Chapter Sixteen

AMONG FRIENDS

On December 11, 1867, Cornelius Vanderbilt ascended to the presidency of the New York Central. Less than five years after he had taken control of the New York & Harlem, he presided over the state's most important railroad—one of the nation's four trunk lines—as well as the lines that connected it to Manhattan. This conquest marked the culmination of the third and most important phase of his empire building. The Central would be the bastion of his realm, much as Prussia would be to the German empire that Otto von Bismarck constructed a few years later. Only now would he move toward the creation of the gigantic corporation—and system—that would seal his place in history.

The press accordingly gave him a new title: the Railroad King.¹ It was a rank (or insult) often handed to railway presidents, but increasingly it stuck to Vanderbilt, who was so different from his peers. Unlike Drew, he did not go into a railroad to manipulate its stock; unlike Keep, he did not go in on borrowed money and sell out when overmatched; unlike J. Edgar Thomson, he was not a professional executive, hired by the stockholders. He used his own cash to buy large blocks of shares, moved into the management to stay, and brought along his eldest son and sons-in-law. (Clark was now joined by Daniel Torrance, who took office as vice president of the Central.) Vanderbilt never liked the title of king, but it looked very much like he was building a kingdom.

And yet, historians have often erred in accounting for this conquest. It has been written that he assumed all but formal control of the Central at the conclusion of the blockade in January 1867.² In fact, he moved slowly and cautiously into the great trunk line over the eleven months that followed. True, the disgusted Henry Keep promptly withdrew from active management, but there is no sign that Vanderbilt simply assumed his place.³ To the contrary: on April 30, William wrote to James F. Joy, the president of the Michigan Central, to thank him for his help in clearing up a misunderstanding between the Hudson River and the New York Central—showing that Vanderbilt did not yet have even informal control of the larger line. But signs of growing influence, and stockholding, in the Central steadily accumulated.⁴

On July 25, Keep resigned the Central presidency, and was replaced by H. Henry Baxter. Eager to appease Vanderbilt, the directors voted to reconsider the Central's relations with the Hudson River Railroad and Daniel Drew's People's Line. Two days later, Erastus Corning's son overheard Vanderbilt advise a friend to buy Central stock. In August, the New York Times reported that the Central's new management had forged “a close alliance with the Vanderbilt roads.” Ominously for Drew, the Central decided to “cut loose from all connection with the Hudson River steamboats.”⁵

The latter statement would prove to be gravely portentous. The relationship between Vanderbilt and Drew had undergone a transformation of late, one that grew more dangerous with each passing month. Vanderbilt's acquisition of the Hudson River Railroad had broken their unwritten nonaggression pact—and their long-standing partnership—by pitting their interests against each other for the first time since their clash on the river three decades before. Drew's participation in the second Harlem corner had turned their rivalry into a matter of open combat. Vanderbilt's infiltration of the Central heightened tensions still further; as one newspaper reported, “Drew and Vanderbilt promise to fight it out on the Hudson River all summer.”⁶

The summer of 1867 served as a mere skirmish before the battle to come. Vanderbilt's ascension to the presidency of the Central would spark a fight so fierce, so enormous, so outlandish, that history would record it as a formal noun: the Erie War.

EVEN BEFORE THE COMMODORE assumed control of the New York Central, his historical legacy as a railroad king began to take shape. He would be no Leland Stanford, no James J. Hill, building transcontinental lines through thousands of miles of unsettled plains and mountains; rather, he would be a creator of the invisible world, a conjurer in the financial ether. What made him powerful—and controversial—was not his riches alone, but his mastery of the corporate golem.

For his first magic trick, he took what was one and made it two. On March 30, 1867, the Hudson River shareholders (himself foremost among them) approved his plan to nearly double the stock by issuing new shares worth $6,963,900 at par value.⁷ Called a stock dividend, it was similar to a stock split, an operation that would become common in the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, it sparked outrage. Charles F. Adams Jr. typified the reaction of orthodox thinkers when he called the transaction an “astounding” act of “financial legerdemain.”⁸ It seemed to unhinge the value of stock from the world of the concrete and real. Even now, the economic mind shrank before abstractions. Economists, moralists, and financiers alike expected stock to represent the original cost of physical construction and real property, at a rate of $100 per share, the standard par value. Even the most sophisticated thinkers refused to accept that stock could be increased at will, or that the market alone should determine the value of a share. The construction-based par value provided a reassuring sense that one could indeed find the honest, intrinsic, value apart from day-to-day market fluctuations, much like the gold that backed pre-greenback banknotes.

Stock that did not reflect construction costs was derided as “fictitious capital,” to use the formal term—or, more commonly, “watered stock,” which called up the image of livestock encouraged to gorge on water before weighing and sale at the market. By contrast, new stock was not seen as diluting share value if it reflected actual construction or additional real estate. This thinking explains the curious fact that bonds were often convertible into stock: if used to buy cars and engines, purchase land, or finance construction, then they represented an increase of real capital.⁹

Vanderbilt used this conventional wisdom to justify his stock dividend. He distributed the new shares to existing stockholders on a one-for-one basis, but required them to pay 54 percent of the par value (or $54 each). This money went to pay for the purchase of St. John's Park for $1 million and the building of a freight depot in place of its trees and flowers. The remaining 46 percent represented construction and rolling stock that had been paid for previously through the sale of bonds, now to be retired. And the Commodore and his son managed to pay 8 percent dividends even after doubling the stock, which tamped down criticism. “They have shown so much of practical ability in bringing up the [Harlem] to an 8 percent investment,” the Times wrote, “and of both ability and economy in making the Hudson River Road what is acknowledged to be… that this calculation was generally accepted as a sound opinion.” Cynical observers on Wall Street saw a stockjobbing ploy behind every corporate decision, but the Timesdemurred. “Mr. Vanderbilt emphatically declared that he should keep his present large holdings… to the close of his days, or so long as he is permitted to participate in the management of the property.”¹⁰

The Commodore also paid attention to the physical dimensions of his budding railroad system. In mid-1867, he realized that new construction would be necessary to integrate his two lines into Manhattan, to make the most efficient use of the strengths of each. The Hudson River had a level, double-tracked route with easy curves, allowing locomotives to pull more cars, use less fuel, and increase speed relative to other lines. It had access to the slips on the west side, convenient for freight handling. The Harlem possessed a portal in the center of Manhattan, which best served passengers. Vanderbilt planned a link between them close to the city: the Spuyten Duyvil Railroad, a short line that would curve along the Harlem River. The legislature chartered the company on April 24, and Vanderbilt took virtually all of the five thousand shares (later increased to a total of ten thousand, representing an investment of $1 million). Work would not begin until 1870, after a long struggle to secure the right of way, but the little line would prove to be an essential piece of Vanderbilt's kingdom.¹¹

Of course, both these tangible and intangible creations remained within the parochial confines of New York. It was the presidency of the Central that would make Vanderbilt a national figure again, by giving him control of one of the four trunk lines that crossed the Appalachians. But the very success of the railroads over the past decade presented the trunk lines with a conundrum: the center of population and commerce had drifted far beyond their western termini (Buffalo for the Central, for example, and Pittsburgh for the Pennsylvania). They now depended heavily on connecting lines to such cities as Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Chicago. Managing their relations with these often quarrelsome connections posed a serious problem.

When it became clear to Vanderbilt that he would gain control of the Central at its annual election in December, he began to address this delicate matter of railroad statecraft. The Central had two routes to Chicago: the North Shore and the South Shore, named for their relationship to Lake Erie. On the North Shore, the Central connected via the Suspension Bridge over the Niagara River to the Great Western Railway of Canada, which used a ferry at Detroit to tie into the Michigan Central, which ran through to Chicago. On the South Shore, a chain of roads ran from Buffalo to Toledo; from there the Michigan Southern & Northern Indiana extended to Chicago. Vanderbilt invested in some of the South Shore lines and placed men on their boards of directors as these companies began a process of consolidation with each other that would not be complete for another two years. When he prepared a list of directors for the Central election coming in December, he included Amasa Stone Jr., an important South Shore railroad man from Cleveland.¹²

These steps worried the North Shore men, namely James F. Joy and the New England investors who had hired him to manage the Michigan Central. They believed that Vanderbilt, as president of the New York Central, probably would discriminate in favor of his South Shore connections, since that was where he had invested his own money. “I had seen by the NY papers that Vanderbilt probably had the control of the NY Cenl,” Nathaniel Thayer, a Boston financier, wrote to Corning on November 26. “Two weeks ago Joy was in NY when Comodore [sic] V. sent for him.” Vanderbilt had reassured Joy that he could “depend upon a perfectly fair course being taken, and that he knew we could injure the NY Cenl. more than they could us. We shall soon see however what course they will take—and must act accordingly”¹³

Joy shared Thayer's suspicions, even after his conference with the Commodore. William hurried to reassure him. “I think you have in some way received an impression that the management of this & NY Cent roads desire to run their trains regardless of the connecting roads,” he wrote to Joy, under the letterhead of the Hudson River Railroad, “and I am most anxious to dispel any such ideas. I think we are fully aware of the importance of maintaining the most friendly relations with our connexions.”¹⁴

The words speak for themselves. As always, the Commodore relied first on diplomacy. Aware of the intricately interwoven web of railroad interests, he carefully avoided alienating his partners, even at the expense of some of his own investments. In the end, the Michigan Central's executives would admit that he remained fair and impartial with them. It may well be that he invested in the South Shore lines because that route was more troublesome than the North Shore (in which he would have to deal with only two well-run companies). That persistent problem in the railroad system—fragmentation—created complications on the South Shore that would grow into a crisis, one that would force Vanderbilt to conquer yet again. But not until after he had gone to war with Daniel Drew one last time.

JOY AND THAYER'S WORRIES spoke to the paradoxical nature of Vanderbilt's reputation at this critical moment. On the eve of his ascension to power in the New York Central, he already stood as an icon of the best and the worst in the new corporate economy. R. G. Dun & Co. summed up the contradiction on July 2, 1867, in that five-word description quoted previously: “Good as gold but sharp.” Good as gold, because none could deny Vanderbilt's “great skill, energy, experience, and business tact,” as a Buffalo newspaper wrote. “He is a shrewd, far-seeing, and far-reaching man.” Wall Street marveled at his accomplishment in turning the Harlem into a profitable, dividend-paying railroad. He won particular praise for his economical management. In the Harlem, he claimed to have reduced expenses by $1.6 million per year. In the Hudson River, he gave instructions to a similar end: “If we can do this business as cheaply as the boats, let us do it, and do it just as cheap as we can.”¹⁵

His honesty attracted great admiration, for this was an era when even the best corporate officials routinely engaged in self-dealing, as they had since the first appearance of railroads in the 1830s. In the Pennsylvania—called by Azariah Boody “the most perfect road in this country”—the highly professional president and vice president, J. Edgar Thomson and Thomas A. Scott, demanded kickbacks in the form of stock from outside contractors, such as sleeping-car and express companies. In the Central, Corning and other directors had ordered the company to purchase iron, goods, and services from their own firms. “The pecularity of Mr. Vanderbilt's railroad management,” Putnam's Monthly Magazine wrote, “is that, instead of seeking to make money out of the road in contracts and side speculations, he invests largely in the stock, and then endeavors to make the road pay the stockholders.” The only compensation he accepted as president of his roads was in dividends on his own shares. “I manage it [a railroad corporation] just as I would manage my individual property. That is my notion, and the way I think a railroad ought to be managed,” he told the assembly committee in February. When he did manipulate share prices, he only drove them up.¹⁶

But he was sharp. In March 1866, the American Phrenological Journal saw “Firmness” and “Self-Esteem” in the high crown of his skull. “His will, self-reliance, and ambition to achieve success are immense.” When he demonstrated those traits in the blockade of the Central, the non-phrenological press decided that they might not be so healthy for the public. “Mr. Vanderbilt is a bold, outspoken man, and, backed by immense private wealth, can afford to say and do things which ordinary and prudent railway people and even very respectable stockjobbers would hesitate to commit themselves,” the Times wrote on February 7, 1867. “As the Colossus of Roads, he thinks as little of defying public opinion as when he used to snap his fingers at the world of California travel when he was dictator of steamship competition.” The Round Table wrote of the blockade, “Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt proceeded to show to what sublimity of insolence the chieftains of the railway banditti have attained.… Railway wars, according to the Vanderbilt view, are to be waged against the passengers.”¹⁷

The enormous impact of this one man's decision to blockade the Central—even if it was short-lived—made him the personification of the unprecedented size and power of railroads. The Jacksonian fear of aristocracy and distrust of corporations reemerged in new form as the railroads became the only large-scale mode of transportation. Even before the blockade, the Times had singled out Vanderbilt for abuse in a scathing editorial, “The Tyranny of Corporations,” that was about these larger changes. “There is no nation on earth where they are so utterly under the control and at the mercy of gigantic corporations and monopolies as in the United States,” it claimed.

The tendency of power—of the modern aristocracy of capital—is toward disregard of individuals and individual convenience and comfort. We already begin to feel the first grindings of the approaching tyranny of capitalists or corporations.… Every public means of transit is in the hands of the tyrants of modern society—the capitalists.… Even the State Legislatures can barely hold their own against these powerful monopolies. They can bribe and bully and cajole, so as to squelch any bill directed against them.

In this essay, one can hear the writer straining to construct a new political matrix to account for conditions that antebellum Americans had only begun to glimpse in the 1850s. These words were heartfelt, but did not reflect a coherent critique of corporate power in a democratic society. The Times admitted, “It is no part of our present purpose to suggest a remedy. Indeed, we must frankly confess we see none.”¹⁸

Inconclusive as this outcry may have been, it appeared in one publication after another, often in the context of an attack on Vanderbilt. On December 15, 1866, Harper's Weekly published an essay titled “King Corporation,” arguing, “Some method must be devised of emancipating the country from the tyranny of these vast corporations.” The Cleveland Leader wrote on January 21, 1867, “The tendency of great railroad corporations has been to become monopolies of the most unblushing and reckless character.”¹⁹

On February 9, the Round Table published the lambasting of Vanderbilt quoted previously—but, unlike the Times or Harper's, it offered a solution: “Congress, under its power to regulate interstate commerce, is the only source whence effectual remedy can come.” Of course: this was the obvious method, if Americans truly wished to regulate railroads. Generally speaking, the railroad (with the telegraph) was the first kind of company to straddle state lines, and it nearly monopolized interstate commerce. But neither the government nor the public was ready for federal regulation. Despite the expansion of federal power during the war, Washington still lacked a nonpartisan, professional civil service that could undertake such a vast and complex task as overseeing the railroads. Nor did the political will for it exist yet. But it was coming.²⁰

None of this particularly mattered to the New York Central stockholders. The Vanderbilt they saw was the economical, energetic, far-seeing executive who promised to energize a leaderless trunk line. By the second week in November the Commodore had guaranteeed his success in the December election. To persuade the public—and his enemies—that he had widespread support, he and a party of socially prominent stockholders published a rather contrived exchange of letters. John Jacob Astor Jr., Edward Cunard, John Steward, and others in control of more than $13 million in stock formally asked Vanderbilt to lead the Central and enact “a thorough reformation in the management of its affairs.” He accepted.

In reprinting the correspondence, the New York Herald offered a pragmatic commentary. “That the result aimed at will be beneficial to the stockholders of all the roads mentioned cannot be doubted,” its financial writer said, “and although there is a look of monopoly about it, the practical effect may be unobjectionable to the public.”²¹ For the stockholders, this was all that mattered. If Vanderbilt truly was becoming society's new tyrant, at least he made the trains run on time—and profitably.

But there was another trunk line in New York, one in which Daniel Drew reigned as treasurer. In taking the Central, Vanderbilt would come to the conclusion that he must drive Drew off the Erie board. It would be the costliest mistake he ever made.

THE YEAR 1867 WAS ONE OF momentous business for one Cornelius Vanderbilt—and of momentous personal developments for three Cornelius Vanderbilts: the Commodore; his benighted son; and his grandson, the oldest of William's four male children. “Handsome, serious, high-minded, industrious, efficient, and thorough,” Louis Auchincloss describes the grandson—Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr., as he was now known. He “got on well with his grandfather—no easy task.” The well-educated scion of Staten Island had started out at the Shoe and Leather Bank in New York. After a certain period, the Commodore saw that he received a position at the banking and brokerage house of Kissam Brothers, and then he brought him in to work for the Harlem Railroad.²²

The Commodore took a special interest in his namesake. Since young Cornelius was the presumed heir of the patriarch's presumed heir, this was natural enough, but the young man's name may have been a crucial factor. The aged founder of the family treasured those two words, Cornelius Vanderbilt. Throughout his life he had christened boats, ships, and children after himself until finally he ceased to produce them. The details of his beliefs about the power of words lie beyond detection, but it is significant that “name” is a synonym for reputation. He prized his “character,” to use an old term, for honor, honesty, strength, and sagacity. The son who bore his name lacked all of those traits, to his bitter disappointment; but now he had a chance to reach down two generations, to build his dynasty by molding the character of another, better Cornelius.

On February 4, 1867, Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. married Miss Alice Gwynne at the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation on Madison Avenue. The new Mrs. Vanderbilt came from a respectable family. She shared her husband's seriousness, his deep sense of responsibility to the family he was destined to lead. “One of Alice's nieces described her to me as ‘pompous,’” Auchincloss writes, “but an old gentleman who had known her well insisted that, on the contrary, she had been… ‘very definite and straightforward, with no airs at all.’ Yet both descriptions might have been true, as they both might have been true of Queen Victoria. Alice's supposed pomposity might have consisted only in her concept of the role she deemed it her duty to fulfill.” With the Commodore still very much in control of the clan, and William waiting to take his place, the young couple would have ample time to learn both the social and business roles laid out for them. And the Commodore soon accelerated his grandson's education. Three months after the marriage, he made Cornelius Jr. the treasurer of the Harlem Railroad, an enterprise that had a special place in the Commodore's heart.²³

Cornelius Jeremiah resented his nephew's public appropriation of the designation “Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.” But self-loathing often manifests itself as bitterness toward others, just as helplessness can result in hatred of those who offer help. Corneil plunged to new depths after his discharge from the Litchfield asylum, writing bad checks and issuing fraudulent promissory notes. He often left Hartford to prowl his favorite gambling haunts in New York. In 1867, he stayed at the United States Hotel on Fulton Street, and befriended one of the proprietors, George N. Terry. The two men soon became very close friends.²⁴

Corneil needed friends. For one thing, he was arrested on civil process for his unpaid checks. And, with more than $50,000 in debts (including $13,905 owed to Horace Greeley), he made plans to file for bankruptcy on October 1. As he explained in yet another pathetic letter to Greeley, he had pawned two gold watches, more than $2,000 worth of silver dinner-ware, “a very costly bracelet & splendid set of coral belonging to my wife. She let me have them with her usual desire to please, and hardly dared to refuse my crazed, rascally demands.… God forgive me for taking advantage of such an ennobling disposition.” To paraphrase the Book of James, repentance without works is dead; Corneil's was, as a doorknob.²⁵

Just how dead could be seen in a letter he wrote to Nathaniel P. Banks, the Union general whom Corneil had besieged for money and favors in New Orleans. “I write to inform you that owing to the very weak condition of my mind for the last few years, I have become involved in a series of financial difficulties from which I can only obtain relief through bankruptcy,” he told Banks, implying that he was a victim, preyed upon by others. “I take pleasure in stating that my general reconstruction has become an accepted fact by my relatives and friends.… My family will soon have an opportunity to display their magnanimity when matters of my personal honor are involved.”²⁶ The words seem so bitter and so sarcastic, and were so false.

His anger at himself and all others now overwhelmed the oily solicitousness that usually flowed from his pen. After his bankruptcy proceedings, he wrote to William, “Your course toward me through the last four years has been unkind.… You perfectly ignored me in my dark and trying days and withheld from me every particle of your aid and encouragement.” This was not true. Though William undoubtedly arched a censorious eyebrow at his younger brother's wastrel ways, he had supported his effort to reform himself in Litchfield. But Corneil was an addict. Typically, what had sparked his self-righteous outrage was William's refusal to give him money. “You promised me upon your honor that you would give me $150,” Corneil wrote. “It appears that you are even now working underhandedly to injure me with my father at the very moment that I am gaining his confidence and respect.”²⁷

A decade later, Corneil's accusations would foster an image of William as a manipulator who schemed to influence his father behind the scenes. He was not. The Commodore came to his own harsh conclusions about his younger son without William's help, and Corneil had little hope of ever regaining his confidence and respect.

Curiously, Corneil's patron Greeley formed an intersection between the two episodes that most strongly marked the Commodore's own personal life in 1867. In recent months, the famous editor seems to have struck up a friendship with Vanderbilt. This was in spite of Corneil's debt, not because of it. Vanderbilt refused to pay it, and Greeley refused to ask.²⁸ Rather, Greeley needed help for something else, a mission that would become increasingly important to the Commodore, until it became his most cherished project: to heal the divide between North and South. The first step, Greeley thought, was to free Jefferson Davis.

Soon after Lee's surrender, the federal authorities had arrested Davis. They incarcerated him at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, month after month, year after year, without charges, without any sign that they might prosecute him. As early as June 1865, Davis's wife had written to Greeley to ask for help in at least bringing about a trial. Greeley sought advice, investigated Davis's connection to mistreatment of Union prisoners of war, and finally agreed to assist her. He secured the cooperation of leading Republicans, including Thaddeus Stevens and abolitionist Gerrit Smith, as well as such noted New York Democrats as Charles O'Conor, Augustus Schell, and Horace Clark. Greeley's editorials and lobbying piled pressure on President Johnson's administration. O'Conor, meanwhile, applied to the Supreme Court for a writ of habeus corpus, and Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase issued one on May 8, 1867. On May 13, army officers delivered Jefferson Davis to civil authorities. “The attorneys of the Government having announced that they were not prepared to prosecute at this term of the court, a motion was made to release the prisoner on bail,” Harper's Weeklyreported.

The bail was set at $100,000. At Greeley's request, Vanderbilt stood as one of the sureties for this huge amount; since he was the recent recipient of the congressional gold medal for his gift of the Vanderbilt, he made a politically (as well as financially) suitable guarantor, an emblem of national reconciliation. Clark and Schell represented him on the scene and signed the bond in his name. As for Davis, he quietly passed through New York after his release, taking a Hudson River Railroad train to Canada.²⁹

Vanderbilt as healer: the role did not fit the caricature that defined his image, yet in the end it would leave a permanent imprint on the national landscape. More familiar was Vanderbilt as competitor, a part he played to immense public satisfaction in the fall of 1867. On September 30 he raced his prize horse Mountain Boy at the Fashion Course against the “fastest horses on the trotting turf.” (Dexter, the unquestioned champion, recently had been purchased and retired from racing by Robert Bonner.) Driven by trainer Sam McLaughlin, Mountain Boy won the second heat in a best-of-five contest, but was edged out in the rest by Lady Thorn. McLaughlin insisted that the ground had worked against Mountain Boy so Vanderbilt issued a challenge for another best-of-five against Lady Thorn at the Union Course for a wager of $2,500. The two horses met again exactly seven days later. “The interest created by this match in trotting circles was very great, and the betting was unprecedentedly heavy,” the New York Times reported. Mountain Boy won easily³⁰

Vanderbilt exulted in the triumph. He and McLaughlin both publicly declared that Mountain Boy could defeat even the famous Dexter. Bonner declined to accept the challenge in a public letter to “My Dear Commodore,” writing, “The good-natured contest between you and myself for the ownership of the fastest trotting horse in the world is attracting increased attention on account of the recent performances of Mountain Boy.” Vanderbilt replied with his own letter to the press, claiming that Bonner had written “in a manner not in entire conformity with the rules of propriety” He disingenuously declared, “I have not been aware, Mr. Editor, that any strife has existed between Mr. Bonner and myself for the possession of the fastest horse.” Of Mountain Boy, he said simply, “I thought him the best horse of his age I ever saw.… His performance speaks for itself. I think him the superior of Dexter.”³¹

Newspapers nationwide reprinted this correspondence, demonstrating how famous Vanderbilt had become for his competitiveness and his horses. But Bonner offered a grim coda to the light-hearted exchange by bringing in bankrupt Corneil. “The disposition manifested in some quarters to hold the Commodore responsible for his son, where he has not signed for him, is, in our opinion, unjust,” he wrote in his newspaper, the Ledger. “It is only fair towards the Commodore for us to say this; and we take pleasure in saying it, notwithstanding he manifested a little want of amiability—excusable, perhaps, in a man of his years—in replying to a good natured letter from us in a horse controversy into which he recently drew us.” Corneil's bankruptcy, he noted, had left Greeley $13,905 poorer; he suggested that they stage a race between Dexter and Mountain Boy, “and offer the gate money to Mr. Greeley”³²

On the face of it, this was a generous and reasonable suggestion, but there is no sign that the Commodore agreed. A man chooses his own friends, he believed; and when among friends, he must watch out for himself or accept the consequences.

THE GREAT ERIE WAR OF 1868 began almost invisibly. On a Sunday afternoon in the fall of 1867, Vanderbilt sat in his office with his longtime lawyer, Charles A. Rapallo, and honed a legal complaint against Daniel Drew. It laid out the details of Drew's famous 1866 bear campaign in Erie stock, and asked for an injunction to bar him from doing the same again. The papers were to be filed in the name of Frank Work, one of Vanderbilt's racing cronies. Reporters sometimes mistakenly referred to Work as Vanderbilt's nephew; he was not, though he was a partner in a brokerage house along with Samuel Barton, a real nephew who served as a director on the Hudson River and was one of Vanderbilt's favorites. But the error indicates how closely Work was identified with the Commodore.³³

Shortly thereafter, most likely in the first week of October, Vanderbilt had occasion to explain the purpose of this planned injunction. One evening, in a private room of the Manhattan Club, he met with one of Drew's self-proclaimed enemies, the big-bearded, small-framed Jay Gould. A stock speculator as well as railroad executive, Gould told Vanderbilt that a clique had formed to seize control of the Erie Railway (as it was now formally called) and kick Drew off its board. Gould was a key, if low-profile, member of this group, assigned to obtain proxies for the cause. He had learned of the impending lawsuit against Drew, which made Vanderbilt a likely ally. Gould had come to ask for the proxy for Vanderbilt's ten thousand Erie shares.³⁴

One of the clique's motives was obvious. During the war, Erie president Nathaniel Marsh had revitalized the recently bankrupt line. But his death in 1864 had left the railroad rudderless. Debt and mechanical breakdowns accumulated as Drew played on its weakness to manipulate the stock. The troubled line had enormous potential—if the “speculative director,” as he was known, were removed.³⁵ And Gould's group had another purpose. The leader was a Boston financier named John S. Eldridge, president of the Boston, Hartford & Erie Railroad; Massachusetts had agreed to provide the line with $3 million to finish construction—if it could sell its bonds at 80. Eldridge wanted to take over the Erie to make the larger company buy his bonds.³⁶

Tedious? Without a doubt. But out of such petty motives nation-shaking conflicts are born. And so are farces. The Erie War would fit both descriptions.

In that room in the Manhattan Club, the Commodore sat with Work and Richard Schell on either hand and frankly told young Gould that he didn't trust him. How could he know the clique would not “join hands” with Drew? So Gould agreed to give a bond, a financial penalty that he would pay if Drew were reelected to the board. As soon he finished the last stroke of his signature, Work handed over the proxy.

Vanderbilt then offered the reason why he “was anxious to defeat Drew,” as Gould recalled—a reason that would be overlooked by posterity but explains his role better than any other. It had nothing to do with the Erie itself, but was an indirect part of his still-unfolding campaign to take over the Central. He wished to halt the insidious effect on the money market of Drew's bear operations, an effect that destroyed credit and market values far beyond the borders of Erie stock certificates. The underlying cause was a grave weakness in the American financial system.³⁷

As described earlier, the creation of a national bank system formalized the centralization of the U.S. financial structure in the city of New York³⁸ With the restriction of gold to specialized uses (mostly in the import and export trade), the volume of money was ultimately pegged to the number of physical greenbacks authorized by Congress. To use the technical term, this was “high-powered money.” All bank deposits and national banknotes were redeemable in greenbacks, so national banks were obligated to maintain a minimum reserve of them. The law required “country banks” to deposit reserves with national banks in designated cities, which in turn had to deposit their own reserves in New York. All year long, money flowed from the countryside toward New York, where banks loaned this surplus to stockbrokers. This was the money that brokers used to finance the purchase of securities on margin.

What went to New York did not stay in New York; like tourists from Topeka, those greenback reserves toured Wall Street and then went home again. In the fall, the harvest and shipping of foodstuffs to the seacoast—known as “the moving of the crops”—required a countermovement of currency to the countryside to accommodate the accompanying flurry of transactions. Country banks drew down their accounts in reserve cities; those banks drew down accounts in New York; and New York banks called in their loans to brokers. Stock trading slowed; prices tended to stall or fall. For this reason, Wall Street panics almost always occurred late in the year.

Economists call this problem “currency inelasticity,” because the fixed quantity of high-powered money made it difficult to ease these seasonal fluctuations. Starting in the twentieth century, the Federal Reserve Bank would fine-tune the money supply on a daily basis, but in the nineteenth century there was no agency charged with such close supervision of the financial system. In fact, Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch determinedly made things worse. Believing that greenbacks were inflationary and literally an abomination—a violation of God's plan to make gold and silver the only money—he gradually withdrew greenbacks from circulation to enable the Treasury to redeem them in gold on demand. While orthodox policy by 1867 standards, it created deflationary pressure that was felt most strongly on Wall Street.

A man as cunning as Drew could see the vulnerabilities of this system, and he did not hesitate to deliberately manipulate it for personal gain. In early l868, the New York Evening Post estimated the banks that belonged to the city's clearinghouse (including all the important ones) possessed a total greenback reserve of only $12 million, just 5 percent of their deposits and circulating notes. It was disturbingly easy for a few wealthy individuals to siphon much of that $12 million out of the system and cripple its ability to provide credit. This was done through a maneuver known as the “lockup.” A man (better yet, a group of men) with a large amount on deposit would draw certified checks against this sum. The bank was now obliged to keep those funds out of use until the checks were presented for payment. Then the perpetrator would take the checks to other banks and use them as collateral for loans, which he would take in the form of actual greenbacks; these he would lock up in a safe. Now he had removed from circulation far more money than was in his original account—and it was high-powered money. Banks, short of greenbacks, would call in loans to brokers, who would curtail trading on margin on Wall Street, causing stock prices to fall. A self-reinforcing credit crunch could ensue, as falling share values caused further reductions in loans against stock. The lock-up was a sawed-off shotgun of a financial weapon—devastating, imprecise, and likely to injure innocent bystanders.³⁹

Vanderbilt accused Drew of carrying out a lock-up during his bear campaign of 1866, when he laid Erie low with his secret 58,000 shares. The chance that he might do it again posed a grave threat to Vanderbilt's campaign to conquer the Central.⁴⁰ The Commodore could afford to buy Central stock for cash, but he needed the support of a wide array of friends and allies who bought on margin and needed an easy money market to finance their purchases. More than that, Vanderbilt needed the perception that his rise to power was good for stockholders. If Drew sent the market tumbling, it would weaken the Commodore's reputation, one of his most valuable assets. And Vanderbilt faced one more worry: it was autumn. The moving of the crops was under way, and money was already tight. He had to forestall Drew's bear operations.

The explanation satisfied Gould, who went his silent way after the exchange of bond for proxy. With Vanderbilt's votes in hand, the Eldridge party looked certain to win the annual election on October 8, 1867. Drew knew he was beaten. On October 6, he called on Vanderbilt at home to beg for mercy. What Drew said is unknown, but the tight-lipped former cattle drover must have been at his most eloquent that night. Perhaps he cited their decades of friendship, the millions they had made together. Perhaps he reminded Vanderbilt of their bull campaign in Erie in 1854. They could do it again; and a rising market would help Vanderbilt conclude his operations in the Central.⁴¹ Whatever he said, it worked.

Vanderbilt dispatched Richard Schell to fetch Eldridge and Gould and bring them to his house that evening. The Commodore explained that he had changed his mind—he wanted Drew to remain. “Some rather plain talk ensued,” Gould dryly recalled. Finally they all settled on a deal. On October 8, Eldridge, Gould, and Work went onto the new Erie board along with a little-known broker named James Fisk Jr.; Drew was not elected. But one of the new directors promptly resigned, and the board named Drew to his place. Friendship had triumphed, with the help of a little trade.⁴²

For Vanderbilt, everything seemed to work exactly as Drew promised in the days that followed. “These manipulators of Erie talk of putting the stock much higher,” the New York Herald commented skeptically. The paper found Central's rising price to be still more remarkable—“ridiculous,” to use the exact quote. “It is said that a certain would-be railway monopolist aspires to control it, and that he and his friends hold a large amount of the stock; but it is against the public interests that any one person should constitute himself a railway king.” Drew led a pool to drive up the price of Erie, managing money contributed by Work, Richard Schell, Banker, and Steward. With the market rising, the Commodore duly conquered the New York Central in December. He little realized what treachery was in store for him.⁴³

With Drew seemingly well in hand, Vanderbilt focused on reforming the management of the Central. “If I take possession of a railroad today,” he explained a year later, “I send my men over it to examine it in every particular and all over. They report to me its condition, and then it is my business to see that it is kept up, equal in every respect to what it is then.” This was a precise description of what he did upon taking command of the Central. On February 1, 1868, he dispatched Banker on an inspection tour with orders to examine the machine shops, ticket offices, and books kept by every office—“in fact look to every department of the company's property along its whole line.” He wanted to save every shilling. As he told the treasurer, “Mr. Worcester, do everything just as you would do it if it was your own business. Vary from this only so far as the peculiar demands incidental to a corporation demand.”⁴⁴

Vanderbilt's reforms ranged from the petty to the profound. As on his other lines, he attacked the “monstrous” practice of handing out enormous quantities of free passes, restricting to himself and his vice president, Torrance, the privilege of granting them. He fired underperforming staff and eliminated patronage positions (including one held by Erastus Corning Jr.), in what one man called a “wholesale slaughter.” He had William better coordinate traffic and running arrangements of the Harlem and the Hudson River. He halted the practice of using the company's money to buy stock in connecting lines. He also revoked an agreement, made when Keep and Fargo had run the board, to pay American Express $50,000 a year—a rather remarkable contract, since ordinarily express companies paid rent to railroads, not the other way around. He also fought to recover a grain elevator in Buffalo that Keep had leased to Fargo.⁴⁵

Vanderbilt's most famous reform was the most superficial: he forbade brass ornamentation on all locomotives, to save the time spent polishing them. This one step attracted lengthy comment in newspapers and railroad journals. Clearly it sent a powerful signal that economy would be Vanderbilt's defining principle.⁴⁶

These changes aroused bitter complaints. Impervious to them all, Vanderbilt continued to squeeze savings out of the Central. But he was never vindictive. Instead, he sought peace with the railroad's strategic partners. After all of the struggles over the previous four years, he wanted peace. According to John M. Davidson, Vanderbilt declared that “he did not wish to persecute, but rather, to forget, and heal old sores.”⁴⁷

AS 1868 BEGAN, VANDERBILT CONTINUED to participate in the bull campaign in the Erie, though it was the Central that really mattered to him. The brokers most closely identified with him were “the most steady buyers of NY Ctrl—they are buying for the Commodore's friends, who are all steadfast believers in the stock, even at these prices, for a long pull,” one Wall Street denizen wrote on January 7. “Vanderbilt advises his horse companions to buy Central,” Davidson wrote to Corning on January 14. “Told the noted driver [Dan] Mace yesterday to buy 500 shares, that he would make $25,000 in a short time.” Erie tagged along, ascending to 76, its highest price since the previous summer.⁴⁸ Then, on January 22, it began to show “hesitation,” according to the New York Herald. Something was amiss. Erie began to fall. Drew unexpectedly declared the pool operation complete and divided the profits.

Schell believed that Drew had cheated them. “There has been quite a quarrel going on for several days between Mr. Drew & Richd Schell,” one financier wrote. Even as Drew had bought for the pool, for his own account he had “sold all his stock of Erie in the market, and gone largely short—in amount of nine millions of dollars.… Schell blows in a fearful manner—public & private—puffed up with his good fortune lately. He says that Erie will sell at par before next May, & threatens Mr. Drew with all kinds of prosecution & exposure.” Schell informed Gould that the legal complaint against Drew—shelved as part of the peace accord—would be filed at last, unless Drew took 5,500 shares of Erie off his hands at 75 or (perhaps intending to expose the famously pious Drew as a hypocrite) paid $20,000 to the poor of New York. Drew declined.⁴⁹

Vanderbilt's involvement in this pool is far from certain. The Commodore later claimed to have been a reluctant participant in the Erie campaign, and one insider reported, “Vanderbilt refuses to have any interest in Erie.” After all, it was one thing to prevent Drew from ruining the money market; it was quite another to commit money into his hands. “There was a lot of people in the street that called themselves my friends, came up to me and pressed me very hard to go in with them,” Vanderbilt later explained. “Damn your pools!” he said he replied. “It is altogether out of my line.” Work and Richard Schell were in fact much more than Vanderbilt's puppets in this drama. They had pushed him to help them, not the other way around. Finally the Commodore had relented. “I had some loose money,” he said. “If you want me to help you along with your Erie I will help you along,” he recalled saying to them. “And they got me engaged in it, and I bought a pretty large amount of Erie.”⁵⁰

But then Drew cheated, and whether he cheated Vanderbilt directly or his friends mattered little to the outraged Commodore. More than that, Vanderbilt's strategic concerns may have motivated him to move against his treacherous old friend. The new Erie board negotiated to lay a third rail on the Michigan Southern's track, to allow the Erie's broad-gauge rolling stock to pass over its standard-gauge line to Chicago; and Michigan Southern already discriminated against the Central in favor of the Erie. It seems that honor and economics both impelled Vanderbilt to proceed with the long-threatened lawsuit.⁵¹ On February 15, Work filed the complaint against Drew and his fellow Erie directors in New York's Supreme Court. (Despite the name, the Supreme Court was a trial, not appellate, court.) As mentioned earlier, it asked the court to halt Drew's trading in Erie stock and force the return of his secret 58,000 shares (which he had used to cheat the pool).⁵²

Rapallo, as Work's attorney, filed the motion with the least respected, least honest, most notorious jurist in New York, Judge George G. Barnard. “Barnard,” historian Allan Nevins wrote, “was an insolent, overbearing man of handsome face and figure who had for a time hypocritically posed as a reformer.” He was not. Nor was he very, or even minimally, learned. “The court-room of Judge Barnard has been a place of amusement, where lawyers and others go to hear something ‘good,’” the New York Tribune later wrote. “Every day his indecent sarcasms and vulgar jests keep his court-room crowded with laughing spectators.” An ally of William Tweed, he had a reputation for being, as one newspaper wrote, “a most merchantable judge.”⁵³

Barnard issued an injunction against Drew that barred him from the stock market. Two days later, Rapallo appeared before him again, acting in the name of New York's attorney general, to ask that Drew be removed from the Erie board. Barnard delivered a temporary order to that effect.⁵⁴With Drew thoroughly enjoined, Vanderbilt charged into the Erie china shop, determined to corner his old friend and punish him for his treachery. He gave orders to his brokers to buy all the Erie they could get.

Contemporaries and historians alike have concluded that the Commodore had “marked the Erie for his own,” as Charles F. Adams Jr. famously wrote, in pursuit of “absolute control over the railroad system.” Biographer Wheaton J. Lane claimed that Vanderbilt aimed at “ending competition between [the New York Central] and the Erie,” by buying up the latter line.⁵⁵ Wasn't his course toward monopoly obvious, as he moved from Harlem to Hudson River to New York Central? The Erie was the closest and most troublesome of the trunk lines; it seemed a natural target.

The Commodore himself thought otherwise. “I never had any intention of taking possession of or having anything to do with the Erie road—I mean in the management of it,” he later told a committee of the state assembly. “I never had the slightest desire; damn it! Never had time to. It is too big a thing!”⁵⁶

Vanderbilt's words demand attention, for, flawed as he was, he was never a liar. And there is good reason to believe him. For one thing, he never launched a war of aggression in all his years as a railroad leader; always he practiced diplomacy first, fighting only as a last resort. For another, Vanderbilt was still mired in the process of taking over the Central, one of the largest and most important railroads in the United States; getting a grip on its levers of power proved to be a time-consuming task. Even a partial list of his work in February alone is imposing. On the 1st, he dispatched Banker on the inspection tour mentioned above; on the 6th, he wrote to President Andrew Johnson, complaining about the customs collector at the Niagara Suspension Bridge; on the 21st, he presided over a conference of the trunk lines to coordinate rates. All the while he fought resistance to his reforms by staff at all levels. “All the Assistant Supt. are doing their best to break the road down… because none of them like Mr. Torrance or the Commodore,” one official wrote. “The way the road is now managed is most ridiculous in the extreme.… It is perfect confusion from one end to the other.”⁵⁷ Soon afterward, a strike broke out in the Albany machine shops because Torrance had reduced the men's hours and wages, then restored the hours but not the wages. Vanderbilt himself had to intervene to settle it.⁵⁸ Seizing the Erie, in the midst of this enormous internal struggle, would have been too big a thing indeed. The surprising truth is that Vanderbilt fought one of the greatest business conflicts in American history purely out of a desire for revenge.

Drew's fellow Erie directors, unfortunately, could not see into the Commodore's heart. Their eyes were fixed instead on the stock certificates piling up in his safe, which made them fear that they would lose control of their railroad. Gould, Fisk, and Eldridge had come into the Erie in order to drive out Drew, but Vanderbilt's vengeance ironically forced them to rally around him and make his cause their own.

To defeat the attempted corner, they engaged in a stock-watering operation of unprecedented size and speed. In essence, they would drown Vanderbilt in new shares, created under cover of the law that permitted the conversion of bonds into stock. First, they approved an issue of $5 million in convertible bonds and sold them to Drew's broker. They also entrusted the “speculative director” with ten thousand new shares converted from the securities of a recently leased railroad, the Buffalo, Bradford & Erie. Then they established a fund of $500,000 in cash to pay for legal expenses—or what have you. On March 5, Erie attorney David Dudley Field approached a close friend of Barnard's and offered him $5,000 to convince the judge to modify his injunction; the friend declined, so Field placed the cash elsewhere. With these preparations made, Drew sold Erie short to Vanderbilt in massive quantities. He also took elaborate steps to have front men deliver the new shares in order to hide his hand from the courts.⁵⁹ The trap was set.

THE COMMODORE HAD NO CORONATION as railroad king—but New York's aristocrats acknowledged early on that he had founded a dynasty. On February 18, William's eldest girl, Louisa, married Elliott F. Shephard at the Episcopalian Church of the Incarnation, on Madison Avenue and Thirty-fifth Street. The chapel was jammed “by the fashionable denizens of Murray Hill, Fifth Avenue, and Madison Avenue,” one newspaper reported. “The streets in the vicinity were lined with carriages for a quarter of a mile.” Afterward the reception was held at William's new house on Fifth Avenue. “For four hours the elite of the town flowed in and out, and it was altogether a splendid affair. The new home of Mr. Vanderbilt is the most elegant in its interior of any house in town.” New York's ballrooms would not be barred to William's princeling children.⁶⁰

Sadly, no one would confuse Ellen Vanderbilt with a princess. The respectable daughter of a prosperous New England merchant, she had married the son of one of the wealthiest men in the world, only to be thrown into poverty and disgrace. Yet she stood loyally by Corneil. Only Greeley shared her faith in her husband—in part because of his affection for her. “I but interest myself in the Commodore's good will to his son and namesake, but I know he cannot in any case leave you destitute, for he knows how nobly you have deserved his highest appreciation,” he wrote her on March 8. “Even should he leave your husband nothing, he will leave a good income to you, and in that faith I rest content.… I know that he [the Commodore] has been sorely tried, and I can only hope that he will live to realize and put faith in his son's devotion.”⁶¹

Ellen needed more than sympathy. The couple had emerged out of Corneil's bankruptcy penniless. In order to “commence housekeeping once more,” she told Greeley, she needed money, though “I am really ashamed” to ask for more.⁶²

Within the walls of 10 Washington Place, the fate of Corneil and Ellen remained a matter of dispute between Cornelius and Sophia. The Commodore simply didn't trust his son. He demanded that Corneil swear that he never again would borrow money; even then, he refused to help. “Father Vanderbilt is waiting to see us started, & in course of the summer he will be vastly more liberal than at present,” Ellen wrote. “But he says we must get started first, & it certainly is strange he does not consider our extra wants & make some appreciation requisite. But he does not.” The Commodore kept a close watch on his son's financial doings, as Ellen complained to Greeley. “I feel that you are in fact the only person on whom we can rely to keep our affairs from the world, & this is just the reason we ask you, as others would at present undoubtedly assist us, but father Vanderbilt would probably hear of it a day or two afterwards.”

“Mother Vanderbilt,” on the other hand, “aids us all in her power. She sent me last week a large quantity of linen, & other things, & says she shall continue to assist us as far as she is able. I think she has no patience with the Commodore for what she calls ‘his stubborn inconsistency’!”⁶³The divide between the two parents over their troubled son had continued—though, tellingly, it was no operatic feud. Sophia did not rage at her husband, just lost “patience.”

If tension was muted between Mother and Father Vanderbilt, it was still tension. Sophia aided the bankrupt couple secretly, lest she arouse her husband's wrath. One did not defy his will lightly; already his power and forcefulness had become proverbial in American culture. On February 17, for example, a religious periodical sought to express the glory of Jesus Christ by equating the Son of God with Vanderbilt—“and none can get a pass on his railroad without respect and loyalty for the Bible.” In the New York Times that same day, Albert DeGroot proposed a fund to build a life-size statue of the Commodore atop the mighty freight depot currently under construction in St. John's Park. “The public spirit, energy, and indomitable nerve of the great steamboat and railway king merits some such recognition,” he wrote. Vanderbilt's admirers began to contribute as his detractors muttered that yes, he certainly had nerve.⁶⁴

A FEW MORE STEPS, and the steel jaws would snap shut. With the secret new stock certificates rolling off the presses, the Erie directors prepared for war with Vanderbilt by withdrawing from the trunk line compact, which freed them to slash rates in competition with the Central. Drew secured a delay of his hearing before Barnard, and hurriedly distributed the fresh shares to his front men. On March 5, in the final piece of preparation, the Erie lawyers appeared in remote Broome County, New York, before Judge Ransom Balcom, who agreed to suspend Work from the Erie board and to bar him—and the New York State attorney general—from pursuing their lawsuits. The attorneys took advantage of a quirk in New York's judicial structure that gave every one of the thirty-three Supreme Court judges jurisdiction over the entire state, a flaw that fed rampant corruption in the legal system. “The New York community is not apparently unaccustomed to seeing one justice of its Supreme Court enjoining another,” the American Law Reviewcommented, “on the ground that his respected associate has entered into a conspiracy to use his judicial power in a stock-jobbing operation.”⁶⁵

A bewildering blizzard of lawsuits and injunctions began to snow paper across the desks of judges and lawyers across the state, giving Drew the legal cover to deliver giant blocks of new shares into Vanderbilt's hands. The courts and markets erupted in chaos: the price of Erie staggered, Richard Schell and the Erie lawyers obtained fresh injunctions, the New York Stock Exchange declared the new shares invalid, and the New York State Senate created a committee to investigate the imbroglio.

On March 10, with losses mounting, Vanderbilt suffered perhaps the most dangerous blow of all: Drew and the Erie board conducted a lockup. “The Erie Company is understood to have drawn nearly the whole of the balance from its bankers in this city… including some of the proceeds of the recent sale of ten millions of convertible bonds,” the New York Herald reported. The Times estimated that $5 million or $6 million in cash—formerly Vanderbilt's—had been withdrawn from the financial system (the Erie directors claimed $8 million), which forced bankers to call in loans, driving up interest rates and shaking down stock prices across the board.

But Vanderbilt continued to buy, grimly determined to corner Drew. According to rumor, his entire fortune teetered on the brink as he fought to put up margins on millions of dollars' worth of questionable Erie stock (questionable, because the Erie board had not secured the approval of the shareholders to issue convertible bonds, as required by law). Supposedly he pressured banks to lend to him on the threat of selling off his Central stock and causing a general panic. If only half of the gossip was half true, he was in a desperate spot.⁶⁶

The farcical Judge Barnard decided that the farce must end. Despite the injunctions against his injunctions, he issued contempt citations for the entire Erie board. David Dudley Field, the railroad's esteemed chief attorney, advised that the distinguished directors go on the lam. “Anticipating a sudden visit by the officers of the law, a regular stampede took place Thursday morning [March 12] among the officials,” the New York Herald reported, “each one lugging off an account book, desk, drawer, or as much of the red tape documents as could be grasped in the hurry of the moment.” Carrying millions in greenbacks, bonds, and stocks, the officers of one of the largest corporations in the United States scampered aboard the ferry to Jersey City, where they crowded into Taylor's Hotel, a brick building with yellow doors hard by the ferry dock. “The proprietor was called for; a brief conference ensued, and the company passed to an upper room of the hotel, strict orders being given as to the admission of visitors.”⁶⁷

Gould and Fisk remained behind. On the evening of March 15, the officers tracked them to Delmonico's, where they were enjoying a luxurious meal. They dashed into the street, boarded a carriage, and rattled to the Canal Street dock. They secured an open boat and, with two hired hands, rowed into a dense fog that had settled on the Hudson. As they meandered the wide river, bellowing into the darkness, they heard a paddlewheeler bearing down on them. They clutched at the guardrails as their boat was swamped, and were hauled aboard. Soon after they joined their colleagues at Taylor's Hotel.

The desperate flight to New Jersey left the public agog. What had been merely a private (if outlandish) fight over a disreputable stock became a symbol of all that seemed wrong in post-Civil War America: public corruption, grasping monopolists, outsize corporations, and an utter disregard for morality As Charles F. Adams Jr. would write, “The American people cannot afford to glance at this thing in the columns of the daily press, and then dismiss it from memory. It involves too many questions; it touches too nearly the national life.”⁶⁸ Harper's Weekly wrote:

The wealth and importance of the contesting roads; the prominence of the two men who control them and who direct this war; the singularity, not to say the illegality, of the judicial proceedings in the case; the amount of money involved in the quarrel; the numbers of brokers, bankers, and speculators engaged, pecuniarily, in it; the vigor and boldness of the effort to take possession of the Erie road; the not less bold maneuvre of a change of base to New Jersey soil—in short, all the circumstances of the rivalry make it one of the “stories of the street.”⁶⁹

Who was worse? Vanderbilt, who seemed to seek a monopoly of New York's railroads, or Drew and company, who defied both the law and business ethics with their stock watering and flight? Few saw any reason to choose between two sides of the same evil.

Crowds formed around the brick walls of “Fort Taylor,” as the newspapers dubbed the hotel, amid rumors of a planned assault by hoodlums hired by Vanderbilt. A reporter for the New York Herald went in and found ten men seated for dinner in a special room—Drew, Eldridge, Gould, Fisk, and other directors and brokers. “Everyone appeared in good humor, and each seemed to relish a good joke which had just been told about Mr. Fisk, who was represented in one of the papers as armed to the teeth,” the reporter wrote. “A good burlesque, on my soul; very good indeed, ha, ha,” responded Fisk, who was described as “a gentleman with luxuriant tufts of hair and Dundreary mustache who sat at a corner of the table draining a glass.”⁷⁰

Fisk emerged as the public face of exiled Erie. Part clown, part generalissimo—“with shining buttons and studs and rings, and an immense shirt bosom, and a porcine carcass,” as William Lloyd Garrison later described him—he was a gifted and often hilarious orator who declaimed freely to any reporter in his vicinity.⁷¹ A former peddler and the son of a peddler, he once had rattled down the back roads of New England atop a wagon full of trinkets. He had joined a merchant house in Boston, helped Drew find a buyer for the Stonington steamboats, and made his way onto Wall Street, where he started a disreputable brokerage house, Fisk & Belden, with partner William Belden.

But Fisk was also shrewd. He seized on the image of Vanderbilt as a monarchical monopolist to win sympathy for their conjuring of stock and run from justice. He attributed to the Commodore alone the decade-old effort by the trunk lines to coordinate rates, and claimed that the result had diverted shipments of foodstuffs to Philadelphia and Baltimore instead of New York. “This struggle, then,” he pronounced, “was in the interest of the poorer classes especially. Vanderbilt opposes the laying of the broad gauge track^*[sic] on the Erie Railroad, which would secure such an abundance of provisions in the New York market from the West as to considerably reduce the current prices.” When asked how long the directors would remain in New Jersey, he grandly declared, “We must throw personal comforts in the balance. Six weeks, six months, or six years are all equal to us in this sense. Just see and judge for yourself.” It was bravado, yes, but he knew the importance of impressing the enemy with a sense of their determination. By contrast, Vanderbilt remained out of sight, turning away reporters.⁷²

The legal comedy continued. Barnard appointed Vanderbilt's son-in-law—and Barnard's good friend—George A. Osgood as receiver for the proceeds of the enjoined stock. Then Osgood was enjoined by an Erie-friendly judge. At one point Osgood sprinted up his stoop and darted inside to avoid the service of papers, which were hurled at him and bounced off the door. New Jersey passed a law to make the Erie a corporation of the Garden State, offering the fugitives a home across the Hudson.

For all the laughter these events produced, the real battle now shifted to Albany. Vanderbilt's attorneys argued that Erie's convertible bonds were illegal, because the Erie's directors had not secured the required approval of two-thirds of the stockholders. A state senate committee began to consider a bill to legalize the enormous increase in stock, in the name of preventing a monopoly under Vanderbilt.⁷³

Senator Abner C. Mattoon belonged to that committee. He had heard rumors that each side would spend up to a million dollars in the notoriously corrupt legislature to secure or kill the Erie bill. In the interests of justice—justice to himself—he visited Drew in New Jersey. Knowing the Erie directors' concern for the poor, Mattoon began to muse aloud about what little income legislators received. “We cannot go there and live upon what we get,” he reflected sadly. Drew recalled, “The inference I drew was that he would take money if it was offered to him.” Soon afterward Mattoon visited the other Erie directors in Taylor's Hotel. He told them that Vanderbilt's allies and attorneys were lobbying vigorously; soon Mattoon's committee would approve a report condemning one side or the other, most likely Erie. Mattoon, ever helpful, urged the exiled directors to send one of their number to Albany—preferably well funded.⁷⁴

The assignment fell to Jay Gould. If Fisk was the ideal spokesman at the besieged Fort Taylor, the discreet and cunning Gould made the perfect bribe-giver. “On March 30,” writes biographer Maury Klein, “he left Jersey City with a suitcase full of greenbacks and a ready reserve of checkbooks. For three days he wooed legislators with a liberal supply of food, drink, and greenbacks.” Now that Gould was in New York State, he was prey to Barnard's contempt citation. But his hearing was delayed, and Gould convinced the court officer who arrested him to serve as his bodyguard. “You may go with me,” he said. “I will still be in your custody”⁷⁵

The allegations of corruption remain impossible to verify in detail. A committee of the state senate later found solid evidence that a great deal of money had been paid in bribes by the Erie board—but it could not pin down who received the bribes. This is not surprising. Corruption had plagued government for decades, and a well-developed system had emerged to mask the dispersal of graft. Lobbyists who specialized in corruption were known as “strikers;” they acted as self-serving middlemen in transactions between legislators and wealthy men and corporations.

And yet, not all of what happened in Albany can be blamed on graft. Both sides of the dispute made serious arguments. The titanic watering of Erie stock struck many as illegal, not to mention immoral; and Vanderbilt's seeming attempt at monopolizing New York's trunk lines appalled others. William Cassidy a Democratic newspaper editor, found himself confused as to the correct line to take in his editorials. “I have denounced the illegality of the overissue & the attempt to whitewash it; I will stand by that portion; but perhaps tis unwise to go further,” he wrote to Samuel J. Tilden. “Our political capital is as important to us, as Vanderbilt's money to him.” For honest legislators, the conundrum proved just as vexing. There is no way of knowing who voted out of conscience or calculation.⁷⁶

Except, perhaps, for Senator Mattoon. On April 1, he gave the decisive vote in committee for a report that denounced the Erie board, declared Drew's conduct to be “disgraceful,” and found that Eldridge, Gould, and Fisk were in collusion with him “in these corrupt proceedings.” Gould later said that Mattoon's vote “astounded” him. He should have known better; to all appearances, it was a negotiating tactic. On April 18, after Gould had changed Mattoon's mind with crisp, green arguments, he reversed himself and voted with the senate majority in favor of the Erie bill. Vanderbilt's lobbyists abruptly withdrew from Albany. On April 20, the assembly passed the bill—which it had previously defeated—by 101 to 5, and the governor soon signed it. More than a legalization of the fresh Erie stock, the new law forbade any director of Vanderbilt's railroads from becoming a director of Erie. The Commodore had lost.⁷⁷

Or had he? Vanderbilt appears to have pulled his forces back from the front line in Albany because he had begun to outflank the enemy in Manhattan. On April 6, Cassidy reported, “Last Sunday Drew was at Vanderbilt's house; & yesterday the interview may have been renewed.” Drew was able to visit his old friend because of a provision of New York law that gave a Sunday reprieve from arrest in civil cases. Drew later admitted, “I called on the Commodore two or three times. He always told me that I acted very foolish in going to Jersey City; I ought to have never left my home in the City.” Drew sadly agreed with him. As Gould later observed, “He had got sick of New Jersey.” Drew and Vanderbilt began to talk about a compromise.⁷⁸

Drew conducted these talks without the knowledge of Eldridge, Gould, or Fisk, though they suspected that he was up to something. On Sunday, April 19, Drew offered to return Vanderbilt's money in return for the shares, saying something about wanting to take over the Erie himself. Fisk found out about the plan and immediately attached Drew's personal funds, which put a stop to the subterfuge. So Drew turned to Eldridge and convinced him to settle with the Commodore to end their exile. Soon the equally Jersey-weary Eldridge joined Drew on his secret visits to Vanderbilt.⁷⁹

For the public, the Erie War ended suddenly and mysteriously. Even before the end of April, the Erie directors fearlessly returned to New York. Barnard spared them arrest, and the New York attorney general agreed to vacate the motion to suspend Drew from the board. But these doves of peace proved just as mysterious to two key Erie directors, Gould and Fisk. In Jersey City the pair had forged a tight friendship, emerging as the most cunning and resilient opponents of Vanderbilt on the board. Recognizing this, Drew and Eldridge kept them in the dark as they negotiated terms.⁸⁰

Frustrated, the two young men took a carriage early one June morning to 10 Washington Place and banged on the door. The servant showed them into the reception room, notified the Commodore, then sent them upstairs to the second-floor parlor. “Presently Mr. Vanderbilt sent for me to come into a little back room,” Fisk testified. Gould waited in the parlor as Fisk went in. It seems that the flamboyant former peddler had made an impression on the Commodore—or perhaps Vanderbilt wished to see him separately as a negotiating tactic. Fisk found him sitting on his bed, putting on his shoes. “I remember those shoes on account of the buckles,” Fisk later testified. “You see there were four buckles on that shoe, and I know it passed through my mind that if such men wore that kind of shoes I must get me a pair.”⁸¹

Vanderbilt looked Fisk over sharply. “I had a very bad opinion of Mr. Fisk since I first knew him,” he said later. “I thought he was a reckless man, and would do anything he undertook to accomplish a purpose.”⁸² But he was accustomed to dealing with enemies, even reckless ones. According to Fisk, Vanderbilt said that “several of the directors were trying to trade with him, and he would like to know who was the best man to trade with.” Fisk proudly replied that Vanderbilt should trade with him, “if the trade was a good one.” The Commodore ruefully said that he might be right. “Old man Drew was no better than a batter pudding, Eldridge was completely demoralized, and there was no head or tail to our concern,” Fisk reported him saying. Fisk agreed.

Vanderbilt wanted to unload his 100,000 Erie shares, and demanded compensation for his losses. Eldridge had made a peace proposal that he had accepted, he said; according to Fisk, Vanderbilt argued that Gould and Fisk should “take hold of it. If we would advocate the settlement and pay his losses we should be landed in the haven where we were all desirious of being, where there was peace and harmony.” Fisk said their talk grew momentarily heated.

He said I must take the position of things as I found it. He would keep his bloodhounds on us and pursue us until we took his stock off his hands; he would be d——d if he would keep it. I told him I would be d——d if we would take it off his hands, and that we would sell him stock as long as he would stand up and take it. Upon this he mellowed down and said that we must get together and arrange this matter. I told him that we would not submit to a robbery of the road.… Well, he said, these suits would not be withdrawn until he was settled with.⁸³

Soon after this interview, Gould and Fisk confronted Eldridge, who told them it was all over. “He was tired and worn out and had been driven away from home and wanted to get out of his troubles,” Fisk recalled. “At last he had got the Commodore to settle on a price, and Schell and Work had fixed on their price, and if we would come in tomorrow we should be free and clear of all suits.”

The two young men went to see Vanderbilt at his home one more time. The Commodore looked them over with respect. According to Gould, he told them that “Drew had no backbone, and if we had not come in he would have had it all his own way.… When we rose to come away he said to us, ‘Boys, you are young, and if you carry out this settlement there will be peace and harmony between the two roads.’” Carry it out they did, but peace and harmony would prove elusive.⁸⁴

The grand settlement was complex, and many of its details would elude contemporaries and historians alike. Of Vanderbilt's 100,000 Erie shares, he sold fifty thousand back at 80, for a total of $4 million. Except he did not actually sell it to the railroad. It was important to Vanderbilt that he technically sold the stock to Drew. As he said to Drew when they made the deal, “I must have an understanding about the matter. I will not sell the Erie Railroad anything; I will have nothing to do with it.” Drew replied that he was buying the stock for himself. “I said that,” Vanderbilt later explained, “because I had made up my mind the Erie Railroad had got under so many difficulties that I would have nothing to do with them.”

If Vanderbilt did not sell his stock to the Erie, the Erie certainly bought it. After Drew made the original agreement, Eldridge arranged for the Erie to take the fifty thousand shares at 70, paying $3.5 million that went into Vanderbilt's hands (Drew himself paid the Commodore the remaining $500,000). The Erie also paid Vanderbilt $1 million for a sixty-day call on his remaining fifty thousand shares at 70 (that is, the Erie purchased the right to buy from Vanderbilt that quantity of stock at that price within two months). In addition to compensating Vanderbilt for his losses, this was a payment to keep the stock off the market, to give the company time to stabilize its finances. The Erie also compensated Frank Work and Richard Schell for their losses with a payment of $429,000, and paid Rapallo for his legal work with 250 Erie shares at 70. And, among other acts, the Erie also bought $5 million of Boston, Hartford & Erie bonds at 80 (accomplishing Eldridge's mission), released Drew from any claims, and settled his long-standing loan to the company. In July, Drew resigned as director and treasurer. In August, Vanderbilt carried out the final part of the agreement, buying $1,250,000 in Boston, Hartford & Erie bonds at 80. Eldridge resigned the presidency, leaving the Erie to Gould and Fisk.⁸⁵

The Erie War proved to be the most serious defeat of Vanderbilt's railroad career. His corner had been thwarted, his attempt at revenge had failed, and his losses had been heavy—perhaps as much as $1 million, though they remain impossible to calculate. But it was not the defeat that the public imagined. Observers in Wall Street and the press saw him as a voracious monopolist, so they assumed that he had wanted the Erie itself, something he explicitly denied. Indeed, what is most striking is not the failure of his corner, but how he rallied on the brink of disaster and forced his enemies to restore much of what he had lost. Unfortunately, he could never recover his lost prestige. More serious than the hundreds of thousands that slipped from his fingers was the humiliation he had suffered at the hands of the upstart Fisk and Gould.

But even his costliest battles served as a reminder of his vindictiveness and his power. On May 19, R. G. Dun & Co. estimated his wealth at $50 million. He was “peculiar & eccentric in [character],” the agency reported, “a strong friend, a mostly bitter enemy.” Drew, his oldest friend of all, would have agreed.⁸⁶

ON MARCH 30, AS THE ERIE WAR approached its height, the United States Senate convened as a court of impeachment for President Andrew Johnson. Most of the charges revolved around his violation of the Tenure of Office Act, a constitutionally questionable law that limited his ability to fire executive-branch officials without congressional approval. He had deliberately flouted the law by sacking Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Commodore Vanderbilt's old friend.

The real issues driving the extraordinary trial were Johnson's personality and the nature of Reconstruction itself. Devotedly Jacksonian and virulently racist, Johnson wanted to quickly restore all-white governments in the South. Rising violence against freed slaves drove Republicans on Capitol Hill toward a far more expansive and direct federal role in reconstructing the South. Johnson had thwarted them at every step, giving rise to anger at his belligerence and sheer incompetence. Before the end of May, the Senate acquitted Johnson on all counts, after failing to meet the required two-thirds majority for a conviction by one vote. But congressional Reconstruction went forward. The South was divided into military districts and put under the administration of army officers until new, more racially just, state constitutions could be put into effect. In the old Confederacy, black voters, jurors, and officeholders appeared for the first time.⁸⁷

In all this, Congress ventured into entirely unmapped terrain, not simply with respect to racial justice, but in terms of its own powers. The war and continuing crisis in the South created a ferment on Capitol Hill, opening up new possibilities. What else could the federal government do? What should it do? The Republicans had been united in fighting the Civil War, and one of the strongest arguments in favor of Radical measures to aid freed slaves was that they had been the only consistently loyal population in the South during the conflict. But in other areas the party remained deeply divided, and sometimes confused. On April 27, in the midst of the impeachment trial, the House of Representatives ordered the Committee on Roads and Canals to investigate whether Congress had the power to regulate railroads. On June 9, the committee reported that Gibbons v. Ogden had clearly established federal power over interstate commerce, but the committee was not sure exactly what to do with railroads. “The question of the constitutional power of Congress to regulate the rates of fare and charges for freight is one of very great importance and of difficult solution,” it hedged. The committee advised no action, though it voiced a serious fear. “The great railroad corporations do possess the power and the will to absorb the lesser competing lines.… These vast consolidated corporations have the power to crush out all competition and to fix upon such rates of fare and charges for the transportation of freight as they please to impose.” But congressional interference was still too radical even for the Radicals.⁸⁸

“We hope the question will not be allowed to drop into forgetfulness,” the Nation responded. “The railroad corporations are already of immense power.” In light of the negotiations to end the Erie War, the Nation thought that Vanderbilt and Drew might make an alliance “which puts for many important purposes the whole State of New York into their hands. It is plain that we need a different order of things from what we had when the Constitution was adopted, when railroads were unthought of.”⁸⁹

The Erie War proved to be a catalyst for rising anxieties over the place of the railroad corporation in a democratic society. In economic culture, railroads ran headlong against the deep Jacksonian belief that free competition was an essential component of democracy itself—that monopoly threatened free government. Their dual nature as both public works and private businesses presented a paradox: What was more important, to protect shareholders in their property rights, or to prevent a monopoly? Good management and returns on investment, or competition? When the Erie War brought this conundrum to a head, even business journals found themselves torn. The Round Table said, “It is very hard to understand why, if Mr. Vanderbilt does own a majority of the stock of the Erie Railway, he should not be allowed to manage it.” On the other side, the Merchant's Magazine wrote, “While allowing that Erie would be sure of a more efficient head under his supervision than under its present and late control, yet it would be a matter of regret” if Vanderbilt added it to his empire. The New York Times awkwardly dodged the monopoly question when defending him: “It may be right that the amalgamation… of the Erie with the Central and other Vanderbilt lines should be prohibited… [but] nothing can justify or even extenuate the conduct of the [Erie] directors in creating ten millions of stock for speculative purposes, or in otherwise abusing their power.”⁹⁰

The Times editorial introduces the second current of anxiety surrounding railroads: the corruption of government. The tales of bribery that flowed out of Albany reinforced stereotypes of public officials on the take, acting as if they were retainers of wealthy corporations, not representatives of the people. After Jay Gould took over as president of the Erie, he allied the railroad explicitly with the Tweed ring, naming “Boss” Tweed himself to the board, along with his close associate Peter Sweeney.

The culmination of the Erie War, culturally speaking, would come in July 1869, with the publication in the North American Review of one of the most influential essays in American history: “A Chapter of Erie,” by Charles F. Adams Jr.⁹¹ (It would be reprinted in a collection, Chapters ofErie, that included articles by Adams's brother Henry.) Ironic, incisive, and impressively researched, it combined a detailed account of the Erie War with an exploration of its broader meaning. “Freebooters have only transferred their operations to the land,” he wrote. “It is no longer the practice of Governments and Ministries to buy legislators; but individuals and corporations of late not unfrequently have found them commodities for sale in the market. So with judicial venality.”

Adams cogently expressed the anxiety that resulted from the combination of the corporation—that abstract entity feared since Jackson's day—with the size and wealth of the railroads. “Already our great corporations are fast emancipating themselves from the state, or rather subjecting the state to their own control,” he wrote. It was the Commodore's mastery of this process that made him such a terrifying figure.

In this dangerous path of centralization Vanderbilt has taken the latest step in advance. He has combined the natural power of the individual with the factitious power of the corporation. The famous “L'état, c'est moi” of Louis XIV represents Vanderbilt's position in regard to his railroads. Unconsciously he has introduced Caesarism into corporate life. He has, however, but pointed out the way which others will tread.… Vanderbilt is but the precursor of a class of men who will wield within the state a power created by it, but too great for its control. He is the founder of a dynasty.

Such power—concentrated in one man's hands through control of corporations—was only possible because of the centrality of the railroads to modern life. “As trade now dominates the world, and the railways dominate trade, his object has been to make himself the virtual master of all by making himself absolute lord of the railways.”⁹²

Adams's words captured a very real dilemma. American institutions and values stemmed from a largely rural, agricultural past in which businesses were limited in size and personal in nature. Corporations had arisen as a means of financing large public works without inflating the size and cost of government—yet they were also private property. This uncomfortable meeting of public and private aroused dark memories, particularly when focused on the person of Vanderbilt. “The country is not without experience of the dangers of intrusting so much power to an individual,” one man wrote to the Journal of Commerce. “Nicholas Biddle and the United States Bank furnish a warning too well remembered by us who passed through the fearful ordeal caused by his abuse of power, to look with composure on the power possessed by this railroad king.”⁹³ Of course, Jackson could control Biddle by vetoing the Bank of the United States charter and withdrawing federal deposits. In 1868 there was no such recourse with Vanderbilt. Small wonder that Adams compared him to Louis XIV.

And yet, this discussion points to a widely shared alertness to encroachments on democracy. It reflected a deep suspicion, even cynicism, about private power and public corruption. Adams and his contemporaries—and historians who followed them—were quick to believe the worst, whereas the truth was complicated and difficult to find. Even the transparently corrupt Tweed ring was a mechanism for controlling a huge, decentralized city through payoffs. “The term ‘boss’ applied to William Marcy Tweed or to John Kelly, his successor, is a measure of the mystery which surrounded their activities, not of their political omnipotence,” writes historian Seymour J. Mandelbaum.

Journalists often claimed that railroads “bought” or “owned” state governments, but corrupt officeholders squeezed corporations as much as they obeyed them. Starting as early as the 1840s, politics had become a breeding ground for manipulators and lobbyists—those “strikers”—who abused the power of the state for the purpose of extortion. Horace Clark, for example, testified about the use of “pro-rata” bills in the state legislature to shake down railroads. Such a law would have set a single per-mile rate and prohibited discounts on through freight from competitive points; in theory, it would destroy a trunk line's ability to compete. “I think it is a fact that the introduction of those bills… has been done with a view to extract money from railroad companies,” Clark said. “It is a very serious question for the railway managers to know what to do; and they do pay money, not to the members of the Legislature, for I don't believe that this money which is paid by a great corporation reaches members or is designed to, but goes to others who are preying upon the hopes and fears of men.” The strikers knew that railroads would think it safer to give them money than to ignore them. Such payments, Clark claimed, “are not bribes but ransoms.” Railroads feared government graft just as the public did, and suffered for it.⁹⁴

Contemporaries and historians alike have carelessly lumped Vanderbilt together with Gould, Fisk, and the Erie board in their accusations of bribery. In fact, the state senate's investigation found little evidence of corruption by Vanderbilt and his agents, by contrast with the abundant proof that the Erie had poured out cash to judges and legislators. Indeed, Vanderbilt's lobbyists in Albany testified that he forbade them from buying votes (at least, not explicitly).⁹⁵ On close inspection, even the Commodore's relationship with the preposterous Judge Barnard proves to be more than a matter of graft. Little doubt exists as to Barnard's corruption, but there is no evidence that he simply took cash from Vanderbilt and did as he was told. Indeed, being a Tweed ally made him a foe of Horace Clark and Augustus Schell, who had started the Manhattan Club as a rival to the Tweed ring.⁹⁶ Even Vanderbilt's bitterest enemies never accused him of bribing Barnard; rather, they pointed out that the judge was a close friend of the Commodore's son-in-law and broker, George A. Osgood, and speculated in Erie. John M. Davidson socialized with Barnard and quoted his opinions about stocks, but his letters show that Barnard often talked down New York Central shares and took positions hostile to the Commodore. Temperamental and self-important, Barnard had his own agenda, if a dishonest one. In the Erie litigation, it simply coincided with Vanderbilt's.

These fine (but critical) details escaped opinion makers and newspaper-headline writers, let alone the public itself. “Exaggeration, misapprehension, and well-grounded allegations mingled together, and created a sense of crisis,” writes Mark Summers, a historian of nineteeth-century corruption. This cynicism obstructed attempts to cure the underlying complaints. Regulation was the obvious method of keeping corporations answerable to democracy, and not the other way around—but why trust public officials to regulate if they were all on the take? The absence of a nonpartisan, professional civil service—still decades away—meant there was no easy answer. The power of the railroads gave rise to demands for a stronger government to control them, yet this same power aroused fears that they would simply corrupt a strong government, and grow still more powerful. As Adams wrote elsewhere, “Imagine the Erie and Tammany rings rolled into one and turned loose upon the field of politics.”⁹⁷ Perversely, one lasting result of “A Chapter of Erie” was the doubt it cast on any solution to the problems it illuminated. And so the railroads grew still larger, and Vanderbilt more powerful.

THE VANDERBILT FAMILY SEEMED to be falling apart. In 1868, after the Commodore battled back from the brink of disaster in the Erie War, he found himself helpless to save his own loved ones. The first to go was the most vulnerable: Frances Lavinia, the invalid. Vanderbilt and Sophia buried their daughter in the family vault on Staten Island in the first week of June. The Hartford Courant took the occasion to report that the old man intended to “bequeath the great bulk of his property, now estimated at sixty millions of dollars, to his son William.… The Commodore has shown much interest in his relatives, particularly young men, and has put many of them… on the high road to wealth.”⁹⁸

With the family gathered in grief at 10 Washington Place, Corneil pulled his mother away from the others, “& held a long & important consultation,” according to Ellen. “They both concluded it was best for him not to write his father again or in any way ask a favor at his hands.” Sophia advised him to go on living quietly until January; if the Commodore did not assist him then, Corneil should take “a political position, or enter into some safe & respectable business,” Ellen reported. In so many words, Sophia tried one last time to convince him to abandon his dreams of making a big score, of duplicating his father's success in one lucky strike.

“On coming home,” Ellen wrote, “he seemed deeply impressed with his conversation with his mother & of his own accord assured me that he should not under any circumstances again trouble his father in any manner during the present year.” She suffered for her husband's penance as much as his crimes. The couple no longer had a house or carriage, and lived in relative poverty Even worse, Corneil sometimes turned against her in his frequent fits of self-hatred. When a close friend discussed Corneil's debts with her, he flared in anger at “this expose [sic] of my matters to a woman.… You certainly must know that I will stand no lecturing from any female.” Ellen, he wrote, “has got nothing to do with my business, and… I am not in the least responsible to her.” Yet still she defended him. “I fear you have a wrong impression in regard to his troubling his father,” she told Greeley “I know that for at least six months past he has neither personally nor by his letter asked his father a single favor, except that of recognition & this he immediately responded to satisfactorily. Cornelius has carefully avoided alluding to increase of allowance.” Then she added a caveat, one that said everything about his habits and associates: “Whatever his friend may have solicited on his behalf is of course another matter.”⁹⁹

As ever, Vanderbilt declined to assist his son, convinced that it would be wasted until he reformed himself. Yet, as the Courant observed, he made extraordinary efforts for other young relatives. On June 27, he beseeched President Johnson to restore his grandson, Vanderbilt Allen, to the commission that the young officer had abandoned. The Commodore observed that he was departing from his “uniform practice” of never requesting public office for his friends, but, he wrote, “He is a promising young man and I am anxious to save his pride.… After the war was over feeling that the country could spare his services—boy like—[he] foolishly resigned his place to make a trip to Europe in July 1865. I want to get him reinstated.” To Vanderbilt's disappointment, young Allen wanted to go into business. At least he took care of himself; the same could not be said for Jeremiah Simonson, the spendthrift nephew and master of the shipyard in Green-point. Vanderbilt sued him for $22,596.71 and won.¹⁰⁰

In the third week of July, the Commodore traveled to Saratoga Springs as usual. He checked into the Union Hotel, a favorite of Daniel Drew. Sophia was not feeling well; in hopes of regaining her health, she went to Lebanon Springs, on the Massachusetts border southeast of Albany. There she was advised to return at once to New York, for her health was too frail. Rather than go to 10 Washington Place, where she would be alone with the servants, she stayed with her daughter Maria Louisa and son-in-law Horace Clark at their home in Murray Hill.

On August 6, a little more than two weeks after Vanderbilt went to Saratoga, he received a telegram that Sophia had collapsed with a stroke. Immediately he boarded a special train for Troy, and telegraphed an order to the Hudson River Railroad to ready a locomotive and car for him there, and to clear the track south. He found his car waiting for him, hitched to the D. T. Vail, driven by engineer S. F. Gregory Jr. The Vail roared down the rails at fifty miles an hour. “Gregory says that is the fastest he ever rode,” the Troy Times reported, “and quite as fast as he thinks it safe to run.”¹⁰¹

Sophia remained bedridden at the Clark house, and showed encouraging signs of recovery. Her husband, who had brought her so much, who had put her through so much, remained with her. He was there at one thirty in the morning on August 17, when she suffered a second stroke and died. As Greeley wrote in the New York Tribune, “She had lived nearly 74 years without incurring a reproach or provoking enmity.”¹⁰²

On August 19, Vanderbilt sat surrounded by family and flowers as mourners came to 10 Washington Place to pay their respects. They filed past a sleek rosewood casket, viewing Sophia's body through a lid that was glass from the bust upward. The pallbearers included Cornelius's closest cohorts, Marshall O. Roberts, Charles O'Conor, John Harper, Augustus Schell, and John Steward, and the couple's wider circle of friends—Alexander T. Stewart, William H. Bradford, and A. S. Halsted. The guests included Daniel Drew, Edwin D. Morgan (now a U.S. senator), and others of note. A short funeral service was held at ten thirty in the morning, after which the Commodore escorted his deceased wife down to Whitehall Slip and across the harbor to the family tomb.¹⁰³

He returned to an empty house. Not literally empty, of course: the income tax assessor finally got a peek inside that year, and found an abundance of taxable possessions, including two fine watches, 468 ounces of silver dinnerware, and three carriages in the stables in the rear (in addition to $69,230 in taxable income, which did not include stock dividends).¹⁰⁴ Then, too, there was the staff of Irish-born servants. Not emotionally empty either: the walls, floors, and cabinets abounded with mementos of their nearly fifty-five years together: paintings of each other, the gifts from their golden wedding anniversary. Each item served as a reminder of his loss.

The image of Vanderbilt as a man of force burns brightly in the historical eye, making it difficult to penetrate the glare to perceive a subtler vision behind it. He often comes across as having been abusive and domineering to his wife. The truth was more nuanced. Daniel Allen, for example, thought that Vanderbilt's notorious dispatch of Sophia to an asylum in 1846 was justified, that she required treatment. Ellen's letters never hinted at anger between her in-laws—and Corneil would have tried any parents' patience. Cornelius and Sophia grew rich together, traveled together, had children together, buried children together, attended the weddings of grandchildren together. They were a couple.

Perhaps the truth is not so nuanced after all: despite his shortcomings as a husband, Vanderbilt loved his wife. And her death left him alone. Of all the forms of stress that afflict human beings, one of the worst is loneliness, especially after the loss of a spouse. His unmarried sister Phebe recognized the emotional vacuum, and stepped in to supervise the maids, keep up the house, and keep up her brother.¹⁰⁵ He needed his sister in this hour; and through her, he glimpsed a future beyond his isolation and grief.

* The Erie already had a broad gauge. Presumably Fisk misspoke or was misquoted, and meant a third rail on the Michigan Southern.