T.J.
Stiles The First Tycoon: The
Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt Alfred A. Knopf
T.J. Stiles
receiving the 2009 National Book Award in Nonfiction.
Video from the 2009 National
Book Awards Finalist Reading
Photo credit: Joanne
Chan
CITATION
With deep and imaginative research
and graceful writing, T. J. Stiles’s The First
Tycoon tells the extraordinary story of a brutally
competitive man who was hard to love but irresistibly
interesting as a truly pivotal historical figure. With
few letters and no diaries, and with layers of legend
to carve through, Stiles captures Cornelius Vanderbilt
as a person and as a force who shaped the transportation
revolution, all but invented unbridled American capitalism,
and left his mark not only all over New York City but,
for better or worse, all over our economic landscape.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Founder of a dynasty, builder
of the original Grand Central, creator of an impossibly
vast fortune, Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt
is an American icon. Humbly born on Staten Island during
George Washington’s presidency, he rose from boatman
to builder of the nation’s largest fleet of steamships
to lord of a railroad empire. In The First Tycoon,
T.J. Stiles offers the first complete, authoritative
biography of this titan, and the first comprehensive
account of the Commodore’s personal life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
T. J. Stiles is the author
of Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War,
winner of the Ambassador Book Award and the Peter Seaborg
Award for Civil War Scholarship, and a finalist for
the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He has written
for the New York Times Book Review, Smithsonian,
and Salon.com, among other publications, and held the
Gilder Lehrman Fellowship in American History at the
Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and
Writers at the New York Public Library. He has taught
nonfiction creative writing at Columbia University.
He served as historical advisor and on-screen expert
for "Jesse James" and "Grand Central,"
two films in the PBS documentary series American
Experience. A native of Benton County, Minnesota,
Stiles studied history at Carleton College and Columbia
University, and resided in New York City for twenty
years. He now lives in the Presidio of San Francisco
with his wife and son.
They came to learn his secrets.
Well before the appointed hour of two o’clock
in the afternoon on November 12, 1877, hundreds of
spectators pushed into a courtroom in lower Manhattan.
They included friends and relatives of the contestants,
of course, as well as leading lawyers who wished to
observe the forensic skills of the famous attorneys
who would try the case. But most of the teeming mass
of men and women—many fashionably dressed, crowding
in until they were packed against the back wall—wanted
to hear the details of the life of the richest man
the United States had ever seen. The trial over the
will of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the famous, notorious
Commodore, was about to begin.
Shortly before the hour,
the crowd parted to allow in William H. Vanderbilt,
the Commodore’s eldest son, and his lawyers,
led by Henry L. Clinton. William, "glancing carelessly
and indifferently around the room, removed his overcoat
and comfortably settled himself in his chair,"
the New York Times reported; meanwhile his
lawyers shook hands with the opposing team, led by
Scott Lord, who represented William’s sister
Mary Vanderbilt La Bau. At exactly two o’clock,
the judge—called the "Surrogate" in
this Surrogate Court—strode briskly in from
his chambers through a side door, stepped up to the
dais, and took his seat. "Are you ready, gentlemen?"
he asked. Lord and Clinton each declared that they
were, and the Surrogate ordered, "Proceed, gentlemen."
Everyone who listened as
Lord stood to make his opening argument knew just
how great the stakes were. "the house of vanderbilt,"
the Times headlined its story the next morning.
"a railroad prince’s fortune. the heirs
contesting the will. . . . a battle over $100,000,000."
The only item in all that screaming type that would
have surprised readers was the Times’s
demotion of Vanderbilt to "prince," since
the press usually dubbed him the railroad king.
His fortune towered over the American economy to a
degree difficult to imagine, even at the time. If
he had been able to sell all his assets at full market
value at the moment of his death, in January of that
year, he would have taken one out of every twenty
dollars in circulation, including cash and demand
deposits.
Most of those in that courtroom
had lived their entire lives in Vanderbilt’s
shadow. By the time he had turned fifty, he had dominated
railroad and steamboat transportation between New
York and New England (thus earning the nickname "Commodore").
In the 1850s, he had launched a transatlantic steamship
line and pioneered a transit route to California across
Nicaragua. In the 1860s, he had systematically seized
control of the railroads that connected Manhattan
with the rest of the world, building the mighty New
York Central Railroad system between New York and
Chicago. Probably every person in that chamber had
passed through Grand Central, the depot on Forty-second
Street that Vanderbilt had constructed; had seen the
enormous St. John’s Park freight terminal that
he had built, featuring a huge bronze statue of himself;
had crossed the bridges over the tracks that he had
sunk along Fourth Avenue (a step that would allow
it to later blossom into Park Avenue); or had taken
one of the ferries, steamboats, or steamships that
he had controlled over the course of his lifetime.
He had stamped the city with his mark—a mark
that would last well into the twenty-first century—and
so had stamped the country. Virtually every American
had paid tribute to his treasury.
More fascinating than the
fortune was the man behind it.
