The Commodore turned ferries and rails into a dynasty
Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794–1877), nicknamed the Commodore, built one of history's great American fortunes in shipping and railroads. He founded the Vanderbilt clan's wealth. Dutch roots trace to Jan Aertson of De Bilt and, further back, Anthony Janszoon van Salee among his ancestors.
Born on Staten Island in 1794, he left school at 11 to work his father's ferry in New York Harbor. At 16 he started his own service with a two-masted periauger, by one account bought with $100 borrowed from his mother, though an 1853 biography says the boat was his father's and the son kept half the profits. Rival captains teased the tireless youngster as "the Commodore," and the name, then the Navy's top rank, stuck for life. In 1813 he married his first cousin Sophia Johnson; they had 13 children, and he remained a Moravian while many relatives became Episcopalians. The family name came from De Bilt, the Dutch village of an ancestor who arrived in New Amsterdam as an indentured servant in 1650.
In 1817 Thomas Gibbons hired him to captain a steamboat between New Jersey and New York in defiance of a state-granted monopoly held by the heirs of Robert Livingston and Robert Fulton. Vanderbilt ran the business, went to Washington to hire Daniel Webster, and watched the Supreme Court rule for Gibbons on 2 March 1824, establishing that states could not obstruct interstate commerce. Sophia meanwhile ran a profitable inn in New Brunswick.
On his own from 1829, he fought rivals by undercutting fares and was often paid to go away: the Hudson River steamboat monopoly bought him off in 1834 after he promoted his People's Line in Jacksonian populist language. Daniel Drew forced Vanderbilt to buy him out and then became his secret partner for thirty years. He survived the 1833 Hightstown rail crash, which John Quincy Adams also rode through. By the late 1830s he ruled steamboats on Long Island Sound, and in 1847 he took over the Stonington railroad, the first of many lines he would run.
The 1849 gold rush pulled him into ocean shipping. He proposed a canal across Nicaragua and, failing to fund it, set up the Accessory Transit Company to move travellers by lake, river and a 12-mile road. When partners cheated him, he launched a rival line and cut prices until they paid up, and when the adventurer William Walker seized Nicaragua and handed the route to rivals, Vanderbilt backed Costa Rica's war against him. He also drove the subsidised Collins transatlantic line out of business and gave the founding gift for Vanderbilt University.
Source: Cornelius Vanderbilt
