The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (31 page)

As Vanderbilt thrived, the city thrived; as he conquered corporations and lines of travel, the republic looked to conquer as well. Polk defeated Clay and entered the White House in 1845, and territorial expansion became a national mission. “The movements for the annexation of Texas by the government of the United States, and the extraordinary sensation which it has produced,” the
New York Herald
wrote on July 2, 1845, “is only a strong manifestation of the spirit of the age.… At all hazards Texas will be annexed to this country. California will follow—Oregon will be occupied.”

Signs of trouble appeared, of course. “On all hands, you hear the question, will Mexico make war against the United States?” the
Herald
observed. “The merchant, the manufacturer, every man at all interested in the affairs of the country is asking.… Will there be war?” But Polk's plans proceeded heedless of such worries. So, too, with Vanderbilt, who rammed through all obstacles. On July 19, 1845, a huge fire destroyed some three hundred buildings along Whitehall and Broad streets, “occupied principally by importing and other merchants,” the press reported. The blaze burned down Vanderbilt's office, wiping out such records as the stock ledgers of the Elizabethport Ferry Company. He steamed ahead regardless, opening a new office at 8 Battery Place and re-creating the lost books, as he built a vast new ferry dock on Staten Island.
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Even before the fire, Vanderbilt decided to make a declaration of his rising status by moving into the heart of the great city. He purchased two adjacent lots that stretched the width of the block between Washington Place and Fourth Street, between Mercer and Greene streets east of Washington Square Park, for $9,500. Just a short distance away from the site where New York's social elite were building Grace Church, not far from the foot of Fifth Avenue, this was the heart of the most fashionable district. Typically, Vanderbilt dictated to mason Benjamin F. Camp every detail of the mansion to be built on the site. He called for stables and a carriage house in the back, facing Fourth Street; a paved courtyard; and a four-story double-wide house of “red brick, with brown-stone trimmings,” as the
New York Times
later described it, sixty-five feet deep and forty feet wide, with an entrance at 10 Washington Place. Camp went to work in May 1845. Rumors flew around the “splendid house,” as one newspaper called it, being built for “the well-known steamboat proprietor.” One account put the cost at an astronomical $180,000. Three decades later, the
Times
reported a figure of $55,000, noting, “It is reckoned to be one of the strongest and best constructed buildings in the City.”
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On Staten Island, the house of Vanderbilt echoed with conspiratorial whispers and angry shouts. In April 1844, Vanderbilt's hard-nosed mother, Phebe, foreclosed on a mortgage she had taken for a loan to her son-in-law, Charles Simonson (one of the builders of the
Lexington)
. Charles had died a year earlier, so the property she seized belonged to her own widowed daughter. On May 10, Vanderbilt bailed out his brother Jacob and cousin John, who had been arrested for missing mandatory payments to the disabled sailors' fund. And Vanderbilt's daughters rallied around his son Cornelius Jeremiah, who aroused his wrath and scorn. Shortly before the move to Staten Island, the boy had suffered an epileptic seizure; though the condition had not reappeared, he lingered at home, thin and aimless, in the shadow of his robust patriarch. “My treatment by my father was rather rough,” he dryly recalled.

Vanderbilt was equally hard on Billy. He spoke to his elder son daily, often with “offensive” language, as Daniel Allen recalled. “The substance of the Commodore's remarks was that William was deficient in brains.” Afterward, Billy would stop at Allen's home to complain of his abuse by “the old man.”
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In 1846, Vanderbilt's children began to suspect that he had designs on the governess, a young woman who cared for the youngest siblings. He often took her on carriage rides as his offspring whispered about the “impropriety” of the relationship. Then, in June, the “old man” pulled Allen aside and suggested that he and Ethelinda take his wife on a trip to Canada. “She was at the change of life,” Allen remembered, “and had been afflicted with the ailments incidental to that period for about a year, although she was naturally a woman of strong mind and body.” She must have had a very strong body indeed, to have endured an unbroken string of pregnancies up to the start of menopause. Allen agreed to the proposal. Mrs. Vanderbilt “was more excitable than usual,” he thought. “The Commodore told me that her physician advised a change of scene.”
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With his wife away, Vanderbilt undertook the construction of the largest steamship ever built in the United States: the
Atlantic
, a 321-foot monster sidewheeler commissioned by the Norwich Railroad. Perhaps the most telling aspect of the vessel was not its size, but its aristocratic luxury. “On ascending the stairs, and reaching the upper saloon, one is almost bewildered with the variety of magnificent adornments which dazzle the eye,” the
New York Herald
reported. Elegant staterooms, “furnished like the chambers of European hotels,” surrounded the saloon, which featured “soft carpets, original settees, and courting couches… magnificent mirrors and rich curtains.” On the distant Rio Grande, war with Mexico began—“the war for the extension of slavery,” as the
Tribune
denounced it—but Vanderbilt abstained from politics, concerning himself with the Stonington, his liners, and his governess.
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After six weeks, Sophia returned and the governess left, to Vanderbilt's distress. Allen told him that the vacation had not improved Sophia's disposition. “During that journey she exhibited great excitability; her nervous system was apparently much shattered.” It is impossible to specify the cause of her anguish, but perhaps her husband's wealth did not compensate for the stress he strung like cobwebs across every open space in their household. With the mansion at 10 Washington Place nearly complete, Vanderbilt mused openly about sending Sophia to an insane asylum.

Perhaps he was simply unable to cope with her distracted state. Or perhaps he wished to make room for the return of the young governess, a prospect he discussed as the move to Manhattan approached. Billy told Allen “that the ‘old man’ had induced some of his daughters to write to the governness and ask her to come back there.”

Asked his daughters to write her? The maneuver seems strikingly uncharacteristic of an overweening titan who took what he wanted. Indeed, it is a rare glimpse of the vulnerability within the warrior. Though he blasted his eldest son—who only tried to please him—as a weakling and a “sucker,” he found himself unable to express his tenderness and need for the young woman who cared for his children. From his earliest days, navigating the subtleties of the inner life escaped him, even if he could not escape its swirling emotions and compulsions. What attracted him to the governess? Was it sexual desire, a longing for youth, mere affection for a sweet girl his children loved? The unknowable answer may be less revealing than his response to her loss. He could not bring himself to demand her return, nor could he approach her directly and simply ask, so he delegated the emotional burden he found so bewildering.

Allen and Billy met to discuss the worsening family situation. They spoke as childhood friends and, in a way, as rival siblings. Allen cultivated a dignified air of efficiency and moral uprightness. He managed the details of Vanderbilt's businesses and served as his agent within Drew's brokerage firm. The blood son Billy, on the other hand, had been exiled from Wall Street to a farm. Slumping, sometimes whining, he had the disposition of someone accustomed to being beaten down. There is little sign that Billy resented Allen, but he had learned to be guarded in his dealings with his overbearing father.

“The old man was bound to have his way,” Allen remembered him saying, “and it was useless to oppose him. He (William) had made up his mind not to do so, as he thought his own interests were too much at stake.” Allen pointed out how angry Billy's sisters were. They had kept their mouths shut about their mother's forced vacation, but “her removal from home” would be too much. “The fact that Mrs. Vanderbilt had fulfilled the duties of a mother more completely than any woman they had ever known, had been talked over,” Allen recalled. He told Billy that Ethelinda had denounced, directly to Vanderbilt's face, the plan to send her mother away and bring back the governess. Even Corneil, the younger brother, had spoken out “manfully.”

Billy shook his head. He couldn't “justify the act,” he told Allen. “He had a great deal of sympathy for his mother.” And yet, “opposition would only provoke the old man's enmity.… The ‘old man’ would be ‘down on him’ forever and had at one time threatened to break up his family and go to Europe if his wishes were opposed.” It was better to approach the problem indirectly, Billy argued. Take the departed governess, for example. “If she don't come back I'll find some woman to take her place,” he said. “The old man is bound to fall under some woman's influence, and I'll have that influence.”

A month after Sophia Vanderbilt's return from Canada, her husband dispatched her to an insane asylum run by a Dr. McDonald in Flushing, Long Island. Shortly afterward, in November 1846, Vanderbilt and his family settled into the house at 10 Washington Place—along with a new governess, the twenty-five-year-old cousin of Billy's wife.
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The meaning of all this should not be overblown. It is doubtful that Billy actually exerted any dire “influence” on the old man through the new governess. Allen saw no impropriety in their relationship; indeed, Billy may well have intended to flush scandal out of the household by replacing his father's mistress with a pious minister's niece. What's more, Sophia joined her family on Washington Place after her discharge from the asylum a few months later.
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And yet, the children's byzantine plotting does illustrate the strain placed on the family by its patriarch, a man who grew more imposing with every million. This unhappy family was unhappy in a way that only wealth and power (more specifically, a will to power) could bring. The very qualities that made Vanderbilt a formidable businessman—his ferocity, his obsession with control—left him unable to manage the murkier negotiations of love, affection, and fatherhood.

AT THE SAME MOMENT THAT
Vanderbilt moved to Washington Place, the finest boat he had ever built was swallowed by the Sound. Shortly after midnight on November 27, the
Atlantic
picked up the Norwich Railroad passengers at its Allyn Point terminal and set out for New York. Then the boiler burst just as a “perfect gale” blew in, seizing the vessel from Captain Isaac Dustan. For long hours he made frantic efforts to save it. He put out multiple anchors and pulled down the smokestacks to reduce wind resistance, but nothing worked. The howling storm drove the steamer upon the rocks of Fishers Island, killing at least fifty of perhaps seventy passengers and crew, including Captain Dustan, a Staten Islander and past commander of many of Vanderbilt's boats.
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There is no evidence that Vanderbilt paid attention to the wreck of his creation, any more than he noticed the agonizing within his household. Ever awkward in his own home, he did not dwell in the domestic interiors of family, but rather in the outer world of men of affairs. It was said as a teenage ferry master that he slept in his periauger; as captain of the
Bellona
, he rose before dawn and returned after dark; as a “well-known steamboat proprietor,” he spent his life in his office, shipyard, or on the docks, when not in the stables with his horses. What his family thought of him apparently mattered little to him; but among his business peers, Courtlandt Palmer had observed, “He is very desirous of being considered a man of honor and integrity.”

In early 1847, he launched a new steamer—the second craft he named
Cornelius Vanderbilt
. “She is a magnificent structure,” the
New York Herald
declared. “The model of the
Vanderbilt
differs from all others, and it is pronounced, by old and experienced shipmasters, peculiarly adapted to rough navigation.” It became the very embodiment of his reputation.
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On May 25, 1847, Vanderbilt joined his brother Jacob on the
Bay State
for a social gathering of the leading steamboat men of New York. The
Bay
State
itself was a beautiful new Long Island Sound steamer belonging to the Navigation Company; the host of this little party was Captain Com-stock, the corporation's gruff general agent. But who wasn't gruff in this gathering? In addition to the notoriously rough-edged Vanderbilts, Isaac Newton was there, along with George Law, owner of the extraordinarily fast
Oregon
. The only missing men were Drew himself and Charles Handy, the Navigation Company's outgoing president.

No body of men could have better exemplified the ironies of the American economy in the 1830s and ′40s. Steamboat proprietors were famous for their competitiveness, symbols of a hotly individualistic society in which hatred of monopoly was a pillar of politics. On the other hand, perhaps no other businessmen had worked so hard to construct mechanisms to limit or even eliminate competition. They made agreements to divide up routes, split profits, and punish those who violated their unwritten code. The business culture they created demonstrates how the impulse to stifle competition arose inseparably from competition itself in the American economy, with sometimes bewildering consequences. The banker Lewis Palmer, for example, was exasperated when he tried to sell the
Eureka
because he was told that, if it went into opposition on some line, her sale would be considered a hostile act and lead to retaliation. “But whither would this doctrine lead?” he asked. “If the boat is only to be sold so as to interfere with nobody's route, who then would like to buy her?”
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