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
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