The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (79 page)

Each generation flatters itself with the thought that it is the vanguard of the new, sweeping away the stodgy ways of the past. Henry Clews imagined that he and his peers had introduced real cunning to the stock exchange in 1857—unaware that they could never surpass Nelson Robinson's skill at sharp dealing. The brokers who arrived on Wall Street during the Civil War told themselves that the aged Vanderbilt snorted at trains as “these steam contrivances that you tell us will run on dry land,” until he finally bought the Harlem.
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Much of it was nonsense, of course; but once upon a time the old had indeed been new for Vanderbilt and such contemporaries as Erastus Corning and Dean Richmond. These elder statesmen had grown up with the country, with the securities markets and corporations and mechanized transportation and rapid growth that were beginning to define the United States. Small wonder the venerable Commodore remained so quick to grasp possibilities, to accommodate change. Yet the world that they had created trapped them in an intractable conflict that defied even their most well-meaning attempts at compromise.

In April 1864, an exhausted Corning had resigned the presidency of the New York Central, passing the office on to his vice president, Dean Richmond.
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A burly man, more than six feet in height, the sixty-year-old Richmond exuded power. He combed a layer of dark hair across his large, round pate, and peered at his (smaller) fellow directors through heavy-lidded eyes set between arching eyebrows and above a fat, mushroom nose and the permanently pursed lower lip so common to jowly faces. He had the look of a man who never moved quickly, for anyone. He, too, had risen from a poor childhood, having moved from Vermont to Syracuse to Buffalo, from clerk to salt manufacturer to commission merchant, before entering the business of railroads. A man of volatile temper, he had little education, with handwriting so abominable that even Corning regularly ordered a clerk to transcribe his letters. He had worked closely with Corning in Democratic Party politics as well as business. The two were recognized as heirs to Martin Van Buren's Albany Regency—though Richmond, unlike Corning, refused to stand for elected office, exerting influence instead as chairman of the Democratic State Central Committee.
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Politics remained uppermost on Richmond's agenda—not electoral but railroad politics. The lucrative business provided by the federal government had muted competition among the trunk lines, but peace threatened to break out. On December 15 and 16, the Union army under General George H. Thomas annihilated the rebel Army of Tennessee at Nashville. At the end of the same month, Sherman completed his March to the Sea. “I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift,” he wired to Lincoln, “the city of Savannah.” And on January 15, 1865, a division led by General Adelbert Ames stormed into Fort Fisher, North Carolina; its capture effectively closed Wilmington, the last rebel seaport. Richmond worried that victory in the South would mean war in the North between the trunk lines.
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As Richmond embarked on his presidency in these troubling times, he spent many of his dinner hours with James Banker, the special representative of Commodore Vanderbilt. Though the Harlem and the Hudson River were minor powers on the railroad landscape, they occupied a strategic position. They provided the Central with a direct rail link to New York, and Richmond had no choice but to pay heed to Vanderbilt (who was, in any case, a major Central stockholder, with some four thousand shares). Still, Richmond saw no reason to cease the practice of shifting the Central's passengers and freight to the People's Line steamboats from spring through fall, when the Hudson was clear of ice and navigable all the way to Albany
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That infuriated John M. Tobin, the Hudson River Railroad president. “It was unjust to insist that the Hudson R.R.R. should form part of its [the Central's] trunk line during three months of the year and be excluded from the advantages of that traffic during nine months of the year,” Horace Clark later explained. “There never has been a man connected with the Hudson River Railroad Company who has not protested against and felt the wrong that such a state of things brought about.”
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This was the issue that brought Vanderbilt's and Richmond's railroads into conflict—the result of the fragmentation of the railroad network, which forced long-distance traffic to pass through the hands of successive companies, each with its own needs and agendas.

The problem came down to a central feature of railroad economics: the difference between through traffic from “competitive points” and purely local traffic from stations where a railway had a monopoly. For freight shipped to New York, the Central could charge higher local rates in Syracuse or Rochester, where it faced no competition, than it could in Buffalo or Chicago, where rival trunk lines fought for the business (especially exports, which theoretically could be shipped from Philadelphia or Baltimore as easily as New York). The Central set the rates for this through freight, and prorated its revenue with the Hudson River on a mileage basis. Daniel Drew's People's Line, on the other hand, operated more cheaply than the Hudson River Railroad, so it accepted less than a pro-rata percentage. Why wouldn't the Central give its business to the steamboats? As Clark admitted, “Before the [Albany] bridge was built, and bulk had to be broken, it might as well be broken and the freight go by river, as the other way.” For the Hudson River, however, this state of affairs brought “all the disadvantages of consolidation without any of its advantages.”
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Tobin wanted compensation—to receive the higher local rates on through freight during the winter.
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For Richmond, this was a frightening prospect. It would cripple the Central's ability to compete with the other trunk lines during the season of ice and snow. He anxiously asked Clark to arrange a meeting with Vanderbilt.

“Commodore Vanderbilt had a great admiration for Dean Richmond,” attorney Chauncey Depew later remarked. “The Commodore disliked boasters and braggarts intensely. Those who wished to gain his favor made the mistake, as a rule, of boasting about what they had done, and were generally met with the remark: ‘That amounts to nothing.’” As Depew's juxtaposition of these observations implies, the Central's president was much like Vanderbilt himself: authentic, honest, and direct. Vanderbilt agreed to intervene on his behalf. “After a severe struggle, Mr. Tobin's policy was overruled,” Clark recalled, “and an agreement was made for that winter through Mr. Richmond and through Mr. Vanderbilt. That winter… the N.Y Central R.R. Co. should fix rates such as they might see fit to fix, in accordance with their policy in competition with the other great trunk lines, and the Hudson R.R.R. Co. should carry them out.”
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Vanderbilt had other interests that impelled him to cooperate with Richmond—particularly the Athens railroad. He had helped Drew create it as a weapon against the Hudson River Railroad; now he needed Richmond's help to prevent it from being turned against himself. Nevertheless, he demanded a price for overriding Tobin: once the ice cleared from the river, the Central would make a permanent arrangement to either give the Hudson River a larger share of freight or pay it compensation.
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Time and again, Vanderbilt showed himself to be patient and diplomatic in his dealings with Corning and Richmond, as he sacrificed short-term profits in return for long-term stability. But the structural conflict between these lines would only get worse.

ON THE AFTERNOON OF
February 6, 1865, a Wednesday, Vanderbilt climbed into his wagon outside his office on Bowling Green. He whipped his team of horses up Broadway until he reached Fulton Street, a block below City Hall Park. There he bowled over a woman named Caroline Walter; her fright and the ensuing confusion can only be imagined. An Officer Dodge arrested the Commodore and took him to the glowering, neo-Egyptian Tombs, the police court and city jail. Mrs. Walter did not appear to make a complaint, so the judge released Vanderbilt. The victim had not been seriously injured, and perhaps she thought it best to let the powerful man go about his business.
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One week prior to his brief imprisonment, the House of Representatives had voted to abolish slavery, by sending the Thirteenth Amendment to the states for ratification. It was both a revolutionary act and a practical recognition that the war had destroyed slavery as a functioning institution. In both senses, it demonstrated how thoroughly America's most costly conflict remade the nation.

But the war itself approached an end. In fighting that began on March 24, the Confederate position at Petersburg crumbled. On April 2, Grant launched a decisive attack that sent Lee's army fleeing to the west. The next day, Lincoln (who had been visiting the Army of the Potomac) entered the fallen Confederate capital.
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When the news reached Wall Street, the rector of Trinity Church began to ring the bell, over and over, joining a symphony of church bells that chimed all over New York. Crowds crowded the pavement. “All the cheers I ever listened to were tame in comparison,” Strong wrote. The massed men—for they were all men on Wall Street—sang “John Brown's Body” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and waved their hats in ecstasy now that the long nightmare had ended, and ended in victory. “I walked about on the outskirts of the crowd,” Strong added, “shaking hands with everybody, congratulating and being congratulated by scores of men I hardly know even by sight. Men embraced and hugged each other,
kissed
each other, retreated into doorways to dry their eyes and came out again to flourish their hats and hurrah. There will be many sore throats in New York tomorrow.”
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The war was not over yet. On April 7, Grant's troops caught Lee's army at Appomattox Courthouse, where a truce was called. Sheridan rode to meet Confederate general John B. Gordon, and complained that a South Carolina unit was firing on General Wesley Merritt's men. He asked Gordon to dispatch orders to cease fire. “He answered, ‘I have no staff-officer to send,’” Sheridan wrote in his memoirs.

Whereupon I said that I would let him have one of mine, and calling for Lieutenant Vanderbilt Allen, I directed him to carry General Gordon's orders to General Geary, commanding a small brigade of South Carolina cavalry, to discontinue firing. Allen dashed off with the message and soon delivered it, but was made a prisoner, Geary saying, “I do not care for white flags; South Carolinians never surrender.” By this time Merritt's patience being exhausted, he ordered an attack, and this in short order put an end to General Geary's “last ditch” absurdity, and extricated Allen from his predicament.

The Commodore's grandson was one of the last prisoners of the Civil War, and, ironically, carried one of the last Confederate orders. On April 9, Lee surrendered.
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“We have the astounding intelligence of the assassination of President Lincoln & the attempt to assassinate Mr. Seward,” New York Central director John V. L. Pruyn wrote in his diary on April 15. “The whole community has been stirred to its deepest depths by these events. Their results cannot be predicted.… Every face bears evidence of emotion. It is a terrible, a fearful tragedy.” At the moment of victory, the great emancipator had been shot dead by John Wilkes Booth—on Good Friday, no less. Three days later, Pruyn observed in Albany, “All buildings in the city almost without exception, are hanging emblems of mourning for the death of President Lincoln. Accounts from every part of the country show this to be the case everywhere. The grief seems to be universal & profound.”
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Lincoln's death was one of an estimated 620,000 in the Civil War: 360,000 from the North and 260,000 from the South, not including civilian casualties. Statistics cannot do justice to the extent of this loss, but they are devastating enough. In perhaps the most commonly cited comparison, this figure, in absolute numbers, surpasses the
combined
toll in American lives from all of the nation's other wars, up to and including the Korean War.
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The death count represented almost 2 percent of the nation's entire population as measured in the 1860 census. Nearly every family suffered.

Long after the Commodore had passed, this generation of the dead would continue to haunt the survivors. Statues would be erected, monuments built, and parades conducted through the end of the century. But for many veterans who lived through the fighting, the encomiums for their fallen comrades sounded bitterly empty. Unquestionably, the war accomplished profound good: it resolved a long-building conflict, freed 4 million slaves, and destroyed the peculiar institution of slavery forever. Yet the personal experience of the Civil War was often as dehumanizing, as poisoned by pettiness, random brutality, and stupidity, as in any other war.
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Out of the war emerged a corps of public intellectuals—Ambrose Bierce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Charles Francis Adams Jr., to name a few—with a dark sensibility shaped by such horrors. After Appomattox, these men would view the world with a grim realism that often overflowed into cynicism, stark and sometimes overblown. The outlook of this generation of writers and thinkers would influence historians, many of whom would picture the postwar years as a time of unrelenting self-aggrandizement, when vulgar, amoral tycoons and carpetbaggers corrupted a political process barely worthy of the name democracy.

There was another, more instinctive response to the war's death and destruction. It was a resurgence of a superstition that owed its modern origin to a pair of toe-cracking girls from Rochester, New York. With so many spirits to contact, Spiritualism became more popular than ever, attended by a general faith in the unseen. As Strong observed in 1865, “The tough, shrewd, unbelieving Yankee generally develops a taste for marvels—for infinitesimal homeopathy, magnetism, spiritualism.” It was a cultural current that moved even the toughest, shrewdest, most unbelieving Yankee of all, Cornelius Vanderbilt. Mrs. Mary Augusta Smett would later claim that she visited the Commodore in his office, apparently during the second Harlem corner, to ask him to spare a friend who faced ruin. As she was about to leave, Vanderbilt asked her, “Did you ever see my son George?” He pointed out a picture and said, “That poor fellow is dead. Would to God he had lived.” As Mrs. Smett recalled the moment, “His eyes filled with tears.” For a man who had grown accustomed to controlling the world around him, the possibility of mastering even death itself must have been appealing.
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