The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (57 page)

Cornelius Garrison thought that this was an excellent moment to leave town. He almost certainly had been elected to his term as mayor with the support of the Democratic machine, and he was not exactly a champion of reform. On June 21, after a political operative named Walter L. Chrysler attempted to blackmail him, Garrison departed for New York—just as the vigilance committee took full power.
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In July, all the leading players in the Nicaraguan transit drama, except Walker, had gathered in New York: Garrison, Morgan, Vanderbilt, and Randolph. Now came the ultimate absurdity in this theater of the absurd. On arriving from Nicaragua, Randolph tried to sell his transit grant twice. First, on July 16, he and Garrison agreed on a price: $10,000 in cash, 50 cents per passenger, and a 2.5 percent commission on nonspecie freight. (The steamboats and other property in Nicaragua, held by the state, would be paid for with credits for carrying filibuster reinforcements.) Ten days later, Randolph brazenly offered Vanderbilt the
same
transit contract, in return for various fees that amounted to $300,000. The
New York Tribune
aptly characterized Vanderbilt's reaction: “Give three hundred thousand dollars cash for a grant which Walker might find plenty of pretexts for revoking the next day, just as he had revoked the former one!”

Rebuffed by Vanderbilt, Randolph fell back on his original plan. Morgan agreed to take the Atlantic half of the transit contract, formalizing the arrangements already in operation. Walker approved all of Randolph's actions; as he wrote on August 20, “The transit business is well settled at last.” But Vanderbilt had not yet begun to fight.
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IT WAS A YEAR FOR WILLPOWER
. In 1856, the sixty-two-year-old Commodore had to muster all of his famous force of mind to master the crisis—or
crises
, for the Accessory Transit Company represented only one of his many operations. In 1853, for example, he and Marshall Roberts had purchased the Vallecillo silver mine in Mexico, originally discovered by the Spanish but abandoned after Mexican independence. They had put to work a corps of men to reopen it, and in 1856 it produced silver again—at least $1,000 worth per day, with expenses of only $50 per day
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Vanderbilt needed such resources in this year of trouble and strife. On March 23, one of his oldest and most valuable allies, Nelson Robinson, fell dead as he left church. The stock exchange closed early the next day in his honor, and Daniel Drew served as executor of his estate.
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Vanderbilt also suffered a setback in court in his fight to force the New Haven Railroad to acknowledge his “spurious” stock. And lawsuits against the Accessory Transit Company by empty-handed creditors multiplied. The Commodore took extreme measures to keep the company alive. He corresponded with Marcy and Pierce; he bought up $ 118,000 of the company's unpaid bonds (at ninety cents on the dollar); and he expended more than $400,000 of his own money to cover company expenditures.
³³
Now president, Vanderbilt drove White off the Accessory Transit board and brought in his son-in-law Cross, ally Frank Work, and various other trusted men.

Troubles mounted. In June, after Garrison finally put his new Nicaragua transit line into operation, Pacific Mail halted its monthly $40,000 subsidy, refusing to pay for a monopoly that no longer existed. Then the U.S. marshal seized the Accessory Transit steamships in San Francisco for alleged indebtedness, forcing Vanderbilt to dispatch an agent to untangle that distant mess. He began to take personal ownership of the steamships as repayment for his advances, rather than let them fall into the hands of other creditors (which would have made them unavailable should he restart the line).
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Remarkably, even in the midst of the Accessory Transit imbroglio Vanderbilt pursued his campaign against the Collins Line on the Atlantic. There, too, he faced enormous obstacles—none larger than the
Adriatic
, launched by Collins on April 7. It was the biggest ship ever built, nineteen feet and eight hundred tons greater than the
Vanderbilt
, though late design changes would keep it out of service for over a year. As the
New York Times
wrote, it was “at once a source of pride and mortification.”
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By contrast, Vanderbilt gave almost daily attention to his namesake ship as cranes at the Allaire Works lowered into the hull the twin engines, each 2,500 horsepower, and four boilers weighing sixty-two tons apiece.

Late in July, the Commodore and several members of his family boarded his new steamship and set sail from New York. Despite the enormous size and power of the engines, “the one thing that struck us most strongly was the complete absence of all vibratory
jarring
,” one observer wrote—a testimony to expert construction. “Twenty-four firemen, 18 coal-heavers, 4 engineers, and 3 water-tenders minister to her capacity for the production of steam,” the
New York Times
reported, “while 8 cooks, 34 waiters, 3 porters, and an efficient steward” tended to the needs of its passengers. Apart from the family, the
Vanderbilt
carried no passengers, but it probably had its full compliment of cooks and waiters—for this was a lobbying trip.

On July 22, the
Vanderbilt
dropped anchor off Greenleaf Point, where the Anacostia River poured into the Potomac. The next day, William H. Seward stood on the floor of the Senate and invited his colleagues to inspect the ship, to judge whether they should give the Commodore the European mail contract. “Immense crowds visited her,” the
Times
reported. Vanderbilt welcomed aboard representatives and senators, as well as President Pierce and his cabinet, who “were treated to a sumptuous entertainment on board.” The ship steamed home on July 27 to receive its finishing touches; the Commodore remained behind to press his advantage with Congress.

The ship made a suitable impression. Congress was growing uneasy over the subsidy for the Collins Line, which failed to float the required number of ships. Collins alienated even his own lobbyists. “I am coming there in season to help
defeat
Collins this year,” wrote former House clerk Benjamin B. French. In August, Congress gave Collins notice that in six months it would roll back the subsidy increase it had previously granted. It was far from a complete victory for Vanderbilt, but it was progress.
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BACK IN 1841
, Captain William Comstock had observed that Vanderbilt wielded every possible weapon when in combat, that he strove for any possible advantage. This was never more true than in 1856. The war over the Nicaragua transit was proving more complicated, more perplexing, than any he ever had fought or would fight—even more than the struggle that had culminated in
Gibbons v. Ogden
. Cross had failed to prevent Garrison's defection; Birdsall had failed to forestall Morgan's start of the line; and Washington had refused his appeals for help. Indeed, this was far more than a metaphorical war, but a real war of guns and bullets, and it was not going well. Vanderbilt's Costa Rican allies had invaded, occupied the city of Rivas, and defeated another of Walker's frontal assaults on April 11, only to fall victim to a cholera outbreak that forced them to retreat.
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But the Commodore planned counterattacks on both the international level and the personal.

On September 4, Garrison found himself under arrest. He was still in New York, where Accessory Transit filed a suit against him “for alleged frauds… amounting to over five hundred thousand” dollars (according to the
Chicago Tribune)
, committed when he was the company's San Francisco agent. In the evening, after he posted the bail of $150,000, Garrison went to 10 Washington Place, where he tried to employ his wiles against the Commodore.

“He insinuated that if I would participate with him and Charles Morgan… [in] the Walker grant… we could make a good business of it, to the exclusion of the Transit Company,” Vanderbilt reported. “My reply was, that my action in this matter had been wholly for the benefit of the Transit Company and its stockholders, and nothing could induce me to swerve from that course. At this he recoiled, and observed that he did not mean to make any insinuations of the kind.” Vanderbilt's choice of words says everything about his reaction to this proposition. To him, the word
insinuate
distinguished the talk of a crooked businessman from a “smart” but honest one. “I then told him he must clear up his character as regarded his conduct towards the company,” he wrote, “and when done, then I would be willing to refer his accounts to arbitration.”
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Vanderbilt's reponse deserves notice, for he has been misunderstood by historians and contemporaries alike as an amoral creature, ready to seize the main chance under all circumstances. “His over-reaching disposition makes people shy of him,” R. G. Dun & Co. noted four years later. Undoubtedly he possessed immense personal force, and pursued his personal interests more aggressively than anyone; but he lived by a code, and despised those who did not. As president of Accessory Transit, he held a position of trust, and he drew heavily on his personal resources to fulfill his responsibilities. In his own mind, at least, he was ever a man of honor.
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What is surprising is that so few others understood that. Everyone, it seems, tried to make Vanderbilt buy what had been stolen from him—even a friend of his, Domingo de Goicouria.
^*
The fifty-one-year-old Goicouria belonged to a community of Cuban exiles in New York who plotted to free the island from Spanish rule. He had supplied Walker with Cuban independence fighters; in return, Walker named him minister to Great Britain, and ordered him to raise money in New Orleans on his way to London. Goicouria went to New York instead, where he discovered that Vanderbilt's enmity had frightened the city's merchants away from any connection with Walker. So Goicouria tried to convince the Commodore himself to buy the transit back—only to learn that Randolph had sold it to Garrison, much to Goicouria's outrage.
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Walker completed the alienation of Goicouria on September 22, when he reinstituted slavery in a blatant attempt to gain money and recruits from the Southern states. The antislavery Goicouria retaliated by publishing Walker's letters in the
New York Herald
. They staggered Walker's supporters, who had always believed that Nicaragua would be absorbed by the United States; now they learned that Walker hoped to
forestall
annexation, not only of Nicaragua but of Cuba as well. “Oh, no! that fine country is not fit for those barbarous Yankees,” he wrote of Cuba. “What would such a psalm singing set do in the island?”
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The revelations also estranged the Pierce administration. Already it had withdrawn its recognition, after Walker named himself president; now the letters eliminated any chance it would reverse course. All this was good news for Vanderbilt. But Walker continued to attract significant support. A famous British soldier of fortune, Charles Henningsen, went to fight for him; Morgan sent artillery and ammunition by sailing ships, which the authorities did not inspect; and hundreds of recruits, many now from the South, still flocked to Nicaragua. But the Commodore had one more weapon to wield, one designed to turn the course of the war itself
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Throughout the autumn of 1856, this drama played out in newspaper headlines and closed-door cabinet debates, in speeches on the Senate floor and noisy rallies. The nation's attention was simply riveted on Walker. But the public did not see Vanderbilt, as he secretly crafted a strategy to bring Walker down. It did not see Vanderbilt, as he quietly met with Costa Rican diplomat Luis Molina. It did not see Vanderbilt, as he quietly interviewed a tall, lean, sharp-chinned young man in a Panama hat, Sylvanus Spencer. It did not see Vanderbilt, as he quietly wrote instructions for Spencer, as he quietly dispatched him on a steamship to Central America in October.

On October 15, the public got one quick glimpse of what went on in Vanderbilt's office. He testified in a lawsuit, one of the many against the Accessory Transit Company, and he spoke of his efforts to restore the corporation to possession of its property and its rights in Nicaragua. “I have corresponded with the Secretary of State and the President on the subject. The correspondence has continued till within the last two weeks, and is still in progress,” he said. “I think the property will come out right for the stockholders.… I have had but one opinion on the subject. I am devoting my own means to bring the matter out right.”
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IT IS A REMARKABLE FACT
that the only foreign conflict involving the United States during the fifty years between the Mexican and the Spanish-American wars was fought by a private army of American civilians. True, they claimed that they were the army of Nicaragua and that Walker was president of that republic; but the charade fooled no one. Indeed, this foreign interloper accomplished a feat that had eluded the victors of countless civil wars: he reconciled Nicaragua's Liberal and Conservative parties, when Tomás Martínez arranged for a unity government under Rivas to fight the filibusters. Their combined forces won their first victory at San Jacinto hill, where they captured and hung Byron Cole—the man who had first convinced Walker to go to Nicaragua.

In many ways, Walker had been fighting for survival from the moment he executed General Corral. But in the summer of 1856 his situation grew more desperate. The allied army of some eight hundred Salvadorans, six hundred Hondurans, and five hundred Guatemalans had seized León on July 12, the very day that Walker declared himself president. There the advance halted as the allies squabbled.
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