The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (30 page)

The intended insult spoke of an ominous shift in American politics. The old political debates still smoldered, but had cooled somewhat. Many Whigs remained unhappy with cutthroat competition, and many Democrats with banks and corporations, but they were learning to endure them. Policy makers from both parties often proved more pragmatic than ideological. In 1838, for example, New York's Whigs had introduced free banking, which allowed anyone who met certain requirements to obtain a charter for a bank; the Whigs had intended to end the political abuse of bank chartering by Martin Van Buren's Albany Regency, but the result was to open the field to all who wished to compete. And the Democrats generally embraced the largest and most active part of the federal government, the Post Office, which subsidized newspaper delivery and (until 1845) many stagecoach lines. Meanwhile a wave of defaults by state governments on their bonds after the Panic of 1837 had tempered the enthusiasm for internal improvements, and President Van Buren's creation of the independent treasury system (removing federal money from private banks) had settled the Democrats' gravest complaints with the banking system.
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But politics still generated searing heat, thanks to slavery. For the previous decade, abolitionists had been organizing and agitating, particularly in pious New England. On the other side, Democrats in particular wanted to annex Texas, where slave-owning settlers from the United States had won their independence from Mexico in 1836. Candidate Polk craved an expansion of the republic, hungrily eyeing Oregon, California, and New Mexico. But it was his enthusiasm for Texas that sparked the fury of many Northern Whigs. The idea of absorbing a territory where slavery actually existed upset even conservatives who frowned on the rabble-rousing abolitionists. And Mexico refused to accept Texas's independence, raising the danger of war. “It would ill become this nation, so boastful of its love of freedom,” declared Horace Greeley the
Tribune's
editor, “to embark in a foreign war, assume a foreign debt, and involve itself in a web of responsibilities the end whereof no man can predict, for the clearly discerned purpose of extending and fortifying slavery”
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And so the mammoth parade proceeded through New York's streets on October 30, 1844. It is too simple to say that passions ran high; the cliché conjures up none of the anger that vibrated between the watching crowds and the columned marchers, none of the hate in the eyes of the union members, the Irish immigrants who had flooded into the city since 1830, the expansionistic Democrats who saw the Whigs as aristocrats who conspired to hold them down. First came the shouts and insults, then pushing, and finally punching. All along the route, skirmishes erupted, in a daylong moving battle.
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Of all the Irish Democrats who smashed Whig cheeks and broke Whig teeth, perhaps the most feared was Yankee Sullivan. Born in Ireland in 1813, he had been transported by British authorities to Botany Bay, Australia, for an unknown felony. In 1839 he had stowed away on a ship to the United States, where he rose to fame as a bare-knuckle prizefighter. He had opened a tavern, the Sawdust House, in the infamous Five Points slum and became an enforcer for the Democratic Party in the city. Sullivan was flamboyant, crafty, and merciless. In one fight, he was losing badly until he broke his foe's arm; Sullivan then punched the broken arm relentlessly until the opponent gave up. In another, he got caught in a headlock, gasped that he was done for, and went limp. When the enemy let him go and turned toward his corner, Sullivan leaped up and hammered his head behind the ear.
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“Vanderbilt… was an ardent supporter of Henry Clay,” an old Staten Islander told the
New York Times
in 1877, “and organized and commanded a magnificent troop of horsemen composed of about 500 of the finest men in the Whig Party on the Island. When the grand… procession took place in New-York, Commodore Vanderbilt and his troop of horsemen occupied a very conspicuous position in it.” Yankee Sullivan, the man recalled, was drinking in his bar with “a gang of roughs” as Vanderbilt rode by. “Rushing out, he [Sullivan] seized the reins of his horse and tried to compel him to alight. The horse reared, the Commodore cut ‘Yankee’ Sullivan across the back with his whip, and then, leaping to the ground, so badly beat him that his friends took him [Sullivan] away in a nearly senseless condition.”

The story is too good not to repeat: one of the richest men in the city now fifty years old, bludgeoning the greatest boxer of the day in a street brawl. Vanderbilt loomed over six feet tall, and he was a seasoned fighter; he suffered none of the hesitation, the muscle-tensing slowness, that an inexperienced man feels when an exchange of blows is imminent. Less than a year earlier, he had beaten a man down on Staten Island. And the details the old Staten Islander provided fit perfectly with the events of the day. Unfortunately, there is no evidence for the fight beyond this anecdote, which first appeared decades later. Yankee Sullivan was a celebrity and the newspapers covered him closely. A beating at the hands of a prominent capitalist surely would have found some mention in the press. There were none. It most likely never happened.
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But the symbolism of the story says more than the facts. Despite ten years of lavishing Jacksonian rhetoric on the public, Vanderbilt would be remembered as a Whig. Long the darling of the Democratic press, he would be depicted as thrashing a working-class Irishman of Five Points—a Tammany Hall operative, no less. In memory, at least, the champion of scrapping, competitive individualism ascended into Whiggery into the party of social prejudice and Wall Street insiders. It is not an accurate portrait (in no other case was Vanderbilt portrayed as seriously engaged with either party), but this anecdote can be seen as a reflection of his slowly changing social status.

In later years it would often be said that New York's social elite snubbed Vanderbilt. Not only is this biographical cliché misleading, it also oversimplifies the extreme instability of fashionable society at this time. In the eighteenth-century culture of deference, the differentiations of rank could not have been more clear: wealth, social status, and political power had been wrapped in a bundle as tight as the leases that bound tenant farmers to manorial lords. But the destruction of that culture wiped out the rules of hierarchy, replacing them with a mad scramble for standing. The competitive individualism of the economy found its reflection even in Sara toga Springs.

“In this country, where a democracy on the broadest scale is supposed to exist, we discover at our watering places an eternal struggle for ascendancy,” the
Herald
observed in 1845.

Exquisites in broad-cloth and patent leather, and female miracles of elegance and taste—the posterity of some Irish washerwoman, turn up their noses at Mrs. Smith and Misses Smith, because their papa keeps a hardware store in Pearl street; and an effeminate and deteriorated specimen of humanity, descended from the loins of some poor porter, pronounces the whole company “decidedly vulgar, and shockingly low.”

The phenomenon of the newly rich caught the attention of many observers, as those who came into fortunes fought for social respect. Francis Grund derided them as “the mushroom aristocracy of New York” to underscore their lack of lineage, their reliance on mere wealth and pretension. “Do you observe that gentleman in tights, with large black whiskers?” he snidely asked. “He is one of the most fashionable and aristocratic gentlemen in the city. I believe he served his apprenticeship in a baker's shop, then went into an auction-room, then became a partner in the firm, and lastly took a house in Broadway, set up a carriage, and declared himself a gentleman.”

The
Herald
mocked these rivals in snobbery, who “calculated to a nicety the number of dollars which may enable them to ‘astonish the Browns’ at the Springs.” Few of the striving new toffs were truly self-made, despite the rhetoric of these observers; the point, rather, is that they struggled to invent social status in a culture that no longer depended upon hierarchy to function. A Livingston of 1800 did not
desire
distinction; she simply had it. But these latter-day climbers had to conjure up artificial ranks now that the organic ones were gone.
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This was the class that Vanderbilt
never
belonged to: an affected aristocracy, the patricians of puffery. And yet, he was a first-generation entrant into the ranks of the wealthy. To that extent, he had a fraught relationship with a distinctly different fashionable set—the remnants of the old knickerbocker elite, the descendants of those who had once stood atop the culture of deference. The onslaught of recently rich outsiders caused this group to rally around each other, to construct elaborate new forms of social exclusivity They had launched this campaign on February 27, 1840, with a “grand fancy dress ball at Brevoort Hall,” as the
New York Herald
called it. It was the first fancy ball held in a private residence in New York; it took place on Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street, at the grand home of Henry Brevoort, “a lineal descendent of the celebrated Dutch merchant, who… first settled Dutch colonies in North America.” More than five hundred of the oldest and most prestigious families in the country came in costume. “The dresses worn on this occasion must have cost, we verily believe, nearly half a million of dollars,” the
Herald
reported. The ball, the paper observed, marked the beginning of a new era, “as it is the first of its kind.”
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All this—the affectations of the newly rich and the closing of the ranks of the old patrician families—reflected the same phenomenon. For centuries, the social, political, and economic elite had been one and the same; power and influence had gone together with social standing and family prestige. The democratization of politics and the unleashing of the market, however, had destroyed the functional purpose of social standing. One no longer had to be a Jay, a Colden, or a Beekman to dominate business or politics. Money was no respecter of persons, and neither were voters any longer. Though the old patrician families still carried on in wealth and, to a lesser extent, in politics as well, they had no choice but to make room for those who could clamber up, now that family connections ceased to be a requirement for success.

In the early nineteenth century, for the first time, a distinction emerged between the social elite and the elite of true power and wealth. They overlapped, of course, but they also existed in a state of tension. Vanderbilt went to Saratoga Springs each August; he built a palace on Staten Island; he bought teams of expensive horses. These activities reflected his sense of his own importance, and they were necessary, to a certain extent, to allow him to engage in highly practical socializing. But he did not go to the balls at Brevoort Hall, nor did his children marry the Livingstons and Van Rensselaers. Instead, he moved in a special zone established by fashionable society, one that allowed the elite to engage social outsiders such as himself. In 1844, for example, John C. Stevens of the patrician railroad-and-steamboat family organized the New York Yacht Club, which immediately attracted the likes of Philip Hone, Moses Grinnell, Oroondates Mauran, Peter Schemerhorn, William H. Aspinwall, and August Belmont, among others, a mixed group of men from old and new families, united only in wealth and influence. And on July 2, 1846, they welcomed Cornelius Vanderbilt into the club.
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VANDERBILT MIRRORED THE CITY'S
own struggle for respectability as its wealth and reputation for enterprise grew. It had long suffered from polluted water and runaway fires, but on June 23, 1842, it opened the Croton Aqueduct, carrying millions of gallons of pure water down from West-chester County. Other moves were less successful. In April 1844, a nativist movement played on fears of Irish Catholic immigrants (and the rampant violence of street gangs) to elect James Harper mayor. He tried to both close businesses and stop the sale of alcohol on Sunday, the only day most workers had free. “In less than two months,” writes historian Edward K. Spann, “the crusade had broken down in a cloud of protest, recrimination, and frustration.” But 1844 also saw the birth of a professional police force that replaced the amateur constables and night watchmen who had worked under the venerable Joseph Hays.
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In the 1840s, New York rebounded from depression. One writer wryly called it “that town which it is the fashion of the times to call the
Commercial
Emporium of America—as if there might very well be an
emporium
of any other character.” As Vanderbilt took the ferry daily between his Staten Island mansion and Manhattan, he saw the buoyant scene that Dickens described in 1842, the “confused heaps of buildings, with here and there a spire or steeple, looking down upon the herd below; and here and there, again, a cloud of lazy smoke; and in the foreground a forest of ships' masts, cheery with flapping sails and waving flags.” Every time the
Sylph
or the
Staten Islander
chuffed closer to Whitehall Slip, Vanderbilt heard “the city's hum and buzz, the clinking of capstans, the ringing of bells, the barking of dogs, the clattering of wheels.” Walking up to his office at 34 Broadway, he entered a daily parade of fashion. “Heaven save the ladies, how they dress!” Dickens exclaimed. “What various parasols! what rainbow silks and satins! what pinking of thin stockings, and pinching of thin shoes, and fluttering of ribbons and silk tassels, and display of rich cloaks with gaudy hoods and linings!” Young clerks turned down their collars and grew whiskers under their chins, while Irish laborers marched by with “long-tailed blue coats and bright buttons.”
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