The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (7 page)

*   *   *

ON MARCH 24, 1841,
Marc Isambard Brunel was knighted. And nearly two years to the day after that, on March 25, 1843, the Thames Tunnel opened. What Brunel had predicted at the start would take three years to build had taken eighteen. “Another wonder has been added to the many of which London can boast,” the London
Times
wrote. “Another triumph been achieved by British enterprize, genius and perseverance.” The tunnel would not have been built had the Duke of Wellington not freed Brunel, who used a government loan in 1837 to restart the tunneling. A new and improved shield also helped, this one weighing 140 tons. It replaced Brunel’s original one and proved to be stronger, faster, and safer.

For the opening ceremony, a “tunnel waltz” was composed, flags were raised, bells rang out, and, at four in the afternoon, a signal gun fired and a procession began moving down a spiral staircase into the western archway of the tunnel. Marc Brunel, who had suffered a stroke a year earlier that left him mostly paralyzed on his right side, insisted on attending the celebration and was greeted with cheers as he walked through the tunnel. The throng of thousands burst into song, and the words of “See the Conquering Hero Comes” echoed off the walls. More than a hundred burners atop lamp posts placed in the arches provided the light. The first day the tunnel was opened, fifty thousand people walked the entire length. But there were others who could not bring themselves to join them.

Marc and Isambard Brunel had dug a tunnel beneath the Thames River wide enough to serve as a road for vehicles. They had proved that the underground could be safely conquered and that man no longer had to stop digging when a river stood in the way. But what the father and his son could not do, the London
Times
reported on the day of the Thames Tunnel’s opening, was wipe away centuries of man’s fears overnight.

The majority of the visitors went the whole distance, 1200 feet; many, however, proceeded only a little way, pausing and looking about with an air of suspicion every four or five yards, while some would not venture into the tunnel at all, but remained in the shaft or on the staircase, yet amongst the majority there was a perceptible anxiety, and notwithstanding the brilliance of the lights, the singular reverberations of the music, the shouting of the admirers of the undertaking, and all the means that were taken to give éclat to the event, and encouragement to the spectators, notwithstanding also the physical heat that oppressed them, it was evident that there was a lurking, chilling fear in the breasts of many.

3

A FAMILY FOR THE AGES

ON MAY 6, 1635, JOHN WHITNEY
and his wife, Elinor, gathered up their five sons, boarded the small wooden ship
Elizabeth and Ann
from England, and crossed the rough seas of the North Atlantic to start a new life. Some time later, their ship, carrying 120 passengers, pulled into Massachusetts Bay, and they quickly settled into a sixteen-acre farmhouse in Watertown, the second largest settlement in Massachusetts next to Boston. Two months after arriving, on July 5, Elinor Whitney delivered their sixth son, Joshua, the first Whitney to be born in America, and two more boys would soon follow, making eight total. Though Elinor died before she turned sixty, her older husband had plenty of life left in him. Four months after his wife’s death, John Whitney married Judith Clement. However, like his first wife, she also died before he did. When John Whitney finally died on June 1, 1673, at the age of eighty-five, he left behind him a collection of boys who scattered across Massachusetts to raise their own families. None took more pleasure in this, apparently, than General Josiah Whitney, who, when he wasn’t busy defending Boston Harbor during the Revolutionary War, was busy in other ways, fathering sixteen children with his first wife, and then nine more with his second. Of all of the general’s descendants that would follow, it was a grandson of Josiah Whitney who began the family’s ascendance to greatness.

James Scollay Whitney was born on May 19, 1811, in the Western Massachusetts town of South Deerfield. His father owned a country store in town, and when James wasn’t attending class, he was working beside his father at the store. By the time he was twenty-one, he had inherited the store from his father and faced an important moment in his young life. He could choose to settle in South Deerfield and live a respectable life defined by his father’s business. Or he could set out for bigger things.

Three years later, James Whitney made his decision. A superb horseman, he had always been interested in military affairs, and in 1835 he was commissioned as a brigadier general in the state militia. For the rest of his life, anybody who knew him closely didn’t call him by his name, but simply General.

In 1836, Whitney married into one of the state’s most prominent families. His bride, Laurinda Collins, was a descendant of Governor William Bradford, a man who was so popular that he was elected to his office thirty times in the 1600s and who helped settle Plymouth Colony and drafted the Mayflower Compact. Not even a year after they married, their first child was born. On September 16, 1837, a girl they named Mary Ann arrived. Two years later, Henry was born, on October 22, 1839; and two years after that, on July 5, 1841, William arrived. Two more children, Susan and Henrietta, would follow (Henrietta’s twin died unnamed just three days after being born).

With a growing family, the couple was eager to start their own life, and so they left South Deerfield for nearby Conway, a hilly town cut through by two pretty streams, the South and the Bear, and not far from the shadows of Mount Tom and Mount Holyoke. In Conway James Whitney built a long white two-story home. His family lived in the back, and in the front he opened a country store with his brother-in-law, Anson Shepard. Shepard & Whitney established itself in Conway as the place to come and talk. The giant elm tree out front and the old stove in the center of the store became popular spots for people to gather around and to talk not only about local gossip but also about more important affairs affecting their town, their state, and their country. James Whitney could talk politics with anyone, and in just three years he established himself as one of Conway’s most astute political and financial leaders, comfortable swapping opinions on business and the military with anyone in earshot. Over the course of his sixty-seven years, until the day he died on a cold Boston street, it would remain one of James Whitney’s most endearing traits, the ability to befriend people no matter their politics, wealth, cultural interests, or personal agenda. It was a quality his sons took to heart at an early age, even as they went their separate ways.

HENRY

The boy was not even ten years old when the old gentleman who ran a country store in Conway decided to teach his young employee a game. This wasn’t the boy’s first job. Living in the small town of about fourteen hundred people, Henry Melville Whitney used to help a local farmer drive a cow out to pasture in return for twelve cents a month and one egg. But one Sunday, while hurrying home from church, Henry took a shortcut and snagged the velveteen pants his aunt had sewn for him on a fence, and thus he needed to earn some more money. Which is how Henry found himself stocking shelves at a country store.

On his first day, after the owner had outlined his duties there, the boy had a question.

“Where do I sleep?” he asked, knowing that he’d be working long days and would need some place to rest.

The two grew close, until one day the storekeeper pulled out his chess set. It wasn’t an easy game to teach such an active boy, since it involved patience and strategy. It was made even more difficult because Henry could hardly hear his instructions, the result of a near-fatal bout with scarlet fever when he was little. As he grew up Henry learned from his mother, Laurinda, that if he stuck a finger into a glass of water and then into his ears, it helped just enough to make hearing easier. It was one of many lessons the Whitney children learned from their mother. She ran a tidy house, writing proper letters to her extended family on a regular basis and making sure the children never neglected their studies or chores. She had a favorite outfit that she wore nearly every day, a simple black dress and a crisp, fully starched white hat with streamers. Her prim look did not do her outgoing personality justice. She was as talented a horseman as her militia-trained husband, maybe even better, able to control a four-horse team with ease and grace. It was a feat that always impressed her children.

Her skill and competitiveness rubbed off on Henry, as the storekeeper would learn. He had figured that playing chess would be a fun way for him and his young worker to fill the long days and evenings. And he enjoyed Henry’s eagerness to try new challenges. Over the course of several weeks and months, he taught Henry the rules of chess. And each day Henry soaked up a little more strategy and acquired a little more skill, until one day he beat his teacher. And then the next day, he did it again. This was not what the storekeeper had in mind when they had started playing, but he had clearly underestimated the boy’s thirst for knowledge and competitiveness. They continued playing every day, until the pupil became the better player and the teacher grew frustrated about losing all the time; eventually their games stopped.

WILLIAM

Henry was not exceptionally close with his younger brother, William Collins Whitney, while growing up, even though they were only two years apart. But over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, as they traded occasional letters; mourned the losses of parents, siblings, and even children; married and raised their own families; loaned each other money; and rose up to become powerful businessmen in New York and Boston, no two siblings would change the course of life in the American city more than the Whitney brothers. They did not compete with each other so much as they observed and learned from each other. But it wasn’t always that way. Only one of them, it could be said, was driven to succeed from his youngest days.

Where studies were of little interest to Henry, William was called Deacon for his habit of reading the Bible for hours beneath the shady trees by the river near their home. In 1856, the two boys attended Williston Seminary, a new boarding school in nearby Easthampton. Their school was chosen for good reason, especially given that its tuition, nine dollars a year, was not inexpensive for the times. It was founded by a long-ago uncle of the boys.

At Williston Academy, nobody was allowed to coast, which is perhaps why only one of the Whitney brothers managed to sustain the grades and level of interest the private school demanded of its students. Will was the serious one who studied Homer and Virgil, algebra, and geography. He focused especially hard on the headmaster’s Bible study course. After graduating Williston, Will Whitney wanted to attend West Point and to follow the path of his father by joining the military. With his education and James Whitney’s connections, gaining acceptance to the academy would not have been a problem. The problem was that his father did not want that for his son. The idea of Will in the army depressed his father so much that Laurinda finally had to go visit Will and make him an alternative proposal. She begged him to choose Harvard, Yale, or Williams, and he relented, enrolling in 1859 at Yale, where the tuition of $216, while unaffordable to most families, was well within reason for the comfortable Whitneys. Will excelled in one area that fascinated him. Debate. He also made some of his best and lifelong friends, including a rich and equally ambitious young man from Cleveland, Ohio, named Oliver Hazard Payne, an economist named William Graham Sumner, and Henry Dimock, who would join Will Whitney not only in a Wall Street law practice but also in family, when he married Whitney’s sister Susan. While some of Whitney’s classmates left school in 1861 to join the fight as the Civil War began, he did not. Instead, Whitney enjoyed his time at Yale, rowing on the crew team, joining Skull and Bones, and excelling in English composition. The law in particular called to him, and as graduation neared and he was presented the opportunity to make a commencement speech, he seized the moment.

On July 30, 1863, speaking to his graduation class and with the esteemed Yale faculty members seated behind him, he railed against Republicans, against the Civil War, and against immigration, and he took particular umbrage at what he perceived as a shortage of bright and ambitious men seeking public office. As with every previous Yale address, Whitney, wearing a slim-fitting suit and high waistcoat, spoke from memory, at least at the start. The expectation of the school’s elders was that the student should be so honored to speak that they would stand in front of a mirror for hours rehearsing their speech until it was just so. “The Drama closes when the nation, sick at heart and worn out by faction and misrule, sinks out of sight in history, or yields itself a willing victim to some ambitious and able usurper,” Whitney said. His classmates gasped at his words, but there was greater shock when he paused, reached into his pocket, and calmly pulled out the rest of his speech and continued to read it, thinking nothing of the sacred tradition he was breaking.

Afterward, when his good friend Sumner asked him why he did not follow the rule of reciting his speech by memory, Whitney seemed nonchalant about his brazen act. “It was too much bother to memorize so many words,” he answered.

He moved back home after Yale so that he could attend Harvard Law School with his friend Henry Dimock. But Will’s patience with schooling was fading. Though Harvard Law School at the time claimed some of the great legal minds in the country, they could not hold the attention of the two chummy Yalies. Barely one year after enrolling, Whitney and Dimock left Harvard, convinced they could just as easily pass the bar requirements and become lawyers by clerking in a law office as they could by sitting in a boring classroom on the Charles River. And they were not interested in clerking in Boston. Nowhere was the legal field more cutthroat than in New York, and competitor that he was, Will Whitney was drawn to it. He arrived in Manhattan in the fall of 1864 with grand ambitions, and the streets and social scene of Gotham would never be the same.