The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (153 page)

51
NYH
, April 17, 18, 1873;
NYT
, April 17, 1873; CV to Samuel L. M. Barlow, March 6, 1860, BW box 36 (14), Samuel L. M. Barlow Collection, HL.

52
RGD, NYC 343:316
NYW
, November 14, 1877.

53
NYT
, June 20, 21, 22, 23, 1873;
HW
, Jul
y
12, 1873.

54
NYTr
, February 13, 1879.

55
Directors' Minutes, June 30, July 2, October 10, 1873, LS&MS, reel 65, box 243, NYCRR;
CT
, July 17, 18, 1873;
NYH
, July 17, 1873;
BG
, July 17, 1873.

56
NYW in Railway World
, April 17, 1875;
CT
, July 17, 1873;
Cleveland Leader in CT
, July 24, 1873;
Fourth Annual Report
. On Amasa Stone, see
Magazine of Western History
, December 1885.

57
New York World in Railway World
, April 17, 1875;
NYTr
, September 22, 23, 1873;
Fourth Annual Report; Testimony Taken Before the Special Committee of the Assembly… in the Matter of the Erie Railway Investigation
(1873), Erie Railway Company Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, 716.

58
CT
, October 25, 1873;
NYTr
, October 25, 1873.

59
NYT
, July 1, 1873;
AtlC
, August 5, September 21, 1873;
HW
, October 11, 1873; RGD, NYC 374:1, 10; H. N. McTyeire to CV, July 31, 1873, Correspondence of Cornelius and William H. Vanderbilt, NYPL.

60
NYH
, September 19, 1873.

61
NYH
, September 19, 21, 1873;
NYTr
, September 19, 1873;
HW
, November 1, 1873. The pre-panic market capitalization figures are based on average stock prices in the weeks preceding the collapse.

62
Entries for September 18, 19, 22–27, 1873, John V. L. Pruyn Journal, box 2, John V. L. Pruyn Papers, NYSL.

63
NYH
, September 21, 22, 23, 1873;
NYTr
, September 22, October 3, 1873; entries for September 22–27, 1873, October 4, 9, 1873, Pruyn Journal.

64
NYH
, September 22, 1873;
CT
, September 23, 1873; Joseph Dorfman,
The Economic Mind in American Civilization
, vol. 3,
1865–1918
(New York: Viking, 1949), 15; Esther Rogoff Taus,
Central Banking Functions of the United States Treasury, 1789–1941
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 68–71.

65
Strong, 4:498; Foner, 512–4; Jean Strouse,
Morgan: American Financier
(New York: Random House, 1999), 150–7.

66
Burrows & Wallace, 991, 1022–34.

67
Nasaw, 151–5; Strouse, 150–7; James A. Ward,
J. Edgar Thomson: Master of the Pennsylvania
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 202–15.

68
NYH
, October 15, 1873;
NYTr
, October 24,
187
3;
NYT
, October 29, 1873;
CT
, April 11, 1874, November 14, 1882; Chauncey M. Depew,
My Memories of Eighty Years
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922), 353.

69
Entry for October 9, 24, 1873, Pruyn Journal;
NYT
, October 28, 1873. Lest there be any confusion about which Vanderbilt negotiated with the trustees, Pruyn's journal specifies that CV proposed the final settlement, confirming press accounts.

70
NYT
, October 28, 1873; Executive Committee Minutes, December 17, 1873, Directors' Minutes, April 18, 1874, LS&MS, reel 65, box 243, NYCRR; Depew, 354.

71
RRG
, May 16, 1874. See also
NYW
, April 9, 1875, in
Railway World
, April 17, 1875. It should be noted that the LS&MS minutes show that WHV was not present at some meetings over which his father presided, and that CV took an active part in all the meetings—presenting, for example, the results of his negotiations with Schell. See Executive Committee Minutes, December 17, 1873, Directors' Minutes, April 18, 1874, LS&MS, reel 65, box 243, NYCRR.

72
Edwin D. Worcester testified on the lease plan, and WHV's lack of knowledge of it;
NYS
, December 15, 1877.

73
NYTr
, February 13, 1879;
HC
, October 9, 1873;
RRG
, October 18, 1873; Western Union Telegraph Company Annual Report, 1873, Baker Library, Harvard Business School; Klein,
Gould
, 196–205.

74
NYH
, September 10, 1873.

75
Irwin Unger,
The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance, 1865–1879
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 203;
CT
, April 1, 1873. See also
RRG
, April 19, 1873, and the still-important Robert P. Sharkey
Money, Class, and Party: An Economic Study of Civil War and Reconstruction
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1959).

76
CT
, April 1, 1873;
Nation
, May 1, 1873; Stiles, 232. See also George H. Miller,
Railroads and the Granger Laws
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971).

77
Stiles, 170–1; Unger, 195–327; Richard Franklin Bensel,
Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 303–65; Foner, 480–2; Sven Beckert,
The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1815–1896
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 192.

78
Beckert, 190(see also 191–2); Schell quoted in Unger, 48, also 195–327. During Andrew Johnson's administration, one conservative banker, steeped in hard-money orthodoxy, compared a return to the resumption of specie payments to death—necessary for eternal salvation, but to be resisted to the end; Dorfman, 4–5. On railroad cartels and attempts to cooperate, see Chandler,
Visible Hand
, 122–87; Jean Strouse,
Morgan: American Financier
(New York: Random House, 1999), 195–9.

79
Gregory A. Mark, “The Personification of the Business Corporation in American Law,”
University of Chicago Law Review
54, no. 4 (autumn 1987): 1441–83. See also Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Partnerships, Corporations, and the Limits on Contractual Freedom in U.S. History: An Essay in Economics, Law, and Culture,” in Kenneth Lipartito and David B. Scilia, eds.,
Constructing Corporate America: History, Politics, Culture
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 29–65. On the post–Civil War struggles of the Supreme Court to account for the new corporate age, see Michael A. Ross,
Justice of Shattered Dreams: Samuel Freeman Miller and the Supreme Court during the Civil War Era
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 176–254. Miller had long criticized the “money power,” and in 1877 voted with the 7–2 majority in
Munn v. Illinois
, which accepted the constitutionality of Granger laws. The justices were products of their time. As Ross writes, 254, “Throughout his judicial career, Miller clung to the Republican ideology of the 1850s, an ideology that became impracticable as a result [of] the nation's postwar economic transformations.”

80
Alan Trachtenberg,
The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1982), 59–60, 79–86; Stiles, 376–95; see also Chandler,
Visible Hand
.

81
NYS
, December 15, 1877
; NYT
, December 15, 1877.

82
NYT
, December 29, 1877.

83
NYTr
, November 21, June 15, 1878.

84
New York Sunday News
, January 6, 1878, Vanderbilt Will Trial Case Clippings, NYPL.

85
Cornelius [J.] Vanderbilt to Thurlow Weed, May 28, 1875, Thurlow Weed Papers, NYHS.

86
NYTr
, March 13, 1878.

87
LW Dictation;
Independent
, August 13, 1874.

88
NYH
, March 5, 1879;
NYTr
, January 9, 1877.

89
Beckert, 220.

90
NYTr
, January 9, 1877, February 6, 1879;
RRG
, June 20, 1874.

91
NYT
, November 8, 1872, June 2, 1874, December 16, 1875;
Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York
, February 17, 1875;
CT
, January 25, 1876;
AtlC
, February 20, 1876;
NYS, in Atlanta Constitution
, April 25, 1875.

92
NYT
, February 15, 1879 (this account mistakenly substitutes “president” for the correct “vice president”);
NYT
, December 15, 1877; Directors' Minutes, May 6, June 16, August 8, 1874, LS&MS, reel 65, box 243, NYCRR; H. E. Sargent to JFJ, May 16, 1874, JFJP Sargent named the rivalry between WHV and HFC as one reason for the Central's prior neutrality between the North Shore lines and the Lake Shore, a statement supported by Amasa Stone Jr.,
NYT
, November 23, 1878.