The First Tycoon Quotes

“He did have his beliefs, chiefly in his own genius.”
― T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

“If he had learned anything from his parents, he learned that business was a matter of relationships.”
― T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

“Thanks in large part to reduced transportation costs, San Francisco matured from a dust-blown, mud-lined tent camp with gambling saloons into a brick-walled, warehouse-filled commercial center with gambling saloons.”
― T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

“Chief Justice John Marshall’s great disquisition on the commerce clause,” writes legal scholar Leonard W. Levy, “is the most influential in our history.” In constitutional terms, it completed his great nationalist project, the establishment of federal supremacy. It struck down the New York steamboat monopoly as an affront to Congress’s exclusive jurisdiction over interstate commerce, refuting the claim that the states shared power in that area. In practical terms, it threw the high court’s weight behind the gathering momentum of competitive individualism—of laissez-faire—in American law and culture.”
― T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

“His uncertainty may not be as uncharacteristic as it appears. The creature of a commercial, individualistic, competitive generation, he saw every relationship as a business transaction; he simply didn’t know what to do with this very human entanglement with a man who was less a rival than a blowhard.”
― T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

“Law, rank, the traditional social bonds—these things meant nothing to him. Only power earned his respect, and he felt his own strength gathering with every modest investment, every scrap of legal knowledge, every business lesson taught by the irascible but brilliant Gibbons.”
― T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

“word “aristocracy” tends to be used rather loosely. In the modern world, it is calculated by multiplying wealth by snobbery. During the early republic, on the other hand, it reflected the division of society into distinct ranks.”
― T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

“As he accumulated his modest portion of the periauger’s earnings over the course of 1810, 1811, and 1812, he purchased shares in other boats, whose profits he did not share with his parents.”
― T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

“You seem to be the idol of… a crawling swarm of small souls,” Mark Twain wrote in an open letter to Vanderbilt, “who… sing of your unimportant private habits and sayings and doings, as if your millions gave them dignity”4”
― T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

“His admirers saw him as the ultimate meritocrat, the finest example of the common man rising through hard work and ability To them, he symbolized America’s opportunities. His critics called him grasping and ruthless, an unelected king who never pretended to rule for his people.”
― T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

“Vanderbilt is but the precursor of a class of men who will wield within the state a power created by it, but too great for its control. He is the founder of a dynasty.”3”
― T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

“Even before the United States became a truly industrial country, he learned to use the tools of corporate capitalism to amass wealth and power on a scale previously unknown, creating enterprises of unprecedented size.”
― T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

“She let him into the house secretly, saw him privately, and kept him out of his father’s sight.53 And yet, even Corneil, this creature of deceit, could not deny the truth about himself. He alternated his bombast with references to “my shame & mortification & sorrow.” He was literally fatalistic about his hope of reform. He wrote to Greeley of his “determination to humbly forfeit my life as the penalty of further vice.” It was the one prediction about himself that would come true.54 ON FEBRUARY 15, 1866, the locomotive Augustus Schell chuffed onto the Albany bridge and rolled westward along its 2,020-foot span, over a total of nineteen piers, across an iron turntable above the center of the river below, and rattled down into Albany itself. Following this symbolic inauguration, the first passenger train crossed one week later. After four years of construction (and many more of litigation), the bridge gave the New York Central a continuous, direct connection to the Hudson River Railroad, and thus to Manhattan. But its completed track became a lighted fuse.55 The Commodore’s cold response to Corneil’s backsliding revealed the icy judge who had always lurked behind the encouraging father. So, too, did the implacable warrior remain within the diplomat who had negotiated with Corning and Richmond. In December 1865, for example, the New York Court of Appeals handed down final judgment in the long-running court battle between Vanderbilt and the New York & New Haven Railroad over the shares that Schuyler had fraudulently issued in 1854. Over the years, weary shareholders had settled with the company—but the Commodore refused. He had waged his battle until the court ruled that the company owed $900,000 to Schuyler’s victims. “The great principle is now settled by the highest court in this State,” wrote the Commercial and Financial Chronicle, “that railroad and other corporations are bound by the fraudulent acts of their own agents.”56 It was, indeed, a great principle—but businessmen also saw a more personal lesson in the Schuyler fraud case. “The Commodore’s word is as good as his bond when it is fairly”
― T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

“If he had been able to sell all his assets at full market value at the moment of his death, in January of that year, he would have taken one out of every twenty dollars in circulation, including cash and demand deposits.2”
― T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

“Gentlemen: You have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you. Yours truly, Cornelius Vanderbilt.”
― T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

“The prosperity of a nation’s commerce cannot be durable, unless it be founded upon a solid basis,” Rochefoucauld-Liancourt warned; “and the solid basis of a nation’s commerce is the produce of its soil, of its manufactures.”
― T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

“IT IS AS IF WE ALL CARRY in our makeup the effects of accidents that have befallen our ancestors,” writes V. S. Naipaul,”
― T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

“Americans from other regions, she wrote, described them “as sly, grinding, selfish, and tricking. The Yankees… will avow these qualities themselves with a complacent smile, and boast that no people on earth can match them at over-reaching in a bargain.” It was a curious kind of vanity, she observed; if you listened to a Yankee describe himself, “you might fancy him a god—though a tricky one.”
― T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

“What distinguished him in a moment of crisis was his self-command.”
― T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

“He may have confused honor with with with ruthlessness.”
― T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

“The speed of transportation largely determined the speed of information.”
― T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

“Confrontation was the stuff of daily life.”
― T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt