard to the rights or convenience of passengers.”

And what was more convenient for passengers than competition? Oliver had cut the fare in half and doubled service. Cornelius got a bargain on the stock because of that competition, which he now meant to snuff out. On July 2, 1839, he filed suit against his cousin. The Richmond Turnpike Company owned the Staten Island property where Oliver kept his dock, he argued, and had exclusive rights to the “bridge, ferry house, and bulkhead” on Whitehall Slip that he also used. The company had “accepted and took the said lease [at Whitehall] with full confidence that no person was to be allowed to interfere with their right, immunities, & privileges.” In short, “the greatest
practical
anti-monopolist in the country” claimed a legal monopoly
¹⁵

WHEN VANDERBILT STRODE
through the portico, he passed between six fluted columns into the interior of his new mansion. Workmen crisscrossed the floor carrying mantels of Egyptian marble and balustrades of solid mahogany on their shoulders. A special crew of craftsmen from England hammered away at a grand spiral staircase recessed into an oval well, spinning upward forty feet to the top floor. The hustle resembled the bustle around Bellona Hall fifteen years earlier, but this grand house was a world away from that humble inn, even if it was just on the other side of Staten Island from the Raritan River. Here was French plate glass, rosewood parlor doors with silver knobs, and a stained-glass skylight at the top of the stairwell. Another English artisan placed a sheet of glass, painted with the steamboat
Cleopatra
, over the front door. The captain was building a home fit for a commodore.

He had been a very young man when he purchased the property from his father. “Cornele's lot,” the locals had called it. His mother lived just a three-minute walk south of here. When he looked out the door of the house, he gazed out atop a hill that gave him a commanding view of the bay, over the terraced landscape and ferry dock below him.
¹⁶
“It is not possible to conceive a more extended or beautiful prospect,” wrote Philip Hone that summer of 1839, after visiting Vanderbilt's neighbors, the Anthons. “Situated on the summit of the hill back of the Quarantine ground [the state hospital for sick immigrants], it commands a view of the ocean and bay, with all that enters or leaves the port, Long Island, the city North River, the Jersey shore, the Kills, Newark, and Elizabeth.” The island was becoming a fashionable summer destination, and even Hone toyed with the “plan of having a seat on Staten Island.”
¹⁷