The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (59 page)

“Yes,” came the reply.

“Come on board,” Spencer said.

Kruger followed him to the top deck, “and was immediately surrounded by Costa Rican officers,” he later reported, “who had been lying down flat on deck, concealed from view. Mr. Spencer then told me that he had taken all of the steamers and was in command of all the river.” Spencer declared that he had seized the boats in the name of Commodore Vanderbilt, and he demanded the surrender of the fort. Kruger balked, but the steamboat crew told him about the Costa Rican force hidden in the trees. “Mr. Spencer told me (when I hestitated) that the innocent blood of my men would fall on my head, as we would certainly be put to death by the Costa Ricans,” Kruger recalled. “I concluded to surrender.”
⁶¹

Spencer's coup was almost complete. Mora's army arrived on December 31, whereupon Spencer and a detachment of troops boarded a small riverboat to go find the
San Carlos
, the largest and last uncaptured lake steamer. On January 3, the two boats encountered each other on the upper reaches of the San Juan River. The result was a repeat of his previous encounters: Spencer gave the correct signals, the boats came alongside, and the Costa Rican soldiers rose from hiding, rifles ready. The
San Carlos's
captain surrendered without a fight. Spencer went aboard and read aloud a proclamation from President Mora, promising safe passage to the passengers. He also tacked up a notice. “Gentlemen: Do not be deceived or induced to enter into any combination to take this boat out of my possession. I am amply prepared for any emergency that may arise. Keep quiet, behave as gentlemen should, and I pledge you my sacred word and honor to see you safe through to Greytown.” The Costa Ricans posted a guard in the main saloon, behind a barricade of piled-up trunks and baggage.

Spencer had carried out Vanderbilt's plan with exceptional skill and courage. Apart from the brutal storming of Hipp's Point, he had used speed and guile to achieve a sweeping—and bloodless—victory. As the
San Carlos
steamed down the river, Charles Morgan's son-in-law, Israel Harris, came forward. “We had you once, now you have us,” he said to Spencer. “We are even.”
⁶²

*
The modern spelling is “Goicuria,” but this book will follow historic sources, both English and Spanish.

Chapter Twelve

CHAMPION

“T
his famous pretended experiment for the spread of Anglo-Saxon enterprise and civilization at the point of a bayonet,” declared the
New York Tribune
, “and for introducing free institutions into Central America through the medium of a military despotism, has ended in blood, murder, rapine.” With these words, Horace Greeley succinctly described William Walker's reign in Nicaragua. But it had not ended quite yet. On January 27, 1857, the day this editorial appeared, the final siege of Rivas began.
¹

After Spencer's capture of the steamers and forts on the San Juan River, General Mora loaded most of his troops onto the steamboats and crossed Lake Nicaragua, where he joined the allied army encircling the filibuster stronghold. Walker would receive no reinforcements or supplies from the Atlantic—or from the Pacific, because Garrison diverted his ships to Panama as soon as he learned of Spencer's exploits.
²
February, March, April—the siege of Rivas ground on. Finally an American naval officer, Lieutenant Charles H. Davis, intervened. He shuttled between the two camps and negotiated an agreement. On May 1, Walker surrendered to Davis, who conducted the filibusters through the allied lines. Walker departed Nicaragua.
³

“The most disastrous blunder of Walker,” observed the
New York Herald
, “was his
coup d'etat
against ‘the house of Vanderbilt.’” The Commodore's role in Spencer's mission was suspected by the press as soon as the first reports reached New York in January. Then again, the newspapers imagined that the steamship tycoons were behind everything from the start. Ignoring evidence that Walker, Randolph, and the Central Americans had driven events, they called the conflict the “war of the commodores.” They even claimed, mistakenly, that George Law intrigued for the Nicaragua route. (The most he did was to sell rifles to Parker French.) In Spencer's case, however, the press was correct. The filibusters themselves stressed Vanderbilt's importance. “Walker owes his defeat not to the natives of Central America, but to his own countrymen,” one wrote in 1859, “and had it not been for the malice or revenge of Vanderbilt, he might have reigned in Nicaragua at this day”
⁴

The filibusters based their entire movement on contempt for Spanish-speaking peoples, so they naturally underplayed the role of the “natives” in the war. In fact, the isthmian republics had fought hard and paid dearly. One British diplomat estimated that the war cost the lives of forty thousand Nicaraguans, Costa Ricans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Salvadorans. The Central American soldiers who survived filibuster gunfire and outbreaks of cholera carried disease home, causing epidemics. The war bankrupted Costa Rica (despite Vanderbilt's aid), which prompted murmurs of dissent against President Mora. But the greatest suffering was inflicted on Nicaragua, where one city embodied the death and destruction that Walker had strewed about him. “Granada… presents, with her demolished houses and masses of ruined citizens, a consummate picture of misery and distress,” wrote a correspondent for the
New York Herald
. “Walker, in burning and in the destruction of Granada, has earned a notoriety which for ages to come the historian will chronicle with infamy and horror.”
⁵

And yet, it cannot be denied that Vanderbilt played a decisive role in Walker's downfall. He had found the filibuster's weak point, crafted the plan to strike it, selected the agent to carry out the operation, and paid its costs. The Central Americans likely would have won in the long run without his help—but with it, they won in the short run. “Mr. Vanderbilt… has shown the ablest generalship,” the London
Times
observed. “Walker's most formidable enemy has conducted the campaign from New York.”
⁶

He exacted revenge on Garrison and Morgan as well. Even before Spencer struck, Morgan had complained of the “large expenditures made to organize a line.” Morgan was so close-mouthed that it is difficult to know how much he had at stake; as the Mercantile Agency noted, with regard to the Morgan Iron Works, “The extent of their means is
a family secret
with Morgan.” But once the line collapsed, he could no longer conceal his need for cash. In April, he mortgaged his iron works for $317,500. In 1859, clerk Benjamin Voorhees testified that Morgan and Garrison “suffered a loss of about $300,000. I have been so assured by [Garrison] and from my own knowledge of his affairs. I believe it absolutely true.” This was a staggering figure—as large as the entire estates of many of New York's richest men. And Morgan continued to bleed as Vanderbilt competed against his Gulf Coast line, slashing fares by up to 90 percent.
⁷

Vanderbilt had wrought his revenge by guiding the military operations of a sovereign nation, at a cost of dozens of lives, through the instrument of a murderer on a jungle river a continent away from 10 Washington Place. His blow had captured international attention, alerting enemies present and future to just how far he would go to punish betrayal. But revenge didn't pay the servants. As
Harper's Weekly
asked, just before the filibusters surrendered, “When we have got rid of Walker, what next?”
⁸

ONE FRIGID EVENING IN JANUARY
, Vanderbilt, his brother Jacob, and a third man boarded a rowboat in the Hudson River at Hoboken, New Jersey. It may not have been in January of 1857—it may have been 1856 or 1855 or 1854—but what is certain is that the third man circulated the story of what happened that night. They were returning to New York from a corporate board meeting in New Jersey. It was late, and Vanderbilt did not want to wait for a ferry. So he hired the craft and took a seat in the stern as two boatmen pulled on the oars. They rowed into a dense mat of slush. It was rapidly getting darker and colder. The slush was hardening. A chunk of ice floating with the current plowed through and cracked dangerously against the side of the boat.

“The Commodore had from the first sat quiet,” reported
Harper's Weekly
in 1859, “and his companions, who looked to him as their leader, had followed his example. At length he sprang up. ‘Boys,’ said he, cheerily, ‘this won't do. Give me an oar! Now you two,’ he added, addressing his brother and one of his friends, ‘take those oars and row’” At first the boatmen refused to give up control of the boat. Vanderbilt glared at them and said, in a low voice, “You keep out of my way, or you'll maybe come to grief.” Standing upright in the bitter cold, balancing on the gunwales, he plunged his oar in the water to serve as a rudder and guided the craft through the bombardment of ice floes until finally they docked, sometime around midnight. “One of the parties who shared the Commodore's society on that evening,”
Harper's
wrote, “has been heard to declare that he grew ten years older in the five or six hours they spent in the boat.”
⁹

Cornelius Vanderbilt remained a powerful physical presence, even in his sixties, as he prowled the city, straight and tall, his cravat around his neck, a cigar swiveling around in his mouth, wearing an air of profound confidence even in crises that threatened his survival. A mastery of physical danger can breed character, or it can breed a bully; it seems to have done a bit of both in the former boatman. It certainly made him a man whom contemporaries found striking. “One's first impression of Vanderbilt is that he is a man of steel,” one writer observed, fifteen years later. “There is a steely glint in his grayish-blue eyes that reinforces the impression.”
¹⁰

Character, judgment, self-possession—these rose in Vanderbilt's values as he gained eminence. More than that, he began to reveal strands of warmth and humanity in his soul; even strangers now remarked on “his extreme courtesy.” Such strands were gently pulled into view by Ellen Williams Vanderbilt, Corneil's wife. On February 12, 1857, for example, Vanderbilt did something very unusual: he wrote a letter in his own hand, to the Williams family in Hartford. His fondness for them, especially for his daughter-in-law, overflowed the page. He had sent a letter to “our Dear Ellen,” he said, by a messenger “who promised to deliver it with his own hand.… I am in hopes to spend an evening with you shortly when we can talk over matters & things. Please give my best regards to all the ladies. Tell Ellen to send her notes along. I like to read them.”

But these threads of warmth were wound around the steel core of a demanding father. The impetus for this letter came from his frustration with his son. “I this moment received a long letter from Cornelius in which he complains of Mr. Bond,” he wrote, “for something he dun on my account. All this looks like one of
Cornelius visions
.” This tantalizing choice of words hints that Vanderbilt still doubted his son's sanity, even after he had won his release from an asylum. The Commodore asserted that Mr. Bond felt great affection for the Williams family, “& if he did not he could not be a friend of mine for a moment. I think these few line should be all sufficient,” he added. “They air for the purpose of your correcting Cornl as his judgemint seams not to be mature upon all points. A great fault of his is to take disputes without sufficient cause.”
¹¹

This letter offers a flash of insight into Vanderbilt's own late-maturing notion of fatherhood. He flared with scorn for his son, yet also demonstrated genuine concern. He wanted to correct the troubled lad, to teach him judgment, coolness, character.

Soon after this note, the Commodore presented Corneil and Ellen with a “fine mansion,” together with an orchard, vineyard, garden, and hay-field, on a ridge overlooking Hartford. “There are few country seats in the land possessing equal attractions,” the
Hartford Courant
observed. “The rooms are uncommonly spacious.… The view of the city, of Hartford Rocky Hill, and of the valleys on both sides of the ridge is charming.”
¹²
The Commodore still shook his head over Corneil, but he made sure that Ellen would live in comfort. In fact, he gave the estate not to his son, but to his daughter-in-law, whom he trusted more than his own flesh and blood.

ON MARCH 9, 1857
, the
New York Tribune
announced the Supreme Court's decision in the Dred Scott case. “
THE TRIUMPH OF SLAVERY COMPLETE
,” declared one of its many headlines. The enslaved Scott had sued for his freedom on the grounds that he had resided in the free Wisconsin territory; Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled against him. Negroes, he wrote, “had no rights which a white man was bound to respect.” What shocked the majority of the Northern public was not the blatant racism, but the implication that free states had no power to bar slavery within their borders.
¹³

What Vanderbilt thought of the decision—or if he thought of it at all—is unknown. But his efforts to reopen the Nicaragua transit route would become entangled with the worsening sectional crisis, thanks in large part to two men: his son-in-law and advisor, Horace Clark, and the new president, James Buchanan. Just a few weeks shy of his sixty-sixth birthday, Buchanan was tall and portly, a deft Democratic politician who had leaped from the House to the Senate to posts as minister to Russia, secretary of state, and minister to Great Britain, winning the wry nickname “Old Public Functionary.” From beginning to end, his presidency would be defined by slavery. In the election of 1856, the new Republican Party had captured the northernmost tier of states on the pledge to stop its expansion; Buchanan had won only with the support of a nearly solid South. No one knew it better than the president, who sought to appease Dixie at every step.
¹⁴