The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (67 page)

But the seriousness of the crisis could not be denied. A panic seized Wall Street as stocks fell, banks called in loans, and depositors withdrew money and hoarded gold. “I believe my assets to be reduced fifty per cent, at least,” Strong wrote in his diary. “But I hope I can still provide wholesome training for my three boys. With that patrimony they can fight out the battle of life for themselves.”
¹⁶

Soon the battle of life would seize Vanderbilt's own sons in ways that he could not have predicted in April 1861. For the time being, he had to attend in person to the battle with the Confederacy. Curiously, William C. Jewett (Cornelius Garrison's son-in-law) wrote to Vanderbilt about a “report you are disposed to aid the South.”
¹⁷
Quite the opposite was true—but purely selfish interests, not patriotism, first propelled him into wartime affairs. After consulting with William Aspinwall, Vanderbilt wrote to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles on April 16, under the letterhead of the Atlantic & Pacific Steamship Company, 177 West Street. “The shippers of specie by our line,” he observed, “are apprehensive that our steamers may be seized or robbed on their voyage from Aspwinall to New York, unless some special provision be made for their safety.” Vanderbilt wanted the government to equip each of the company's ships with a cannon, along with one hundred rifles. “These arms, in the hands of passengers such as ordinarily travel over this route, will be a sufficient protection against any pirate or privateer,” he wrote, thinking perhaps of the hardened Californians who had gone straight from the gold fields to Walker's army.

His concern was well founded. The next day, a group of New York's merchants and bankers begged Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase to place guns on Vanderbilt's ships, noting that they carried “$40,000,000 of gold annually from San Francisco to this port.… The capture of even one of these steamers,” they argued, “would stop shipments of gold from San Francisco, or at any rate divert the flow of treasure from New York to foreign countries.”

The Commodore's quick response to the crisis prevented the capture of one ship, the
Daniel Webster;
he diverted it from its voyage to New Orleans, where the rebels had planned to seize it on April 22. But the danger remained. On April 17, Confederate president Jefferson Davis authorized Southern privateers to attack Northern merchantmen. In June, Captain Raphael Semmes escaped the blockade of Southern ports in the CSS
Sumter
, the first Confederate commerce raider. It would not be the last. Indeed, Semmes would become a personal problem for Cornelius Vanderbilt.
¹⁸

Meanwhile, New York's wealthy men took in hand the problem of mobilization. Before the end of April, they organized the Union Defense Committee, with an office at 30 Pine Street. The members comprised a roster of the city's patriarchs: John J. Astor, Moses Taylor, Moses H. Grinnell, Alexander T. Stewart, Samuel Sloan, William E. Dodge, and nineteen others, of both parties. They raised regiments of volunteers; purchased arms, uniforms, and supplies; issued passes for travel to Washington; and generally assumed governmental functions.
¹⁹

To a great extent, this was inevitable. The limited government inherited by Lincoln's administration lacked the financing, the manpower, even the organizational capacity to undertake a major war. The federal budget for 1860 had amounted to just $63 million. (The annual figure would grow to more than $1 billion by the end of the war.) Only sixteen thousand men filled the regular army, and they were dispersed across the western frontier. The navy floated just forty-two ships, not all of them ready for service. Though the army boasted some highly professional quartermasters, they had never dealt with the demands now imposed on them; as James McPherson writes, “The War Department slumbered in ancient bureaucratic routine.” States and private citizens
had
to assume responsibilities ordinarily reserved for the national government.
²⁰

Vanderbilt did not join the Union Defense Committee. He never joined civic organizations or loaned his name to charitable bodies. In part, he hated the formality of the proceedings; in part, he was too proud to be a rank-and-file volunteer. “When the rebellion broke out in 1861 and Mr. Vanderbilt was waited upon by Moses Taylor to take some government bonds,” Lambert Wardell recalled, “he declined to do so, but later on was a large purchaser of the bonds, purely from the standpoint of speculation. It is believed that had the idea originated with him he would have taken the bonds in the first instance, but he was averse to playing second fiddle to Mr. Taylor.”
²¹

And yet, his patriotism remained as real and deep as on the day when he had driven Lafayette through the streets of New Brunswick. His opportunity to serve came as the Union prepared amphibious expeditions against the Southern coast. But he grew dissatisfied—even angry—as the War Department and navy began to charter his ships. “The moment a man comes to New York he is surrounded by a lot of thieves all the time, and in every shape and direction,” Vanderbilt told a committee of the House of Representatives later that year. Ship brokers swarmed around the federal officials in charge of the charters, inserting themselves as middlemen for either the government or the private owners.

“I am to give a man, one of these outside thieves,” Vanderbilt stated increduously “two and a half percent commission on that charter.”
²²
The idea offended both his patriotism and his sense of commercial justice—but he had a solution. On April 20, he wrote to Navy Secretary Welles, “I feel a great desire that the government should have the steamer
Vanderbilt
, as she is acknowledged to be as fine a ship as floats the ocean, and, in consequence of her great speed and capacity, that, with a proper armament, she would be of more efficient service in keeping our coast clear of piratical vessels than any other ship.” He suggested that the sale price be determined by any three men with the rank of commodore (still the highest in the navy), recommending the eminent Robert Stockton as one of them. “If this will not answer,” he added, “will the government accept her as a present from their humble servant?” In addition, he offered to sell the
Ocean Queen
, the
Ariel
, the
Champion
, and the
Daniel Webster
on the same terms.
²³

“There is no such water craft afloat, and I know it,” Vanderbilt later testified before Congress, speaking of the
Vanderbilt
. “But he [Welles] would not hear it, and did not answer my letter.” Instead, Welles wrote a note on May 2 to Captain Samuel L. Breese, commandant of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, saying he did not want the
Vanderbilt
. “The complement originally ordered is full,” he stated, and the great steamer was “of a larger and more expensive description than the service is supposed to require.”
²⁴

Why turn down a gift—the most “princely and munificent” ever offered by an individual to the government, in the words of the
New York Herald?
Perhaps Welles expected the war to end soon, as many did, and did not want to be left with an unnecessarily large and expensive-to-run ship. The secretary was also a man with a great deal of pride. The idea that his fleet needed Vanderbilt's help may have insulted him. Perhaps most important, there was tension between the War Department and the navy. Much of the chartering of merchant ships was not conducted by naval personnel; and Welles seems to have viewed all transactions with commercial men with a bit of cynical distaste.

So the
Vanderbilt
would
not
be “at the head of the navy, where she ought to be,” as its owner believed. Instead, it would be chartered as a mere transport, along with most of the sidewheelers run by the Atlantic & Pacific Steamship Company, as the “outside thieves” collected their 2.5 percent and drove up the price. Vanderbilt received $2,000 a day for his great ship; in the end, the federal government would pay him a total of $303,589.10 for the use of that vessel alone—approximately one-third of its original cost. Yet even this fee was not as unreasonable as it might seem. Vanderbilt paid all costs of operation, which could amount to $600 a day under ordinary circumstances, and bore all risks except for actual combat; the peculiar demands of wartime operations could raise that operating cost far higher. (Boiler fires had to be kept burning at all times, for example, to allow for a quick escape or to avoid collision in a dense fleet.) The charge of extortionate pricing would prove persistent, but it was not well founded. In any case, he never wanted to charter his steamers in the first place. “The fact is, I would rather sell every ship I have,” he testified. “I, myself, am not a fair criterion for other men. I would rather sell my ships than let them remain in the government employ until they earn their whole value and then have the ships and the money too.”

He did finally sell two boats to the navy in 1861—two boats he did not want to let go: the
Clifton
and the
Westfield
, of the Staten Island Railroad ferry, for $90,000 each. The navy's agent was George D. Morgan, cousin to Governor Edwin D. Morgan of New York and brother-in-law to Gideon Welles—who took his 2.5 percent. As Vanderbilt wisely observed, New York had thieves in every shape and direction.
²⁵

WAR BROUGHT
George Washington Vanderbilt home.

On July 1, 1860, he had graduated from West Point after the standard five years. (George Custer graduated in 1861 in the first four-year class.) The regular army was stingy with promotions—so stingy that it did not even grant him the rank of second lieutenant, the very lowest for commissioned officers. Instead, it named him brevet (honorary) second lieutenant. He was dispatched to Fort Dalles in Oregon, where there recently had been hostilities with Indians. He had arrived on December 4, 1860, only to be recalled on January 28. Posted to Fort Columbus on Governors Island, he finally received the full rank of second lieutenant in the 10th Infantry Regiment on February 27, 1861. With the outbreak of war, the army assigned him to the unglamorous task of training the recruits who signed up by the thousands.
²⁶

Of the Commodore's three sons, George remains the most mysterious. William was dutiful, diligent, and dull, the colorless farmer and manager whose profile steadily rose higher without ever seeming any larger. Corneil flared fitfully into public view, with his epileptic fits, episodic gambling, and artful begging from prominent men. But George exists in the historical record as little more than a shadow, defined largely in contrast to his brothers. He was brave and strong and manly, legend tells us, the pride of a father who wanted so much to have a Vanderbilt to be proud of. This comes to us as more an impression than even an anecdote, but perhaps it is true; William named a son after his brother, after all. But hidden by the warm glow of the honored memory of a Civil War veteran is lurking disappointment.

For one thing, George seems to have struggled at the Military Academy, where he graduated thirty-ninth out of forty-one, only one step above his lowest point. Custer, of course, graduated last in his class and still went on to fame in the war. But the two Georges had different fates. Hardly had the hostilities begun than the Commodore's son found himself standing before a court-martial. On the afternoon of May 16, he had disappeared from his training duties at Fort Columbus. He had returned the next day without explanation. At his trial on May 29, he made no defense, and was sentenced to one month of confinement to the fort, after which he returned to duty.

The conviction seems to have marked him. Though it is always difficult to understand why a military bureaucracy treats any individual the way it does, the army shunted him aside, despite its need for every regular army officer it could find, as it created hundreds of new regiments of U.S. Volunteers (temporary units for the duration of the war). Men such as Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, West Pointers who had retired after rising no higher than captain or lieutenant, returned to service and rapidly became generals. But the army sent George to Boston. There, on September 1, he took charge of the recruiting station, replacing an officer who was given command of his own regiment. It appeared that if the Vanderbilts were to gain any glory in the Civil War, the aged Commodore would have to win it for himself.
²⁷

IT HAD BEEN A YEAR
of defeat upon defeat. Bull Run, Wilson's Creek, Ball's Bluff, and Lexington, Missouri: such was the legacy that Edwin M. Stanton inherited when he took office as secretary of war in January 1862. Overbearing, incisive, and fiercely honest, this former U.S. attorney general brought a determination to reform a department demoralized by the inefficiency and corruption that had prevailed under his predecessor, Simon Cameron. “Stanton impresses me and everybody else most favorably,” wrote Strong. That ubiquitous observer met Stanton in Washington on January 29. “Not handsome, but on the contrary, rather pig-faced. At lowest estimate, worth a wagon load of Camerons. Intelligent, prompt, clear-headed, fluent without wordiness, and above all, earnest.”
²⁸

As his secretaryship began, Stanton could count a rising number of victories and advantages. Even before he came into office, amphibious expeditions had captured key fortifications along the Southern coastline. In February, General Ulysses S. Grant won rousing twin victories at forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee. And General George B. McClellan now commanded the Army of the Potomac, which he organized, trained, and equipped superbly. McClellan planned a new offensive against the Confederate capital, Richmond, Virginia. He would land his army at Fortress Monroe, at the tip of the peninsula that extended east from Richmond between the York and James rivers. From Monroe (still in federal hands), he would strike west. In March, swarms of men loaded dozens of ships with arms and supplies as the great expedition prepared for departure.