The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (45 page)

Of course, fascination with this fantastic display of wealth did account for much of the attention. It is important to remember that steamships were the largest, most complicated, and most expensive man-made objects in existence (apart from a very few buildings). Most of the vessels that plied the oceans were still sailing ships; even the U.S. Navy remained largely under sail, with only sixteen steam vessels of any description in 1852 (and only nine of those categorized as frigates or “first-class” steamers).
¹⁵
Now Vanderbilt had constructed, as a personal yacht, a steamship to rival the largest commercial liners—260 feet in length (at the keel; it stretched to 270 feet on deck) and 2,500 tons. The press lovingly described two mighty walking-beam engines, their pistons pumping a ten-foot stroke, fed by four massive boilers, each ten feet in diameter. The Commodore had designed the
North Star
himself; in keeping with his now-standard pattern, it boasted enormous thirty-four-foot paddlewheels and a straight stem (as the nearly vertical line of the bow was called).

The ship's luxuriousness attracted the most notice. A grand staircase led down to a reception area, with a large circular couch, which opened onto the main saloon. “The furniture… is of rosewood, carved in the rich and splendid style of Louis XV covered with a new and elegant material of figured velvet plush,” the
New York Tribune
reported. “Connected with this saloon are ten staterooms, superbly fitted up, each with a French
armour le gles
, beautifully enamelled in white, with a large glass-door.… The berths are furnished with elegant silk lambricans and lace curtains. Each room is fitted up with a different color, viz: green and gold, crimson and gold, orange, etc.” Then there was the main dining saloon, paneled with polished marble and Naples granite, with tables boasting fine silverware and china with a ruby and gold finish. “The ceiling of the room is painted white, with scroll-work of purple, light green, and gold, surrounding medallion paintings of Webster, Clay, Washington, Franklin, and others.”
¹⁶

Vanderbilt—who paid close attention to his reputation—fully grasped the public impact of his grand holiday. Indeed, there is every reason to think that he planned the entire thing with an eye on his growing status as a cultural icon. He was not merely a businessman, but “one of our steamship nobility” as
Scientific American
wrote. Compared with his “magnificent steamship—his pleasure steam yacht… the yachts of the English nobility are like fishing cobles to a seventy-four gun ship.”
¹⁷
He was no mere rich man; he was the Commodore.

When May 19, the date of departure, arrived, Vanderbilt encountered an omen of what lay before him in the year ahead—a jarring reminder that there was indeed no friendship in trade. All spring, labor trouble had wracked the docks. Firemen and coal passers, the crewmen who fed the fires under the boilers, had organized repeated strikes in April, forming angry processions from ship to ship along the waterfront. Just a week before the
North Star's
departure, a mob of white dockworkers attacked their black counterparts when they learned that the black men received lower wages, which undercut their own pay
¹⁸
The
North Star
had a picked crew of firemen and coal passers who had served on Vanderbilt's other ships, but they, too, caught the militant mood. One hour before departure, they (and some of the sailors) called a strike.

“Mr. Vanderbilt refused to be coerced by the seeming necessity of the case,” Rev. Choules wrote. “He would not listen for a moment to demands so urged, and in one hour selected such firemen as could be collected; and many of them were green hands, and ill-adapted to give efficient service in their most important department.” The action was so in keeping with Vanderbilt's personality, it scarcely needs comment. Rather than accept his disadvantage, he fired the strikers and took his chances with untried men.
¹⁹

At ten thirty in the morning, after the new firemen had been ushered down into the hold and handed their coal shovels, the crew cast loose the lines that held the ship to the dock at the foot of Grand Street. The side-wheels began to churn, and the immense hull of the
North Star
eased into the East River. Some four hundred guests milled about the deck with Vanderbilt and his family; the visitors were to sail aboard until Sandy Hook, where they would transfer to the
Francis Skiddy
for the return to New York.

Suddenly the happy crowd felt a jolt. The rapidly ebbing tide had caught the ship and smacked the stern into another pier. Vanderbilt shouted at the pilot to spin the wheel hard aport, to carry the
North Star
into the main channel, but the current was too strong. The ship struck hard on a hidden reef, and the alarmed visitors lost their footing as it keeled over onto one side, tilting the deck at a frightening angle. “For a moment,”
Scientific American
reported, “there appeared danger of her capsizing.” In a breath, the ship righted itself—but it was still “stuck fast.”

The grand voyage had come to a halt 150 feet from the pier, with the near sinking of the celebrated yacht. But the Commodore knew how to manage a crisis. As the passengers returned to shore in another boat, he telegraphed Secretary of State William L. Marcy asking permission to use the U.S. Navy's dry dock across the East River. Permission was immediately granted. As soon as the rising tide lifted the
North Star
free of the rocks, it steamed into the facility for inspection and repairs. That night Vanderbilt dined aboard ship (as it sat in the stocks of the dry dock), accompanied by broker Richard Schell, and the two men drank a toast to Marcy. The Commodore paid the not inconsiderable sum of $1,500 for use of the dock. To Marcy, the money mattered less than facilitating a voyage that would serve as a bit of informal public diplomacy
²⁰

Vanderbilt's children and their spouses
^*
fretted over a long delay; fortunately the damage was superficial, and easily fixed. “At seven minutes to eight o'clock P.M. on the 20th of May,” Choules wrote, “we left the gates [of the dry dock] amid the cheering of our kind friends who lined the dock; and, as we steamed down the river, we fired salutes and received them from various ships, and at the Battery, where a large party had gathered to give us a farewell greeting.” As the
North Star
churned through the Narrows, past the home of Vanderbilt's aged mother, the crew fired off cannons and shot rockets into the clear night sky. The flinty old woman had taught the Commodore his shrewdness and frugality; now he saluted her from an emblem of extravagance, on a voyage that would prove shrewder than anyone could know.

At nine thirty in the evening, the
North Star
passed Sandy Hook and slowed to a halt to allow the pilot, John Martineau, to board a boat for the return to New York. Martineau may have been a bit dispirited after his highly public embarrassment of the day before, and perhaps more so when, as he was about to step off the ship, he was called to Vanderbilt's cabin. He encountered Horace Clark, the Commodore's “professional adviser.” The Commodore, Clark informed Martineau, had sent a letter to the New York newspapers concerning his conduct. “He is entirely free from censure,” Vanderbilt wrote. “I know Mr. Martineau to be as good a pilot as there is out of the Harbor of New-York.” Then Clark dropped a “purse of gold” into Martineau's hand.
²¹

The
North Star
steamed into the Atlantic, its paddlewheels churning the calm sea under bright moonlight. An unexpected act of generosity marked the departure; but then, the entire voyage was an unexpected act of generosity. More telling may have been Vanderbilt's choice of messenger. With nearly his entire family aboard, from his oldest son to those sons-in-law who had long served him as lawyers, managers, and agents, he chose Clark. It was a sign of things—and trouble—to come.

VANDERBILT HAD PREPARED
as well as anyone could have for a long absence overseas. It would not be enough. “Ships are but boards, sailors but men,” Shylock wisely observes in
The Merchant of Venice
. “There be land rats and water rats—water thieves and land thieves.”

When Vanderbilt had resumed his place in the Accessory Transit Company, he had not, in fact, moved to take complete control. It appears that he acted merely to protect his interests, to ensure an income stream as agent during his prolonged absence.
²²
As a result, the company suffered a power vacuum. It was filled, in part, by a man intimately familiar with the company's affairs, a man who still served as its counsel, if no longer as a director: Joseph L. White. Like a tapeworm, he had wound his way into the intestines of the Transit Company, and would not be removed until both he and it had been murdered.

White's influence persisted because it was of a particular kind, confined to the company's relationship with the U.S. and foreign governments. The board did elect a new president, James De Peyster Ogden, but, as White explained to Secretary of State Marcy “He is new in the company & hence not familiar with its antecedents.” With characteristic arrogance and condescension, White took it upon himself to advise the new administration of President Franklin Pierce on Nicaraguan affairs. “I
know
the Central Americans quite as well, I think, as any man in this country,” he told Marcy. “Firmness & determination will accomplish anything with them.”
²³

White was not wealthy enough to become a dominant stockholder—but Charles Morgan was. Initially, at least, Morgan made no attempt to take power. He waited until the
North Star
steamed over the horizon, then began to buy up the company's shares. “The movement in Nicaragua is of such a decided character,” the
New York Herald
reported on May 28. “A large party have taken hold of it.” Soon a rumor ran through Wall Street that this was more than a short-term operation. Morgan, the brokers whispered, “is to take superintendence of the Company”
²⁴

As Morgan strengthened his grip on the stock, White wormed into his confidence. Each offered something the other lacked. White could handle political intrigue with slippery, insinuating skills that did not come easily to a self-made businessman like Morgan; Morgan, on the other hand, possessed the wealth, financial acumen, and large blocks of stock that White lacked. The two men, it appears, agreed on a new axis of power in the Accessory Transit Company. On Monday, July 18, they held a new election for the board of directors. White and his lackey H. L. Routh resumed their seats, and Morgan took office as president. Vanderbilt was out.
²⁵

Nelson Robinson survived on the board, but he could not protect the Commodore. Robinson's own interests were complicated enough. By March 1853, he had accumulated twelve thousand shares of the Erie Railroad. At a par value of 100, that made his holdings officially worth $1.2 million. There were few American businesses that, in their entirety, had a value equal to his stake in Erie. In the stock market, though, the share price was only 83, and it was falling. The stress proved to be too much for him. He declared that, as of May 27, he would retire from business. “The tremendous vicissitudes of stocks affected his nerves,” a Wall Street observer later wrote. “His family implored, his doctor insisted. At last he yielded and retreated into the country”
²⁶

Vanderbilt's other long-standing ally, Daniel Drew, did nothing to help his absent friend. After the loss of the
North America
, he had abandoned all interest in California steamship lines. In any event, he was busy with his religious duties. For the past year, he had raised funds for a very special project of a Methodist charity, the Ladies' Home Missionary Society: to purchase the Old Brewery, the hulking warren that glowered over Paradise Square at the heart of the infamous Five Points, the most violent, impoverished slum in the city. Since 1837, the very poorest of the very poor had packed into the filthy and infested building, “creating a tenament so repulsive that it quickly became the most notorious in New York,” writes historian Tyler Anbinder. “Here is vice at its lowest ebb,” wrote the
National Police Gazette
, “a crawling and fetid vice, a vice of rags and filth.” Drew collected the $16,000 to buy the structure, which was then ripped down. On June 17, the society celebrated the opening of a new four-story mission where the Old Brewery had long stood.
²⁷

With uncontested control of Accessory Transit, Morgan and White removed Vanderbilt from his post as agent, depriving him of his rich commission on tickets. “This payment was regularly made to Mr. Vanderbilt up to the time he left in his yacht for Europe,” the
New York Herald
reported on July 29. “Since, the company have refused to make payments to Mr. Vanderbilt's agent.” Morgan himself took over as agent. Brokers on Wall Street chattered anxiously about the act of treachery. As the
Herald
observed, “Trouble is anticipated upon the return of Commodore Vanderbilt.”
²⁸

AS THE
NORTH STAR
CHURNED ACROSS
unusually smooth seas, smoke billowing out of its twin black funnels, Vanderbilt instructed Captain Eldridge to cover no more than 250 miles every twenty-four hours. “As my journey would be a long one,” he explained in a letter to a friend in New York, “and as I meant to have the ship in such order on our arrival in a foreign country as to be a credit to our ‘Yankee land,’ I did not wish to hazard this by making any attempt to obtain high rates of speed.” Pushing a new engine too hard could damage it; steam engines generally had to be broken in before they could produce their best speed.