The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (114 page)

Bibliographical Essay

Cornelius Vanderbilt's life is truly an epic one. In length of activity, scope of action, and centrality to significant events, it looms larger than most others, at the very least. Unfortunately, his life and its impact have received little intensive study. The image of the Commodore that lingers in American memory is largely the creation of rumors reported as fact by the press, as well as tales told by outright fabulists, from his own time down to the present. I have found new information about every aspect of Vanderbilt's life (if only through sheer drudgery). Under the circumstances, I believe it is worthwhile to discuss previous biographies and the primary sources on which I have based my account. (This book was written before the 2008 financial crisis, and was not changed afterward.)

First, I should describe the method I have used to write this biography. I began by reading existing biographies and studies of the topics relevant to Vanderbilt's life, and combed through their notes to compile an initial list of primary sources. I examined those sources, and searched archival catalogs and online digitized collections, including the Proquest historical newspaper database and archives of congressional documents. (I examined every article obtainable through a Proquest search for “Vanderbilt” between 1810 and 1879, among many other searches—and learned just how much property was for sale on Brooklyn's Vanderbilt Avenue.) I visited archives, made photocopies and took notes, and saved thousands of electronic files. I also scrolled through microfilm and sifted through manuscript collections to search far beyond the specific citations on my list. (I surveyed every issue of
Railroad Gazette
for Vanderbilt's lifetime in the original printed form, for example.) I then created databases of my own, with an entry for notes and quotes from each relevant source, and wrote the initial draft of each chapter largely from the primary sources. I then went through the secondary sources again and revised my manuscript, incorporating other historians' information and interpretations (when not already cited in the text).

Just as important as the discovery of sources, of course, is their interpretation. It is famously said that the past is a foreign country; unfortunately it is not always foreign enough. Nineteenth-century Americans spoke the same language as anyone who is now reading this sentence, but their vocabulary is deceptive in its familiarity. They imbued words with meanings that have long since disappeared, and they used expressions that, while familiar to historians, were built into a mental architecture that strikes the twenty-first-century mind as alien, even unsustainable. Terms such as “character,” “monopoly,” “competition,” “stock watering,” “par value,” “intrinsic value,” even “cash” must be understood in their original context, for they reflected a view of the world that is counterintuitive to us now and was constantly in dispute at the time. I have done my best to map this changing mental landscape over a rather long distance; authorities on any of the many periods covered here undoubtedly will find fault, and probably with cause. My motto is to research in terror, write with confidence, and publish with humility: terror, lest something escape me; confidence, lest the narrative seem weak and uncertain; and humility because some sources and interpretations, not to mention perfect literary grace, always lie beyond the grasp of any writer.

Finally, I submitted drafts of my manuscript to some very generous academic historians. They include Joyce Appleby Edward Countryman, Andrew Burstein, Robert E. May, Richard R. John, and Maury Klein. I owe them a great debt for correcting factual errors and misinterpretations, pointing out ideas I had not considered, and recommending further reading. But this book's failings are mine alone.

Cornelius Vanderbilt has not been well served by his biographers. Early writers based their works on—well, I don't know what. The newspapers freely embellished the rumors about Vanderbilt's life that came their way, as did the most influential account written before his death, by James Par-ton's
Famous Americans of Recent Times
(1867). This book is most useful as a description of how he was seen, not how he lived. Nine years after Vanderbilt's death, William A. Croffut published the lightweight volume
The Vanderbilts and the Story of their Fortune
(1886). This work has some value, for Croffut spoke to Charles F. Deems, William H. Vanderbilt's Staten Island field hands, and others for their firsthand accounts, but it is in no sense a scholarly work, and can best be used to give shading to accounts from solid sources.

The twentieth century brought only a small improvement. In 1927, novelist Arthur D. H. Smith published the heavily fictionalized
Commodore Vanderbilt: An Epic of American Achievement
, followed in 1941 by Wayne Andrews's
Vanderbilt Legend: The Story of the Vanderbilt Family
. Andrews offered endnotes, a rarity in books about Vanderbilt, though he based his work almost entirely on press accounts. As such, its main value is as a guide to newspaper stories about the Commodore.

In 1942 came the most important biography of Vanderbilt to date: Wheaton J. Lane's
Commodore Vanderbilt: An Epic of the Steam Age
. Lane, an authority on the history of transportation, adopted a serious approach to his subject, focusing overwhelmingly on his business career. He acquired access to business records and tracked down many examples of the relative handful of Vanderbilt's surviving letters. As a business historian, he wrote with none of the angry tone that emerged out of the populist and radical movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—perhaps best exemplified by Gustavus Myers's
History of the Great American Fortunes
(1910), and Matthew Josephson's
The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861–1901
(1934). Lane placed Vanderbilt's business operations in their contemporary context, and revealed much about his historical significance.

Important as it is, this book also suffers serious flaws. As of this writing, it is nearly seven decades old. A great deal of historical research and analysis has been conducted in the interim, rendering Lane's account obsolete. His narrative of Vanderbilt's career through 1848 is gravely incomplete, particularly with reference to his involvement with Daniel Drew and in New England's early railroads. His discussion of the Nicaragua years fails to identify the great divide that opened early on between Vanderbilt and Joseph L. White, or the true nature of the relationship between the steamship magnates and William Walker. His narrative of Vanderbilt's creation of the New York Central empire better stands the test of time, but it, too, is incomplete, missing much of the Commodore's patient diplomacy and the extent to which Horace F. Clark operated on his own at the end of his life.

In terms of construction, Lane's book is a narrowly conceived piece of business history, paying limited attention to Vanderbilt's personal life, and often none at all to the larger historical context, such as the political and cultural issues that have occupied so much space in these pages. It segments Vanderbilt's different ventures by chapter, so that the reader is left without an understanding of his career's intensity as he engaged in multiple operations—and battled multiple foes—simultaneously. Finally, it frustratingly offers no endnotes. Rather, it provides bibliographic summaries for each chapter in the backmatter. Numerous quotes appear throughout the narrative without a clue as to what source they came from. Even worse, it frequently relies on unsourced and unreliable accounts, uncritically reprinting anecdotes and dialogue from Parton, Croffut, and Henry Clews, as well as obituaries and other apocryphal sources. That said, it remains the touchstone for any study of Vanderbilt's life.

Since Lane's work, there has been only one adult biography dedicated to the Commodore alone (as opposed to accounts of the Vanderbilt family as a whole). It is Edward J. Renehan Jr.'s
Commodore: The Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
(New York: Basic Books, 2007). I had completed a draft of my own manuscript when this work appeared, and drew nothing from it; any similarities are entirely coincidental. I find
Commodore
to be a problematic work at best, based almost entirely on secondary sources, largely lacking annotation, and suffering numerous factual errors. I cannot verify many of the primary sources that Renehan does cite, and find that he mischaracterizes a number of those that I could locate.

Renehan writes that he discovered the privately held diaries of sleeping-car manufacturer Webster Wagner and Dr. Jared Linsly, Vanderbilt's personal physician. Renehan claims that Linsly's diary reveals that Vanderbilt contracted syphilis in 1839, began to suffer syphilitic dementia in 1868, and died of the disease. He further asserts, citing both these diaries, that William H. Vanderbilt used his father as a figurehead from 1868 on, treating the demented and uncomprehending Commodore as a puppet while William secretly ran his affairs.

I feel compelled to discount the validity of these diaries, and I find Renehan's assertions to be untenable. First, Renehan's claims are contradicted by an immense body of evidence, both medical and historical. There is no room here for a full discussion of the body of scientific knowledge of syphilis, but suffice it to say that Renehan's account conflicts with both recent medical literature and that written before effective treatment, when many patients were studied through the full life cycle of the disease. A doctor in 1839 would likely not have distinguished syphilis from gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted diseases, so any diagnosis would have meant little. Even if Vanderbilt did contract syphilis, he never developed syphilitic dementia, or “general paresis,” to use the technical term (which only afflicted a small minority of syphilis victims). General paresis follows a well-documented course that is completely out of keeping with Vanderbilt's late-life history. Most important is the total lack of corroboration for Renehan's claims. Vanderbilt was a national celebrity, in the public eye on an almost daily basis;
no
observers noticed the distinctive abnormalities caused by general paresis, or even the loss of mental acuity. Both private and public records show him in full command of himself and his businesses, except as he chose to delegate to others. And William traveled to Europe more than once during his father's final decade, which he hardly would have done if he were secretly manipulating a demented father as his puppet.
^*

Second, Renehan has not allowed verification of his sources. I asked to examine his copy of the diaries, and offered to sign a written agreement to protect his right to first publication of any findings. He declined. When I asked the names of the owners, he refused to provide them. He claimed that he had promised each of them confidentiality an arrangement I had never heard of before with holders of historic papers. He promised to contact them for me, but told me they were all very old. I heard no more from him.

Claims based on unauthenticated papers cannot be considered
information
. The most basic scholarly standards require that sources be available for scrutiny and verification by independent parties before they can be accepted. Renehan has chosen to make that impossible.

Finally, Renehan's credibility has been impeached by subsequent developments. In 2008, he pleaded guilty to two felonies, a federal charge of transporting stolen property across state lines, and a New York State charge of third-degree grand larceny, and was sentenced to eighteen months in federal prison. These criminal convictions stemmed from the theft of letters written by George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt from the Theodore Roosevelt Association, during the period when Renehan was acting director of the organization. According to press reports, state and federal authorities believe that he forged a document to establish his ownership of the stolen letters, sold three of them through an auction house for nearly $100,000, and came under suspicion when he attempted to sell a fourth. (See
Newsday
, March 22, 27, April 21, June 14, September 20, 2008.) Renehan explained his conduct by claiming that he suffered from untreated bipolar disorder during this period, saying that he felt “invulnerable and answerable to no one.” (See
Providence Journal
, May 29, 2008; also
New York Sun
, June 23, 2008.) Though his crimes do not pertain directly to
Commodore
, he committed them at the time he was writing that book. Together with the untenable nature of his claims for his sources, his insistence on keeping them secret, and his own description of his state of mind, this affair raises serious doubts about these purported diaries.

THIS BOOK RELIES ON
numerous manuscript collections, many of which have never been cited in a Vanderbilt biography before. I will review only a few of the most significant, beginning with Part One of this book.

I am convinced that no history of American business in the first half of the nineteenth century (and perhaps the second half as well) that touches in any way on New York can be written without consulting the Old Records Division of the New York County Clerk's Office, 31 Chambers Street, 7th floor. It was central not only to my discovery of raw facts about Vanderbilt and his friends and allies, but also to the portrait I paint of America's emerging economic culture. I happened upon it by accident, and ended up spending many months conducting research there. I was helped by the highly professional archivists, Joseph Van Nostrand, Bruce Abrams, David Brantley Robert Soenarie, Eileen McAleavey, and Annette Joseph, who have in their care the four-hundred-year legal history of New York City. Since legal papers find their way to the Old Records Division willy-nilly, the historian works alongside citizens in search of certified copies of divorce decrees from a few years before, lawyers seeking filings from long-running lawsuits, and the occasional private investigator. The papers I examined showed the inner workings of many of Vanderbilt's operations, from his takeover of the Staten Island Ferry in 1838 to conversations with angry passengers who had been stranded in Nicaragua. More than that, they revealed a time when insider trading, noncompetition deals, and market-division agreements were not only legal but sometimes enforced by the courts. Not all the documents are so rich; many are simple lawsuits over unpaid promissory notes. But it is worth the effort to find the gems.