The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (32 page)

The contradictory fact was, if one wanted to enforce monopolies, one had to be a master of competition. Such was each of those who sat in the saloon of the
Bay State
—good businessmen who divided markets to maximize profits, and ruthless warriors who savored triumph. And Jacob Vanderbilt spoke proudly of the most ruthless of them all, his older brother, and that brother's greatest achievement, the
Vanderbilt
, “new, strong, and elegant,” as
Scientific American
called it, “first rate in every respect.” Jacob suggested a race against the others' fastest steamers, Newton's
Hendrick Hudson
, Comstock's
Bay State
, and Law's
Oregon
. They could start at the Battery, he suggested, run up the Hudson to Haverstraw Bay, where the river widened enough for four large boats to turn, then drive back to the city. He suggested a wager of $500.

Why only $500? Cornelius asked. “I say, I will run the
C. Vanderbilt
, untried as she is, against any boat afloat to any place they name where there is sufficient water to float her, for any sum from $ 1,000 to $ 100,000.” Newton sat silent, and Comstock said something about consulting with Handy first. But George Law took the bet. Twice before he had challenged Vanderbilt steamers (most recently the
Atlantic)
to race his
Oregon
. Now he would get his wish. The prize would be $1,000. They agreed to June 1, during the regatta of the New York Yacht Club.
⁴⁵

Law had emerged as a leader in transportation only three years earlier. Like Daniel Drew, he had no practical experience in navigation, and had moved into steamboats purely as an investment. Born near Saratoga in 1806, he had started his career by digging canals, working as a contractor on several major projects. From 1839 to 1842 he had built the mighty High Bridge over the Harlem River, the most impressive piece of the most important work of civil engineering in a generation, the Croton Aqueduct. He had proved as gifted at finance as at construction; he had set up a retail canteen for his bridge workers, for example, and soon put many of them in his debt. In 1842, he had taken over the troubled Dry Dock Bank, where he now made his office, as well as the nearly worthless Harlem Railroad; in short order, he had turned both businesses around. In 1843 he had bought his first steamboat; two years later he had launched the
Oregon
and begun to compete on the Hudson (where he forced Drew to pay him $4,000 to leave the river) and Long Island Sound.
⁴⁶

War filled the columns of the newspapers on June 1—detailed accounts of the American triumph over the Mexicans at Buena Vista three months earlier. Though that new invention, the telegraph, could carry news as fast as light, the wires had been strung only as far south as Maryland, so information from the battlefield trickled back slowly. Between the victory and the race, a holiday air breezed through the city. Crowds began to gather at ten o'clock in the morning, filling the Battery, the piers, and “every elevated position in the neighborhood of the Battery, as well the rigging of the various vessels lying at anchor,” according to the
New York Evening Post
.

At eleven o'clock the
Oregon
and
Vanderbilt
were seen opposite Castle Garden, near the Jersey shore… and then both started off on the race. For a few moments they kept side by side, and neither boat appeared to have the advantage of the other, but soon the
Vanderbilt
sheered off for the east shore, and the
Oregon
took the western side of the river, so that it was impossible to tell whether either boat was ahead of the other.

Vanderbilt commanded his steamer in person as the two great vessels, each more than three hundred feet long, thrashed up the Hudson, smoke trailing from their funnels, the furious splashing of the enormous side-wheels echoing inside their arching wooden cases. For thirty-five miles they raced bow by prow with no discernible lead. At one point, the
Hendrik Hudson
drew close with a boatload of spectators; Vanderbilt ran to the rail and shouted at it to “fall back.” He returned to the pilothouse, only to see the
Oregon
pour on steam and gradually pull ahead. As they drew near the designated turning point, the “flag-boat” anchored in Haverstraw Bay, Vanderbilt ordered a cut in speed in order to make a short, inside turn. His steamer promptly smashed its bow into the starboard paddlewheel housing of the
Oregon
.

Then the
Vanderbilt
suddenly slowed to a near dead stop. It would later be said that her anxious proprietor interfered with the pilot, but the
Herald
reported that “the engineer of the
Vanderbilt
made a mistake in answering the bell from the wheel house, and instead of reducing the speed so as to allow the boat to turn quicker, stopped the engine entirely, which retarded her progress very materially.” The
Oregon
kept up its velocity, taking a wide turn of a full mile, but precious minutes passed as the
Vanderbilt
painfully regained its momentum. The
Oregon
pulled ahead and kept the lead down the river as they approached the northern tip of Manhattan.

Just as Law's boat passed the mouth of the Harlem River, its engine room ran out of coal. Desperate to win, Law ordered his crew to burn anything at hand. The firemen ripped out berth slats and doors, broke apart settees, tables, and chairs, and threw it all into the fire. The
Vanderbilt
rapidly gained on her—but it was too late. The
Oregon
steamed over the finish line two minutes ahead. “The river as far as Yonkers was crowded with people,” the
New York Tribune
reported, “and when the boats hove in sight on their return the wharves of the city were a mass of spectators. As the
Oregon
swept in she was greeted with a continuous huzza from Hammond st. to the Battery”
⁴⁷

“Captain Vanderbilt was beaten for once,” Philip Hone wrote in his diary. Hone's tone of surprise underscores the formidable reputation that Vanderbilt had made for himself. The “enterprising proprietor,” as Hone called him, was expected to win. Indeed, the race only seems to have enhanced his stature. At the end of the month, President Polk began a triumphal tour of the northeastern states, a kind of political counterpart to the military thrust that General Winfield Scott was making from Veracruz to Mexico City For the journey from South Amboy New Jersey, to New York, the presidential party traveled in the
Vanderbilt
, dubbed “the pride of the rivers” by the
Herald
. “She was in charge of Capt. Vanderbilt himself, who performed the double duty of commander and pilot. Every subordinate was in his place, and every waiter punctual in the performance of his duty… Nothing could exceed the completeness of the arrangements on board.” Despite his admiration for Clay, Vanderbilt had laid any partisanship aside after Polk's victory in 1844—though throughout the president's speech at South Amboy, the vessel loudly let off steam, “rendering it almost impossible to hear a word of what was said at two paces distant from the speakers.”
⁴⁸

This was the year that the general public promoted Vanderbilt from the rank of captain. In court testimony taken in September, a man casually referred to him as “Commodore Vanderbilt,” a title even his family began to use in everyday conversation. When not escorting presidents, he hobnobbed with Philip Hone's set at the yacht club and bought up Manhattan real estate. In business, he continued to display his ability. He sold his Long Island Railroad shares shortly before it became obvious that the railroad suffered grave difficulties. After taking over as president of the Stonington, he immediately set to work to improve the long-troubled line's prospects. Soon he launched a new steamer to run to Stonington in conjunction with the
Vanderbilt
. He called it the
Commodore
.
⁴⁹

At almost the same moment that Vanderbilt ascended to the presidency of the Stonington, General Scott occupied Mexico City On March 10, 1848, the Senate would ratify the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which would strip 500,000 square miles from Mexico (roughly a third of that republic) and annex them to the United States, in return for $15 million. Even in the clamor of joy over the great victory, however, hints of future trouble could be heard. As popular as the war was, a significant group of Northerners—from Congressman Abraham Lincoln to Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant—had opposed it, fearing that it would primarily enlarge the territory of slavery. Hardly had the fighting started in 1846 when Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania attached an amendment to an appropriations bill prohibiting the expansion of the “peculiar institution” into any land acquired from Mexico. Though the “Wilmot Proviso” failed to pass, it sparked abiding outrage across the South.

Perhaps Vanderbilt little imagined that the war and its foreboding aftermath would ever affect him. And yet, he had always existed in curious synchronization with the republic, living the larger struggles of the day in pursuit of his selfish interests. In his youth, he had helped to throw down the culture of deference, with its aristocratic privileges and mercantilist policies. He had risen to wealth and power by battling monopolies on the primary lanes of commerce as he vocally championed competitive individualism. Now he was coming to embody the rise of corporations in his railroad directorships and presidency of the Stonington. He worked toward a kind of synthesis between competition and incorporation that reflected gradual changes in the nation's culture. In early 1848, the
American Railroad Journal
, a periodical devoted to an industry consisting entirely of corporations, would declare, “It would be much more for the prosperity of business—much more for the credit of the people, and much more in accordance with the
spirit of the age
—to allow and encourage
competition
.”

Even his ambiguity—his stubborn, irreducible ambiguity—mirrored these trickster times, the eternal ambivalence of the free market: he who drove down fares and improved service, yet demanded bribes to abandon competition; who praised free trade yet enforced his own monopolies; who celebrated the people yet summered in Saratoga and knocked knees with old knickerbockers. Dickens had noted with irritation the smug self-satisfaction of most Americans; the Commodore must have shared it when he contemplated his kingdom from his castle on Washington Place. He was “reputed to be worth some millions,” the press reported. Almost everyone who traveled between New York and Boston took a Vanderbilt boat or a Vanderbilt train.
⁵⁰

An observer on December 31, 1847, would have found it absurd to think that all this would one day be half forgotten, that obituary writers would dismiss in a few sentences these fifty years of fistfights and Supreme Court cases, steamboat races and stock market machinations. But already forces were in motion that would upend the population of the continent, launch the nation toward civil war, and unleash an ambition in Vanderbilt greater than anyone could have imagined.

*
Edward J. Renehan Jr. claims, in his book
Commodore: The Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
(New York: Basic Books, 2007), 155, to have discovered the privately held diary of Dr. Jared Linsly, asserting that it shows that Vanderbilt contracted syphilis in 1839. In light of significant contradictory evidence and subsequent developments that cast doubt on Renehan's credibility I must discount the validity of such a diary and Renehan's claims for it. See the bibliographical essay, pages 581–4, for a full discussion.