Cornelius Vanderbilt on Philanthropy

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.

The Vanderbilt family rose to define the Gilded Age, its success beginning with the shipping and railroad empires of Cornelius Vanderbilt and expanding into other areas of industry and philanthropy. Cornelius was the richest American until his death in 1877; his son William Henry inherited the fortune and held the same standing until his own death in 1885, the last moment the family name topped the nation's wealth. The dynasty's prominence lasted until the mid-twentieth century, after which the ten great mansions of Fifth Avenue came down and most of the family's other houses passed into other hands or became museums, a decline often called the Fall of the House of Vanderbilt. The founder's rise was improbable: born fourth among nine children of a modest Staten Island family, he left school at eleven and built a shipping and railroad empire that made him one of the wealthiest men in the world. Contemporary descendants include the journalist Anderson Cooper, the actor Timothy Olyphant, and the present Duke of Marlborough.

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 stipulated that McTyeire serve as chairman of the Board of Trust for life. For its first forty years the institution remained under the auspices of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, a lineage modern historians have documented unsparingly: McTyeire was born into a slave-owning family and wrote an essay defending slavery, chancellor Landon Garland owned as many as sixty enslaved people before the war, and Vanderbilt's own second wife was a Confederate sympathizer during the conflict. Tension between the board and the church over trustee selection and the place of non-Methodist faculty culminated in 1910, when the board refused to seat three Methodist bishops. After litigation, the Tennessee Supreme Court held in 1914 that the true founder of the university was the Commodore himself, not the Methodist Church, and the General Conference voted 151 to 140 to sever its ties with the institution that carried his name.

When the Civil War began in 1861, Vanderbilt offered his largest steamship, the Vanderbilt, as a gift to the Union Navy; Secretary Gideon Welles refused it, expecting a short war and judging the ship too expensive to operate. Vanderbilt leased her to the War Department instead. After the Confederate ironclad Virginia shattered the Union blockading squadron at Hampton Roads, the conflict drew appeals for help from President Abraham Lincoln and War Secretary Edwin Stanton, and this time he completed the donation, re-equipping the vessel with a ram and handpicked officers. She helped bottle up the Virginia, then was converted into a cruiser to hunt the Confederate commerce raider Alabama under Raphael Semmes. Congress awarded him a Congressional Gold Medal, and he paid to outfit a major expedition against New Orleans. His youngest and favorite son, George Washington Vanderbilt II, a West Point graduate and heir apparent, fell ill and died without ever seeing combat.

Following Sophia's death in 1868, Vanderbilt traveled to Canada, and on August 21, 1869, in London, Ontario, married Frank Armstrong Crawford, a cousin from Mobile, Alabama, more than four decades his junior. His second wife encouraged the act that softened his historical reputation: a one-million-dollar gift to Bishop Holland Nimmons McTyeire to found Vanderbilt University in Nashville, at that date the largest charitable gift in American history. He also gave fifty thousand dollars to her congregation, the Church of the Strangers, and land for the Moravian cemetery on Staten Island where he chose to be buried. He died at 10 Washington Place on January 4, 1877, aged eighty-two, after roughly eight months confined to his rooms, with exhaustion from chronic disorders cited as the immediate cause. His estate, estimated at one hundred and five million dollars, was the largest in the world at the time.

Vanderbilt's will left ninety-five percent of the estate to his son William and four grandsons, while his surviving son Cornelius Jeremiah and nine daughters received comparatively little, in some cases less than their own nephews. Three of the disappointed heirs sued, claiming their father had been of unsound mind and under William's influence and that of a corrupt spiritualist, alleging staged seances in which a spirit in the form of their dead mother endorsed William as the trustworthy heir. Rather than endure further public airing, William settled, adding two hundred thousand dollars in cash and a four-hundred-thousand-dollar trust for each challenger. Biographer T. J. Stiles credits the Commodore with vastly expanding the nation's transportation infrastructure, embracing new technologies and new forms of corporate organization, and helping create the corporate economy that defined the United States into the twenty-first century. Rankings of all-time American wealth place him second only to Rockefeller as a share of the economy.

Vanderbilt died at eighty-two in his Manhattan home on January 4, 1877, and lies buried in the Moravian Cemetery on Staten Island, leaving the bulk of a fortune estimated above one hundred million dollars to his son William. Unlike the Gilded Age titans who followed him, Andrew Carnegie with his libraries and John D. Rockefeller with his foundations, he owned no grand homes and gave away little of his wealth; the only substantial philanthropic donation of his life came in 1873, near its end, when he gave one million dollars to build and endow Vanderbilt University in Nashville. The mansion era belonged to his descendants: the Breakers in Newport and the 250-room Biltmore in Asheville were built by later Vanderbilts, and Biltmore remains the largest privately owned home in the United States. In a nod to its founder's nickname, the university's athletic teams are called the Commodores.

Vanderbilt was a great capitalist but not a great philanthropist. He left most of his fortune to his children and under five percent of it to charity, though the two to three million dollars he did dedicate to giving exceeded that of anyone else in his generation. Around 1873 a Catholic priest returned ten dollars he had found belonging to the New York Central; Vanderbilt had the money booked to the railroad's accounts and sat silently until the priest left, remarking afterward that there was considerable good in religion after all. In 1863 he declined to contribute to a hospital for wounded soldiers, writing that he owed it to himself to keep his name aloof from public acts granted in association with legislative bodies. In 1869 Mark Twain publicly demanded that he do something that was not shameful; the New York Herald answered that his numerous, liberal charities bore the reticence of his business character.

The clearest statement of what the university gift meant came from Charles F. Deems, a Southern Methodist minister who testified at the 1878 trial over the will. Vanderbilt, Deems recalled, had said the idea dated to the Rebellion: he had spent a million dollars sending a warship against the South to show where he stood, and now wanted to give a million after the war as proof that Northerners stood ready to extend the olive branch. The two gifts bracketed the conflict, the steamship donation for the Union Navy and the endowment for a Southern university, as matched bookends of sectional reconciliation. His son William added two hundred thousand dollars, and the school opened with a six-hundred-thousand-dollar endowment, exceptionally privileged among universities of its era. The philanthropic line then faded with the family: at a 1973 university reunion of one hundred twenty Vanderbilt descendants, not one was a millionaire.