Cornelius Vanderbilt

Cornelius Vanderbilt left the largest fortune in the United States and left almost all of it to one son. He began at sixteen with a small sailing boat ferrying produce and passengers between Staten Island and Manhattan, worked for Thomas Gibbons running steamboats in defiance of the monopoly the state of New York had granted, and was the operator behind Gibbons v. Ogden in 1824, the Supreme Court case that struck that monopoly down and opened interstate waters. He then built his own steamship lines by cutting fares until competitors paid him to withdraw, a method that made him hated and rich. During the gold rush he ran passengers to California across Nicaragua rather than Panama, cutting two days off the journey, and when Charles Morgan and Cornelius Garrison seized the company while he was in Europe he wrote them a famous short letter and destroyed them in the market; it was the same company William Walker later confiscated, which is why Vanderbilt financed the coalition that drove Walker out of Nicaragua. In his late sixties he moved into railroads, took the New York and Harlem, the Hudson River and then the New York Central, and consolidated them into a single line to Chicago. He built Grand Central Depot. He gave away almost nothing in his lifetime, the exception being a million dollars to the Nashville university that took his name. He was married twice, the second time at seventy-five to a cousin forty-three years younger, and consulted spiritualists. Of an estate of about a hundred million dollars he left ninety-five to his son William, and the will was contested for a year.

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