Chapter Two
The twenty-three-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt who took command of the Mouse on November 24, 1817, had no way of knowing he was making the most important decision of his life. Then again, not even Thomas Gibbons, who saw a good deal, could foresee how far-reaching their collaboration would prove to be—how it would help unlock the potential of the steam engine, recast the Constitution, and contribute to the remaking of American society. Gibbons had his hard eye fixed on his enemies, unaware that his struggle would inexorably link his own name to Vanderbilt's for the rest of time.
Even as an impulse, Vanderbilt's snap decision to take orders from Gibbons must have mystified his friends and associates, for the brusque sailor was nothing if not commanding. Vanderbilt was proud, of course, and filled with “the desire of riches” that Rochefoucauld-Liancourt had identified as the essential American trait. His sense of physical power, too, should not be underestimated. He was a big man who lived by his strength, straining daily against the wind and current. His combative manner had been hardened in a fringe of society marked by “rough independence,” where confrontation was the stuff of daily life. He sneered with that contempt for weakness that comes naturally to a man who has beaten and cowed other men.
What's more, the engagement with Gibbons set him back a step in his plans to build his fortune. A thriving ferryman, he aspired to more, as he used his boats to embark on the only obvious voyage to wealth in the new republic, setting up as a general merchant. Even as he stepped aboard the Mouse and inspected its copper boiler, he kept his periauger plying between Staten Island and Whitehall Slip with passengers and produce, and his schooner nosing along coastal waters with cargoes of fish and woolens.1
And yet, he clearly saw the advantages of the connection he had made. Having formed partnerships with his father and his brother-in-law, he recognized that few men in the entire nation commanded greater resources than Thomas Gibbons. Even more important, Vanderbilt and his contemporaries understood that the steam engine (or, to put it more broadly, motorized transportation) was the most dramatic technological breakthrough since the advent of the printing press at the dawn of the Renaissance. To move on water at will, against wind, tide, and current, was to transform a fundamental fact of life; to say that it marked a revolution is to give an overused word its proper weight. A practical education in steam would be worth a few days of taking orders.
What he did not reckon on was how well he would get on with Gibbons. “I always thought Thomas Gibbons a very strong-minded man, the strongest I ever knew,” he said later. “I don't believe any human being could control him; he was a man that could not be led.”2 He could just as easily have been describing himself. And there, ironically, in this meeting of iron wills, lay the seed of an alliance that would force the freedom of commerce within America's borders and tear down one of the last bastions of the eighteenth-century world—a culture of deference, privilege, and rank already groaning under the pressure of the times. And it all started with the most aristocratic of rituals: a challenge to a duel.
“DUELLING IS AN ABOMINABLE CUSTOM introduced by the depravity of man,” Thomas Gibbons scratched out on a piece of paper, pausing now and then to dip the nib of his quill into an inkwell. “And good men sometimes are dragged into it by the wicked, thoughtless part of the community.” It was the evening of September 15, 1786; Gibbons was composing a letter to his eldest son, a letter that he believed might be his last. The next morning, he planned to engage in the “abominable custom” with characteristic righteous wrath. As he counseled his son, “Should your character be wantonly sported with, with deliberate caution arm yourself.”
The next day, he and his opponent faced each other with pistols in hand, bellowing their firm intention to kill each other—until their seconds arranged a compromise. Gibbons had been entirely earnest; the essence of the art of the duel, he knew, was a sincere willingness to stake everythingon the outcome. Killing the foe was entirely secondary; the point, rather, was to bravely expose oneself to deadly gunfire, thereby proving to the world a quality that lies hidden in a man's heart: his honor. In his own case, however, he may have confused honor with ruthlessness, for no trick or ploy was beneath him when he had a goal in mind.
Gibbons came into the world in 1757 as heir to an army of slaves, and a large rice plantation in Georgia, and he never forgot it. In adulthood he opened a thriving law practice in Savannah, and eventually bought more plantations. He accumulated and consumed until he himself had swelled to almost three hundred pounds. Cunning and commanding, he had, his daughter dryly noted, “a particular and singular mode of doing… business.” In other words, he was almost pathologically contentious.3
In the Revolution, he alone in a family of patriots stood by the king. Imprisoned for treason, he called the sheriff a “damned scoundrel” and accused him of asking for a bribe. Remarkably, he was able to have his conviction overturned after the war, managed General “Mad Anthony” Wayne's campaign for Congress, then fought a duel with the losing candidate, who had accurately denounced him as a man “whose soul is faction… who never could be easy under government.” The two faced off in 1791; they blazed away at each other three times before they settled their quarrel. Gibbons went on to serve as the Federalist mayor of Savannah off and on until 1801.4
That year he established “bachelor quarters,” as he called them, in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. Perhaps he was driven out of the South by tense relations with the wife he left behind (he soon impregnated a young maid in his new home). In any case, it was a financially astute move. New York was just beginning its climb to a predominant role in the South's overseas trade. Living in the North, Gibbons served as his own middleman, and he had ample opportunities for reinvesting his profits in real estate, rapidly multiplying banks, and turnpike corporations that constructed solid new toll roads across New Jersey5 He also discovered a culture surprisingly familiar to him.
Three years after Gibbons's arrival, in that ritual he knew so well, Vice President Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton dead in nearby Weehawken, in the culmination of Burr and Hamilton's long and bitter political rivalry. The duel led to a quixotic turn in Burr's life, sending it on a winding path that led to a trial for treason and an eventual return to a prestigious law practice in New York. It also showed that dueling (which first appeared in America among military officers in the Revolution) was far from the specifically Southern institution that it would eventually become. In the early years of the republic, politicians issued challenges to each other with alarming frequency. They did so in part because the first parties of the early republic were, to a great extent, factions of notables; political disputes quickly became matters of personal honor.6 But the importance placed on honor reveals something deeper: the persistence of an eighteenth-century culture of deference, dominated by an American aristocracy.
The word “aristocracy” tends to be used rather loosely. In the modern world, it is calculated by multiplying wealth by snobbery. During the early republic, on the other hand, it reflected the division of society into distinct ranks. Until the Revolution, wrote historian Bernard Bailyn, Americans had assumed “that a healthy society was a hierarchical society in which it was natural for some to be rich and some poor, some honored and some obscure, some powerful and some weak.” Perhaps most important, “it was believed that superiority was unitary, that the attributes of the favored—wealth, wisdom, power—had a natural affinity to each other, and hence that political leadership would naturally rest in the hands of social leaders.” In New York in particular, these natural leaders came from a closed set of families, distinguished by an inherited prestige. A full century before Gibbons moved north, the aristocrats of his day had already emerged—the Livingstons, Van Rensselaers, Schuylers, Beekmans, Jays, Bayards, Morrises, and others—in a self-perpetuating circle of intermarried clans.7
The patricians owed much of their status to their particular kind of wealth. New York's aristocrats were classic landed gentry, owners of vast manorial estates along the Hudson River that were populated by tenant farmers (a rarity in land-abundant America). Philip Schuyler, for example, held some six thousand acres, while the Van Rensselaers reigned over an enormous “patroonship” established by the Dutch in the seventeenth century. Their relationships with their inferiors were defined by vertical chains of deference and dependence. “As late as 1828,” writes historian Martin Bruegel, an English observer was amazed by the “immense influence” of these manorial lords over their tenants and neighbors. And landed wealth was proprietary wealth, the kind that originally defined a “gentleman.” The gentry did not work for their income, and so had the leisure to educate and improve themselves. Strikingly, they neatly adapted to, and even championed, the Revolution: they saw themselves as a refined, disinterested ruling class for a virtuous, classical republic.
Property requirements for suffrage under New York's constitution of 1777 hardened the culture of rank into law. Two distinct levels of wealth were required to vote: one for the state assembly, and a second and higher level for the state senators and governor—establishing a “three-tiered scaffolding of society” as Bruegel writes. In 1790, four of ten adult white men could not cast a ballot of any kind; in some places, only one out of four could vote for the assembly, and one out of five for governor.8
It was in this environment that the duel flourished. In the aristocratic culture of deference, little distinction was made between the person and his position. A leader could only function if he maintained his personal authority; upholding his “character” (as reputation was called), by the duel if necessary, was essential to all aspects of his life. So too in an economy with limited currency and few formal institutions, where transactions were highly personal and usually sealed by an exchange of promissory notes. A lofty character allowed one's notes to “pass current,” to be circulated in the marketplace at little or no discount. The patricians literally could not afford to be defamed, to allow insults to their authority to go unchallenged.
The Revolution marked a decisive turn against the culture of deference. By the time Gibbons settled in New Jersey—the year Thomas Jefferson took office as president, after campaigning against patrician rule—assertiveness as well as deference was visible in the lower layers of society, swelled chests as well as bowed heads. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt noted the progress of this transformation in two telling observations in the 1790s: “They deceive themselves very much who think that pure republican manners prevail in America,” he wrote, pointing out how the citizens painstakingly differentiated between the ranks of society “In balls, concerts, and public amusements, these classes do not mix; and yet,” he added in amazement, “every one calls himself, and is called by others, a gentleman.”9
It is the image of a society in the midst of tectonic change. An older, stratified idea of the world was being torn up by political radicalism erupting out of the Revolution, and by a new social dynamism linked to the surging economy. Once-deferential artisans wanted to serve in public office themselves. Average Americans were less and less willing to passively follow the old elite, as they had for so long.10
Thomas Gibbons, by contrast, settled comfortably into that old order—or, at least, as comfortably as a cantankerous tyrant could—as he passed his promissory notes among New York's elite, and formed business partnerships with his neighbors Aaron Ogden and Jonathan Dayton, the Federalist senators for New Jersey. He could hardly have been a less likely champion of Jeffersonian ideals. Ironically, a chain of events had already been set in motion that would turn his famously hard head into a battering ram against the citadel of aristocracy. That chain of events—and that citadel—were the work of the most patrician of patricians, Chancellor Robert R. Livingston.
No one better exemplified the culture of deference than Chancellor Livingston. Peering out of serious eyes set between the arching eyebrows and long nose of his bloodline, he looked every ounce the aristocrat. As leader of one of the richest and most prestigious families of Hudson Valley gentry, he presided over a vast manor, serving as patron to hundreds of tenant farmers who came to him, hats clutched to their chests, to ask for favors or pay their rent. In keeping with his family's tradition of leadership, he played a prominent part in the Revolution, serving alongside Jefferson on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence, and he later became New York's first chancellor (a chief judge in the state court system). Livingston allied with Jefferson and his Republicans, proving that, under the state's restrictive constitution, the aristocrats and their values crossed party lines, despite the Federalists' reputation as the party of the elite. In 1802, the New York Evening Post referred to the Livingstons as a “house of republican nobility” and quoted a junior member of the clan as saying, “To be born with their family name is a fortune to any man.”
Unlike the stuffy, fictional aristocrats of Jane Austen's novels, Livingston and his fellow patricians felt no disdain for trade. They maintained countinghouses in the city invested in urban real estate, and had careers as lawyers and merchants. They embraced Hamilton's financial program, with its stocks, financial markets, and banks. Schuyler, Hamilton's father-in-law, sought to rationalize his tenants' leases for greater profits, and the patricians led the drive to build a canal to Lake Erie. Livingston organized a state agricultural society and promoted merino sheep and gypsum fertilizer. To quote George Washington, they were decidedly a “monied gentry.”11
Those very activities, however, separated the commercial vision of aristocrats such as Livingston from the emerging ideals of rank-and-file Jeffersonians. He believed in economic development, but in an ordered manner, directed from above. After the Revolution, the seeds of a different notion began to sprout—of an individualistic, competitive economy where one could go as far as his ability and energy could take him. “Adam Smith's invisible hand,” writes historian Joyce Appleby “was warmly clasped by the Republicans.” They criticized the patricians for using their political power to grant themselves special privileges. Corporate charters usually went to the well-connected. Many early banks extended credit only to a closed network of relatives and cronies. Government intervention in the economy largely consisted of special rewards to officeholders and favored men.12
The aristocrats saw no conflict of interest in using public office to enrich themselves. As society's natural leaders, they reasoned, they should be entrusted with economic stewardship as well. This outlook, this merging of the private and public roles of the elite, was the essence of mercantilism, in which the state empowered private parties to carry out activities thought to serve the public interest.13 The standard reward for such an undertaking was a monopoly—just what Chancellor Livingston sought when he offered to meet a most pressing public need, the need for steamboats.
Even before Americans learned of James Watt's work with the steam engine in England in the 1760s, they had dreamed of bolting it to the hull of a boat to speed themselves across the vast stretches of water that linked their scattered communities. Experiments abounded: paddlewheels, early propellers, even a water jet and mechanical oars.14 Chancellor Livingston dreamed and experimented as ambitiously as anyone. In 1798, he convinced his friends in the legislature to give him a monopoly on steamboats in New York State waters. Unfortunately he failed to produce a working design of his own, and his monopoly remained unused.
In 1801 he arrived in Paris as Jefferson's minister to France, where he met an émigré American artist and inventor named Robert Fulton. As Livingston helped to negotiate the Louisiana Purchase, he financed Fulton's prototype steamboat, which ran on the Seine in 1803. They returned to New York, where Fulton tinkered with his designs. Finally, on August 17, 1807, the sixty-year-old Livingston invited New York's dignitaries aboard Fulton's final effort, a clanking, 150-foot-long vessel prosaically named Steam Boat. Crowds lined the shore to watch the amazing spectacle: a boat moving by mechanical power. It churned up the Hudson at five miles per hour to Livingston's manor, Clermont, where Livingston declared that his cousin Harriet and Fulton were to be married. The steamboat—and Fulton—had arrived.
Fulton created a line between New York and Albany while Livingston maneuvered an extension of the monopoly through the legislature—“a veritable model of state munificence,” as legal scholar Maurice G. Baxter writes—that gave him the right to seize steamboats that entered New York waters from other states.15 But Livingston had overreached. With so many inventors and investors interested in the steamboat, the monopoly only served to limit its widespread adoption. The new technology was simply too important for the monopoly to remain unchallenged.
In 1813, Chancellor Livingston died. That same year, Gibbons's neighbor and business partner Aaron Ogden took office as governor of New Jersey, and promptly launched an attack on the steamboat grant, both as chief executive of the state, fighting New York's claims to the waters shared with New Jersey, and as a private steamboat entrepreneur. In a bitter battle Fulton successfully defended his monopoly, though at the cost of his own life, after he fell ill from exposure when crossing the frozen Hudson on his return from a lobbying trip to New Jersey. The monopoly lived on in the hands of Livingston's heirs, who came to terms with Ogden. On May 5, 1815, a little over two months after Fulton's death, the Livingstons gave Ogden a license to run his own steamboat between Elizabethtown and New York. Ogden had begun as the monopoly's most potent challenger; he had ended as its ally16
Enter the irascible Thomas Gibbons. On the surface, he and Ogden had everything in common: they were of the same party profession, and patrician status. In temperament, however, they were virtually destined to clash. Gibbons was arrogant and explosive; Ogden, wily and sanctimonious. And both were men of infinite calculation. With all the force of a Greek tragedy, their respective traits drew them into an epic conflict, one that would decide the fate of the Livingston steamboat monopoly.
At the height of Ogden's battle against the Livingstons, he and Gibbons fell into a dispute over the renewal of a lease for his steamboat pier, which he rented from Gibbons, who characteristically made things difficult. Ogden tried to apply pressure by involving himself in Gibbons's ongoing dispute with his wife, daughter, and son-in-law over Gibbons's will, suggesting strategies to the disinherited family members. This only enraged the easily enraged Gibbons. To make matters worse, Ogden acquired a past-due promissory note that Gibbons had made out to a third party; Ogden deposited it with his banker in New York, who had Gibbons arrested for nonpayment on May 30, 1816 (on Ogden's steamboat, no less). Gibbons bailed himself out and stomped home, steeped in a hatred that soon took on a life of its own. “As we reside within half a mile of each other,” he wrote to Ogden, “and your never intimating to me, nor any of my friends, any claims or cause of action you had against me, I pronounce your conduct rascally.”17
For Gibbons, it had become an affair of honor. On July 25, 1816, he stormed over to Ogden's house, horsewhip in hand. He pounded on the door as Ogden ran out the back and scrambled over a fence. Gibbons tacked up a challenge that read, “Sir—I understand that you have interfered in a dispute between Mrs. Gibbons and myself.… My friend Gen. Dayton will arrange with you the time and place of our meeting.” He later testified in court that “if he had found him at home he meant to have whipped him within an inch of his life in his own house, for he knew he was a coward.”
Ogden, who had no intention of exchanging shots at dawn, had Gibbons arrested for trespass and for dueling. Gibbons decided to get revenge another way, one that stood to increase his own wealth even further: he would drive Ogden out of the steamboat business by running his own paddlewheeler between Elizabethtown and New York. And that—against all logic of politics, social position, and personal conviction—pitted him directly against the New York steamboat monopoly.
In taking on Ogden as an ally, the Livingstons had unwittingly acquired their deadliest enemy yet.18
WHEN THE STORM HIT on the morning of February 3, 1818, Vanderbilt stood in the rocking hull of the Dread, which he ran on a strict schedule between Staten Island and New York's Whitehall Slip. Scanning the skies from within the grip of Manhattan's piers, he could see what little time he had to secure his boat. The winds began to howl through the bare masts of the ships that nursed along South Street, driving hail, then rain, then snow down New York's narrow ways.
Then the little steam ferry York* came drifting past the Battery, just off Manhattan's southern tip. The boat had no business there; as Vanderbilt knew, it made its 10:30 run from Paulus Hook (later the site of Jersey City) to the foot of Courtlandt Street, over on the North River waterfront. What he did not know was that it carried a full load of thirty passengers and three wagons, each with a two-horse team; that the storm had smashed the boat like the butt of a rifle, halting its progress across the Hudson; and that the pilot had decided to seek the shelter of Whitehall Slip. On rounding the Battery, it had met a ruthless ebb tide pouring out of the East River, which ripped the York out of control. Waves crashed over the rails, sending tons of freezing seawater knee-high across the deck.
As Vanderbilt stood in the Dread, a single glance would have revealed hundreds of masts in the harbor—of boats, barks, and brigs, all anchored or moored against the gale. With the storm rising to its height, none dared to go to the aid of the York. Undeterred, he cast off and hoisted sail. Running before the wind, he bore down on the spinning York, bringing the Dread alongside amid the snow and hail. The two vessels drifted together in the worst of the storm; one by one, twelve passengers clambered over the gunwales into the Dread before Vanderbilt had to cut loose. He later tied up safely at Whitehall. Now out of reach, the York drifted on with the rest of the passengers, all the way to the Narrows, until it finally landed six hours later.19
After the rescue, Vanderbilt returned immediately to work, repairing his ravaged boat, preparing to resume his scheduled runs. If anything, his moment of glory only underscored the distance between himself and the merchants, who read about his exploit in the Evening Post.
It is often thought that youth is the time of grand horizons, of great dreams and bold plans. In fact, the reverse is often true: how little the young have experienced, how little they know of what might be. Vanderbilt daily glimpsed the emporium of New York, but he saw it strictly from sea level. He may have begun to buy and sell his own small cargoes of fish and fabrics, but he was removed from the countinghouse kingdom on the far side of South Street—the merchants who endorsed bills of exchange with glasses of sherry in hand, the auctions of federal bonds and British imports. His was a gunwale-to-gunwale existence of weather in the face and physical strain. He encountered the Anglo-Dutch elite only when they called on his sailor's skill and knowledge—as they did again just three weeks after the storm.
Late on the night of February 23, the British ship Neptune ran aground at Sandy Hook. Twenty-two days out of Jamaica, the merchantman carried $404,000 in gold and silver, of which $339,000 belonged to the New York branch of the recently refounded Bank of the United States. That precious metal formed the very foundation of the most important branch of the nation's central bank; every note, every record of deposit, every check it issued was considered a promise to pay in specie. Though no lives were at risk, the loss of the cargo might have a devastating effect, sparking a panic. None of the bay's boatmen had been able to salvage it, as waves battered the helpless vessel. So on February 26, Vanderbilt piloted the Dread down to Sandy Hook to see the stranded ship for himself. Two boats were luffing uselessly around its inert hull. Vanderbilt neatly steered his craft alongside and began to haul the specie across the gunwales. Later he met the federal revenue cutter Active and transferred the cargo. A possible financial catastrophe had been averted.20
By the time of this second rescue, Vanderbilt had already begun his foray into the world of wealthy men. When the Mouse was laid up for winter refitting, Vanderbilt had returned to his sailboats. But he seemed to sense that there was more to be made of his relationship with Gibbons; so when Gibbons asked him to check on the work being done to the Mouse, he agreed.
On the day the Neptune ran aground, Vanderbilt hurried over to the shipyards of Corlears Hook, the southeastern bulge of Manhattan island, and marched into the sprawling steam-engine works of James P. Allaire. A friendship quickly grew up between these two men, who both valued tough-minded competence, and Allaire willingly tutored Vanderbilt in this new world of steam. Few knew more about it. Allaire had worked on Fulton's first boats, then leased the inventor's engine works after his death and moved the machinery to these yards on Cherry Street. Allaire had built the Mouse himself, in fact, to test a paddle design. He walked Vanderbilt through the yard, pointing out the replacement parts for the boiler, the new toilet (or “necessary”), and the boring mill where the piston cylinder would be prepared.
Vanderbilt moved on to the shipyard of Lawrence & Sneden. There, beneath a swarming crew of caulkers and carpenters, glistened an entirely new hull ordered by Gibbons, for a vessel provisionally called the Violin. This sleek steamboat-in-creation stretched twice as long as the Mouseand would soon be fitted with Allaire's newest machinery. “I have saw the Violine,” Vanderbilt reported, in his characteristically direct style, “and think she will be a fine Boat.” It soon received a new and lasting name: the Bellona, after the Roman goddess of war. It would prove a fitting title indeed.
When Vanderbilt next sailed up the narrow Kill Van Kull to Gibbons's Rising Sun Landing, where a crew of workmen hammered together a pier and buildings to serve the Mouse and the Bellona, Gibbons greeted him with a demanding air. Obese and diabetic from a life of rapacious eating and drinking, Gibbons constantly grumbled about “the agonies of my frail body” that often left him housebound in Elizabethtown. Gibbons needed someone to help run his new steamboat enterprise; his first preference, his son William, spent much of his time overseeing the family's plantations. Gibbons observed that Vanderbilt stood in marked contrast to the “worthless fellows” who ran so many of the harbor's boats; his manner and conduct earned as much trust as Gibbons was grudgingly willing to give. He asked Vanderbilt to become his permanent captain, and move to Rising Sun Landing—directly under his hard eye.
Vanderbilt agreed, but only up to a point. He would take command of the Mouse, then the Bellona when it was launched, but no more. He looked over the rooms at Rising Sun Landing and begged off, explaining, “I would prefer living in N. York.” He had his own ferry to run, after all, and a schooner to ready for the spring coastal trade.21
Gibbons put him in charge of the refurbished Mouse for several weeks before they settled on an employment contract, the only one Vanderbilt would ever sign.
Memorandum of agreement made this 26 June 1818 between Thomas Gibbons and Cornelius Vanderbilt,—The said Cornelius Vanderbilt agrees to serve as master and commander of the Mouse, and when the Bellona shall run of the Bellona Steamboat until the present season is over, or until the ice shall block up the boat at the rate of Sixty Dollars a month and the privillege of half of the bar—Gibbons finding the bar furniture and Vanderbilt preserving the furniture and making the whole good at the end of the season. Vanderbilt will do all the duties required of him as commander, to run to and from Elizabeth Town at the landings of the said Thomas Gibbons.
Th. Gibbons
Cornelius Vanderbilt
It was a typically hard bargain for the stony Gibbons—though the bar would swell Vanderbilt's earnings. As one historian has put it, America was an “alcoholic republic;” early steamboats were motorized taverns, dispensing wine, whiskey, and brandy in enormous quantities. Once the Bellona was launched, Vanderbilt could expect anywhere from $60 to $110 a month from the bar alone.22 More important was Vanderbilt's limitation of his commitment to the “present season” as he continued to pursue an independent course. He carried on with his ferry, of course, and even laid plans for a new schooner, the Thorn.23
Gibbons was focused on crushing Aaron Ogden. Vanderbilt listened to endless outbursts at “this fallen Shylock,” as Gibbons called him. “He will if he can ruin me,” he claimed, in a fit of projection. “Indeed he would ruin the whole world to enrich himself and family.” Unfortunately, his enemy now sheltered inside the fortress of the New York steamboat monopoly. Ogden and the Livingstons, Gibbons wrote to John Randolph, “have no merit; they have no claim to useful invention. They are mere locusts and blood suckers in this part of the union. We cannot get to New York without their consent and at their price.”24
In his employer's presence, Vanderbilt caught his first insider's glimpse of how business affairs were of one flesh with the law and politics. Despite Gibbons's physical infirmities and extravagant self-absorption, he possessed a legal mind of Damascus steel—sharp, hard, and penetrating. In the glare of his own self-righteousness, he readily saw the vast repercussions of his vendetta. To bankrupt Ogden, a ruthless business war was necessary, but insufficient; he had to convince the courts to overturn the Livingston monopoly itself. “The present is not a question of pounds shillings & pence,” he later wrote; “it is the great question of sovereign rights—the right of navigating your own waters, under the laws and constitution of the U. States.” At stake was the notion that the United States should be a common market, that the individual states should have no power to erect barriers to trade at their borders. The outcome of such a case could hardly be clear; indeed, if it did reach the Supreme Court, it would be the first in the Constitution's three-decade history concerning the commerce clause.25
In their frequent conversations, Vanderbilt learned of Gibbons's careful preparations for the legal battle to come. Aaron Burr had assured Gibbons that “any judge of the Court of the U.S.” would find the steamboat grant “unconstitutional… highly absurd & tyrannical.” Gibbons intended to obtain federal licenses under the Coasting Act of 1793, violate the monopoly to trigger a legal response from Ogden, then move the case to federal court. There he would argue that the commerce clause gave Congress sole authority over interstate commerce.26
Ogden, of course, merely held a license; behind him loomed the rich and powerful Livingston family. They were certain to fight back, for their monopoly was tremendously lucrative. In 1818, for example, the gross receipts of their North River Steam Boat Company reached $153,694, leaving a profit of $61,861 and dividends of $49,000. These sums were astronomical for the economy of the day. (In 1812, Fulton had described an income of $34,000 as “such immense profits.”)
But the Livingstons were a divided clan. The chancellor had left to his heirs, Robert L. and Edward P. Livingston, the North River Steam Boat Company and its line to Albany. In 1808, however, he had sold to his brother John R. Livingston the rights to the waters between New York City and New Jersey, Staten Island, and Long Island. Intensely belligerent, eternally suspicious, and underhanded, John was aggravated by gout in both feet, and he aggravated his monopoly partners in turn. One of his many slippery maneuvers had led Fulton to erupt, “Never shall he edge himself into any other enterprise which I can control.”27
On December 5, 1817, Gibbons had approached John R. Livingston to test his reaction to the news that he was building the Bellona to compete with Ogden's new ninety-five-foot Atalanta. Livingston had never liked Ogden; he had agreed to grant him a license only because of intense family pressure. So he slyly replied that he would not stop Gibbons from waging his vendetta.28
So far, so good: Gibbons had made every preparation for the legal fight to come. But the courtroom struggle would only be half the war. He still needed to win the business battle. After all, the ultimate goal was not to take away Ogden's license, but to send him to debtor's prison through direct competition. And that was Vanderbilt's job.
IN THE PARLOR OF THOMAS GIBBONS, Vanderbilt found a portal into the world of New York's wealthy patricians. Surprisingly, he found a second one through his own family. His introduction came through his brother-in-law, John De Forest, who now commanded the Nautilus, a steamboat that ran between New York and Staten Island. The craft belonged to the Richmond Turnpike Company, a corporation that was itself the property of Daniel D. Tompkins. Tompkins, a former governor of New York who had married into an aristocratic family, pursued expensive plans to develop his estate of Tompkinsville, Staten Island, even as he served as vice president of the United States. Thanks to De Forest, Vanderbilt became a regular guest at Tompkins's imposing marble mansion. There he learned that Tompkins, like all of patrician New York, was terrified by Gibbons's vendetta against Ogden.
An air of desperation hovered over Tompkins, who swayed under the weight of alcoholism and heavy debts. He owed a great deal of money to Gibbons, and ran the Nautilus under an expensive license from the Livingstons; he stood to lose heavily if the monopoly was overturned. Indeed, Gibbons's assault on the steamboat monopoly was also an attack on aristocratic privilege, as represented in Tompkins's own Richmond Turnpike Company. Whenever Vanderbilt stopped at the Tompkinsville dock and knocked on the doors of the mansion, the vice president urged him to press Gibbons to compromise, to make peace “with honor & propriety.”29
What a universe was captured in that phrase—one that Tompkins's young guest could never grasp. For all of the vice president's Jeffersonian political affiliations, he picked his way through this changing society with an eighteenth-century mental map, written in the ink of deference and rank, drafted with mercantilist principles that placed the orderly direction of the economy in elite hands. To New York's patricians, Gibbons's insistence on competition was scandalous. Shortly after Vanderbilt took command of the Bellona, the aristocrat Rachel Stevens wrote in alarm, “Gibbons runs an elegant Steamboat for half price… purposely to ruin Ogden, and as he has a very long purse, I expect he will do it. Ogden has lowered his price and now Gibbons says he will go for nothing. Did you ever hear of such malice in this enlightened age?” Malice may seem a curious term for the offering of better service at lower rates, but it was malice indeed. Perversely, it was an obsession with honor that drove Gibbons to a kind of competitive capitalism that respected profits, not persons.30
In Vanderbilt's world, crowds were thicker, elbows sharper, confrontations cold and raw. He had grown up in a market-centered household outside the shadow of aristocrats; his was the individualistic society still emerging in America, guided not by honor but by calculation. He was angered but not scandalized when Ogden's men tore down signs to Rising Sun Landing, when the captains of Ogden's periaugers blocked the Mouse's dock—to “plague” Gibbons, as one declared.
The twenty-four-year-old Vanderbilt took command of the 116-ton Bellona in October 1818. He brought it through the broad bay and narrow creek of Kill Van Kull less than a dozen times before he was met on the New York docks by a process server. Ogden had been content merely to harass the Mouse, but the large and powerful Bellona prompted him to seek an injunction from New York's Chancery Court, charging Gibbons with violating the monopoly. For Gibbons, it was all according to plan, and he began work on an appeal.
The vendetta played out in parallel battles of high and low. In September 1818, Gibbons stood trial for trespass, stemming from his attempt to challenge Ogden to a duel. (The charge for dueling was dismissed, as there had been none.) “The celebrity and high standing of the parties,” the Newark Centinel reported, “excited considerable interest in the public mind.” Each day, “a great number of respectable ladies” attended the trial, which ended with a $5,000 fine for Gibbons. It was far less decorous down on the waterfront, where the rival steamboat crews stooped to stealing fuel from each other's woodpiles. When Gibbons's own process server approached the engineer of the Atalanta, Ogden's man started punching and kicking, shouting, “Damned rascal, infernal villain, damned son of a bitch.”31
Vanderbilt resorted to his own brazen and bewildering maneuvers to keep the Bellona running to Manhattan in the face of the court order. On June 4, 1819, as he chatted with De Forest and Tompkins at the vice president's mansion, he received another injunction barring the Bellona from New York. Nevertheless he went, was arrested, and was bundled off to Albany to see Chancellor James Kent, a man decidedly sympathetic to the monopoly. There Vanderbilt explained his insolence: Tompkins had hired the boat on the day he was taken into custody. The chancellor had no choice but to release him. Sometimes Vanderbilt simply ran the Bellona to the city, deftly avoiding the authorities who tried to impound it. When Ogden presented evidence of these violations, Gibbons blithely told the court that he had “misunderstood” its orders.32
With Vanderbilt managing the tactics of the struggle, Gibbons gave thought to strategy. His ferry service, he realized, was lucrative because it was a link in the most important commercial corridor in the burgeoning economy—the route between New York and Philadelphia, the young republic's financial centers and largest cities. Each year, more and more people passed between them, carrying information, capital, credit, and new business relationships. Gibbons constructed a consolidated line in early 1819 by forming a partnership with the Stevens brothers (aristocratic nephews of Chancellor Livingston, no less), who had a steamboat on the Delaware River, and with a group of stagecoach owners who provided transit by turnpike across the thirty-mile neck of New Jersey. The Bellona connected with the stages at New Brunswick, the farthest navigable point on the Raritan River. They called it the Union Line.33
There was already a steamboat that sailed between New York and New Brunswick. Perversely named Olive Branch, it belonged to John R. Livingston. He had eyed Gibbons's war against Ogden with unease that simmered into anger as Gibbons looked increasingly likely to succeed. Now that Gibbons competed directly against his own boat, his shallow patience boiled away, and he swept down on the Bellona with an injunction on April 24, 1819.34
Vanderbilt kept the business running, passing passengers through to New York by connecting with the Nautilus in New Jersey waters or simply by dodging process servers in Manhattan. Meanwhile Gibbons proceeded with his appeal to the Supreme Court of what was now called Gibbons v. Ogden. On December 13, 1819, he wrote to Daniel Webster, former congressman and future secretary of state. Webster already had a formidable reputation for his national vision, his championing of enterprise, his arguments before the high court—and his godlike vanity. A case that could tear down state barriers to national commerce, Gibbons thought, would suit Webster perfectly.35
THE ICE FROZE the Elizabeth in port. In February 1820, it sealed shut New York's North River piers and prevented the tall-masted vessel from departing. No one could free it. On board, Dr. J. M. Scott McKnight tended to the shivering passengers: some fifty black men and women, all skilled artisans bound for Africa to prepare settlements for rescued slaves. Technically a federal expedition against the transatlantic slave trade, it was a thinly disguised project of the American Colonization Society which planned to ship freed slaves to Africa.
Vanderbilt stepped forward and said he could cut the Elizabeth loose in one night, and he'd do it for $100. With the Mouse and the Bellona undergoing winter refitting, he had been spending much of his time in New York, where he and Sophia still lived (now in a low wooden building at 58 Stone Street, a twisting, crowded lane close to the waterfront). The ship's agents agreed to Vanderbilt's price. He then took three sailors from the USS Cyane, the ship's escort, in a small boat alongside the trapped vessel. He balanced an anchor on the end of a long board and pushed it out onto the ice, then used another board to push it farther, then another, until the anchor sank on the outside edge. He and his men hauled on the anchor line and cut a path through the ice. De Forest brought the Nautilus around and swiftly towed the ship out.36
The city itself felt frozen in as 1820 began. The previous year, a devastating financial panic had cut short the heady expansion that had followed the peace of 1815, depopulating the countinghouses faster than a plague. Politics still sank beneath the weight of the old order—the limited franchise, the mercantilist monopolies, the political favoritism bestowed upon the privileged few. And Gibbons's boats were barred from New York by Ogden and Livingston's injunctions, a matter of rising gossip and debate.
As the year progressed, the frozen crust began to crack. A state constitutional convention convened, holding out hope for a more democratic government. In Trenton, the New Jersey legislature passed a retaliatory act that allowed Gibbons to impound the boats of anyone who impounded his own under the New York monopoly law. He promptly seized Ogden's and Livingston's vessels, which forced them to allow the Bellona to run to New York while his appeal crept toward the Supreme Court and the business war raged on.37
Vanderbilt fought this war at water level, lashing his crew ahead in a literal race for business. On the Delaware River landings, stages for Gibbons's and Livingston's lines swallowed passengers from Philadelphia, then pounded up the turnpike in a bouncing, careening charge to New Brunswick. Frances Trollope later described one such chaise as “the most detestable stage-coach that ever Christian built to dislocate the joints of his fellow men. Ten of these torturing machines were crammed full of the passengers who left the boat with us.… Every face grew grim and scowling.” At New Brunswick, riders poured onto the pier as porters hurled their luggage onto associated steamers. “No sooner were we in the boats,” wrote passenger Anne Royall, than “the steam was liberally plied to the wheels, and a race… commenced for New-York.”
Down the Raritan and into the kills the Bellona and the Olive Branch plunged, paddlewheels beating the water, smoke trailing behind, as their pilots fought for any advantage. “It was quite an interesting sight to see such vast machines, in all their majesty, flying as it were, their decks covered with well-dressed people, face to face, so near to each other as to be able to converse,” Royall thought. “It is well calculated to amuse the traveller.” Speed was indeed everything: in a world where news generally traveled only as fast as people, first access to information from Philadelphia might mean a fortune to a speculator in New York. More than that, Americans were discovering a love of speed entirely for its own sake.
The daily race did nothing to mar the beauty of the Raritan. “For two or three miles the banks are pretty high,” wrote Bellona passenger Sam Griscom, “and covered mostly with shrubs of pine and cedar with here and there a neat farmhouse to vary and give greater beauty to the scene. Beyond this the salt marsh commences.… The river winds its way thro this to the Bay.” After more than an hour on board (with some three more hours left in the journey), Griscom sat down to “an excellent dinner,” noting with curiosity that New Yorkers referred to their change as shillings and sixpence. Then the passengers rushed back on deck as they steamed out of Kill Van Kull into the bay.
“In a short time, the numerous spires of New York suddenly make their appearance,” Griscom observed. “All around us the Bay is crowded with sails and Steam Boats with their long trails of smoke, crossing the Bay in all directions.… Directly ahead is the Battery… with the numerous masts of the shipping that line the wharves on each side of the city, the whole conspiring to render it the most delightful scene imaginable.” The view took away the breath of the most cosmopolitan passenger. “I have never seen the bay of Naples,” wrote Trollope, “but my imagination is incapable of conceiving any thing of the kind more beautiful than the harbour of New York”38
The Bellona—unlike the wedding-cake paddlewheelers that would soon teeter down every western river—ran low, sleek, and slender through the water. Ninety feet long and twenty-two wide, it had a low foredeck covered in an awning and dominated by a boxy pilothouse. Amidships loomed the paddlewheels sealed in arching wooden housings, a clanking working beam overhead that transmitted power from the piston, a pair of smokestacks, and dual copper boilers with blazing fireboxes, plus mounds of pine wood. Aft sat the main cabin, with its kitchen, dining room, and lounge.39
Lean and muscular, the twenty-six-year-old Vanderbilt remained very much the man of action, as the Elizabeth incident showed; but this enormous machine elevated him to another level of command. He presided as chief mariner, mayor, and magistrate of a temporary town, as he dealt with difficult passengers, tended to technical matters of the engine and hull, gave orders regarding navigation and speed, secured stocks of food and fuel, negotiated with harbormasters and customhouse officials, and coordinated with stagecoach drivers.
Then there were the lists he drew, the ledger entries that laid out line by line the complexity of this operation: the monthly payments made to the pilot, engineer, three firemen, four deckhands, “boy” cook, steward, chambermaid, three waiters, and “bar boy;” the equipment for the kitchen, the dutch oven, fish steamer, a pair of forty-gallon water casks, coffee boilers, frying pans, milk pails, and meat skewers; the payments for the lobsters, oysters, duck, and salmon, the veal, lamb, pork, and beef, plus fruits and roots and vegetables. Indeed, the Bellona was a floating restaurant serving nearly fifty diners at a time, who ordered glasses of brandy, claret, madeira, and gin from the bar. Trollope, writing later in the decade, marveled at this mobile social scene, describing the “gentlemen who… lounged on sofas, and balanced themselves in chairs… with all the conscious fascinations of stiff stays and neck-cloths… while doing to death the rash beauties who dared to gaze” from under “expansive bonnets.”40
And so the few days that Gibbons had asked for multiplied into a year, and then two, and then another. Vanderbilt's service, rather than compressing him into another's lackey, stretched his stature and business knowledge. And with knowledge came ambition. That same year he built the Thorn, described in the press as a schooner, and began construction of his own little steamboat, the Carolina, as a speculative venture. When Gibbons could not find a buyer for the Mouse, Vanderbilt decided to take it himself and sell it at a profit, handing Gibbons two promissory notes for a total of $1,500 (signed “Van Derbilt,” as usual, to contrast himself with his father).41
More and more, Vanderbilt acted as Gibbons's general agent, wandering the streets of New York to pay bills, collect intelligence, and visit lawyers. The experience lifted him from the world of deckhands, tides, and machinery breakdowns to that of quills and cravats, and he studied it carefully. Indeed, he now demonstrated an intensity and quickness of intellect that belied his coarse exterior. “Capt. V. is well acquainted with my case,” Gibbons tellingly wrote to one of his lawyers.42 In February 1821, Vanderbilt volunteered to go to Washington to hire the attorneys who would represent Gibbons before the Supreme Court: Daniel Webster and William Wirt, the attorney general of the United States. (In yet another example of the blurring of private interests and public office, Wirt maintained a private practice before the high court.) “I do not know a better way to present the fees… than by a special messenger,” Gibbons wrote, “and C.V. has a desire to hear the argument.”
Barely schooled but keen and shrewd, this blunt, bare-knuckled sailor rushed off to Washington to meet Wirt and Webster, two of the republic's foremost figures. He spent a couple of days going from one plush office to the next, shoving a meaty fist containing $500 into the hands of each man. The long-awaited day came on March 8, when the Supreme Court finally took up the steamboat case. The result was a crushing setback: the justices turned down the appeal on the grounds that New York's Court of Errors had not yet delivered a final verdict. Afterward Vanderbilt chatted with Webster, who promised to report to Gibbons about the case. The final battle would have to wait.43
VANDERBILT RETURNED TO NEW YORK to his wife and the daughters who multiplied in their rooms on Stone Street. Phebe Jane had been born in 1814, Ethelinda in 1817, and Elizabeth (or Eliza) in 1819—and Sophia waddled under the weight of yet another pregnancy, which she no doubt planned to see to term with family on Staten Island.44 What passed between the captain and his cousin wife on his homecoming went unrecorded, whether it was tenderness, a stern insistence on a son, or simple neglect. What is known is that he once again began a frenzy of activity.
Soon afterward he launched the Bellona on a new season of high-speed competition, powered by another cut in the fare to Philadelphia. The repeated price reductions were a stark departure from the past. They delivered a competitive advantage, of course, but also showed that Gibbons and Vanderbilt believed in a growing market—that more and more people wanted to travel between the two cities, and would do so by steamboat if rates were cheap enough. This notion of an expanding economy was surprisingly new. The Livingstons' North River Steam Boat Company had kept the same number of boats running to Albany at the same fare for years, and saw ridership steadily drop. They believed there was a natural number of passengers, and that competition was destructive, robbing them of their due.
Increasingly, the belligerent John R. Livingston shoved aside Ogden as Gibbons's chief opponent. He seethed at the “mortification, trouble, & expence” resulting from the attack on the monopoly. “My right,” he stormed, using consummately patrician language, had been “invaded.” His son, R. Montgomery, felt the need to ask Ogden to “lend your aid” against Gibbons, writing, “We can destroy him.”45 Unable to impound the Bellona without having his own boat seized in New Jersey, Livingston came up with a new strategy: to file a lawsuit against Vanderbilt directly in the Marine Court, a minor bench limited to suits for $100 or less.
On May 29, 1821, two days after Vanderbilt's twenty-seventh birthday the lanky captain squinted from the deck of the Bellona up the North River pier where his boat was docked, and saw High Constable Jacob Hays approach. Hays announced that he had an arrest warrant from the Marine Court, and Vanderbilt erupted. “I was mad enough to defy the whole Livingston tribe, Old Hays included,” he later recalled, “but when I caught a glimpse of his calm and smiling face, and a twinkle in his eye, which… said as plain as words could express it, ‘If you don't obey the order of the court, and that damn soon, I'll make you do it, by God,’ I concluded to surrender.”
Forty-nine years old, stout, and quite bald, the heavy-eyed Hays had earned a fearsome reputation as the city's calm but inexorable chief law enforcement officer. He possessed considerable skill in subduing criminals; rather than tussle with a brawler, for example, he would knock off the offender's hat with his staff, and then send him sprawling on the ground the moment he bent over to retrieve it. “I didn't want to back down, however, too hurriedly,” Vanderbilt explained, “and I said that if they wanted to arrest me, they should carry me off the boat; and don't you know old Hays took me at my word, and landed me on the dock with a suddenness that took my breath away.”
The Marine Court quickly found Vanderbilt guilty of violating the monopoly law, and he appealed. Heady with the experience of meeting Webster and Wirt, flushed with anger at Livingston, he decided to take his own case to the Supreme Court. If Gibbons did not destroy the monopoly, then he would.46
If Livingston didn't destroy him first, that is. Just as the fare cuts heightened the competition, this legal clash intensified the animosity of the daily race, adding a growing sense of danger that soon became evident. On October 27, the Bellona churned up the Raritan at top speed alongside Livingston's Olive Branch, engines straining, paddles battering the water. Suddenly the Branch's captain spun the wheel. The vessel smashed into the Bellona; the sound of cracking wood reverberated as rails snapped off and part of the superstructure collapsed. Vanderbilt himself may have been at the helm, for his boat came through the harrowing collision with no serious damage.47
His response reflected a combination of technical and tactical mastery. One of the key problems for both competitors was the shallowness of the Raritan at New Brunswick; at low tide the rival steamboats had to row their passengers to the dock in scows. He could fix that, he thought, if the Bellona were cut in half and extended. “You will reccolect the Bellona must be halled up weather you have hir 12 feet longer or no, in order to repair hir bottom; that is, if you do hir justice,” he told Gibbons. Lengthening the boat would give it a proper forward cabin and reduce its draft, “which will enable us to go to the dock at all times.… That will do over all that besides a number of othair advantages we would gain.” Gibbons agreed.48
Then there was the matter of Livingston's lawsuits. To escape his reach, Vanderbilt decided to move to New Brunswick. At Gibbons's urging, he and Sophia settled into a house and stables that Gibbons had rented just a block from the river. The move to this old Dutch country town was a relief for Sophia, who had never taken to New York; it also gave her more responsibility than she was to have through all their years of marriage. The house was a small inn for overnight travelers, now dubbed Bellona Hall. She took charge and earned a reputation as a gracious innkeeper who provided good food and small courtesies such as heated stones to warm the feet of passengers on the stage ride to Trenton. And she did all this while caring for yet another baby—a boy named William Henry. Indeed, her husband left management of the children entirely to her. He even demanded that she feed, clothe, and educate them out of her income from the inn.49
THEY WERE WINNING. In early 1822, Vanderbilt and Gibbons talked matters over with the Stevens brothers and their stagecoach partners, then slashed the Philadelphia fare yet again, to $2.50. The move diverted even more traffic to the Bellona—and drove Ogden to the edge of bankruptcy He pleaded vainly with Gibbons for a truce. In March, he put the Atalanta up for sale, though he found no buyers.50
Even the wealthy Livingstons began to panic. On one side, Gibbons squeezed John R. in business; on another, the monopoly right of the entire clan remained in danger as the appeals of Gibbons and Vanderbilt marched ominously toward the Supreme Court; on still another, the state constitution had been revised in 1821, peeling the aristocrats' last fingers off the wheel of power. In the face of fierce conservative opposition (headed by Chancellor James Kent, who wrote a decision upholding the steamboat grant), politician Martin Van Buren had led the Bucktail faction to triumph in the convention, expanding the electorate to 80 percent of white men and radically democratizing the institutions of government. (In 1826, the vote would be extended to all adult white males.) Real political parties could now emerge, with mass participation from people of all walks of life.51
The old order was collapsing on the aristocrats, following inexorably from the Revolution their fathers had helped lead. More and more, the scions of great families accepted their declining influence and devoted themselves to business. But the Livingstons clung desperately to their monopoly, that most lucrative relic of the age of privilege. In a telling moment, R. Montgomery Livingston appealed to Gibbons, his fellow patrician, for an accommodation in the face of all these challenges. “It has long been a matter of astonishment that you & the Mssrs Livingston have been so long at war,” he wrote. Gibbons brusquely rebuffed him.
Afterward R. Montgomery ran into Gibbons's son William on the streets of New York and began to rage about seeking “personal satisfaction.” As William related the conversation to his father, R. Montgomery declared that it was common knowledge that Thomas Gibbons had “declared you would ruin [John R. Livingston] as you had Col. Ogden and that you would have $200,000 to give means for that purpose if you could not succeed in your lifetime.” The outburst led the senior Gibbons to demand a duel with young Livingston—indoors at five paces, supporting himself with a cane behind his back, due to his poor health and failing eyesight. Livingston indignantly declined.52
This farce abruptly ended when William Gibbons disappeared amid a yellow fever epidemic that swept New York. “Well-founded alarm prevails through every part of this city,” the New York Evening Post reported on August 26, 1822, as hundreds grew sick and died. Though none knew it at the time, it was the natural scourge of a primitive city of backyard wells and privies, of filthy streets of standing water where mosquitoes bred and fed. Scores of businesses relocated outside the city and Vanderbilt began to run the Bellona to a dock far up the North River. Every day he went into town to search for William, who finally surfaced, sick but recovering, like the city itself.53
The epidemic threw more light on Vanderbilt's character in these changing times. During the outbreak, a new crewman named Willett died after a few days on duty “I want and will go to sea Mrs. Willit as quick as I can get Leasure,” Vanderbilt wrote to Gibbons. “I take it we owe Mrs. Willitt nothing. Yet we conceive it to be a generous act to help this Lone widdow through the winter and bestow uppon her something.” The crew collected $90 for her, a third of it Vanderbilt's.
This ambiguous act of charity reveals the captain as a revolutionary of the world within. Though he worked for a patrician, he himself was the ultimate anti-aristocrat, a man who never felt the tug of noblesse oblige. He was hypermasculine, yes—he might beat down a man who defied his will—but he would never think to defend his honor in a duel. Nor was he a man “of sentiment,” a man of feeling, a part of the Romanticism that was now replacing the culture of deference. Vanderbilt represented a far more radical departure than that. He was an early example of that most modern of characters: the economic man. His charity was real—a trace, perhaps, of his Moravian upbringing, even his fundamental sense of decency—but cold calculation also marked his thinking (“we owe Mrs. Willitt nothing”). That calculation extended even to his own family, with his insistence that his wife pay for his children's upkeep and education. Truly a creature of the market, Vanderbilt made the most intimate relationship a line in his ledger book.54
Law, rank, the traditional social bonds—these things meant nothing to him. Only power earned his respect, and he felt his own strength gathering with every modest investment, every scrap of legal knowledge, every business lesson taught by the irascible but brilliant Gibbons. He had little regard for legal formalities or public office, and bitterly resented any hint of condescension. After clashing with the Perth Amboy customs collector about registering the Bellona, for example, he declared that the man “puts on great airs.… I think if it was my case I would not get papers and let him stop her. I think it more than he dares to do.” The collector complained that Vanderbilt had treated his staff “with a kind of contempt.”55
Even Gibbons began to suspect that he had created a monster. By adding a broad and sophisticated vision to Vanderbilt's innate shrewdness and ferocious will, he feared that he had unlocked an unstoppable ambition. The young captain began to amass a stable full of thoroughbreds—the aristocrats' own hobby—and purchased a pair of exceptional gray mares for the astoundingly steep price of $220. He designed an elegant new steamboat of more than one hundred tons, named the Fanny—another speculative venture financed with the help of James P. Allaire. And yet, he deeply respected Gibbons. According to legend, the Livingstons offered to hire him, but he turned them down on the grounds of loyalty to his master. “He was a man that could not be led,” Vanderbilt admiringly described Gibbons, “but some persons had influence with him to a certain extent.” He added, with uncharacteristically modest pride, “I had some with him.”
The suspicious Gibbons took no comfort in Vanderbilt's respect. It was clear to him that his gladiator was outgrowing this arena, that he would not be content forever in his position. “He will do nothing for me in Winter,” Gibbons fretted to his son. “He is building a new steamboat the size of the Bellona before she was lengthened. Vanderbilt has commenced horse racing too. Tomorrow he runs his brown colt in a match race. He is striking at every thing. I am afraid of this man.”56
AT EIGHT O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING on March 30, 1823, snow began to pour over New York Bay like an avalanche. Branches snapped off; then entire trees crashed to the ground; even chimneys blew apart in the gale, scattering bricks. A flood tide tore across the Battery and the slips, “causing the most alarming apprehensions,” the Evening Post reported, “for the fate of vessels of all descriptions, either at sea or on the coast, in our rivers and harbors, or even at our wharves.”
The Bellona started from New Brunswick at six that morning. At nine o'clock, it reached the mouth of the Raritan, where the pilot began to have trouble. “The storm was tremendous,” Vanderbilt reported. In the roaring blizzard, faced with a flood tide, the Bellona “became unmanageable. She would not mind her helm at all.” As the boat began to drift out of control, he concluded that it was useless to fight the storm—they would have to run with it. Somehow he managed to come about and steam back to New Brunswick. There he found the waves crashing over the pier. He dropped anchor and sat out the storm all night. He finally returned his passengers to shore at four the next afternoon, ferrying them over in row-boats. Elsewhere four ships sank in the storm as the torrent drove scores of vessels ashore, including Ogden's Atalanta.57
Self-assured in the face of nature's fury he felt far less certain of himself with mercurial humanity. “Last evening New Brunswick wais in an uproar,” he wrote to William Gibbons, five days before the storm. Some passengers had been detained in town; Robert Letson, a stagecoach driver, “toald the passengers that retaining them their was all my falt, that all I did it for was to get their supper and lodging from them.” The trouble left Vanderbilt deeply distressed. “Cannot you stop Letson mouth by a letter,” he begged. “I wish you would rite to Letson. I continuly beg of him to keep still.”58
His uncertainty may not be as uncharacteristic as it appears. The creature of a commercial, individualistic, competitive generation, he saw every relationship as a business transaction; he simply didn't know what to do with this very human entanglement with a man who was less a rival than a blowhard. He had made himself into a supreme man of force, but now he showed how vulnerable he could be to a simple social interaction—one that could not be solved with his fists. His only solution was financial: he suggested that they pay Letson to keep him away from the dock.
It was almost with relief that he returned to the clarity of battle. By now, all sides knew the Supreme Court would decide the fate of the monopoly. Ogden and John R. Livingston had good reason to expect success, for the steamboat grant had been upheld repeatedly by lower courts. But Livingston wanted to crush his enemies before the case reached the high bench. Starting on May 1, he renewed his legal assault in Marine Court against Vanderbilt and his crew. The damages were limited to $100, but he filed a fresh suit every day, dispatching an officer to arrest them when the Bellona docked.59
“I could not leave the boat as J. R. would take all the men if I am not their,” Vanderbilt wrote to Gibbons. “I now keep all my men out of the way so that they cannot take them and wile I am agoing in & out to the dock in NY I work the boat myself and let them take me but I will not let them take them as it is intended with some difficulty to get bail for the men.” According to anecdotes told later, he grew increasingly ingenious at avoiding the arrests. He built a secret compartment and hid on board until the deckhands had cast off again; when the officer found him, Vanderbilt offered the man a choice of leaping to the wharf or spending the day in New Jersey. At one point he trained a young woman to steer the boat into dock, and hid as the officer stormed aboard, only to be left stuttering and embarrassed in the face of a female pilot.
Gibbons, on the other hand, began to panic. Bedridden with gout, diabetes, and possibly cancer, he had had a stroke in April, leaving him isolated at home. “J. R. L. is waging a dreadful war against us, ruinous in the extreme,” he wrote. “Vanderbilt is not capable of defending such suits. I can't see him, he won't write. I am left like a dead man in the midst of a sanguinary war. I have submitted questions to V. Whether we must stop the Boat, run to Powlis Hook, or the Nautilus? I can get no answer.”60
In fact, the possibility of failure never occurred to Vanderbilt. When he wasn't dodging arrest, he gleefully plotted traps for Livingston. He secretly obtained the lease to the Olive Branch's dock, for instance, and waited until the season was under way to evict his foe. He had its crew arrested in New Jersey in a retaliatory lawsuit and taken “6 miles in the woods from N. B. before a magirstrate and make them give bail,” he bragged. “It will give them more trouble than I have in N. Y.” Far from fretting about the future, he brought his sixteen-year-old brother Jacob and his old partner, James Day, into the business.61 But Gibbons was a lawyer who understood very well the uncertainties of the courtroom. After all the expenditures on boats, docks, and inns, after the fare cuts and steamboat races, everything could be destroyed by a few words from the Supreme Court.
AT ELEVEN IN THE MORNING of February 4, 1824, six justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, led by Chief Justice John Marshall, filed into their basement chamber beneath the Capitol and settled under the high windows on the eastern wall of that dim, semicircular room. Even in the February chill the space must have been sweltering, for it was packed with bodies—lawyers and congressmen, men and women—crowded in to witness what everyone knew would be a most important case. Gibbons v. Ogden was about to be heard at last.
Two lawyers for each side sat at the single counsel table. Representing Ogden were Thomas Jackson Oakley and Thomas Addis Emmet. Emmet had long defended the monopoly; in 1815, Fulton had given his life to rescue him from the freezing waters of the Hudson. As Attorney General William Wirt noted, “Emmet's whole soul is in the cause, and he will stretch all his powers.” Wirt himself sat for Gibbons, alongside Daniel Webster. “Webster is as ambitious as Caesar,” Wirt had written a few days earlier. “He will not be outdone by any man.… It will be a combat worth witnessing.” With everyone in place, the marshal of the court intoned, “God save the United States and this honorable Court!” Then Webster rose to begin his argument.62
In far-off New York, the Livingstons were worried. For more than a decade they had fought off or bought off successive rivals; more recently, the New York Court of Errors had given them a resounding victory over Gibbons's challenge. Yet Gibbons had persevered, and Vanderbilt had his own case against them next on the docket. The Livingstons had decided to make one more appeal. After all, the political future looked grim; New York was no longer governed by factions of landed families, but by Martin Van Buren and his plebeian Albany Regency. And Gibbons and Vanderbilt had outmatched John R. Livingston, who warned his family of “an immense loss” if the court overturned the monopoly. It was a risk they could not afford to take.63
On January 27, 1824, the great clan had sent an emissary, Walter Livingston, to Elizabethtown on one last mission. I have “come on the old business,” he said to William Gibbons. The monopoly had a final offer: Thomas Gibbons would discontinue his case, in return for the Livingstons' “letting T. G. participate in their rights & throwing open the Jersey runs to him.”
William shook his head. “It was too late,” he replied. Livingston said it could be settled in an hour—did his father agree with him? William entered the darkened sickroom and spoke quietly to the suffering old man. Thomas Gibbons glared up at his son and tersely refused. Livingston said “he was very sorry nothing could be done,” William wrote, “& then immediately withdrew”64
The risk was at least as great on the other side. For Vanderbilt, defeat in the high court would virtually doom his future in shipping, forcing him to either buy an expensive steamboat license (assuming John R. Livingston would sell him one) or fall back on his far less lucrative sailboats. If he could avoid debtors' prison, that is: the Marine Court lawsuits had piled up remorselessly, threatening him with bankruptcy. His own case looked doubtful if Gibbons lost. And victory was far from certain. Chancellor Kent, the author of the New York decision upholding the steamboat grant, was one of the most highly regarded jurists in the country. And a new justice had just been appointed to the Supreme Court who had repeatedly ruled in favor of the monopoly: Smith Thompson, a relative of the late Chancellor Livingston.
But Thompson was so new to the Court that he had not yet arrived on February 4, when Webster rose to speak. “With Webster there was also a thin veil of hauteur,” writes biographer Robert V. Remini. “He was a snob about many things: his New England breeding, his education, his legal, linguistic, and literary talents, the fact that… he was the foremost constitutional authority in the United States.”65
The monopoly lawyers would argue, as they successfully had before, that the government of New York had created a valuable property right and the Court was bound to protect it. The public, on the other hand, grew ever more hostile to the idea that the state could carve up the economy and assign a portion to a prestigious family. By 1824, more and more Americans demanded a market open to any who dared to venture in, an economy as democratic as the political arena increasingly was.66 Ogden's attorneys were also to assert a state's authority to interfere with interstate commerce. The claim affronted both Webster's nationalism and his economic vision. If it prevailed, it would establish a constitutional rule that would turn the United States into a collection of feuding principalities, each erecting its own barriers to trade.
And there Webster struck, in one of the most important speeches of his long career. He pointed out the “extreme belligerent legislation” that New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut had enacted, barring each other's steamboats. “It would hardly be contended,” he intoned, “that all these acts were consistent with the laws and Constitution of the United States.” The Constitution had been written to create a commercial “unit… complete, entire, and uniform. Its character was to be described in the flag which waved over it, E PLURIBUS UNUM.”
Webster's rivals responded over the next three days, until February 7. Their arguments reflected a social and economic vision that had not kept pace with the growth in domestic trade, the increasing economic integration of the country, the new American outlook. Commerce was the buying and selling of goods, they argued, not the transportation of passengers, and so the commerce clause did not apply; in any case, the states retained powers over commerce that they had had before the Constitution. Wirt concluded for Gibbons with an appeal to national unity warning of civil war.
For three weeks, they waited—Webster and Wirt in Washington, the Livingstons on their manors or the streets of New York, Ogden in Elizabethtown, Gibbons in his sickbed, Vanderbilt in his stables at Bellona Hall. The anticipation could be felt throughout the United States, for everyone sensed that this was a case that would help to define the age. Newspaper editors stood by, day after day, hoping to be the first to publish the result of the “celebrated Steam Boat controversy,” as the National Intelligencer called it. On February 19, Chief Justice Marshall dislocated his shoulder, further delaying a decision. On February 23, William Gibbons wrote to his father from Washington that Webster had told him “confidentially” that one of the justices had said that his argument had convinced them “that it is a broad constitutional question upon which scarcely any doubt exists.”
On March 2, Marshall led the associate justices into the courtroom and began to read the majority opinion—his own opinion—to the crowd that packed the basement, straining in utter silence to hear every word. He began by paying tribute to the immense authority of the New York courts, whose decision was now at issue. Then he struck at the heart of the matter. “Commerce, undoubtedly, is traffic,” he said, “but it is something more; it is intercourse.” Hardly another word was necessary. As the Evening Postsuccinctly put it, “The Steam Boat grant is at an end.”67
* The York and all other steamboats operating in New York waters that will be mentioned in this chapter, apart from those owned by Gibbons, were run either by the Livingstons or under a license from them.