The Erie War proved to be the most serious defeat of Vanderbilt’s railroad career. His corner had been thwarted, his attempt at revenge had failed, and his losses had been heavy—perhaps as much as $1 million, though they remain impossible to calculate. But it was not the defeat that the public imagined. Observers in Wall Street and the press saw him as a voracious monopolist, so they assumed that he had wanted the Erie itself, something he explicitly denied. Indeed, what is most striking is not the failure of his corner, but how he rallied on the brink of disaster and forced his enemies to
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