The First Tycoon_ The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt Part 1

The First Tycoon.

The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

by T. J. Stiles.

Chapter One.

THE ISLANDER.

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.

Shortly before the hour, the crowd parted to allow in William H. Vanderbilt, the Commodore's eldest son, and his lawyers, led by Henry L. Clinton. William, "glancing carelessly and indifferently around the room, removed his overcoat and comfortably settled himself in his chair," the New York Times New York Times reported; meanwhile his lawyers shook hands with the opposing team, led by Scott Lord, who represented William's sister Mary Vanderbilt La Bau. At exactly two o'clock, the judge-called the "Surrogate" in this Surrogate Court-strode briskly in from his chambers through a side door, stepped up to the dais, and took his seat. "Are you ready, gentlemen?" he asked. Lord and Clinton each declared that they were, and the Surrogate ordered, "Proceed, gentlemen." reported; meanwhile his lawyers shook hands with the opposing team, led by Scott Lord, who represented William's sister Mary Vanderbilt La Bau. At exactly two o'clock, the judge-called the "Surrogate" in this Surrogate Court-strode briskly in from his chambers through a side door, stepped up to the dais, and took his seat. "Are you ready, gentlemen?" he asked. Lord and Clinton each declared that they were, and the Surrogate ordered, "Proceed, gentlemen."1 Everyone who listened as Lord stood to make his opening argument knew just how great the stakes were. "THE HOUSE OF VANDERBILT," the Times Times headlined its story the next morning. " headlined its story the next morning. "A RAILROAD PRINCE'S FORTUNE. THE HEIRS CONTESTING THE WILL.... A BATTLE OVER $100,000,000." The only item in all that screaming type that would have surprised readers was the $100,000,000." The only item in all that screaming type that would have surprised readers was the Times's Times's demotion of Vanderbilt to "prince," since the press usually dubbed him the railroad demotion of Vanderbilt to "prince," since the press usually dubbed him the railroad king king. His fortune towered over the American economy to a degree difficult to imagine, even at the time. 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 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. John's Park freight terminal that he had built, featuring a huge bronze statue of himself; had crossed the bridges over the tracks that he had sunk along Fourth Avenue (a step that would allow it to later blossom into Park Avenue); or had taken one of the ferries, steamboats, or steamships that he had controlled over the course of his lifetime. He had stamped the city with his mark-a mark that would last well into the twenty-first century-and so had stamped the country. Virtually every American had paid tribute to his treasury.

More fascinating than the fortune was the man behind it. Lord began his attack by admitting "that it seemed hazardous to say that a man who accumulated $100,000,000 and was famous for his strength of will had not the power to dispose of his fortune." His strength of will was famous indeed. Vanderbilt had first amassed wealth as a competitor in the steamboat business, cutting fares against established lines until he forced his rivals to pay him to go away. The practice led the New York Times New York Times, a quarter of a century before his death, to introduce a new metaphor into the American vernacular by comparing him to the medieval robber barons who took a toll from all passing traffic on the Rhine. His adventure in Nicaragua had been, in part, a matter of personal buccaneering, as he explored the passage through the rain forest, piloted a riverboat through the rapids of the San Juan River, and decisively intervened in a war against an international criminal who had seized control of the country. His early life was filled with fistfights, high-speed steamboat duels, and engine explosions; his latter days were marked by daredevil harness races and high-stakes confrontations.

It was this personal drama that moved that crowd of spectators into the courtroom eleven months after his death, but more thoughtful observers mulled over his larger meaning. Vanderbilt was an empire builder, the first great corporate tycoon in American history. 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. "He has introduced Caesarism into corporate life," wrote Charles Francis Adams Jr. "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 Adams did not mean a family dynasty, but a line of corporate chiefs who would overshadow democratic government itself. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Gould, Morgan-all were just beginning their careers when Vanderbilt was at his height. They respected and followed his example, though they would be hard-pressed to match it. Few laws had constrained him; few governments had exceeded his influence. In the 1850s, his personal role in Central America had been more important than that of the White House or the State Department. In 1867, he had stopped all trains into New York City from the west to bring the New York Central Railroad to its knees. In 1869, he personally had abated a panic on Wall Street that threatened to ring in a depression.

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. Still worse, they saw him as the apex of a vulgar new culture that had cast off the republican purity of the Revolution for the golden calf of wealth. "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 Perhaps there were those who understood that Vanderbilt's true significance was more complex, even contradictory. How could it not be? His life spanned a period of breathtaking changes, from the days of George Washington to those of John D. Rockefeller (with whom he made deals). He began his career in a rural, agricultural, essentially colonial society in which the term "businessman" was unknown; he ended it in a corporate, industrial economy5 Neither the admirers nor the critics of his later years had witnessed his role during the tumultuous era of the early republic and the antebellum period. They could not see that Vanderbilt had spent most of his career as a radical force. From his beginnings as a teenage boatman before the War of 1812, he had led the rise of competition as a virtue in American culture. He had disrupted the remnants of the eighteenth-century patricians, shaken the conservative merchant elite, and destroyed monopolies at every step. His infuriated opponents had not shared his enthusiasm for competition; rather, the wealthy establishment in that young and limited economy saw his attacks as destructive. In 1859, one had written that he "has always proved himself the enemy of every American maritime enterprise," and the Neither the admirers nor the critics of his later years had witnessed his role during the tumultuous era of the early republic and the antebellum period. They could not see that Vanderbilt had spent most of his career as a radical force. From his beginnings as a teenage boatman before the War of 1812, he had led the rise of competition as a virtue in American culture. He had disrupted the remnants of the eighteenth-century patricians, shaken the conservative merchant elite, and destroyed monopolies at every step. His infuriated opponents had not shared his enthusiasm for competition; rather, the wealthy establishment in that young and limited economy saw his attacks as destructive. In 1859, one had written that he "has always proved himself the enemy of every American maritime enterprise," and the New York Times New York Times condemned Vanderbilt for pursuing "competition for competition's sake." condemned Vanderbilt for pursuing "competition for competition's sake."6 Those on the other end of the spectrum had celebrated the way he had expanded transportation, slashed fares, and punished opponents who relied on government monopolies or subsidies. To Jacksonian Democrats, who championed laissez-faire as an egalitarian creed, he had epitomized the entrepreneur as champion of the people, the businessman as revolutionary. Those on the other end of the spectrum had celebrated the way he had expanded transportation, slashed fares, and punished opponents who relied on government monopolies or subsidies. To Jacksonian Democrats, who championed laissez-faire as an egalitarian creed, he had epitomized the entrepreneur as champion of the people, the businessman as revolutionary.

But the career that started early ended late, and the revolutionary completed his days as emperor. As he had expanded his railroad domain from the benighted New York & Harlem-annexing the Hudson River, the New York Central, the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, and the Canada Southern-he had seemed not a radical but a monopolist. His role in the Erie War of 1868, with its epic corruption of public officials, had made him seem not a champion but an enemy of civic virtue. He played a leading part in the creation of a new entity, the giant corporation, that would dominate the American economy in the decades after his death. The political landscape had changed as well. With the rise of large railroads and the expansion of federal power during the Civil War, radicals began to think of the government as a possible counterweight to corporate might. Vanderbilt had remained as committed to laissez-faire as ever; as he told the newspapers more than once, his guiding principle was "to mind my own business," and all he asked from government was to be left alone.7 He never acknowledged that, as Charles F. Adams Jr. wrote, the massive corporations he commanded gave him power to rival that of the state, and that he became the establishment against which populists armed themselves with government regulation. He never acknowledged that, as Charles F. Adams Jr. wrote, the massive corporations he commanded gave him power to rival that of the state, and that he became the establishment against which populists armed themselves with government regulation.

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. Far ahead of many of his peers, he grasped one of the great changes in American culture: the abstraction of economic reality, as the connection faded between the tangible world and the new devices of business, such as paper currency, corporations, and securities. With those devices he helped to create the corporate economy that would define the United States into the twenty-first century. Even as he demonstrated the creative power of a market economy, he also exacerbated problems that would never be fully solved: a huge disparity in wealth between rich and poor; the concentration of great power in private hands; the fraud and self-serving deception that thrives in an unregulated environment. One person cannot move the national economy single-handedly-but no one else kept his hands on the lever for so long or pushed so hard.

The spectators in that courtroom, then, could mark Vanderbilt down as complicated indeed, even before the first witness spoke. Yet what pulled them there was perhaps not so much his national significance as his strange, powerful character, his mysterious personal life. Public rumor depicted a home wracked by intrigue, spiritualist seances, and Vanderbilt's controversial sponsorship of the feminist Victoria Woodhull and her voluptuous sister, Tennie C. Claflin. What the public did not see was his emotional complexity: his patient business diplomacy, his love for his first and second wives (as well as his selfishness with them), and his conflicting feelings about his often difficult children-especially Cornelius Jeremiah, who struggled with epilepsy and an addiction to gambling. Contemporaries and posterity alike often would overlook the very human, even sympathetic, side of the imperious Commodore, attracted instead to the most salacious, scandalous, and overblown reports.

It was his final act that brought everyone into that courtroom, an act that combined the personal and the corporate. He had built something that he meant to last and remain in the hands of his own bloodline-to found a dynasty in the most literal sense. To that end, he had drafted a will that left 95 percent of his estate to his eldest son, William. William's sister Mary meant to break that dynasty by breaking the will, to force a distribution of the estate equally among the ten surviving children.

Would she succeed? Each side would fight to define Vanderbilt; each side would seek out its own answer to the enigma of a man who left few letters and no diaries. Lord began to speak, and the crowd bent forward to listen, straining to learn who the Commodore really was.

A CHILD, IT IS SAID, CHANGES EVERYTHING. For Phebe Hand Vanderbilt, another child meant more of the same. In May 1794, during the last month of her fourth pregnancy, her first three children, Mary, Jacob, and Charlotte, ran about their humble house. Knowing the Vanderbilt tradition, she could expect many more to follow the unborn infant in her womb. Continuity not change, defined everything about her existence, an existence that differed little from that of her parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents. She sat in wooden furniture hand-cut from hand-hewn lumber. She wore clothes hand-sewn from hand-spun wool. She washed cups and plates that had been spun on a wheel, and bottles blown by a craftsman's mouth. Looking out a window, she would see hand-built wagons harnessed to teams of horses. Peering a little farther, she could watch the sloops and ships that sailed by the shore just steps from her door. And at night she would light the room with a mutton-fat candle or a whale-oil lamp.

Phebe lived in a close wooden world made by human hands, powered by winds and horse and human strength, clustered at the water's edge. Most of the technology she knew had been first imagined thousands of years before. Even the newest inventions of her time-the clock, the printing press, the instruments of navigation-dated back to the early Renaissance. The "Brown Bess" muskets stored in U.S. arsenals and carried by British redcoats had been designed in the 1690s, a full century before. Revolutions were a matter for politics; the constructed world merely crept ahead.8 Phebe lived in Port Richmond, that most ancient kind of community-a farming village, its air pungent with the smell of animal manure and open fires, its unpaved paths sticky with mud from the season's rains. It sat on the northern edge of Richmond County better known as Staten Island, a sprawling, sparsely occupied landscape of not quite four thousand souls who still governed their affairs with town meetings. The islanders tilled the steep green hillsides, let pigs wander and forage for themselves, and built their houses close to the soft, swampy shores that crumbled into the kills-the tidal creeks that wrapped around the island's edges. Staten Island sat like a stopper in the mouth of New York Harbor, separated from Long Island by the two-mile-long Narrows, where the ocean decanted into the bay. West of Staten Island stretched the mainland of New Jersey, and across the length of the harbor sat Manhattan, a long and narrow island that extended between the deep East and Hudson (or North) rivers like a natural pier of bedrock.

An island is defined by its edges. Phebe looked across the water for her husband's return whenever he was gone, until he sailed up in his boat and tied it fast. His name was Cornelius. It was a solid Dutch name, as was Vanderbilt, and both were common around New York Bay. The first of his family had arrived in America in 1650, when Jan Aertsen Van Der Bilt settled in the Dutch colony of New Netherlands. In 1715, long after the English had conquered the province and renamed it New York, one of Jan's descendants had crossed the water to sparsely populated Staten Island. That one move was change enough, it seems, for the family that dispersed and multiplied there. The ensuing generations lived out their lives as farmers or tavern keepers, unmoved by the climactic North American war with France in the 1750s, the outbreak of revolution two decades later, the British occupation of their island, the triumph of independence, the ratification of the Constitution, and the swearing in of President George Washington in Manhattan.

On May 27, 1794, Phebe gave birth to her fourth child. She underscored the sense of continuity by naming him Cornelius, too, though they called the boy Cornele. She cooed over him in English. Phebe had first met her husband in Port Richmond, a heavily Dutch village, where she had been working as a servant in the home of a minister, but she herself came from an old English family in New Jersey.

In the town of New York this sort of intermarriage surprised no one. There the Dutch had fallen to less than half the population as early as 1720; now they were less a minority than an interbred strand among its 33,000 residents. As early as the rule of Petrus Stuyvesant in 1647, the village then named New Amsterdam had grown into a rather cosmopolitan place. Stuyvesant governed under the authority of the Dutch West India Company, created to mobilize merchant capital to advance Dutch interests in the New World. Under his administration, the little seaport came to reflect the commercial orientation of the Netherlands, the most industrious nation of seventeenth-century Europe. As in the mother country, the primacy of trade, foreign trade in particular, had fostered a tolerance of strangers and disparate creeds (at a time when being a Quaker was a hanging offense in Massachusetts), and that tradition persisted.9 On Staten Island, a slightly different legacy prevailed. Most of the original Dutch settlers in New Netherlands, including Jan Aertsen Van Der Bilt, came to farm. They spread out on either side of New York Bay and the Hudson River (known as the North River well into the nineteenth century) from Staten Island to Albany. Theirs was an inward-looking, rural society and Americans of British descent often viewed them with distaste. "Nothing can exceed the state of indolence and ignorance in which these Dutchmen are described to live," wrote traveler William Strickland in the 1790s. "Many of them are supposed to live and die without having been five miles from their own houses." Outsiders generally considered the Dutch rude; one English-speaking Hudson Valley resident, for example, complained about "what I call Dutch politeness." At times suspicion boiled over into blows.10 These great-great-grandchildren of the Netherlands carried on old customs for decade after decade. As late as 1836, a diarist wrote, "It is difficult to turn the Dutch population from their old established ways." Women in high caps continued to serve "oely-coeks," sweetened balls of deep-fried dough; men often went about in traditional clothes, including the broad-brimmed beaver hat. And they preferred to speak "Laeg-Duits," or "Low Dutch." By 1790, this dialect had evolved into a tongue that was incomprehensible to natives of the Netherlands, but it was heard all along the North River and New York Harbor. In one telling measure, three-quarters of 1,232 runaway slaves in the region at the beginning of the nineteenth century spoke Low Dutch.

Those slaves point to another difference between the Dutch and their English-speaking neighbors. In 1799, the state of New York passed the Gradual Manumission Act, phasing out slavery over twenty-eight years. Opposition to the law came largely from rural Dutch areas. In 1790, only 11.3 percent of English families owned slaves, compared to 27.9 percent of the Dutch-and one out of every three families in northern Staten Island. As international merchants, the Dutch had played a central part in introducing slavery to North America; as New York-area farmers, they carried on the institution to the last.11 Slavery, in addition to being an oppressive social system, was a commercial institution, providing both labor and property. Its presence revealed another distinctive feature of the rural Dutch: they farmed for profit. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this was a notable fact. Even into the 1800s, many English-speaking farmers in New York and New England devoted much of their effort to subsistence-though not necessarily by choice-whereas Dutch farming "was market-oriented," in the words of one historian, "and derived its distinct regional characteristics from Dutch tradition."

The rural Dutch, then, shared much of the commercial consciousness of their urban brethren. They clattered their wagons into Albany, New Brunswick, and New York to sell their produce with a savvy that became proverbial. When a cobbler refused to return a man's shoes until he made full payment, for example, the frustrated customer wrote in his diary, "He is too Dutch by half." These perceptions led to such coinages as "Dutch treat." A more charitable observer linked this shrewdness, this market orientation, to a detachment from public life. "The low Dutch are a quiet, frugal people," he wrote in 1786, "possess considerable property, are afraid to run into Debt, without being fond of law, or Offices of Government."

There was, perhaps, one more inheritance from the land of dikes and tulips for the newborn boy on Staten Island: independent women. Dutch law extended substantial autonomy to women, compared to British custom, and the fact was reflected in society "Strong and assertive Dutch wives were commonplace," observe two historians of New York City. Even after the English conquest, the tradition persisted, and Dutch women conducted business in their own names.12 Cornelius and Phebe Vanderbilt carried on these folkways faithfully, giving them no more thought than Staten Island's trails and landings, established long ago by their ancestors. Cornelius's own parents had died when he was young, leaving him no estate worth the name. Within a few years of the birth of his namesake, he achieved sufficient prosperity to move his family-little Cornele and his three older siblings, along with younger sisters Phebe, Jane, and Eleanor-to a roomier house east of Port Richmond, in what would become the village of Stapleton. This two-story wooden structure, with a steep-sloped roof, chimneys at either end, three dormer windows, and a porch that ran its width, sat amid pear and cherry trees, just two hundred feet from the shores of the Narrows.

They were pulled to the water's edge by the gravity of commerce. Living across the bay from New York, the Vanderbilts enjoyed a year-round market for their produce, something rare for American farmers. The longstanding trade between the crowded town and its neighboring shores had led the Dutch to develop a specialized vessel, a large, two-masted boat known as a periauger (or pettiauger).13 In an act that spoke volumes about Cornelius's commitment to accumulation, he built or bought his own periauger and began to sell his services, ferrying his neighbors and their produce across the bay. As other work for the boat presented itself, he began to attend to the water as much as to his farm. In an act that spoke volumes about Cornelius's commitment to accumulation, he built or bought his own periauger and began to sell his services, ferrying his neighbors and their produce across the bay. As other work for the boat presented itself, he began to attend to the water as much as to his farm.

In some ways, it would be Phebe who would prove to be the more Dutch of the two. Like the classic wife of New Netherlands tradition, she radiated strength of personality. "She was not only the family oracle," one nineteenth-century writer declared, "she was the oracle of the neighborhood, whose advice was sought in all sorts of dilemmas, and whose judgment had weight." She was also as much a creature of the marketplace as her husband, as she sent her vegetables and sewing and whatever else she produced to town in her husband's boat. When cash came in, she would count the silver coins, march to her tall grandfather clock, and stow them within. Her shrewdness outshone that of her husband at times. According to tale, Cornelius once mortgaged the farm to finance a deal that then failed utterly. Phebe heard his confession, went to the clock, and came back with the entire amount. It was a legend, but one with a basis in fact: later court records show that she lent money at commercial rates of interest, and once foreclosed on a widow's mortgage-the widow being her own daughter. It seems that silver rarely stayed in the clock for long before Phebe found a better place to invest it.14 Ambition and inventiveness, practicality and toughness: the mixture of virtues that emerged from the marriage of these two people lifted them out of the poverty in which they had begun their lives together. They created a household where, far earlier than in more remote communities, the marketplace strode in the door and shaped their lives. Farmers living up the Hudson straggled along with much more haphazard connections to the world of commerce; one study found that the average household made just one delivery of crops and handicrafts to riverside merchants in an entire year. How different it was in the Vanderbilt house, where daily life was filled with buying and selling, borrowing and lending, earnings and debt. "The desire of riches is their ruling passion," a French observer wrote of Americans at this time, "and indeed their only passion." He could easily have been describing Phebe and Cornelius.15 But where would their passion take them? The future they could envision was in keeping with past generations of Vanderbilts, a set of possibilities confined within the water's edge that wrapped around them: a farm, a boat, perhaps a tavern, perhaps more land. The thin dispersal of people in a rural landscape dispersed opportunity as well. But unlike most country folk, the Vanderbilts lived within sight of the place of the most densely concentrated possibilities in North America: the city of New York.

THE DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD-LIANCOURT stared in wonder across the bay. Standing at the Battery, the plaza marking Manhattan's southern tip, he gasped at the view. "In this promenade," he wrote, "the eye embraces at once all the outlets of this great port, and sees all its shipping come in and go out." In a glance, he saw the marshy shores of New Jersey, the bluffs of Brooklyn, and directly across the green hillsides of Staten Island, looming above the Vanderbilt farm. In between billowed the sails of ships and sloops passing up and down the rivers, sailing to and from the ocean, mooring and unmooring from the piers that fingered the water. The scene, he sighed, made the Battery "incomparably the most delightful public walk anywhere to be found." stared in wonder across the bay. Standing at the Battery, the plaza marking Manhattan's southern tip, he gasped at the view. "In this promenade," he wrote, "the eye embraces at once all the outlets of this great port, and sees all its shipping come in and go out." In a glance, he saw the marshy shores of New Jersey, the bluffs of Brooklyn, and directly across the green hillsides of Staten Island, looming above the Vanderbilt farm. In between billowed the sails of ships and sloops passing up and down the rivers, sailing to and from the ocean, mooring and unmooring from the piers that fingered the water. The scene, he sighed, made the Battery "incomparably the most delightful public walk anywhere to be found."16 In 1795 he had sailed across the ocean to North America, where he wandered as an exile for three years. They were years spent very much on the edge of civilization. The United States was a nation with grass between its toes. Only five cities held more than ten thousand residents; the percentage of the nation's four million citizens who lived in towns of at least 2,500 people languished in the single digits, and would linger there for decades to come. Most lived in farms, villages, and landings scattered along the long Atlantic coast.17 Across the Atlantic, Europe burned. In France, the king had been executed, thousands more had been guillotined during the Terror, and the massed armies of the surrounding monarchies marched in to crush the revolution. How different the United States was: during Rochefoucauld-Liancourt's three years there, the nation's military hero, George Washington, voluntarily stepped down from the presidency, declining to stand for a third term. Despite some pointed political debate, no heads rolled when John Adams assumed the office in 1797. Here was a peaceful, stable republic, whose white-wigged leaders spoke of honor, service, and the example of classical Rome.

What captured the Frenchman's imagination, as he looked out over the ships crowding New York Harbor, was not politics but economics. Again and again, Rochefoucauld-Liancourt had observed the Americans' "ardour for enterprise." When he turned and strolled up Broadway, past bustling stores and workshops, under the ringing hammers and shouts of workmen erecting new buildings, he marveled that every inhabitant seemed to cherish "the project of making an ample and rapid fortune.... Few of them are contented with what they have."

It was that sense of the public mood, of the emerging American character, that illuminated Rochefoucauld-Liancourt's vision of this country. The United States, he wrote, "is destined by nature for a state of strength and greatness, which nothing can prevent her from attaining." The prophecy was far from obvious: despite the enormous geographical size of the republic, it was desperately underpopulated, with only a skeletal military establishment. And yet Rochefoucauld-Liancourt boldly predicted that it would attain "a degree of prosperity, which must in future render this part of the world the rival, perhaps the fortunate [i.e., more successful] rival, of Europe."

There was, however, an obstacle standing between the young republic and its destiny. A sophisticated as well as inquisitive traveler, Rochefoucauld-Liancourt saw that New York's busy harbor spoke of weakness as well as strength. A momentary disarrangement of the world-the war between France and its enemies-had allowed American merchants to step in as shippers to all nations. European ports once closed to Americans now stood open; competing merchant fleets now sat at their piers or were impressed into naval service. But Americans traded comparatively little with each other; merchantmen sailed from New York for Europe or the Caribbean rather than Baltimore or Boston. And fully half of American exports, in terms of value, were re-exports re-exports of goods arriving from overseas, rather than sales of U.S. products. of goods arriving from overseas, rather than sales of U.S. products.

"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." But Americans manufactured little that they could sell to each other, beyond the confines of a local community. For a century and a half, London's imperial policies had molded the North American colonies into suppliers of raw materials and consumers of British manufactured goods. As a result, foreign trade had been at least four times greater than domestic during the colonial era, as each port gathered in crops and raw material from its immediate hinterland and shipped them abroad. Even now, foreign trade remained two or three times greater. The ports of the United States were an unstrung line of pearls, shining with Europe's trade but with little to hold them together when peace returned.18 If there was any place where that would start to change, where the republic would begin to grow into a cohesive nation nation and so grow great, it must be New York. When Rochefoucauld-Liancourt arrived in August 1797, the advantages of its location could hardly be missed. "The situation of this city in point of commercial importance," observed a foreign visitor, "is surpassed by none in the United States." Centrally placed between New England and the rest of the states, sitting on a large and sheltered deep-water harbor at the junction of the Hudson River, Long Island Sound, and the sea lanes to Europe, New York drew an ever-greater portion of American trade. By 1807, an Englishman could describe it as "the first city in the United States for wealth, commerce, and population." and so grow great, it must be New York. When Rochefoucauld-Liancourt arrived in August 1797, the advantages of its location could hardly be missed. "The situation of this city in point of commercial importance," observed a foreign visitor, "is surpassed by none in the United States." Centrally placed between New England and the rest of the states, sitting on a large and sheltered deep-water harbor at the junction of the Hudson River, Long Island Sound, and the sea lanes to Europe, New York drew an ever-greater portion of American trade. By 1807, an Englishman could describe it as "the first city in the United States for wealth, commerce, and population."

And yet, New York remained in the moment of its dawn. In 1790, it remained the second city in population in the United States, with only 33,131 to Philadelphia's 54,388. New York nearly doubled by 1800 to 60,515, but even then it was hardly a grand affair. In 1811, one visiting Scotsman dismissed it as an "overgrown sea-port village." Like a rock in a sock, New York sank into Manhattan's toe, leaving most of the island to pastures, fields, and swamps. Much of the city's growth was not upward but seaward. South Street, for example, was constructed in the first decade of the 1800s on landfill dumped along the East River shore.19 But then, the waterfront was the very reason for New York's existence. "Belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs," Herman Melville would write, "commerce surrounds it with her surf." Every visitor, it seems, felt compelled to comment on the teeming scene. "The wharfs were crowded with shipping, whose tall masts mingled with the buildings," wrote John Lambert, after seeing it all in 1807, "and together with the spires and cupolas of the churches, gave the city an appearance of magnificence."20 Closer inspection tended to ruin that impression. To be blunt, the city stank. The docks consisted of solid masses of stone and dirt packed into wooden cribs, creating enclosures called slips. The water within the slips, observed a traveler, "being completely out of the current of the stream or tide, are little else than stagnant receptacles of city filth; while at the top of the wharves exhibits one continuous mass of clotted nuisance, composed of dust, tea, oil, molasses, &c., where revel countless swarms of offensive flies."

Within the belt of wharves, this overgrown seaport village swarmed with men rushing to make money. "Every thought, word, look, and action of the multitude," Lambert observed, "seemed to be absorbed by commerce." The impression deepened with each step along South Street. "Every thing was in motion; all was life, bustle, and activity," he wrote. "The carters were driving in every direction; and the sailors and labourers upon the wharfs, and on board the vessels, were moving their ponderous burthens from place to place." Penetrating a block or two deeper into town, one wandered through the twisting corridors of Pearl, Water, and Front streets, narrow lanes that were home to most of the city's "countinghouses," or merchants' offices and warehouses. A frenzy of construction was replacing old wooden houses with new brick buildings, standing shoulder to shoulder under slanting tile roofs, along new brick sidewalks lit by whale-oil lamps at night and bustling with business by day. "The Coffee-House Slip, and the corners of Wall and Pearl streets, were jammed up with carts, drays, and wheel-barrows," Lambert wrote; "horses and men were huddled promiscuously together, leaving little or no room for passengers to pass."21 Thirty years earlier, John Adams had expressed other reservations. "With all the opulence and splendor of this city, there is very little good breeding to be found," he had noted in his diary. "They talk very loud, very fast, and all together. If they ask you a question, before you can utter three words of your answer, they will break out upon you again, and talk away." These habits would never really change. But at least one visitor found New Yorkers' directness refreshing. "The people of Philadelphia are stiff in their manners," he noted by way of contrast, "& not so hospitable as those of New York." This was a more cosmopolitan place, he observed, thronging with an "immense number of foreigners established in N. Y, attracted thither by the advantages of its commercial importance."22 Commercial importance brought luxury, best seen on Broadway, the most fashionable street in North America. It flowed north from the Battery, glistening with enough elegance to impress even Rochefoucauld-Liancourt. "There is not in any city in the world a finer street than Broadway," he declared. Lambert marveled at the boulevard's "large commodious shops of every description ... exhibiting as splendid and varied a show in their windows as can be met with in London. There are several and extensive book stores, print-shops, music-shops, jewelers, and silversmiths; hatters, linen-drapers, milliners, pastry-cooks, coach-makers, hotels, and coffee-houses." At the northern end of Broadway rose the new marble-clad city hall, presiding over an eponymous triangular park.

Still, with every mark of sophistication came a reminder of New York's rustic immaturity Beyond City Hall Park steeped a stinking pond called the Collect. Surrounded by a nauseating cluster of tanneries and slaughterhouses, the Collect was rapidly filled in after 1802, but the area was avoided by all who could help it. The back of the city hall was left undressed with marble because contemporaries thought "it was not likely to attract much notice." But even the best neighborhood had its woes.

"It is remarked on all hands," admitted the author of a guide to New York in 1817, "that the streets of New-York are the dirtiest in the United States." There were the backyard lavatories, for one thing, that overflowed with every heavy rain. And then there were the roaming herds of "innumerable hungry pigs of all sizes and complexions." Because of the swine, a petition of laborers explained, "many poor are able to pay rents and supply families with animal food during the winter." The pig was "our best scavenger," because it ate "fish, guts, garbage, and offals of every kind," and was smart enough to find its way home each night. But the hogs perpetuated the habit of strewing rotten waste into the gutters. "So long as immense numbers of swine are allowed to traverse the streets," wrote the travel-guide author, "so long will the inhabitants think themselves justified in throwing out their garbage to them for food; and so long will the streets of New-York remain proverbial for their filth."23 The same tension between sophistication and simplicity-if not exactly squalor-could be felt off the streets as well, in the countinghouses, where clerks perched on high stools and scratched with quills in copy books, where porters lumbered in and out with sacks, crates, and barrels. A quarter of a century had passed since Adam Smith had explained the division of labor in The Wealth of Nations; The Wealth of Nations; yet this commercial community remained a city of the unspecialized. Apart from artisans who sold merely what they made, the economy belonged to general merchants. yet this commercial community remained a city of the unspecialized. Apart from artisans who sold merely what they made, the economy belonged to general merchants.

"Their activities," writes historian George Rogers Taylor, "comprehended almost every aspect of business." Each master of the counting-house (perhaps with two or three partners) bought and sold cargoes of goods, owned the ships that carried them, and warehoused them in the same building with his office. He distributed these goods to smaller general merchants in towns and villages, and perhaps retailed them from his own storefront, and spun out a web of credit to his customers. He made no specialty of any particular product, but bought and sold what he could.24 He also traded in promissory notes and bills of exchange. Cash was scarce. British law had banned exports of specie (precious-metal coins, worth their face value in gold or silver) to the colonies and prohibited them from minting their own. Americans mostly used foreign coins acquired in their trade with the Caribbean-especially Spanish dollars (the legendary "pieces of eight") and their constituent eighth-dollar coins. As the United States began to mint its own coins, Congress made the new American dollar equal to the Spanish in silver content, for an easier transition. In New York slang, the eighth-dollar coin, worth twelve and a half cents, was known as a "shilling" well into the nineteenth century.*1 (Spanish pieces of eight continued to circulate in the United States as legal tender until 1857.) (Spanish pieces of eight continued to circulate in the United States as legal tender until 1857.)25 By any name, silver was hard to come by, so Americans made do with informal devices. A bill of exchange, for example, was a certificate of debt written up by a merchant who was owed money by a party in a distant place-London was a common case. It would be purchased by someone in New York who owed money in London. The buyer would then send it across the Atlantic with instructions for the seller's debtor to pay his own creditor. In this way, the movement of coin and final settlement of credit took place locally, at either end of these long-distance transactions. But the system was highly personal and unpredictable; it depended heavily on how well individuals knew and trusted each other. Because of the risks, the buyers of bills usually paid less than face value for them, driving up costs for everyone.

Locally, merchants usually paid each other with promissory notes, pledging payment with interest on specific dates. The recipient of one would endorse it, then use it to pay his own debts. But if the person who first issued it refused to pay when it came due, the endorser could be sued for payment, "according to the usage and custom of merchants," as the standard legal form read. It's notable that there was was a standard legal form (in New York at least), indicating just how common unpaid notes were. And yet, promissory notes would remain a primary method of payment for decades to come. a standard legal form (in New York at least), indicating just how common unpaid notes were. And yet, promissory notes would remain a primary method of payment for decades to come.26 If this unspecialized, informal economy were to change, it would first be through organization, by institutions that would replace these messy personal dealings. And it was in New York where just such institutions began to rise. It was there that the merchants' patron saint, Alexander Hamilton, helped to found the Bank of New York, one of the nation's first commercial banks. Commercial banks concentrated money for bigger loans; as specialized, professional lenders, they tended to make better choices about borrowers than individuals did, so their loans were more productive. Banks also eased the cash shortage. They began to experiment with checking early on, and they also made loans by issuing banknotes-paper money-that could be redeemed at the bank for gold or silver coin.

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. The Stock's interest payments funneled federal revenue-those hard-to-come-by silver coins-to merchants, who invested the money in their enterprises. More important, the federal bonds provided a universal form of payment and collateral. The first, cautious banks in America unhesitatingly loaned money to merchants who mortgaged them; the Stock also provided a convenient means of payment over long distances, as they held their value anywhere in the country, even overseas in the British and Dutch markets.

The Stock was soon joined by shares in two banks: the new, federally chartered Bank of the United States (the second part of Hamilton's financial plan), and the older Bank of New York, which acquired a state charter and issued shares that year. Investors in New York began to meet six times a week for formal stock auctions at the Merchants' Coffee House on Wall Street; between sessions, they clustered outside under a buttonwood tree to trade informally. In 1792, they formalized the stock market with the Buttonwood Agreement, setting fixed commissions for brokers (or "stockjobbers") and establishing the Tontine Coffee House at the corner of Wall and Water streets as a physical exchange (though the informal "curb market" continued to thrive).27 These new institutions laid a foundation that was absolutely essential for the future. But their immediate scope and impact should not be exaggerated. The stock market remained small for many years, because there was little stock to trade. In 1792, the New York stock exchange publicly quoted the price of just five securities, including three federal bonds; by 1815, the number had grown to only twenty-three. The vast majority of businesses remained partnerships or personal proprietorships. As a business historian notes, a corporation was "considered appropriate only when the enterprise was intended to perform a public service," such as the construction of a bridge or turnpike. A special act of the state legislature was required for every corporate charter. Few corporations had widely traded shares, and many were small, with a handful of investors, serving essentially as a new form for the traditional partnership.28 Every place, of course, is the scene of continuity But not every place is equally a fulcrum of change. New York's geographical advantages-its deep-water port at the end of a long river into the interior of the country-had attracted first imperial planners and then private merchants. Its density of merchants in turn gave rise to innovations in finance and business methods. A self-feeding cycle began to emerge, a multiplication of people and commerce, and needs and solutions, that was already starting to magnify New York's significance for the country as a whole.

Of all the accidents that would make the little boy Cornele into the man he would become, perhaps the most important was the location of his birthplace. From his waterside farmhouse hard by the Narrows, the future flowed in only one direction-toward the steeples and masts that marked the city across the bay.

A THIN LINE SEPARATES destiny from coincidence. A child's passion may begin a lifelong obsession; or a momentary interest, no more vehement than any other, may be remembered as an omen, thanks to the exaggeration of hindsight. For Cornele, the defining moment was a race. He was only six, he later recalled, when he rode a horse through the surf against another ridden by a neighbor's child slave. It would seem absurd if his rival had not returned decades later to publicly confirm the story. But what matters is that Cornele's earliest memory, the beginning of his self-image, was of competition-and victory. destiny from coincidence. A child's passion may begin a lifelong obsession; or a momentary interest, no more vehement than any other, may be remembered as an omen, thanks to the exaggeration of hindsight. For Cornele, the defining moment was a race. He was only six, he later recalled, when he rode a horse through the surf against another ridden by a neighbor's child slave. It would seem absurd if his rival had not returned decades later to publicly confirm the story. But what matters is that Cornele's earliest memory, the beginning of his self-image, was of competition-and victory.

A taste for competition may have been the natural result of growing up in a household filled with children. Certainly he never lacked confidence. With long limbs, a head of sandy hair, full lips, and a strong chin, he boasted a pair of penetrating eyes set between a high forehead and a long, sharp nose like the prow of a ship. A strong swimmer, he quickly grew tall and athletic, capable of immense labors and endurance.29 Farm life has always tended to erode the line between childhood and adulthood. Cornele lived a life of work and responsibility, hoeing and milking, piling and shoveling. There was church, too-Moravian services, the legacy of a conversion generations before that had taken the Vanderbilt family out of the Dutch Reformed tradition. But the sermons and hymns left no mark on him. He went to school briefly-for a mere three months, by one account-and would recall it as an agonizing process of rote memorization, drill, and punishment. Though he learned to read well enough, he manifested a lasting contempt for the conventions of written English. The handwritten letters that survive from his early twenties-the ink that flowed from a split nib, freshly dipped in an inkwell, now faded on brown, crumbling paper-show an alarming level of innovation in spelling. "See" became "sea" or even "se"-all in the same letter. To "know" was to "no." And he wrote "wrote" as "roat." His casual written diction stood in sharp contrast to the formality of the letters of contemporaries, even of those who also had little education.

Indeed, Cornele wrote so phonetically that it is possible to reconstruct his pattern of speech. Some of his quirks are not surprising. A man who has returned home, for example, "is got home;" if he was forbidden, he was "forbid;" if he ought to have been, he "aught a bean." Cornele's conversations featured now unusual or long-lost pronunciations (such as "ginerally" for "generally"), including the frequent use of a long "a": "air" for are are, and "wair" for were for were. He also said "git" for get for get, "sence" for since since, and he did not remember remember, but would "recollect." And, like many others around New York Bay, he would add "a" before a verb ending in -ing, as in "Mr. Jones is agoing to Albany"30 When he was eleven, his older brother Jacob died. The event, scarcely mentioned in later years by Cornele or his chroniclers, surely shook this young boy's life. Already the family had lost a child-Phebe, born next after Cornele, had died very young-but Jacob died as a teenager, at an age when he no doubt served as his father's closest assistant in his operations and ambitions. Even apart from the emotional trauma of the loss of a brother, the event turned Cornele from a middle child into the oldest son. Small wonder that he left the schoolroom so young.31 Few traces remain of Cornele's childhood, such as it was. What is known is a mirage, a hazy image floating above the real childhood. It consists of stories repeated by the man the boy became, solidified into a portrait with frequent retelling, colored by admirers. The haziness, the distance, and the repetition not only cast doubts on the accuracy of the image, they raise questions about what it really means.

The mirage tells us that, as early as 1805, during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, the eleven-year-old boy began to work alongside his father in the periauger. Taking the place of his dead brother, he learned to man the tiller, to raise and set the sails, to tack into the wind. He grew comfortable with the vessel heeling steeply in a stiff breeze, the masts dipping toward the waves, or crashing through a rising storm. One morning, the story goes, the boy awoke to a day he had been looking forward to. His father had promised him a reward for a particularly exhausting chore of hoeing a potato field: Cornele could take his friend Owen in the periauger to New York and spend the day. Cornele gathered Owen and ran down to the shore, where his father stood beside a stack of hay he had contracted to deliver to the city "Now, Cornele, there's the periauger for you," Vanderbilt recalled his father saying. "I've pitched on more than half the hay, you and Owen can just pitch on the rest, and take it up and unload it at the wharf as usual, and you can play on the way." He tossed his son a few pennies, and left him to do the work. "A boy can get fun out of most anything," Vanderbilt later grumbled, "and we got some fun out of that; but I remember we were just as tired that night as if we had been working."

But what does the story mean? That the eleven-year-old was trustworthy enough to make a delivery across several miles of open water to what was now the biggest city in the country? That he resented his father's total control over his life? Probably something in both these explanations sealed the tale's place in Cornele's memory. But, observed across the chasm of two centuries, the story seems to demonstrate how the nearness of New York overshadowed this family, filling their lives with commerce, turning even a boy's play into a chance for profit. It is a story that could not be told about the more distant reaches of rural America.

The mirage expands. The next year, it tells us, Cornele's father took a contract to retrieve the cargo from a ship that had run ashore at Sandy Hook, the great sandbar that extends from New Jersey outside of Staten Island. Cornelius marshaled some laborers, three wagons, and a few row-boats to do the work. He put his son in charge of the wagons as they shuttled the cargo from the beached ship across the sandbar to the boats on the other side. Cornelius departed with the scows, leaving Cornele to lead the wagons and teamsters on the long drive to the ferry at South Amboy By the time the boy and his men arrived, he had spent all his money on food and feed-but the ferryman demanded $6 for the crossing. Thinking quickly, Cornele went to a tavern and asked to borrow the money from the proprietor, offering to leave one of his horses and promising to redeem it with cash within twenty-four hours. The innkeeper agreed. They crossed, and the boy soon returned to give the innkeeper his money back.

The story would later be told as an example of Cornele's resourcefulness, but (if true) it too contains signposts that point to larger matters. For one thing, his family had so immersed him in business that, at the age of twelve, he already understood the principle of borrowing on collateral security. And the entire enterprise of salvaging a wreck further highlights the way the port of New York defined their lives.

There was another aspect of this tale that surely made an impression on the boy: the ferryman's ability to demand his own price. As an islander, Cornele could not help but feel that power in his bones. Living across the water from Manhattan and the mainland, he developed a sensitivity to the spaces between, to the significance of the crossing, to the strategic importance of the vessel that conveys from shore to shore. This knowledge, formed early in his mind, would serve him all of his life.32 But he was still a boy. Though it is reasonable to believe that he knew the marketplace better than the typical child, it is just as reasonable to believe that he reveled in his physicality-that he was moved by a "pride in action for action's sake" that a later friend attributed to his youth. That trait drew him to New York's waterfront, with all its furious activity: the strutting captains and mates; the insolent pilots, idling as they waited to take vessels back out to the ocean; and the packs of free-living sailors-many of them black-pushing into saloons or staggering drunkenly under the bowsprits that thrust like rafters over South Street. These were men whose lives were all action.33 Cornele learned this scene well as he entered his teenage years, for he took on more and more responsibility for his father's periauger. As he sailed past fat merchantmen or sleek navy frigates, as he talked with ships' officers along South Street, he began to dream of possibilities beyond those on Staten Island. Cornele learned this scene well as he entered his teenage years, for he took on more and more responsibility for his father's periauger. As he sailed past fat merchantmen or sleek navy frigates, as he talked with ships' officers along South Street, he began to dream of possibilities beyond those on Staten Island.

At the end of 1807, the possibilities grew smaller. The city's frenzied trade abruptly halted when Congress passed the Embargo Act, at President Jefferson's urging, in a vain attempt to force Britain to lift restrictions on American ships and cease the impressment of American sailors amid its long war with France. The act prohibited the nation's vessels from sailing for foreign ports. "Not a box, bale, cask, barrel, or package was to be seen upon the wharfs," John Lambert observed. "The few solitary merchants, clerks, porters, and labourers that were to be seen were walking about with their hands in their pockets."34 In March 1809, when Congress finally repealed the act, joy swept New York, and ships were again readied for distant ports. In March 1809, when Congress finally repealed the act, joy swept New York, and ships were again readied for distant ports.

After James Madison assumed the presidency in 1809, Congress continued to tinker with the idea of using trade to influence Britain and France-especially Britain, so detested by Madison and most Republicans. The Royal Navy, meanwhile, swept down on American ships with rising ferocity, seizing vessels and sailors under the notorious Orders in Council, which required neutral vessels to abide by Britain's blockade of Napoleon's empire. A crew could make enormous profits by running a ship to continental European ports, but at a tremendous risk that grew almost by the day.

In that tense and warlike world, young Cornele made a momentous decision. Early in 1810, after bringing passengers and goods to the city, he strode down South Street to see a captain he knew. The captain's ship was a fast-sailing merchantman, about to make the dangerous run to France with a cargo of silks-a luxury that would sell for a high price in the blockaded ports of Napoleon's Europe. Cornele was just fifteen, but he was tall and strong and an able sailor; when he applied for a place, the captain agreed to take him on as a member of the crew, with a regular share of the fortune they would gain. The act marked an abrupt end to Cornele's already tenuous childhood. Once he stepped onto that ship, he would depart the gritty marketplace and enter into a life of action for action's sake. He sailed the boat home that night, determined to tell his parents that he would be leaving Staten Island for good.35 "IT IS AS IF WE ALL CARRY in our makeup the effects of accidents that have befallen our ancestors," writes V. S. Naipaul, "as if we are in many ways programmed before we are born, our lives half outlined for us." in our makeup the effects of accidents that have befallen our ancestors," writes V. S. Naipaul, "as if we are in many ways programmed before we are born, our lives half outlined for us."36 For a farm-born fifteen-year-old in 1810, it was nearly impossible to shrug off the weight of time. Cornele had acted forcefully when he signed on to that blockade runner, yet he still faced a formidable obstacle: his mother. She "found out," he later said, "and begged him so earnestly not to go." For a farm-born fifteen-year-old in 1810, it was nearly impossible to shrug off the weight of time. Cornele had acted forcefully when he signed on to that blockade runner, yet he still faced a formidable obstacle: his mother. She "found out," he later said, "and begged him so earnestly not to go."

There were dangers enough to startle her, from storms and disease to the threat of impressment into the British navy. More to the point, Phebe and her husband relied heavily on their oldest son as she continued to bear children. Cornele, who would become legendary for his ruthlessness, listened to his mother's pleading and was moved. He reluctantly told his father, he later recalled, "If he could get him honorably released from his engagement he would remain." The senior Cornelius promptly went to see the captain and settled the matter. It was a fortunate decision. Cornele later learned that the British captured the ship in the English Channel on that very voyage.37 The weight of the past pushed him back onto Staten Island, but it also subtly bent this would-be turning point in another direction. Cornele would return to the periauger as his own commander. But here, as so often in his childhood, the truth has been polished. According to an oft-repeated account, he learned of a periauger for sale at Port Richmond and agreed to purchase it for $100. Phebe would loan the boy the money if he cleared, plowed, and sowed an eight-acre lot that belonged to the family, a plot "so hard, rough, and stony," according to nineteenth-century biographer W. A. Croffut, "that it had never been ploughed." And he had to do it by his sixteenth birthday.

They agreed to the terms on May 1, so he had little time to spare. He gathered his friends and promised them a summer on the water in his boat, filled with fishing, sailing, and excursions to the city which induced them to help him finish the job in the allotted time. His mother inspected the plot, then went to her clock and drew out the hundred dollars. Her son hurried down to Port Richmond, silver jingling in his pocket, knowing that he would not use the boat for fun, as he had told his friends, but for profit.38 Here again we have a tale from Vanderbilt's early life offered to us by his later admirers as a record of his virtues, a parable of the enterprising American spirit. But the earliest published account of his life, in an 1853 issue of Scientific American Scientific American, puts the same events in another light. "He found himself with a growing desire to make his livelihood by following the sea," the story ran. "He therefore left the farm, and commenced running a small sail boat between Staten Island and New York, which was owned by his father."39 This simpler version makes more sense than the legend. Cornele's parents told him that he could run his own boat, but it would belong to them. They grudgingly allowed him to keep half of what he earned after dark. This simpler version makes more sense than the legend. Cornele's parents told him that he could run his own boat, but it would belong to them. They grudgingly allowed him to keep half of what he earned after dark.

It would not be wise, then, to exaggerate Cornele's sixteen-year-old sophistication. But both versions of the story reveal something important: at the very beginning of his working life, he sought to be his own master. Through all of his later achievements, Vanderbilt recalled, "I didn't feel as much real satisfaction... as I did on that bright May morning sixty years before when I stepped into my own periauger, hoisted my own sail, and put my hand on my own tiller." He pulled away from the dock and immediately heard a sickening crack. The boat had collided with a large rock under the surface. He barely had time to run the boat ashore before it foundered. He soon repaired the damage.40 Eighteen cents per passenger, or a quarter per round trip: that, tradition has it, was the fare Cornele charged between Staten Island and New York. More likely it was a shilling each way (twelve and a half cents), the customary ferry charge in New York Harbor. At that price, in a boat that seated just twenty people, with only half of the nighttime fares going into his own pocket, revenue piled up slowly. Yet in those daily handfuls of silver shillings he discovered his hunger for money, an ache that would mingle with his pride and longing for control to shape his life at every turn.

Despite his youth, there was nothing childish about the trade he had entered. Cornele faced bare-knuckled competition-literally bare-knuckled. On the harbor's waterfront, he would find few boundaries to define a fair fight; and if no other means of beating a rival would do, then a beating it would be. Ten years earlier, Rochefoucauld-Liancourt had observed that absolutely everyone in America called himself a gentleman gentleman-"except," he had added, "the laborer in ports, and the common sailor."41 Cornele seemed suited to the battle. As he grew to his adult height of around six feet, he stood far taller than the average man (sixteen-year-olds then averaged perhaps five feet six, and full-grown adults about five feet eight). Above his strong chin and prow-like nose, under his high forehead, his eyes acquired a peculiar sailor's squint, the outer edges sloping down to dim the sun reflected on the water. His sandy hair swarmed on his head, and he began to cultivate thick sideburns that crawled down to his jawline.

"There are many still living who remember 'Corneil the boatman,'" declared Harper's Weekly Harper's Weekly in 1859, "how skillful he was in managing his craft; how daring in encountering the roughest weather; how perfectly reliable in every respect." Such references to common knowledge hint that the mirage of anecdotes was not merely an illusion. It would be said that he approached his work with the eye of a strategist. Rather than waiting for a full load before sailing, as most boatmen did, he ran on a schedule-operating a "packet" ferry, to use the technical term. "His life was regulated by self-imposed rules," claimed one admirer in 1865, "and with a fixedness of purpose as invariable as the sun in its circuit. Among other things he determined to spend less every week than he earned." Even allowing for exaggeration, it seems clear that the boy boatman did credit to his early education in the ways of business. in 1859, "how skillful he was in managing his craft; how daring in encountering the roughest weather; how perfectly reliable in every respect." Such references to common knowledge hint that the mirage of anecdotes was not merely an illusion. It would be said that he approached his work with the eye of a strategist. Rather than waiting for a full load before sailing, as most boatmen did, he ran on a schedule-operating a "packet" ferry, to use the technical term. "His life was regulated by self-imposed rules," claimed one admirer in 1865, "and with a fixedness of purpose as invariable as the sun in its circuit. Among other things he determined to spend less every week than he earned." Even allowing for exaggeration, it seems clear that the boy boatman did credit to his early education in the ways of business.42 Legend has it that he developed a reputation for an especially Dutch temper as he cursed at passengers who got in his way. One morning, the story goes, he was enraged to see his main rival, from the neighboring Van Duzer family, pull slowly ahead on the run to New York, as Cornele sat becalmed in shallow Buttermilk Channel between Governors Island and Brooklyn. Cornele ran out his long setting pole, pressed the end to his chest, and leaned into it to force the craft ahead, again and again. By the time he reached New York-ahead of his rival-the wooden pole had torn through to his breastbone, leaving a permanent scar.

Between and after his scheduled ferry runs, Cornele looked for whatever work he could get, even sleeping in his boat at Whitehall Slip in order to be on hand when a job came up. When autumn arrived and blinding sheets of sleet and snow crashed across the harbor, many nervous merchants who hurried from Pearl Street countinghouses to the waterfront trusted the boy to deliver messages to their vessels out in the bay.

But the image of young Vanderbilt as a cursing, isolated water rat cannot be entirely accurate. If he had learned anything from his parents, it was that business was a matter of relationships. Though he developed callused hands from hauling the spun-hemp sheets and twisting the wooden tiller, the work also brought him friendships. 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. This small act says as much about the boy as any anecdote. He had become an investor-or, to put it another way, a capitalist.43 WAR WAS COMING-so went the talk along South Street. As Britain's war with Napoleon moved toward a climax, the pace of impressments of American sailors accelerated, and the Royal Navy's seizures of American ships under the Orders in Council seemed to take on added brutality In 1811, the USS President President traded broadsides with the Royal Navy's traded broadsides with the Royal Navy's Little Little Belt Belt, and workmen completed a series of fortifications around New York Harbor.44 In February 1812, President Madison reimposed the ban on imports from Britain. On June 18, Congress declared war. In February 1812, President Madison reimposed the ban on imports from Britain. On June 18, Congress declared war.

For a time the war seemed to go well. America's oversize frigates (carrying forty-four guns to Britain's standard thirty-eight) won a series of small but dramatic victories against the fabled Royal Navy. On January 1, 1813, the triumphant United States United States sailed into New York Harbor with the captured sailed into New York Harbor with the captured Macedonian Macedonian, to the cheers of immense crowds. Cornele may even have found additional work in the first two years of the war. Britain imposed a blockade on American ports, and masters of coastal merchant craft feared capture if they sailed along the New Jersey coast. Instead, cargoes shipped between New York and points south passed along Cornele's accustomed route between Manhattan and Staten Island, then down the Arthur Kill and Kill Van Kull, where the British fleet did not penetrate. (Goods passed overland across New Jersey and along the protected waters of the Delaware River.) In November 1813 alone, some 1,500 wagons plied the route, offering abundant work for New York's boatmen.

Generally speaking, however, 1813 brought setbacks both military and commercial. In May, the Royal Navy tightened the blockade, and even landed a raiding party at Sandy Hook. The U.S. Army suffered reversals all along the frontier with Britain's colony of Canada. Some rare good fortune-the grand victory over the British fleet on Lake Erie on September 10-sparked a citywide outburst of joy. A celebration on October 4 saw candles in every window, a band playing on the balcony of city hall, and gunboats in the harbor swinging colored lanterns and firing rockets into the night sky.45 During this time Cornele was said to be unstintingly courageous, unfailingly skillful, and unflinchingly competitive. According to one of the flattering tales, he was hired to transport troops from Fort Richmond to Manhattan. A competitor's boat pulled alongside, and an army officer stepped out into Cornele's hull. The officer ordered all of the troops into the other boat "for inspection." Cornele, believing it to be a trick to steal his business, refused to let them go. Enraged, the officer began to draw his sword. The boy smashed his knuckles into the officer's face, chucked his limp body into the other boat, and continued on his way.

This story depicts a lad who was cunning and combative-traits later seen by all the world-and so it was readily believed when it circulated decades later. Other tales are more questionable. One describes the Royal Navy's attempt to sail past the outer fortifications of the harbor in the fall of 1813. A raging storm swept down on the bay, but Fort Richmond's commander felt it was urgent to notify the headquarters in New York of a skirmish that had taken place. Knowing Cornele's reputation, he took a few men to see him. Can a boat get through this storm? he asked. "Yes," the young man replied, "if properly handled," adding, "I shall have to carry them underwater part of the way." He made it through.46 Less than five years later the press would testify to Cornele's skill and courage when sailing into another storm, but the tale does not quite ring true. For one thing, the British navy did not attack New York in 1813. For another, Cornele was still a boy in a harbor full of skilled sailors-sailing a boat that was legally his father's property-and the idea that his reputation outshone all others' is hard to believe. If anything, he was then struggling to emerge from his father's shadow, to start start to build a reputation. to build a reputation.

By 1813, he took the steps that would finally establish him as a boatman in his own right. First, he ordered his own periauger, to be built in New Jersey, using the money he had so painstakingly saved. On Sundays, he often sailed up the Passaic River to the boatyard to examine the construction with the girl he was courting, Sophia Johnson. She was his pride, the realization of his hopes-the boat, that is; the girl was another matter. A nineteenth-century writer described this quiet woman as "lovely and industrious," a hint at her beginnings as a common servant. For young Cornele, neither her loveliness nor her industry was so important as her ring finger, for marriage was the essential second step in his plan to go out on his own.

He had not gone far in searching for a bride. Sophia was his cousin. The daughter of his father's oldest sister, Eleanor, she "was more typically Vanderbilt than Cornele himself," according to a later biographer. She, too, belonged to a large family and had little education. She had grown up nearby in Port Richmond, and Cornele had known her from early childhood; given his working habits, one must wonder if he had ever had the chance to meet anyone else. When he spoke of marrying Sophia, however, his mother reportedly objected, primarily because she would no longer be able to demand a share of the boy's earnings if he married.

To Cornele, that was much the point. How deeply he loved Sophia can never be known; how much he needed her, financially speaking, could not be more clear. On December 19, 1813, the couple married, then retired to the ferry dock to a small house that Vanderbilt had rented. There they began a life of suppressed turmoil and muffled intimacy. Within a year Sophia gave birth to the first of many babies to come, and one of her sisters moved into the household to help during the weeks that followed. In these early days, Vanderbilt relied heavily on Sophia's capacity for hard work and her tolerance for living lean; but legend has it that he often turned to his shrewd mother to discuss his plans, leaving his wife to wonder what he was thinking. He even insisted to Sophia that they name their first child Phebe.47 IN 1814, THE UNITED STATES stood on the brink of losing the war. On April 6, Napoleon abdicated the imperial throne of France, allowing Britain to reinforce its armies in North America. Of particular concern for New York was a possible thrust down the Hudson from Canada, an attack that would avoid the heavy fortifications on the harbor. On July 15, Brigadier General Joseph Swift began construction of a line across upper Manhattan and the western end of Long Island. On August 26, terrified New Yorkers snatched up copies of a special edition of the stood on the brink of losing the war. On April 6, Napoleon abdicated the imperial throne of France, allowing Britain to reinforce its armies in North America. Of particular concern for New York was a possible thrust down the Hudson from Canada, an attack that would avoid the heavy fortifications on the harbor. On July 15, Brigadier General Joseph Swift began construction of a line across upper Manhattan and the western end of Long Island. On August 26, terrified New Yorkers snatched up copies of a special edition of the Evening Post Evening Post, announcing that Washington had been captured and sacked by a British force. "Your capital is taken!" the press declared. "In six days the same enemy may be at the Hook!... Arise from your slumbers!" Thousands of residents took up shovels to dig trenches as 23,000 militiamen reported for duty48 Military disaster meant economic windfall for the strapping twenty-year-old Vanderbilt. One of the canonical stories of his early life describes a moment of great excitement among the harbor's boatmen, as the military headquarters offered a contract to carry supplies to the forts and construction sites. Vanderbilt, at his father's urging, put in a bid at a price that he considered fair, but was far from the lowest. He was startled when he learned he had won. "Don't you know why we have given the contract to you?" the officer reportedly asked. "It is because we want this business done done, and we know you'll do it." No evidence has ever surfaced to support the tale, but, if true, it hints at the moment when a subtle transition began, when he started to acquire a reputation in this slippery, low-caste society.49 That year Vanderbilt took his wife from their rented house in Staten Island to the city of New York, settling into rooms at 93 Broad Street. Their new home spoke eloquently of the young man's social standing: it was an artisans' boardinghouse, where there also lived a carpenter and a gunsmith, along with their wives and children. Broad Street boasted some countinghouses, but it was also home to grocers, drapers, and cabinetmakers, along with other boatmen-craftsmen and shopkeepers all.50 How alarming it must have been for Sophia to move from a country village on a broad green island to this crowded street. Cornelius expected her to raise their infant girl in a house shared with three other families, emptying the chamberpots in a backyard privy, dodging horses and wagons and grunting pigs on muddy streets to fetch water or bring home food from crowded open-air markets. Her transition calls to mind the observations of Frances Trollope, mother of novelist Anthony Trollope, who visited America a decade later. "The women are doggedly steadfast in their will," she wrote, describing a crowd jostling for seats in a boat, "and till matters are settled, look like hedgehogs, with every quill raised, and firmly set, as if to forbid the approach of any one who might wish to rub them down. In circumstances where an English woman would look proud, and a French woman nonchalante nonchalante, an American lady looks grim; even the youngest and the prettiest can set their lips, and knit their brows, and look as hard and unsocial as their grandmothers."51 Lovely and industrious Sophia may have been; now she had to learn to be hard as well. Lovely and industrious Sophia may have been; now she had to learn to be hard as well.

She and her husband occupied a distinctly subordinate rank in a society shaped by eighteenth-century notions of social status. The craftsmen they lived with on Broad Street-the carpenters, coopers, and cabinetmakers, the gunsmiths, grocers, and fellow boatmen-were "middling sorts" who made a living with strength and skill. Such fellows affected "a sort of rough independence, which appeared to me manly," one genteel New Yorker wrote. "They... filled their parts in society with reputation and respectability." But even artisans who owned shops and employed assistants were men of labor. "The culture of rank," notes historian Stuart Blumin, "degraded those independent businessmen who worked with their hands."

Cornelius and Sophia lived only steps away from lower Broadway, where luxurious private houses were "occupied by the principal merchants and gentry of New York," as John Lambert observed. Lambert's travelogue frequently referred to this class, noting that their "style of living in New York is fashionable and splendid." They looked down on "the inferior orders" with contempt. In 1811, a memoirist wrote of how he and his friends had aspired "to be merchants, as to be mechanics was too humiliating."52 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.

Vanderbilt could hardly avoid noticing that, despite the innovations and energy of his fellow artisans, most of New York's wealthiest citizens were general merchants. Even banks and securities markets largely remained merchant clubs. When the federal government needed to sell millions of dollars' worth of bonds to fund the war, for example, it turned to two ship-owning, international merchants, Stephen Girard of Philadelphia and John Jacob Astor of New York, who brokered the sale and took bonds for themselves. Vanderbilt would never forget that the richest men traded in cargoes.53 But for all of his success during the war years, his wealth could only grow so much as long as British ships-of-the-line shadowed Sandy Hook, the president embargoed trade, and the citizens of New York dug trenches that everyone hoped would never be needed.

SNOW FELL ON THE EVENING of February 11, 1815. The New York waterfront sat silent, the thousands who depended on the port lingering at home, many of them desperate. Chunks of ice descended the North River into the bay-ordinarily a problem for schooners and square-riggers, now a concern only for the few boatmen at work. Shortly before eight o'clock, a small craft steered up to Manhattan's slips. It was a swift pilot boat, one of those that used to race to meet incoming merchantmen from Europe and the Caribbean. As its hull scraped the dock, two men leaped out and raced across South Street to the offices of the city's newspapers. They burst in and gasped, of February 11, 1815. The New York waterfront sat silent, the thousands who depended on the port lingering at home, many of them desperate. Chunks of ice descended the North River into the bay-ordinarily a problem for schooners and square-riggers, now a concern only for the few boatmen at work. Shortly before eight o'clock, a small craft steered up to Manhattan's slips. It was a swift pilot boat, one of those that used to race to meet incoming merchantmen from Europe and the Caribbean. As its hull scraped the dock, two men leaped out and raced across South Street to the offices of the city's newspapers. They burst in and gasped, "There is peace." "There is peace."

The pilot boat had met the British sloop-of-war Favourite Favourite, carrying an American and a British diplomat coming to announce the seven-week-old Treaty of Ghent. Within an hour the city burst into celebration. In every house residents put candles and lamps in the windows. Trinity Church rang its bells, over and over, as the batteries on the harbor fired off cannons. Men and women packed the freezing streets in impromptu torchlight parades, cheering "Huzza!" and "A Peace!" until midnight.54 The next morning, crews began to scour the docks to prepare ships to sail again. They shoveled out salt that had been thrown into bottoms to preserve timbers, removed the tar barrels (nicknamed "Mr. Madison's night caps") thrown over mastheads, and prepared new sails and lines. On March 1 the first ship cleared the harbor-the The next morning, crews began to scour the docks to prepare ships to sail again. They shoveled out salt that had been thrown into bottoms to preserve timbers, removed the tar barrels (nicknamed "Mr. Madison's night caps") thrown over mastheads, and prepared new sails and lines. On March 1 the first ship cleared the harbor-the Diamond Diamond, bound for Havana.

The incoming ships may have mattered more. British merchants, themselves suffering from the years of war, selected New York as their favored port for dumping their large inventories of manufactured goods. In 1811, New York had run behind Massachusetts in imports, and only slightly ahead of Pennsylvania; in the year ending September 30, 1815, it took in more than both combined. The resurgence of trade lifted New York's imports from $2.4 million in 1811 to $14.6 million in 1815.

It was merely the first act in a startling revival of the long-closed port over the next few years. On October 24, 1817, came the formation of the first transatlantic packet line (a regularly scheduled service, as opposed to the old custom of ships sailing when they were full), a major contribution to New York's growing dominance over other American ports. Also in 1817, the state passed new legislation that fostered auctions and made the city the most favorable place for merchants from across the republic to buy foreign goods, helping to seal New York's lead as the nation's import center. It began to emerge as the premier distribution hub for the entire country, and as a financial center as well, as money clattered in and credit poured out.55 The result was a revolution in New York's trade, not only with the interior, but with the Atlantic seaboard. Its long-suppressed coasting trade burst out again as merchants made contact with isolated communities. Much of the nation was, in essence, a new market-a vast, untamed economic frontier. The result was a revolution in New York's trade, not only with the interior, but with the Atlantic seaboard. Its long-suppressed coasting trade burst out again as merchants made contact with isolated communities. Much of the nation was, in essence, a new market-a vast, untamed economic frontier.

After the long stagnation of embargo and war, the air on South Street vibrated with opportunity, with the concussion of hogsheads on ship decks and the snap of canvas filling with wind. A race began to be the first to reach new customers and find new suppliers. In this frenzied atmosphere, Vanderbilt's actions spoke both to his unending hunger for wealth and his close reading of the world around him. For one thing, he was bold: just twenty years old when peace arrived, he now reached far beyond the familiar New York Harbor to distant ports and landings along the Atlantic coast. For another, he was shrewd, as he looked for partners with expertise and financial resources greater than his own. His brother-in-law and fellow Staten Islander John De Forest joined with him first. A highly regarded mariner, De Forest was the master of a fast schooner, the Charlotte Charlotte (named for Cornelius's sister and De Forest's wife), which he had run to Virginia and beyond before the war. In 1815, Vanderbilt purchased a share in the ship. The partners used it to haul goods from New York to Charleston and other Southern ports, where they filled the hold with fish and produce for the return voyage. Before long, Vanderbilt bought full ownership of the schooner. Slowly and steadily, he was making himself into a general merchant. Nothing better illustrated his careful study of the riches that poured into New York. (named for Cornelius's sister and De Forest's wife), which he had run to Virginia and beyond before the war. In 1815, Vanderbilt purchased a share in the ship. The partners used it to haul goods from New York to Charleston and other Southern ports, where they filled the hold with fish and produce for the return voyage. Before long, Vanderbilt bought full ownership of the schooner. Slowly and steadily, he was making himself into a general merchant. Nothing better illustrated his careful study of the riches that poured into New York.

He also took on his father as a partner. Cornelius the elder put up some of the money for large new periaugers, big enough for open water. So too did James Day of Norwich, Connecticut, a shipwright who constructed or rebuilt Vanderbilt's vessels, all two-masted boats ranging from twenty-two to thirty-two tons*2 and costing around $750 each (at a time when a succesful artisan in New York earned about $3,200 a year). Though patterned after the harbor-bound boats of New York Bay Vanderbilt had them built for longer voyages, and registered them for the coastal trade with the New York Custom House. The first was the twenty-seven-ton and costing around $750 each (at a time when a succesful artisan in New York earned about $3,200 a year). Though patterned after the harbor-bound boats of New York Bay Vanderbilt had them built for longer voyages, and registered them for the coastal trade with the New York Custom House. The first was the twenty-seven-ton Dread Dread, registered on January 24, 1816. It measured forty-nine feet by fourteen and a half, with little more than a four-foot draft.

In his small fleet of the small and fleet, Vanderbilt swept down on coastal and riverside communities around New York, seeking out new customers and cargoes. Soon after the war ended, he raced ahead of a cluster of rival schooners to the Virginia oyster grounds to fill his hull with New York's favorite food. He began to sail the Dread Dread around Cape May and up the Delaware River, where he bought shad by the slippery thousands, then sailed up New Jersey's Raritan River, where he learned to hire horsemen to spread the word that he had fish to sell. In New York Harbor, he paid boatmen to sail out to meet incoming ships to peddle food or liquor, while he haggled on South Street over the around Cape May and up the Delaware River, where he bought shad by the slippery thousands, then sailed up New Jersey's Raritan River, where he learned to hire horsemen to spread the word that he had fish to sell. In New York Harbor, he paid boatmen to sail out to meet incoming ships to peddle food or liquor, while he haggled on South Street over the Charlotte's Charlotte's cargo of fish, produce, and goods. cargo of fish, produce, and goods.56 As he struggled into the lowest tier of merchants, he conducted his business with an elbows-out aggressiveness. On October 2, 1816, he had one Daniel Morgan arrested for failing to pay De Forest and himself for a cargo, claiming $200 for goods delivered. The Mayor's Court, located in the city hall, ruled in Vanderbilt's favor, but decided that he had overstated the bill by $100. A few days later his lawyer John Wallis argued in the same court that merchants Phineas Carman and Cornelius P. Wyckoff owed Vanderbilt and his father the substantial sum of $900 for "divers quantities of fish and goods, wares, and merchandize before that time sold and delivered." Three merchant referees examined the books. In April 1817, they reported that the true debt was only $189.57 Americans had long been comfortable with the commercial marketplace, but for centuries many had lived in rural isolation or labored under British commercial restrictions. Now they encountered a new world, with the promise of new, better, more more-as well as changes that no one could predict. The war had planted the seeds of manufacturing across the North, as workshops were established to produce things no longer available from Europe. New commercial institutions and mercantile houses opened for business. In 1815 alone, the number of American banks rose from 208 to 246, and the value of their circulating notes from $46 million to $68 million. That year marked the start of Vanderbilt's rise as well, as he both rode and added to this rising tide. As a decidedly minor, boat-owning merchant, he could not share in the lucrative transoceanic trade. His very limitations, then, forced him to seek out opportunities on the domestic frontier-to tie together distant marketplaces and introduce trade in places that had been wilderness when it came to commerce.58 Commerce, of course, consisted of the physical movement of people and goods; it only flowed as smoothly as transportation technology and infrastructure would allow. And transportation was a problem that deeply troubled merchants and lawmakers alike. The nation's road network could best be described as barely in existence. In 1816, a Senate committee found that it was as expensive to move a ton of goods thirty miles overland as it was to bring the same ton across the Atlantic from Europe. John Lambert described how in upstate New York goods were carried in narrow, four-wheeled wagons, each drawn by a team of two horses. "It is a very rough method of riding," he complained, "for the waggon has no springs, and a traveller ought to have excellent nerves to endure the shaking and jolting of such a vehicle over bad roads." A movement emerged, a rush to build turnpikes-solidly engineered roads, financed by tolls. Turnpikes, Lambert observed, "have tended greatly to improve the country; for as soon as a [turnpike] is opened through the woods... the country which was before a trackless forest becomes settled."

Even the best turnpike was suited only for short distances, and it was cheaper to move goods by water under any circumstances. But shipping had its own limitations. The coastwise trade traveled mostly in sloops and schooners, small vessels with limited capacity And a journey upriver against the current was sometimes impossible under sail. The 150-mile, straight-line voyage from New York to Albany could take several days. In New Orleans, boats that arrived with goods from upstream were simply broken up for lumber in many cases.59 The speed of transportation largely determined the speed of information information, which set limits on long-range commerce-the emergence of financial markets, the efficient movement of capital, the transactions between distant regions. News traveled only as fast as people, whether by messenger, the mail, or the shipment of newspapers. When George Washington died on December 14, 1799, for example, the news took seven days to travel the 240 miles from northern Virginia to New York. Under these conditions, few institutions straddled state lines or operated across long distances-even as Americans began to cross the Appalachians by the thousands.60 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.61 It can never be known how much thought Vanderbilt gave to these changes and challenges. He was a rough, ambitious young man, striving in his undersize schooners to match the international traders who strutted past in the stiff top hats, swallowtail coats, and trousers that had replaced the eighteenth century's powdered hair and knee breeches.62 It probably never occurred to him that, in aspiring to their position, he was moving backward. He had started out as a specialist-one in transportation, no less, the field where a revolution was sorely wanted, where businessmen and legislators were looking to invest millions. But at this moment he surveyed the world as it was, saw that the general merchant reigned, and methodically became one himself. It probably never occurred to him that, in aspiring to their position, he was moving backward. He had started out as a specialist-one in transportation, no less, the field where a revolution was sorely wanted, where businessmen and legislators were looking to invest millions. But at this moment he surveyed the world as it was, saw that the general merchant reigned, and methodically became one himself.

AN OFT-REPEATED BUT APOCRYPHAL TALE portrays a thoughtful Cornelius in December 1817, tallying his wealth. Just twenty-three years old, he was now supposedly worth $15,000, including $9,000 in cash. But the Vanderbilt of legend was always one step ahead of everyone else. He shrewdly concluded that the economy was about to change, and so he abandoned his enterprises to ride the incoming wave. portrays a thoughtful Cornelius in December 1817, tallying his wealth. Just twenty-three years old, he was now supposedly worth $15,000, including $9,000 in cash. But the Vanderbilt of legend was always one step ahead of everyone else. He shrewdly concluded that the economy was about to change, and so he abandoned his enterprises to ride the incoming wave.

In reality, he saw nothing special about the end of this particular year. To all appearances he planned to carry on as before, adding the General Wolcott General Wolcott to his tiny fleet in July to his tiny fleet in July63 He had established a solid reputation as a skilled sailor and merchant-albeit a small one, a shopkeeper of the sea. When men approached him on the docks, they now spoke to him not as Cornele, but as He had established a solid reputation as a skilled sailor and merchant-albeit a small one, a shopkeeper of the sea. When men approached him on the docks, they now spoke to him not as Cornele, but as Mr. Vanderbilt Mr. Vanderbilt, or even Captain Vanderbilt Captain Vanderbilt.

On November 24, 1817, he turned at the sound of those words and saw a well-dressed sixty-year-old man looking at him with sharp, hard eyes. The fellow's dark hair was combed forward in the style of the classical Romans, and when he spoke his puffy double chin wobbled. He introduced himself as Thomas Gibbons. He was a staggeringly rich rice planter from Georgia, now of Elizabethtown, New Jersey; recently he had started a ferry to New York from there. Emphatic and direct, Gibbons said that Ebenezer Lester, captain of his ferryboat Stoudinger Stoudinger, "has suddenly left my employ." Given "my present embarrassment," he said, he needed someone to take charge of the boat "on this day, and, I expect, for a few days to come." Would Vanderbilt do it?

As a past master of all things related to the port, young Vanderbilt knew the Stoudinger Stoudinger well. It was secondhand and small (smaller, at forty-seven feet, than the well. It was secondhand and small (smaller, at forty-seven feet, than the Dread) Dread). It was so tiny in fact, that it went by the nickname Mouse of the Mountain Mouse of the Mountain, or simply Mouse Mouse. But Vanderbilt also knew the critical difference between the Mouse Mouse and all his own vessels-or, for that matter, almost every craft on the surface of the earth: it ran on steam. And that made it the focus of a legal and business war that was the talk of the waterfront. Perhaps he grasped, in a flash of insight, that his future would pivot on the fate of Gibbons's little boat. In any case, he agreed to take command of the and all his own vessels-or, for that matter, almost every craft on the surface of the earth: it ran on steam. And that made it the focus of a legal and business war that was the talk of the waterfront. Perhaps he grasped, in a flash of insight, that his future would pivot on the fate of Gibbons's little boat. In any case, he agreed to take command of the Mouse Mouse. After all, it was only for a few days.64 *1 The eighth-dollar coin (also known as a "bit") was so pervasive that stock prices were given in dollars and eighths, a custom that lasted until the end of the twentieth century. The eighth-dollar coin (also known as a "bit") was so pervasive that stock prices were given in dollars and eighths, a custom that lasted until the end of the twentieth century.*2 Tonnage represented not the vessel's weight (except in the case of warships), but its carrying capacity. Tonnage represented not the vessel's weight (except in the case of warships), but its carrying capacity.

Chapter Two.

THE DUELIST.

The twenty-three-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt who took command of the Mouse Mouse on November 24, 1817, had no way of knowing he was making the most important decision of his life. Then again, not even Thomas Gibbons, who saw a good deal, could foresee how far-reaching their collaboration would prove to be-how it would help unlock the potential of the steam engine, recast the Constitution, and contribute to the remaking of American society. Gibbons had his hard eye fixed on his enemies, unaware that his struggle would inexorably link his own name to Vanderbilt's for the rest of time. on November 24, 1817, had no way of knowing he was making the most important decision of his life. Then again, not even Thomas Gibbons, who saw a good deal, could foresee how far-reaching their collaboration would prove to be-how it would help unlock the potential of the steam engine, recast the Constitution, and contribute to the remaking of American society. Gibbons had his hard eye fixed on his enemies, unaware that his struggle would inexorably link his own name to Vanderbilt's for the rest of time.

Even as an impulse, Vanderbilt's snap decision to take orders from Gibbons must have mystified his friends and associates, for the brusque sailor was nothing if not commanding. Vanderbilt was proud, of course, and filled with "the desire of riches" that Rochefoucauld-Liancourt had identified as the essential American trait. His sense of physical power, too, should not be underestimated. He was a big man who lived by his strength, straining daily against the wind and current. His combative manner had been hardened in a fringe of society marked by "rough independence," where confrontation was the stuff of daily life. He sneered with that contempt for weakness that comes naturally to a man who has beaten and cowed other men.

What's more, the engagement with Gibbons set him back a step in his plans to build his fortune. A thriving ferryman, he aspired to more, as he used his boats to embark on the only obvious voyage to wealth in the new republic, setting up as a general merchant. Even as he stepped aboard the Mouse Mouse and inspected its copper boiler, he kept his periauger plying between Staten Island and Whitehall Slip with passengers and produce, and his schooner nosing along coastal waters with cargoes of fish and woolens. and inspected its copper boiler, he kept his periauger plying between Staten Island and Whitehall Slip with passengers and produce, and his schooner nosing along coastal waters with cargoes of fish and woolens.1 And yet, he clearly saw the advantages of the connection he had made. Having formed partnerships with his father and his brother-in-law, he recognized that few men in the entire nation commanded greater resources than Thomas Gibbons. Even more important, Vanderbilt and his contemporaries understood that the steam engine (or, to put it more broadly, motorized transportation) was the most dramatic technological breakthrough since the advent of the printing press at the dawn of the Renaissance. To move on water at will, against wind, tide, and current, was to transform a fundamental fact of life; to say that it marked a revolution is to give an overused word its proper weight. A practical education in steam would be worth a few days of taking orders.

What he did not reckon on was how well he would get on with Gibbons. "I always thought Thomas Gibbons a very strong-minded man, the strongest I ever knew," he said later. "I don't believe any human being could control him; he was a man that could not be led."2 He could just as easily have been describing himself. And there, ironically, in this meeting of iron wills, lay the seed of an alliance that would force the freedom of commerce within America's borders and tear down one of the last bastions of the eighteenth-century world-a culture of deference, privilege, and rank already groaning under the pressure of the times. And it all started with the most aristocratic of rituals: a challenge to a duel. He could just as easily have been describing himself. And there, ironically, in this meeting of iron wills, lay the seed of an alliance that would force the freedom of commerce within America's borders and tear down one of the last bastions of the eighteenth-century world-a culture of deference, privilege, and rank already groaning under the pressure of the times. And it all started with the most aristocratic of rituals: a challenge to a duel.

"DUELLING IS AN ABOMINABLE CUSTOM introduced by the depravity of man," Thomas Gibbons scratched out on a piece of paper, pausing now and then to dip the nib of his quill into an inkwell. "And good men sometimes are dragged into it by the wicked, thoughtless part of the community." It was the evening of September 15, 1786; Gibbons was composing a letter to his eldest son, a letter that he believed might be his last. The next morning, he planned to engage in the "abominable custom" with characteristic righteous wrath. As he counseled his son, "Should your character be wantonly sported with, with deliberate caution arm yourself." introduced by the depravity of man," Thomas Gibbons scratched out on a piece of paper, pausing now and then to dip the nib of his quill into an inkwell. "And good men sometimes are dragged into it by the wicked, thoughtless part of the community." It was the evening of September 15, 1786; Gibbons was composing a letter to his eldest son, a letter that he believed might be his last. The next morning, he planned to engage in the "abominable custom" with characteristic righteous wrath. As he counseled his son, "Should your character be wantonly sported with, with deliberate caution arm yourself."

The next day, he and his opponent faced each other with pistols in hand, bellowing their firm intention to kill each other-until their seconds arranged a compromise. Gibbons had been entirely earnest; the essence of the art of the duel, he knew, was a sincere willingness to stake everything everything on the outcome. Killing the foe was entirely secondary; the point, rather, was to bravely expose oneself to deadly gunfire, thereby proving to the world a quality that lies hidden in a man's heart: his honor. In his own case, however, he may have confused honor with ruthlessness, for no trick or ploy was beneath him when he had a goal in mind. on the outcome. Killing the foe was entirely secondary; the point, rather, was to bravely expose oneself to deadly gunfire, thereby proving to the world a quality that lies hidden in a man's heart: his honor. In his own case, however, he may have confused honor with ruthlessness, for no trick or ploy was beneath him when he had a goal in mind.

Gibbons came into the world in 1757 as heir to an army of slaves, and a large rice plantation in Georgia, and he never forgot it. In adulthood he opened a thriving law practice in Savannah, and eventually bought more plantations. He accumulated and consumed until he himself had swelled to almost three hundred pounds. Cunning and commanding, he had, his daughter dryly noted, "a particular and singular mode of doing... business." In other words, he was almost pathologically contentious.3 In the Revolution, he alone in a family of patriots stood by the king. Imprisoned for treason, he called the sheriff a "damned scoundrel" and accused him of asking for a bribe. Remarkably, he was able to have his conviction overturned after the war, managed General "Mad Anthony" Wayne's campaign for Congress, then fought a duel with the losing candidate, who had accurately denounced him as a man "whose soul is faction... who never could be easy under government." The two faced off in 1791; they blazed away at each other three times before they settled their quarrel. Gibbons went on to serve as the Federalist mayor of Savannah off and on until 1801.4 That year he established "bachelor quarters," as he called them, in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. Perhaps he was driven out of the South by tense relations with the wife he left behind (he soon impregnated a young maid in his new home). In any case, it was a financially astute move. New York was just beginning its climb to a predominant role in the South's overseas trade. Living in the North, Gibbons served as his own middleman, and he had ample opportunities for reinvesting his profits in real estate, rapidly multiplying banks, and turnpike corporations that constructed solid new toll roads across New Jersey5 He also discovered a culture surprisingly familiar to him. He also discovered a culture surprisingly familiar to him.

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. In the early years of the republic, politicians issued challenges to each other with alarming frequency. They did so in part because the first parties of the early republic were, to a great extent, factions of notables; political disputes quickly became matters of personal honor.6 But the importance placed on honor reveals something deeper: the persistence of an eighteenth-century culture of deference, dominated by an American aristocracy. But the importance placed on honor reveals something deeper: the persistence of an eighteenth-century culture of deference, dominated by an American aristocracy.

The 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. Until the Revolution, wrote historian Bernard Bailyn, Americans had assumed "that a healthy society was a hierarchical society in which it was natural for some to be rich and some poor, some honored and some obscure, some powerful and some weak." Perhaps most important, "it was believed that superiority was unitary, that the attributes of the favored-wealth, wisdom, power-had a natural affinity to each other, and hence that political leadership would naturally rest in the hands of social leaders." In New York in particular, these natural leaders came from a closed set of families, distinguished by an inherited prestige. A full century before Gibbons moved north, the aristocrats of his day had already emerged-the Livingstons, Van Rensselaers, Schuylers, Beekmans, Jays, Bayards, Morrises, and others-in a self-perpetuating circle of intermarried clans.7 The patricians owed much of their status to their particular kind of wealth. New York's aristocrats were classic landed gentry, owners of vast manorial estates along the Hudson River that were populated by tenant farmers (a rarity in land-abundant America). Philip Schuyler, for example, held some six thousand acres, while the Van Rensselaers reigned over an enormous "patroonship" established by the Dutch in the seventeenth century. Their relationships with their inferiors were defined by vertical chains of deference and dependence. "As late as 1828," writes historian Martin Bruegel, an English observer was amazed by the "immense influence" of these manorial lords over their tenants and neighbors. And landed wealth was proprietary proprietary wealth, the kind that originally defined a "gentleman." The gentry did not work for their income, and so had the leisure to educate and improve themselves. Strikingly, they neatly adapted to, and even championed, the Revolution: they saw themselves as a refined, disinterested ruling class for a virtuous, classical republic. wealth, the kind that originally defined a "gentleman." The gentry did not work for their income, and so had the leisure to educate and improve themselves. Strikingly, they neatly adapted to, and even championed, the Revolution: they saw themselves as a refined, disinterested ruling class for a virtuous, classical republic.

Property requirements for suffrage under New York's constitution of 1777 hardened the culture of rank into law. Two distinct levels of wealth were required to vote: one for the state assembly, and a second and higher level for the state senators and governor-establishing a "three-tiered scaffolding of society" as Bruegel writes. In 1790, four of ten adult white men could not cast a ballot of any kind; in some places, only one out of four could vote for the assembly, and one out of five for governor.8 It was in this environment that the duel flourished. In the aristocratic culture of deference, little distinction was made between the person and his position. A leader could only function if he maintained his personal authority; upholding his "character" (as reputation was called), by the duel if necessary, was essential to all aspects of his life. So too in an economy with limited currency and few formal institutions, where transactions were highly personal and usually sealed by an exchange of promissory notes. A lofty character allowed one's notes to "pass current," to be circulated in the marketplace at little or no discount. The patricians literally could not afford to be defamed, to allow insults to their authority to go unchallenged.

The Revolution marked a decisive turn against the culture of deference. By the time Gibbons settled in New Jersey-the year Thomas Jefferson took office as president, after campaigning against patrician rule-assertiveness as well as deference was visible in the lower layers of society, swelled chests as well as bowed heads. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt noted the progress of this transformation in two telling observations in the 1790s: "They deceive themselves very much who think that pure republican manners prevail in America," he wrote, pointing out how the citizens painstakingly differentiated between the ranks of society "In balls, concerts, and public amusements, these classes do not mix; and yet," he added in amazement, "every one calls himself, and is called by others, a gentleman gentleman."9 It is the image of a society in the midst of tectonic change. An older, stratified idea of the world was being torn up by political radicalism erupting out of the Revolution, and by a new social dynamism linked to the surging economy. Once-deferential artisans wanted to serve in public office themselves. Average Americans were less and less willing to passively follow the old elite, as they had for so long.10 Thomas Gibbons, by contrast, settled comfortably into that old order-or, at least, as comfortably as a cantankerous tyrant could-as he passed his promissory notes among New York's elite, and formed business partnerships with his neighbors Aaron Ogden and Jonathan Dayton, the Federalist senators for New Jersey. He could hardly have been a less likely champion of Jeffersonian ideals. Ironically, a chain of events had already been set in motion that would turn his famously hard head into a battering ram against the citadel of aristocracy. That chain of events-and that citadel-were the work of the most patrician of patricians, Chancellor Robert R. Livingston.

No one better exemplified the culture of deference than Chancellor Livingston. Peering out of serious eyes set between the arching eyebrows and long nose of his bloodline, he looked every ounce the aristocrat. As leader of one of the richest and most prestigious families of Hudson Valley gentry, he presided over a vast manor, serving as patron to hundreds of tenant farmers who came to him, hats clutched to their chests, to ask for favors or pay their rent. In keeping with his family's tradition of leadership, he played a prominent part in the Revolution, serving alongside Jefferson on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence, and he later became New York's first chancellor (a chief judge in the state court system). Livingston allied with Jefferson and his Republicans, proving that, under the state's restrictive constitution, the aristocrats and their values crossed party lines, despite the Federalists' reputation as the party of the elite. In 1802, the New York Evening Post New York Evening Post referred to the Livingstons as a "house of republican nobility" and quoted a junior member of the clan as saying, "To be born with their family name is a fortune to any man." referred to the Livingstons as a "house of republican nobility" and quoted a junior member of the clan as saying, "To be born with their family name is a fortune to any man."

Unlike the stuffy, fictional aristocrats of Jane Austen's novels, Livingston and his fellow patricians felt no disdain for trade. They maintained countinghouses in the city invested in urban real estate, and had careers as lawyers and merchants. They embraced Hamilton's financial program, with its stocks, financial markets, and banks. Schuyler, Hamilton's father-in-law, sought to rationalize his tenants' leases for greater profits, and the patricians led the drive to build a canal to Lake Erie. Livingston organized a state agricultural society and promoted merino sheep and gypsum fertilizer. To quote George Washington, they were decidedly a "monied gentry."11 Those very activities, however, separated the commercial vision of aristocrats such as Livingston from the emerging ideals of rank-and-file Jeffersonians. He believed in economic development, but in an ordered manner, directed from above. After the Revolution, the seeds of a different notion began to sprout-of an individualistic, competitive economy where one could go as far as his ability and energy could take him. "Adam Smith's invisible hand," writes historian Joyce Appleby "was warmly clasped by the Republicans." They criticized the patricians for using their political power to grant themselves special privileges. Corporate charters usually went to the well-connected. Many early banks extended credit only to a closed network of relatives and cronies. Government intervention in the economy largely consisted of special rewards to officeholders and favored men.12 The aristocrats saw no conflict of interest in using public office to enrich themselves. As society's natural leaders, they reasoned, they should be entrusted with economic stewardship as well. This outlook, this merging of the private and public roles of the elite, was the essence of mercantilism, in which the state empowered private parties to carry out activities thought to serve the public interest.13 The standard reward for such an undertaking was a monopoly-just what Chancellor Livingston sought when he offered to meet a most pressing public need, the need for steamboats. The standard reward for such an undertaking was a monopoly-just what Chancellor Livingston sought when he offered to meet a most pressing public need, the need for steamboats.

Even before Americans learned of James Watt's work with the steam engine in England in the 1760s, they had dreamed of bolting it to the hull of a boat to speed themselves across the vast stretches of water that linked their scattered communities. Experiments abounded: paddlewheels, early propellers, even a water jet and mechanical oars.14 Chancellor Livingston dreamed and experimented as ambitiously as anyone. In 1798, he convinced his friends in the legislature to give him a monopoly on steamboats in New York State waters. Unfortunately he failed to produce a working design of his own, and his monopoly remained unused. Chancellor Livingston dreamed and experimented as ambitiously as anyone. In 1798, he convinced his friends in the legislature to give him a monopoly on steamboats in New York State waters. Unfortunately he failed to produce a working design of his own, and his monopoly remained unused.