The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (42 page)

On October 22, 1851, Vanderbilt embarked on his final voyage to Nicaragua. His three trips neatly adumbrated the enormous effort he had put into his California line, for they were in turn geographical, political, and commercial—or, perhaps, maritime—in nature. First he had gone to scout the canal and transit route, next to create the corporate body of Accessory Transit, and last to crush his competitors. Unlike Law or William H. Aspinwall, the Commodore was a technical master of steam navigation, and it was to trumpet his prowess that he personally took the
Central America
to Nicaragua. The 375-ton steamboat trailed in the wake of the new
Daniel Webster
, sister ship to the
Prometheus
, sailing on its maiden voyage. It was another day of four simultaneous steamship departures; a huge crowd pushed onto the slips, and some of the onlookers even climbed wood piles and heaps of coal to get a look. “No sooner were the vessels observed to be moving from their berths,” the
New York Tribune
reported, “than parting cheers began to be exchanged between the people on board and those on shore, which were heartily renewed and continued till the increasing distance… rendered them inaudible.”
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Decades later, Vanderbilt's clerk, Lambert Wardell, would describe the Commodore as a man who couldn't be bothered with details. Clearly that was not true in 1851. The millionaire checked and double-checked the two stout hawsers that ran out over the stern to the
Central America
, as the
Daniel Webster
paddled through the Atlantic swell. Towing the boat onto the ocean was highly risky, as he had often been told before leaving New York. “All the ‘knowing ones,’” Vanderbilt wrote, “and particularly those of the greatest experience of the seafaring part of the community, pronounced it to be impossible.” The critics gave the
Central America
six hours before it swamped.

That evening, the water grew restless, then rough. After nightfall, the sea lashed out violently. Vanderbilt made his way across the tossing deck to the stern and learned that one of the hawsers had snapped. “This would have been the last of the tow had I not been here,” he declared. As always, the moment of crisis—of physical danger—showed the Commodore at his finest. He ordered the
Daniel Webster
to slacken its speed and personally directed the crew as they attached a new cable in the darkness, amid crashing waves and a soaking spray. The
Webster
went ahead again, and the new line held. The crisis had passed.
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On November 2, Vanderbilt arrived at Greytown and piloted the
Central America
into the San Juan River. Now came the second moment of danger. “She is a large vessel to get up through this river, drawing about four feet of water,” he wrote to a friend in New York, “when you know I never pretended, nor do I now, to navigate it with a greater draught of 20 to 22 inches, which is the draught of the small iron steamers now navigating it.” After a hard struggle, he made it through on November 19, and the
Central America
began to carry five hundred passengers at a time across the rough waters of Lake Nicaragua. “The steamer will now always be in readiness on the Lake,” he wrote to the
New York Tribune
, “which will hereafter remedy the former delays of the line.”
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His mission accomplished, Vanderbilt descended the now-familiar river to Greytown. With the increasing traffic across the isthmus, Americans hoping to profit from the migration had swelled the village. They met with frustration. Few passengers stopped in town; most transferred directly between the steamships and the riverboats. Accessory Transit set up its facilities across the harbor, at Punta Arenas. Exasperated municipal officials began to pester steamship and riverboat captains to pay port fees, only to be ignored—in part because the officials were black Jamaicans and the captains white Americans, and in part because the British had stipulated, as Sir Henry Lytton Bulwer had informed Daniel Webster, “All vessels or goods connected with the Nicaraguan Canal Company going up the River San Juan should be admitted free of duty.”
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On November 21, a well-satisfied Vanderbilt stepped aboard the
Prometheus
from one of the Accessory Transit Company's riverboats tied alongside. With him came some five hundred passengers traveling from California, who flocked through the ship, dropping bags in their cabins or claiming berths in steerage. At two in the afternoon, as Captain Henry Churchill was about to give orders for departure, a boat rowed over from Greytown and disgorged the port collector, Robert Coates. As on four previous occasions, Coates demanded port fees. This infuriated Vanderbilt; he had been assured by Lord Palmerston himself in London that his ships would be free from municipal interference. “I cannot nor will not recognize any authority here,” he snapped, “and I will not pay unless I am made by force.” The crew bundled Coates and his entourage off the
Prometheus
. Unnoticed by Vanderbilt, Coates notified the British consul, who dispatched a messenger to the British warship
Express
, anchored offshore.
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“I hove up my anchor and dropped down the harbor with the current, having alongside one of the river steamers, receiving from her the baggage of the passengers,” Captain Churchill reported later that day. “The English brig-of-war, lying a short distance from us, immediately got under weigh, made sail for us, and when within a quarter of a mile from us fired a round-shot over the forecastle, not clearing the wheelhouse over ten feet.”

Stunned, Vanderbilt and the passengers watched as smoke again billowed from the warship's gunports, and a moment later heard the cannon's boom and the dull whir of a second ball rocketing over the stern, “so near that the force of the ball was distinctly felt by several passengers,” Churchill wrote. When he sent a boat over to ask the reason for the shots, “the captain stated that it was to protect the authorities of Greytown in their demands, and if we did not immediately anchor he would fire a bombshell into us, and ordered his guns loaded with grape and canister shot.”

Some of the passengers, filled with fury at the bully Britain, demanded that they risk it. But Vanderbilt told the captain to steam back into the harbor and anchor, as the Royal Navy had ordered. (To pile on insult to American pride, the British sent over a detachment to see that the
Prometheus
's boiler fires were extinguished.) Then the Commodore went ashore to pay $123 to the triumphant Greytown authorities.
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No sooner had the
Prometheus
returned to the United States than news of the affair prompted a national wave of indignation. Americans had a clear sense of inferiority toward Britain that, together with a belligerent pride in the superiority of their republican institutions, primed them for outrage. And it
was
an outrage. A British warship had shot at an unarmed American passenger ship, had threatened to destroy it and kill hundreds of civilians. The order to fire came from the British consul, James Green, in violation of treaty and explicit assurances from London.

Joseph White carried an official protest from the American Atlantic & Pacific Ship Canal Company to Washington (oddly, as the canal company was not involved). The United States government demanded an explanation from London, and dispatched the USS
Saranac
to Greytown. Newspapers across the country voiced anger, even a willingness to go to war with the British Empire. “The outrage upon the
Prometheus
demands the most ample apology and reparation,” proclaimed the
New York Herald
, “or it demands the application of the Jacksonian doctrine of retaliation and reprisals.”
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As luck would have it, the British cabinet was in a state of turmoil. On December 21, Lord Russell dismissed Palmerston from the Foreign Office; his replacement, Lord Granville, eventually wrote to Washington, “Her Majesty's Government have no hesitation in offering an ample apology for that which they consider to have been an infraction of Treaty engagements.” The onus fell on the Greytown consul, James Green, but the ultimate victim may have been Frederick Chatfield, the British viceroy in Central America who had charted an aggressively anti-American course. London recalled him, even though he had not taken direct part in the affair. The real result of the near bombardment of Cornelius Vanderbilt, then, was a more stable diplomatic environment.
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In his war with George Law, he had gained another advantage.

IF THERE WAS ONE RELIGIOUS RITE
that Vanderbilt believed in, it was marriage. Weddings brought him sons-in-law—and sons-in-law made trustworthy assistants, which were hard to find in the treacherous business world at mid-century. Vanderbilt's own sons sorely disappointed him, but his daughters gave him a steady succession of replacements in the form of their husbands. In the end, he would rely on no son-in-law, not even Daniel Allen, more than Horace F. Clark.

Clark exuded ambition from every pore—ambition in politics, ambition in business, ambition in society. Born in 1815 to a respected clergyman in Southbury Connecticut, he graduated from Williams College and began to practice law in New York in 1837. In 1848 he joined the firm of Charles A. Rapallo, the Commodore's attorney. Round-faced and wide-eyed, Clark pursued high-profile cases—demanding, for example, that famous writer Nathaniel P. Willis hand over letters written to Willis by a client's wife. Clark threw himself into Democratic Party politics alongside such luminaries as August Belmont. Above all, he tried to climb in social standing. George Templeton Strong derided him in 1851 as “that snob of snobs”—not in the sense of one who condescends, as the word would later mean, but one who sucks up insufferably. A dictionary of that era defined “snob” as “a person who looks up to his or her social betters and tries to copy or associate with them.” So when Clark married Maria Louise Vanderbilt on April 13, 1848, on a Thursday evening several months before the California gold rush changed the world, it was undoubtedly a wedding in keeping with the customs of New York's social elite, even if that elite shunned the event itself.
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Years after the wedding, a story would circulate about Clark's request for the Commodore's permission to marry Louise (as she was called). Vanderbilt assumed the lawyer was after his wealth, and curtly refused. “The impetuous Horace, with more emphasis than elegance, told him to take his money and be d——d, he would have the girl anyhow,” a newspaper later wrote. “Whereupon the Commodore, always an admirer of pluck and perseverance, quickly relented and consented to the union.” The story sounds suspiciously like something that a self-admiring man like Clark might tell of himself. He was too smart a Yankee not to see, and take advantage of, his new connection; and Vanderbilt was smart enough to see how useful Clark could be to him. The new son-in-law boasted strengths in precisely the areas where Vanderbilt felt most vulnerable—those requiring great learning, such as the law, public speaking, and politics, areas in which his business increasingly carried him.
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If the Commodore felt a growing appreciation for his new son-in-law, he seethed at the son who bore his own name. When Cornelius Jeremiah came to the wedding in his father's house at 10 Washington Place, the father boiled over. In the midst of the reception, this finely calibrated social event, he lashed out at his son with his fists. “The Commodore tried to do something to Cornelius,” son-in-law James Cross recalled, and Corneil “fled from the house.” The specific cause is unclear. The incident occurred before Vanderbilt sent Corneil to California, but perhaps the boy already showed some of the character flaws that later became so pronounced.

Corneil returned from California in 1849 with something broken inside of him. It was the gear that connects labor with reward, diligence with satisfaction. Perhaps it had never worked properly in the first place, but the land of excitement and easy money had ruined it for good. Back on the Atlantic coast, he drew another draft on his father, which his father also refused to pay. He then agreed to seek treatment in an asylum. It did not help. He began to disappear into card and roulette-wheel saloons, only to emerge penniless. He developed a taste for fine clothes—a black silk tie, white watered silk vest, black frock coat, and kid gloves—but he neglected to pay for them, causing his creditors to pester the Commodore with the bills (unsuccessfully). Vanderbilt had given his own name to this boy, only to see him become everything he despised: sickly, weak, spendthrift, dishonest, dishonorable.
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William H. Vanderbilt—or Billy, as the Commodore still called him—had said nothing about his father's outburst at the wedding. He knew better than to try to fight such abuse, which he himself still received during his father's regular visits to Staten Island. Billy continued to complain to Daniel Allen about “the old man.” Vanderbilt had exiled Billy to a farm, yet harshly rebuffed his requests to borrow money to improve the place. “He would say of his father that he was mean,” Allen later recalled, “that he couldn't get anything out of him and couldn't get along without money.” As a prosperous businessman as well as a brother-in-law, Allen was always willing to help, loaning a few hundred dollars here and there, which Billy repaid promptly. Very likely it was Allen who brought Billy into his first joint business venture with his father, the ill-fated California Navigation Company (under which they had shipped the disassembled steamboat to San Francisco at the start of the gold rush).
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Gradually—and almost unnoticed by the Commodore—the supposedly meek, soft son turned his farm into a profitable operation. “He was a hard master to work for,” one field hand told W. A. Croffut, the nineteenth-century biographer. Knowing that new workers tried to make a good impression on their first day, Billy “would count the number of rows of corn they had hoed, and then require them to do the same amount of work every day”
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