The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

by T.J. Stiles

They came to learn his secrets. Well before the appointed hour of two o’clock in the afternoon on November 12, 1877, hundreds of spectators pushed into a courtroom in lower Manhattan. They included friends and relatives of the contestants, of course, as well as leading lawyers who wished to observe the forensic skills of the famous attorneys who would try the case. But most of the teeming mass of men and women—many fashionably dressed, crowding in until they were packed against the back wall—wanted to hear the details of the life of the richest man the United States had ever seen.

The trial over the will of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the famous, notorious Commodore, was about to begin.

Most of those in that courtroom had lived their entire lives in Vanderbilt’s shadow. By the time he had turned fifty he had dominated railroad and steamboat transportation between New York and New England (thus earning the nickname “Commodore”). In the 1850s, he had launched a transatlantic steamship line and pioneered a transit route to California across Nicaragua. In the 1860s, he had systematically seized control of the railroads that connected Manhattan with the rest of the world, building the mighty New York Central Railroad system between New York and Chicago. Probably every person in that chamber had passed through Grand Central, the depot on Forty-second Street that Vanderbilt had constructed; had seen the enormous St.

Probably no other individual made an equal impact over such an extended period on America’s economy and society. Over the course of his sixty-six-year career he stood on the forefront of change, a modernizer from beginning to end. He vastly improved and expanded the nation’s transportation infrastructure, contributing to a transformation of the very geography of the United States. He embraced new technologies and new forms of business organization, and used them to compete so successfully that he forced his rivals to follow his example or give up.

Hamilton’s role in the Bank of New York was nothing compared to what he accomplished as secretary of the treasury in Washington’s first term, when the federal capital was temporarily located in Manhattan. In 1790, he presented a plan to have the federal government assume the states’ Revolutionary War debts, paying for them with interest-bearing federal bonds, backed by a tariff and an excise tax on whiskey. Despite fierce resistance by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Congress enacted the program. The new federal bonds—known as “the Stock”—essentially created the securities market in New York, and by extension in America.

Vanderbilt could have remained on Staten Island, enjoying the fresh sea air at a fraction of the cost of living. But he and his fellow middling sorts were looking to rise. With the oceangoing ships of the “principal merchants” locked up in port, with wartime shortages rampant, craftsmen became entrepreneurs, breaking down longstanding methods to increase productivity. Vanderbilt’s move to New York was itself an entrepreneurial act. It was in the city that information moved most quickly, through word of mouth or the many newspapers that published prices of important goods, news of ship arrivals and departures, and prices of stocks and commodities. It was in the city where the exchanges were located, where auctions of goods were held, where informal, curbside trades of bonds and shares went on each day. It was in the city where one acquired a reputation—and reputation was the axle of this informal, personal economy.

Americans naturally looked for a revolution in transportation. In 1817, New York State began to construct an enormous canal, 363 miles long, between Albany and Buffalo, a village on Lake Erie. Equally important, a dramatic technological breakthrough had appeared on the North River: a vessel that provided its own motive power, independent of wind and muscle and current. They called it the steamboat.

Three years after Gibbons’s arrival, in that ritual he knew so well, Vice President Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton dead in nearby Weehawken, in the culmination of Burr and Hamilton’s long and bitter political rivalry. The duel led to a quixotic turn in Burr’s life, sending it on a winding path that led to a trial for treason and an eventual return to a prestigious law practice in New York. It also showed that dueling (which first appeared in America among military officers in the Revolution) was far from the specifically Southern institution that it would eventually become.

WAS THERE EVER A PRESIDENT like Andrew Jackson? This lean and predatory Tennessean, with his bristling mane of gray hair, resembled nothing so much as a hungry wolf, a creature of ferocious passion and territorial instincts, whether defending his inner landscape of honor or the physical boundaries of the United States. The only chief executive to have killed a man in a duel, this former general had defeated the British at New Orleans in 1815, crushed Indian tribes, and essentially conquered Florida.

Cheap fares and breathtaking speeds made steamboat travel on Long Island Sound a widely shared experience in the 1830s.

Vanderbilt also hired a personal clerk in 1837: a native of Shrewsbury, New Jersey, named Lambert Wardell, who would stay by his side until his death. Looking back decades later, Wardell vividly remembered the day when, as an inconspicuous, unambitious twenty-two-year-old, he began to work for Vanderbilt.

Vanderbilt had recovered from his near-fatal ailment; the new clerk found him to be “very strong” with “great powers of endurance,” a man who exuded raw energy. “His personal appearance was very neat.… He was very abstemious, being a light eater and never drank to any extent, not even at his meals, taking liquor only as medicine.” His only vice was smoking; he “always had a cigar in his mouth, either lit or unlit.”

Captain Vanderbilt has made arrangements for running the fine steamboats Cleopatra and Clifton from this city to Oyster-Pond Point and Sag Harbor.” The paper helpfully noted, “The east end of Long Island offers a quiet and agreeable retreat from the noise, heat, and polluted air of the town.”

Soon after that first locomotive opened the route, Cornelius Vanderbilt investigated the line for himself. His nearly fatal accident four years earlier had not made him hostile to trains, as some later claimed; he keenly understood that control of traffic on Long Island Sound lay in the strategic balance between steamboats and railroads—and between rival railroads, as this and other lines neared completion.

“It was a common occurrence for the boats to come together 3 or 4 times a day,” one man observed. The collisions had grown more dangerous.

Vanderbilt, however, won respect for more than simply being smart. Americans, and Democrats in particular, distinguished between “stockjobbing” speculators, whom they saw as little more than gamblers or tricksters, and “enterprising” men, who built businesses and created wealth. In 1842, editor Moses Beach added Vanderbilt to his annual list of “the Wealthy Citizens of New York City” alongside Philip Hone, Oroondates Mauran, Daniel Drew, and John Jacob Astor.

“Cornelius has evinced more energy and ‘go aheaditiveness’ in building and driving steamboats, and other projects, than ever one single Dutchman possessed,” he exclaimed.

Marx says somewhere that men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves.1 He forgot to add that great plans often come about by accident.

How many times had Vanderbilt embarked on important enterprises only because of chance? His start in steamboats under Gibbons, his Dispatch Line to Philadelphia, his lower Hudson route, his People’s Line to Albany, all originated in the unexpected. He was quick to turn trouble to his advantage, and to prey on the weak and vulnerable.

In the 1840s, the strategic balance in the transportation network of Long Island Sound destabilized as new railways were constructed alongside the Boston & Providence and the Stonington. The decade began with the completion of both the Hartford & New Haven and, more important, the Norwich, a line that descended from Worcester, Massachusetts, to the Connecticut seaport that gave it its name. And the Long Island Railroad advanced eastward by the hour. Though it would one day become a commuter line...

It was not the first time Vanderbilt was titled “Commodore,” but afterward his name rarely appeared in print without this honorary rank. He was becoming a cultural icon.

the New York that Vanderbilt had helped to create: commercial, mobile, and individualistic—yet increasingly polarized into rich and poor.

The age of unspecialized merchants and skilled artisans began to fade as mills, factories, banks, and railroads rose in their place. Most Americans still worked on their own farms, in their own shops, or for small partnerships or personal businesses, but New York (and New England) presaged a future of industrialization and incorporation, of stockholders, managers, and wage workers. Unquestionably the new economy worked wonders, creating a highly productive, exceedingly wealthy society;

The carriage was the great recreational institution of New York’s rich. Any afternoon would see expensive affairs pulled by fancy horses, carrying William B. Astor, Hamilton Fish, Watts Sherman, or even Daniel Drew through “the pleasant drives of the Central Park,” as the Herald remarked on December 5, 1859. Vanderbilt, of course, was one of the “fast men” who held his own reins and hungered for speed.

Beyond all analysis of Vanderbilt’s historical role, it is worth remembering that men willingly followed this difficult, profane titan, even at the risk of their own lives. It was not because he was generous or kind, but because he was a man of genuine prowess. No one, they knew, understood steamships better; no one, they knew, was more willing to face personal danger; no one, they knew, was truer to his word. Vanderbilt was many things, not all of them admirable, but he was never a phony. Hated, revered, resented, he always commanded respect, even from his enemies.

The division of the republic proceeded inexorably; but the question of whether it would result in war centered on Fort Sumter, a federal post on an island in Charleston Harbor. The South Carolinians wanted it.

“Extra—a Herald! Got the bombardment of Fort Sumter!” Walt Whitman, George Templeton Strong, and countless others anxiously read the freshly printed sheets in the glare of corner gaslights. War had begun.

For one thing, George seems to have struggled at the Military Academy, where he graduated thirty-ninth out of forty-one, only one step above his lowest point. Custer, of course, graduated last in his class and still went on to fame in the war. But the two Georges had different fates.

IT HAD BEEN A YEAR of defeat upon defeat. Bull Run, Wilson’s Creek, Ball’s Bluff, and Lexington, Missouri: such was the legacy that Edwin M. Stanton inherited when he took office as secretary of war in January 1862. Overbearing, incisive, and fiercely honest, this former U.S. attorney general brought a determination to reform

ON JULY 17, 1862, PRESIDENT LINCOLN sent a formal message to Congress. “I have inadvertently omitted so long to inform you that in March last Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt, of New York, gratuitously presented to the United States the ocean steamer ‘Vanderbilt,’ by many esteemed the finest merchant ship in the world,” he wrote.

At nine o’clock the next day, October 27, Vanderbilt returned to Stan-ton’s office. “I have thought this thing over and made up my mind,” the secretary said. “Come and get into the carriage.” The two rode to see General Nathaniel P. Banks, a former speaker of the house turned unsuccessful general (against Confederate general Thomas T. “Stonewall” Jackson, against whom almost everyone was unsuccessful).

Few men in wartime New York were better known than Cornelius Vanderbilt—or so often misjudged. Thousands recognized him as he drove his fast horses through the streets each day, sitting erect on a light racing wagon with reins in hand, long white sideburns flowing down his cheeks, keen eyes squinting ahead. The fastidious Commodore always dressed in black and wore a white cravat typical of a passing generation, now affected largely by clergymen.

By creating one of the largest railroad companies the world had ever seen, Vanderbilt would directly shape this business transformation. But the sheer size of his enterprises would give him a larger cultural significance. He operated on an unprecedented scale, amassing some of the first interstate corporations in American history, which gave him a chokehold over the nation’s arteries of commerce. The gigantic entities he helped pioneer would overshadow forever after the old landscape of individuals and small partnerships. They would also infuse American life with an institutional, bureaucratic business culture—what scholar Alan Trachtenberg calls the “incorporation of America.”8 Vanderbilt would emerge as the first great icon of this revolution.

“When I was a boy,” George Templeton Strong reflected in early 1865, “the aristocracy lived around the Battery, on Bowling Green.” So it had been since New York was named New Amsterdam, two centuries earlier. Young Cornelius and Sophia Vanderbilt had lived on Broad and Stone streets, in buildings and circumstances that might have been recognizable to Pieter Stuyvesant himself. Then, in the 1820s, the transformation of New York began, as immigrants swarmed in from Germany, Ireland, and the American countryside. The elite relocated, and kept on relocating every decade or so. In 1864, Strong declined to serve as president of Columbia College, since it would require him to move from Murray Hill (the current center of fashion) “to a frontier settlement… on Forty-ninth Street.”

The Commodore’s grandson was one of the last prisoners of the Civil War, and, ironically, carried one of the last Confederate orders. On April 9, Lee surrendered.

“We have the astounding intelligence of the assassination of President Lincoln & the attempt to assassinate Mr. Seward,” New York Central director John V. L. Pruyn wrote in his diary on April 15.

At the moment of victory, the great emancipator had been shot dead by John Wilkes Booth—on Good Friday, no less. Three days later, Pruyn observed in Albany, “All buildings in the city almost without exception, are hanging emblems of mourning for the death of President Lincoln. Accounts from every part of the country show this to be the case everywhere. The grief seems to be universal & profound.”28 Lincoln’s death was one of an estimated 620,000 in the Civil War: 360,000 from the North and 260,000 from the South, not including civilian casualties.

On December 11, 1867, Cornelius Vanderbilt ascended to the presidency of the New York Central.

Reasonable is a word that historians have rarely linked to the Commodore’s name, but it defined his behavior as a railroad leader.

The Panic of 1873 started one of the longest depressions in American history—sixty-five straight months of economic contraction.

Cornelius Vanderbilt, child of the eighteenth century, master of the nineteenth, maker of the centuries to come. He never ceased to strive to rationalize his businesses, or to foster cooperation with his rivals. But he could not escape the legacy of the past, or the realities of economics. The irony is that the railroads suffered severely after the Panic of 1873 precisely because of the laissez-faire policies and culture that Vanderbilt himself had championed throughout his life. With the economy in shambles, railway companies battled each other ruthlessly to capture whatever traffic they could, sending prices spiraling downward. As the Commodore faced his final years, his empire fought to survive. Success would depend on how well he had constructed it.

At 9:12 a.m. on January 4, 1877, William sent a telegram to Bishop McTyeire at Vanderbilt University “Father is very low. Be prepared for the worst.” At 11:41 a.m., he sent a second telegram. “Commodore passed away at nine minutes to eleven this morning.”

The image of Vanderbilt as the man of force is powerful, so much so that it can easily be forgotten that he was a man, emotional and complicated. Here and there, his vulnerabilities and sensitivities poke through the cracks of the stony historical record. He was often difficult with both his wives, yet he loved and needed them.

The Commodore himself remains. His statue still stands at the city gate, gazing down Park Avenue South from the front of Grand Central Terminal. In 1929, the railroad moved it from the top of the St. John’s Park Freight Depot, which was slated for destruction, to its current location.

It is fitting that he should stand guard over the infrastructure he created, more grand and more central than it was even in his own time, so vitally important to the city that rose to greatness under his influence. His corporation has disappeared; his plans for a dynasty ultimately failed; but, as the directors of his railroads observed,

The New York Times, July 15, 2007, named Vanderbilt the second-wealthiest man in American history,