The Vanderbilts were the richest family in America, with an empire founded on railroads and shipping by Cornelius Vanderbilt, “a coarse, tobacco-chewing, profane oaf of a man,” in the estimation of one of his contemporaries. Cornelius Vanderbilt—“Commodore” as he liked to be known, though he had no actual right to the title—didn’t offer much in the way of sophistication or intellectual enchantment, but he had a positively uncanny gift for making money. At one time he personally controlled some 10 percent of all the money in circulation in the United States.
