Cornelius Vanderbilt on Founding and Origins

Cornelius Vanderbilt, born on Staten Island, New York, on May 27, 1794, and nicknamed the Commodore, was the American business magnate who assembled one of history's great fortunes, first in shipping and then in railroads. He began working with his father's boat business, fought his way into leadership of inland and coastal shipping, and then redirected his energy and capital into the rapidly growing railroad industry, which was transforming the geography of the United States. He was the patriarch of the wealthy and influential Vanderbilt family, stood among the richest Americans of any era, and provided the initial gift that founded Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Because his dominance of shipping and railroads was facilitated in part by political manipulation, historians have argued ever since over whether he belongs among the captains of industry or the robber barons, two labels that have competed for his reputation since his own lifetime.

The New York and Harlem Railroad, incorporated on April 25, 1831, was one of the first American railroads and the world's first street railway. Its founders laid track on the east side of Manhattan Island, convinced a line on the Hudson side could never compete with steamboats, and the first section, along the Bowery from Prince Street to 14th Street, opened in November 1832. Horses drew the early cars; steam engines arrived in 1837 but were confined to stretches outside the settled city. Reaching Chatham in 1852, the road gave New York a rail connection toward Albany, Boston, and Vermont. In 1854 the city's Common Council barred steam power below 42nd Street, an ordinance the company resisted through injunctions until the courts cleared enforcement in 1858. Vanderbilt acquired the property in the eighteen-sixties and consolidated it with the Hudson River Railroad, and in October 1871 Grand Central Depot became the terminus for intercity trains from the north.

Before the Civil War the Methodist Episcopal Church South had contemplated a regional university for training ministers, and after lobbying by Nashville bishop Holland Nimmons McTyeire, church leaders voted in 1872 to found the Central University of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in Nashville, a project delayed by lack of funds and the ravaged state of the Reconstruction South. The following year McTyeire, in New York for medical treatment, stayed at Vanderbilt's residence; Vanderbilt's second wife was a cousin of McTyeire's wife, both women from Mobile. The Commodore, then the wealthiest man in the United States, had been planning a university on Staten Island, but McTyeire persuaded him to endow Central University with five hundred thousand dollars to help strengthen the ties between all sections of the common country. Vanderbilt doubled the gift to a million, never asked that the school carry his name, and the trustees rechristened it in his honor in the spring of 1873. Landon Garland became the first chancellor as the university enrolled its first students in the fall of 1875.

Vanderbilt was in his seventy-ninth year when he decided, in the spring of 1873, to make the gift that founded Vanderbilt University. The one million dollars he gave to endow and build the institution was, the university's own history records, his only major philanthropy. Bishop Holland N. McTyeire of Nashville, husband of Amelia Townsend, a cousin of Vanderbilt's young second wife Frank Crawford, came to New York for medical treatment early in 1873 and spent his recovery in the Vanderbilt mansion, where he won the couple's support for building a university in the South that would strengthen the bonds between all sections of the country. McTyeire chose the campus site, supervised construction of the first buildings, and personally planted many of the trees that make the campus a national arboretum. The university opened with one Main Building, an astronomical observatory, and professors' houses, enrolling 307 students in the fall of 1875.

Vanderbilt's lineage traces to Jan Aertson, a Dutch farmer from the village of De Bilt near Utrecht who reached New Amsterdam around 1650 as an indentured servant; over generations the family name fused his village with the Dutch van der to become Vanderbilt. Cornelius was born on Staten Island to Cornelius van Derbilt and Phebe Hand, quit school at eleven, and worked on his father's ferry in New York Harbor. At sixteen he resolved to start a ferry service of his own. In the standard account he borrowed one hundred dollars from his mother to buy a shallow-draft, two-masted periauger he christened the Swiftsure, carrying freight and passengers between Staten Island and Manhattan; the first published account of his life, from 1853, held instead that the boat belonged to his father and that the son took half the profits. Either way, the teen's ferocity in the trade led neighboring captains to mock him as the Commodore.

On November 24, 1817, the ferry proprietor Thomas Gibbons recruited Vanderbilt to take command of a steamboat running between New York and New Jersey. Vanderbilt kept his own ventures alive but in practice became Gibbons's business manager. Gibbons was then waging war on the steamboat monopoly that the New York State Legislature had handed to the patrician Robert Livingston and the steamboat inventor Robert Fulton, a privilege Livingston's heirs inherited and licensed to Aaron Ogden for a ferry linking New York and New Jersey. Gibbons had started his rival operation out of a personal quarrel with Ogden, whom he meant to drive into bankruptcy, cutting fares while carrying a landmark legal challenge to the United States Supreme Court. Piloting Gibbons's boats put the young captain in daily defiance of a state-protected monopoly, an apprenticeship in aggressive competition under legal fire that shaped everything he later did as an operator and placed him at the center of the struggle that opened American interstate commerce.

When Gibbons died in 1826, Vanderbilt worked for the son William until 1829, then struck out entirely on his own, assembling lines step by step around New York. He took over Gibbons's Jersey ferry, shifted to western Long Island Sound, and in 1831 assumed his brother Jacob's route to Peekskill on the lower Hudson. There he met the steamboat operator Daniel Drew in open competition, and Drew fought hard enough that Vanderbilt bought him out; impressed, he then made Drew a secret partner for the next thirty years so the two men would have an incentive never to compete with each other. In November 1833 a Camden and Amboy Railroad train derailed at Hightstown with Vanderbilt aboard, nearly killing him; the former president John Quincy Adams rode the same train and survived the jolt. The episode marked his first serious brush with the iron rail, the industry he would one day rule.

When the California gold rush began in 1849, Vanderbilt abandoned regional steamboating for ocean-going steamships. Most migrants, and nearly all the returning gold, moved by steamship to Panama, crossed the isthmus by mule train and canoe, and sailed on; a Panama Railroad soon speeded the crossing. Vanderbilt judged Nicaragua superior, closer to the United States and nearly spanned by Lake Nicaragua and the San Juan River, and proposed a canal across it. He could not attract enough investment to dig, so he settled for the next best thing: a steamship line to Nicaragua plus the Accessory Transit Company, which carried passengers across the country by steamboat on the lake and river, linked to the Pacific port of San Juan del Sur by a twelve-mile carriage road from Virgin Bay. The route cut both miles and days from the journey, and the Commodore had built the fastest artery of the gold rush economy.

History.com's profile emphasizes how unpolished the rising magnate remained. A descendant of Dutch settlers who arrived in the mid-1600s, Vanderbilt was born on May 27, 1794, to Staten Island farmers, and his father supplemented farm income by ferrying produce and merchandise to Manhattan in his periauger. As a teenager Cornelius moved cargo around the harbor in his own periauger, then acquired a fleet of small boats and learned the fundamentals of ship design. In 1817 he signed on as ferry captain for Thomas Gibbons's commercial steamboat service, mastering the steamship business before going independent in the late 1820s and becoming one of the country's largest operators through fierce fare wars, with rivals sometimes paying him hefty sums simply not to compete. In the 1840s he built a large brick home at 10 Washington Place in what is now Greenwich Village. The city's elite remained unmoved, considering him rough and uncultured.

Vanderbilt's career centered on New York City and ran impossibly long: he remained in charge of his companies until 1876, at eighty-two. It began on the Hudson River, where he operated a passenger ferry, and he made his first serious money in the War of 1812, commanding a small vessel that helped break the British naval blockade of New York. He invested in the passenger railways of the 1830s, kept building steamships, and became a major player in the race to move hundreds of thousands of people from the Atlantic to the Pacific during the California gold rush. He involved himself deeply in the failed effort to dig a canal across Nicaragua in the 1850s and fought the American filibuster William Walker, who nearly seized Nicaragua as a private fiefdom. A consummately practical man, he read the pace of technological change better than anyone, and in 1864 sold his last steamship interests for railroads.