In 1817, when Cornelius Vanderbilt was a strapping twenty-three-year-old ferry captain with a young wife and two baby daughters, a businessman named Thomas Gibbons hired him to run a Hudson River steamboat between New Jersey and New York. Cornelius kept his own ferry boats running on the side, but he assumed control of Gibbons’s ferry concerns as well. But while Vanderbilt’s ferries all ran within New York State, Gibbons’s ferries were interstate, and technically illegal. He was breaking a long-standing monopoly on that essential service (echoed by the battle between medallioned yellow taxis
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