In the summer of 1810, a sixteen-year-old boy who lived on Staten Island in New York harbor decided to go into the shipping business. He persuaded his mother to lend him $100 out of the precious family savings and bought a periauger - a tiny boat with two masts and a flat bottom. Then the lad offered a ferry service between Staten Island and the lower tip of Manhattan, five miles away. The fare was eighteen cents each way, and a quarter for the round trip. Every day, the little boat left on schedule, and despite tricky tides, choppy waves, and high winds, it was rarely late. The work was wet and hard. It was also the cornerstone of a career for young Cornelius Vanderbilt.

In those days, barely 100,000 people lived in New York. James Madison was president of the United States, the fourth man to hold the office he had helped write into the Constitution. Cities like Buffalo, Cincinnati, and St. Louis were rough frontier settlements; Chicago did not even exist. The West of forest and Indian began at the Alleghenies, at some points less than 100 miles inland from the Atlantic coast. Most Americans lived on farms, wore homespun clothing, read by oil lamps, and warmed themselves at wood fires. Men and goods moved by the power of wind and animal muscle, at speeds of under ten miles per hour. It took two full days to make the ninety-mile trip from New York to Philadelphia.

By the time Vanderbilt died, nearly seventy years later, the steam engine had changed the face of the land. Steam provided a new and gigantic source of power that men could add to their own as they toiled to unlock the hidden treasure of the American continent. Steam engines could power a threshing machine in an Iowa harvest field, a drill excavating a copper mine in Montana, or a loom spinning cotton yarn into cloth in a Rhode Island textile factory. Steam locomotives, hurtling over a network of railroads, could bring the products of one area to fill the needs of another. Farm produce from the prairies, bales of cotton and tobacco from the South, factory-made goods from the East, mineral ores from Minnesota and the Rockies, crisscrossed the country. Most important of all, the trains carried people. First came pioneers, prospectors, and men looking for quick money. Then came immigrants, families with children looking for a place to settle down and get to work on turning their dreams into reality. But faster than the trains, which now could carry passengers the 900 miles from New York to Chicago in a little over twenty-four hours, was the electric spark of the telegraph, which could rap out a message in San Francisco and New York simultaneously. That message was the new and equally marvelous age of electricity.

In 1877, the year of Vanderbilt’s death, the telegraph was already thirty years old, the telephone had just been invented, and practical electric motors and electric lights were just around the corner. In another twenty years, gasoline engines would be applied to transportation. Then men would travel at ever-increasing speeds over an ever-improving network of roads, with no need to be bothered with boilers and rails. But why bother with keeping to the roads? And so, eventually, men took to the air, powering their airplanes with highly developed gasoline engines. The era of steam was only the opening chapter in the story of a modern world.

Millions of men helped bring this new world to birth: inventors and scientists, soldiers and statesmen, pioneer settlers and industrial laborers. But a much smaller number of men organized the work of others. They brought the savings of a rapidly growing population - investment capital in the language of economics - into working patterns with the new machines and the old raw materials. In doing so, many of them created giant industrial and transportation empires. Because it all happened so quickly and on such a vast scale, these so-called captains of industry grew rich and powerful almost overnight. They were, like characters in a fairy tale, gifted with the magic powers of imagination and ability, with necessity playing the part of fairy godmother. Like all men who gain control over others, they were both respected and feared: admired by those who envied their dynamic drive, or hated by those they ruined in their determination to make money and get ahead, whatever the cost. Few of these larger-than-life-size men found time in their busy lives for reflection or gentleness. Some of them, in their impatient strength, threatened the values of equal opportunity and government by law and consent which support American democracy at its best. Yet all of them, good and bad alike, made important contributions to national growth.

Vanderbilt was one of the first of these colossal, colorful figures. By wise investment, shrewd manipulation, and the use of his fists when needed, he built up a fortune of almost $100 million and died the richest man in the United States. His life was, as one biographer put it, an “epic of the steam age.”

Steam was far from the mind of Cornelius Vanderbilt (or Van Derbilt, as he usually spelled his name) at the start. Young “Cornele the boatman” was busy building a reputation as the ablest and hardest working ferry operator in New York harbor. Between ferry trips, he found freight-hauling assignments, and he was prepared to tackle any job in any weather. Once, during a storm which kept his competitors hugging the wharves, he was asked if he could bring some officers into the city from the fort at Sandy Hook, at the entrance to the lower bay of New York. “Yes,” he replied cheerfully, “but I shall have to carry them under water part of the way.” He was as good as his word: His passengers arrived safely but soaked to the skin.

The War of 1812 brought a brisk demand for vessels to carry troops and stores to the various forts defending New York’s harbor. Cornelius worked around the clock, paying his parents all the money he earned in the daytime and half his earnings at night. He thriftily set aside the other half in savings, and by the time peace came, he had enough money to buy a little coasting schooner. Gradually, he acquired complete or part ownership of six little ships which heeled along the coast bringing oysters, fish, and vegetables to market. By 1817, “Cornele” had married his cousin, Sophia Johnson, had put aside $9,000 in cash, and seemed to have a fine career ahead as a merchant loading square-riggers for distant seas. But his mind was working differently. Cornelius liked sailboats but sensed the “b’ilers,” as he called them, that had recently begun to puff around New York harbor, had a future full of promise. He planned to take part in developing that future.

The way was not a simple one. Early steamboats were clumsy, cranky inventions. They broke down or blew up frequently, and they were expensive. So Vanderbilt decided to educate himself in the ways of steam on water without investing his own money at the start. Instead, he hired himself out to a wealthy New Jerseyite, Thomas Gibbons, as captain of a steamboat that Gibbons operated between New York and New Brunswick, New Jersey. {From there, travelers went by coach to Trenton, and then by water again down the Delaware to Philadelphia.) Vanderbilt’s first steamship was meekly called the Mouse, but his job on it was exciting. Gibbons was competing with a rival line, which had secured, from New York State, the exclusive right to carry people between New York and New Jersey. Thus, in the eyes of his native state, Cornelius was breaking the law each time he landed in Manhattan, and he found that he had to be nimble to avoid being arrested. Sometimes he was not nimble enough. As he once reported to Gibbons in his rough-and-ready spelling: “This day J.R. [one of the owners of the rival line that was chartered by New York State] brought a sute againts all my men even the kook but caught no boddy but me.”

Nevertheless, he kept on with his business of mastering steamboats and graduated to the command of a bigger ship, the Bellona, on the same run. Gibbons meanwhile embarked on a series of lawsuits against his rival. Finally, in 1824, in the case of Gibbons v. Ogden, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the legislature of New York had been in the wrong. No state could grant a monopoly - in other words, give one man or firm complete control - of traffic between any two states. Power over interstate commerce belonged only to Congress. The way was thus open for many independent steamship operators, without political influence, to develop interstate runs. Five years after the decision, Vanderbilt - now thirty-five, with savings of over $30,000 resigned from Gibbons’s employ and became his own master again. His battles on Gibbons’s behalf had taught him a few things by hard experience. Money, lawsuits, and the right connections with lawmakers were useful aids to business success. Monopolies could be dangerous enemies - unless you happened to own them yourself.

For the next twenty years, Vanderbilt operated steamers in New York Bay, on the Hudson River, and finally on Long Island Sound. He was a fierce competitor, prepared to cut fares of $2 or $3 down to ten cents when fighting for passengers. Competing owners soon learned that in such ruinous price wars, it was never Vanderbilt who backed down first. They paid him, finally, to withdraw from business between New York and New Jersey, and on the Hudson. (Of course, when he did so, they promptly raised fares again to cover their losses, so that in the long run, the public paid for the competition. But the business practices of the time were less strictly controlled than now, and such behavior was not exceptional.) On Long Island Sound, however, Vanderbilt’s ships became a familiar sight. Long, narrow at both ends, with tall smoke stacks thickly belching black wood-smoke, and huge gilt paddle-boxes, they carried passengers in luxury from New York to points in Connecticut and Rhode Island, and eventually all the way to Boston.

Soon, New York papers were referring to Vanderbilt as “the Commodore,” and the name stuck. He was an important citizen, helping his city to build up a profitable and growing trade with New England and the interior. It was time to move to Manhattan. Sophia at first objected to leaving their fine house on Staten Island, but Vanderbilt committed her to a private mental asylum for a couple of months to think things over, and she withdrew her opposition. In 1846, the Vanderbilts moved into a fashionable new house off Washington Square, and the Commodore bought fast trotting horses to take him on Sunday drives. He worked hard and enjoyed his money, but he was never quite accepted by the older society of New York. After all, he had once worked as a boatman; he still swore like a dockhand, murdered Webster’s English, and refused to be respectable. At the age of fifty, he got into a street brawl which developed during a political parade and successfully knocked out a prize fighter.

The Commodore was tough, as those who crossed him soon found out. In 1850, for example, during the California Gold Rush, he joined with others in forming a company to set up a new route from New York to San Francisco. This meant going by ocean steamer to the east coast of Nicaragua, then across that country by lake and river boat and mule-back to the Pacific, then northward again by sea. (Vanderbilt even went to Central America and laid out the Nicaraguan inland water route, scaring his engineers by tying down safety valves to raise enough steam to force his boats through rapids and over sandbars.) After a couple of years of operation, two fellow directors of this company took advantage of Vanderbilt’s absence on a trip abroad to buy control of the management through stock purchases. They then tried to break their agreements with the Commodore. When he returned and found out about it, he dictated a letter. It read: “Gentlemen: You have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you.”

Promptly, he opened a competing line by way of the Isthmus of Panama, cutting fares for a 5,000-mile trip to as little as $30 for steerage. Soon, the Nicaraguan route was almost abandoned, and the company that ran it was on the verge of bankruptcy. Vanderbilt bought his way back into the company and took pleasure in seeing his rivals ousted. They later made a deal with the dictator of Nicaragua - an American soldier of fortune named William Walker - to seize the Vanderbilt properties in the country. The relentless Commodore then lent his support to an invasion by Honduras, Guatemala, San Salvador, and Costa Rica which threw Walker out. The influence of the modern world, and of American capital, was already strong enough to be felt in jungles thousands of miles from home.

These Central American operations and the establishment of a transatlantic line occupied Vanderbilt throughout the 1850s. By the time the Civil War broke out, however, he was ready to bid steamships goodbye. Nearly seventy, but still hale, Vanderbilt was now prepared to bet everything he had on the new king of the transportation world, the iron horse. At that point, “everything he had” amounted to something between $10 and $20 million.

Vanderbilt’s first experience with railroads had not been happy. In 1833, he was riding a Camden & Amboy Railroad train to Philadelphia when an axle broke and his carriage overturned. He was pitched down a thirty-foot embankment and was lucky to survive, despite broken ribs and a punctured lung. Nevertheless, he had confidence in the potential of railroads and started buying railroad stocks some years before 1863, which was the year he became president of the New York & Harlem Railroad. This little line did a small business in commuter traffic and the transport of farm goods in the Bronx and Westchester County. Its real importance to Vanderbilt was that it had good terminal facilities in New York City. His eye was on bigger game, however. The Hudson River Railroad, on the east side of the river for which it was named, joined New York to Albany. There it connected with another line, the New York Central, which carried the rich freight of the West eastward from Buffalo. By biding his time and buying carefully, Vanderbilt finally got enough shares of Hudson River stock to make him the effective owner of the line. He could be sure that, as owner of more than half of the stock, his orders would be strictly obeyed.

With the Hudson River line in his grasp, Vanderbilt controlled all the rail traffic into New York. Now his problem was to work with - or against - the New York Central. To arrange for their freight to be picked up at Albany, the owners of that line could make a number of different and advantageous arrangements: with Hudson River steamboats, or with Vanderbilt’s line, or even with the Western Railroad, which ran from Albany to Boston. But Vanderbilt did not like to dance to the Central’s tune. By severe rate-cutting, he managed to reduce riverboat competition, and he made temporary pacts with the Central. But these pacts were never binding; they could be canceled whenever the lordly Central wanted to make a better deal. In January of 1867, when the Commodore thought the Central had backed out of an arrangement with him, he took a drastic step. He ordered the trains of his Hudson River line to be stopped at East Albany, on the opposite bank of the river from the terminal in Albany where the Central’s tracks ended. No boats were running in the ice-choked river, of course. Passengers bound for New York from the north and west had to trudge through snowdrifts to change trains, and freight had to be hauled in the same bitter way. Public opinion was enraged - not only with Vanderbilt but also with the Central. Yet the Central could not afford to lose public confidence, for it was fighting severe competition from several other major lines or “trunks” between the Atlantic and the Great Lakes. So, when the price of New York Central dropped sharply on the stock market, a group of Central stockholders decided that the way out lay not in fighting Vanderbilt, but in joining him. They gave the Commodore control over their votes (which represented $13 million worth of stock) and elected him president of the board of directors. Vanderbilt ruled the rails from New York all the way to Buffalo.

The power that Vanderbilt commanded was vividly symbolized by this incident. A railroad king was a king, indeed. Henry Adams, himself a descendant of two presidents, looked hard at Vanderbilt in 1869 and was disturbed. “His ambition,” he wrote, “is a great one. It seems to be nothing less than to make himself master in his own right of the great channels of communication which connect the city of New York with the interior of the continent, and to control them as his private property.” The Commodore, Adams went on, had sought “to make himself a dictator in modern civilization” by his control of those indispensable iron highways. Others also feared the extent of the railroad king’s power, and many men to this day have gone through life in the belief that Vanderbilt was an autocrat who said: “The public be damned.”

Actually, he said no such thing. His son, William, who inherited the railroad empire, once made the remark to a reporter - and what he meant was that he could not run a non-paying stretch of line as a convenience to “the public,” since his first obligation was to his stockholders. In fact. Commodore Vanderbilt himself once told legislative investigators: “I have always served the public to the best of my ability. Why? Because, like every other man, it is my interest to do so.” But he did add: “I for one will never go to a court of law when I have got the power to see myself right.” In fact, Vanderbilt frequently employed lawyers to fight for him, but his disdainful attitude toward the courts was shared by many men like him. Members of the public, in admiring Vanderbilt’s wealth, were apt sometimes to forget the manipulations by which it had been achieved.

For the remaining ten years of his life, Vanderbilt supervised the growth of his railroads into a system. In 1868, he attempted to take over his most serious competitor in New York State - the Erie Railroad. Starting in New Jersey opposite Manhattan and extending across farmlands all the way to Buffalo, with valuable connections to western cities, the Erie could be a great carrier of coal, flour, meat, and machinery. But its directors in 1868 were ruled by a rascally trio: Daniel Drew, a tobacco-chewing ex-cattle driver who, like Vanderbilt, had invested in steamboats and railroads; fat Jim Fisk, a pleasure-loving one-time peddler; and Jay Gould, a foxy stock market operator. These three used the Erie’s treasury to finance various tricky schemes. To raise more money still, they “watered the stock” of the line - selling shares whose total worth was far more than the actual value of the company’s property. (Drew was said to have invented this practice when driving cattle to market in New York. He would feed his animals a salty diet, and let them drink until they were bloated just before reaching the slaughterhouse. “Uncle Dan’l” then collected for pounds of “beef” that were only water in an animal’s stomach.)

When Vanderbilt tried to buy the controlling interest in the Erie, Drew, Gould, and Fisk secretly loaded him with shares of bogus stock. When he got the New York courts to issue warrants for their arrest, they fled to New Jersey one dark night and took over a hotel in Jersey City, which they filled with their usual bodyguard of toughs. From this fortress, secure from reprisal, they were able to laugh at Vanderbilt, who had invested millions in purchasing a vast amount of nearly worthless stock. A deal was finally made. The Commodore arranged to let them return to New York and resume operations, and they in turn bought back some of the shares he had acquired. It was Vanderbilt’s only defeat.

In a sense, it was not a total loss. Vanderbilt simply set out to make his road better than the Erie. He managed, by 1875, to acquire two additional lines, the Michigan Central and the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, which gave him a link all the way to Chicago. He then fought aggressively with such rivals as the Erie, the Pennsylvania, and the Baltimore & Ohio. To lure business his way he cut rates to ten cents a bushel on wheat and $13 per passenger from Chicago to New York. As one observer put it, the returns would not pay for the axle grease. But such tactics forced the other lines to make agreements with Vanderbilt, which in the end divided traffic and revenues fairly. (Of course, in places where the Central had no competition, rates were not nearly so attractive.)

What was more, the Vanderbilt system was a well-run one. The Commodore, too, watered Central stock to some extent. He believed, however, that the true worth of the company was not in the dollar value of its property, but in its earning promises. And he did his best to make those promises good. In 1871, a brand new terminal for the Harlem Railroad (which was also large enough to house Central, Hudson River, and New York, New Haven & Hartford trains) was opened at New York’s Fourth Avenue and 42nd Street. With five acres of space, twelve tracks, and numerous offices and waiting rooms, it was one of the marvels of the period. (The modern Grand Central still stands on this site, and the little avenue cut between 42nd and 47th streets to provide entrances on the west carries Vanderbilt’s name to this day.) Soon afterwards, prompted by complaints from New Yorkers who objected to waiting at street corners until a train had passed by, the tracks were sunk below the level of Fourth Avenue, later renamed Park Avenue, and eventually were covered completely by pavement and a landscaped area.

The Commodore took the progressive step of four-tracking the Central line from Albany to Buffalo. This meant that two tracks - one in each direction - could be reserved for passenger trains, while two were kept clear for the steadily growing freight traffic. No longer would passengers be delayed by slow-moving strings of boxcars on the rails ahead. Steel rails replaced brittle cast iron. Locomotives lost their gilding and bright brass-work, but grew in speed and hauling power. By 1877, the Central line was hauling Chicago harvesters, Toledo glass, Cleveland petroleum, and countless other products along the margins of Lake Erie and the Mohawk and Hudson valleys. Even in the terrible depression that started in 1873, the Central continued to pay dividends of 8 percent. And workers on the line were understandably bitter when, in 1877, the Central cut their wages on the grounds of “hard times.”

As the Commodore grew old, he left much of the business management to his son, William. He mellowed a little, too. Though he had long distrusted book learning, he gave $1 million to a Methodist university in Nashville, Tennessee, which adopted his name. He joined gentlemen’s clubs, played cards with old business friends and enemies, and after his first wife died in 1868, married Frank Armstrong Crawford. Though father now to one of New York’s first families, Vanderbilt continued to take pride in his own ruggedness. “Here,” he once told an overzealous photographer, “don’t you rub out the wrinkles and paint me up that way. I ain’t particularly pretty, as I know of, but I’m damned if I’ll travel in disguise.” He would probably have snorted at some of the sentimental editorials and sermons that marked his passing in 1877.

His life had been active, dramatic, and personally rewarding. By the time it was ending, some people had come to think that he represented America even better than statesmen and scientists. The country was dazzled by its new wealth and the men who had made it. Vanderbilt, the richest of them all, made his millions from the power of steam. Other younger men of the same tough grain were already taking different trails to the pot of gold.