Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [345]
UNDER STEAM AND SAIL
When Robert Fulton died in 1815, his fame as inventor of the steamboat earned him a hero’s funeral in Trinity Church and the rare distinction of having his name attached to the streets that ran down to the Brooklyn Ferry terminals on both sides of the East River. Not everyone mourned his passing, however. A charter from the state legislature had given him and his partner, Robert Livingston, a monopoly of the steamboat business in New York. With the help of eminent lawyers like Thomas Addis Emmet and Cadwallader Golden, the duo had ruthlessly suppressed one competitor after another. Even Livingston’s brother-in-law, Colonel John L. Stevens, couldn’t get permission to operate a steamboat of his own design across the Hudson to develop his property near Hoboken. After both partners died, their company continued to swat down rivals, forcing them to settle for the use of horse ferries—a much slower form of transport that employed eight draft animals to drive a central water wheel. By 1820 many New Yorkers considered the Fulton-Livingston monopoly as annoying an obstacle to the city’s growth as the swamps and escarpments that confronted engineers on the Erie Canal. But in this case it would be the United States Supreme Court, not pick and shovel, that would solve the problem.
Aaron Ogden, onetime governor of New Jersey, had purchased a franchise from the monopoly to operate a steamboat between Manhattan and Elizabethport, New Jersey. From there, passengers could continue to New Brunswick on a steamboat run by Thomas Gibbons, a tough and irascible lawyer from Savannah. Gibbons didn’t need a New York franchise, because his route lay entirely within New Jersey. But in 1818 Gibbons and Ogden had a falling out. The Georgian decided to steam all the way to New York, in direct competition with Ogden and in open defiance of the monopoly. To pilot his vessel into these lawyer-infested waters, Gibbons turned to a lanky, quick-fisted young Staten Islander named Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Vanderbilt’s family traced its New York origins to Jan Aertsen van der Bilt, who had arrived in Flatbush from Holland somewhere around 1650. In 1715 Jan’s grandson established a farm near New Dorp, Staten Island, from where he and his descendants carried their produce to Manhattan markets in their own small boats. Cornelius, born in 1794 at Port Richmond on Kill van Kull, loathed farming, however. He escaped it by hauling freight and passengers in a flat-bottomed, two-masted periauger that the brawny six-footer poled through the marshes rimming the island. During the War of 1812 the sandy-haired young Dutchman made great profits delivering beef and firewood to blockaded Manhattan and also won a lucrative military contract to ferry supplies to the harbor’s six forts. He gained a reputation for reliability, pugnacity, thriftiness (some said meanness), and world-class profanity. After the war, it was obvious to Vanderbilt that “b’ilers”—steamboats—were the wave of the future, and when Gibbons offered him command of his Mouse of the Mountain, he leapt at the chance. He dodged writs brandished by the monopoly’s lawyers with such skill that Gibbons gave him the helm of a much larger boat, the 142-ton Bellona. Again, Vanderbilt successfully evaded sheriffs and process servers, darting into different Manhattan landings to offload passengers and hiding in secret onboard compartments to avoid the law.
When the enraged Ogden won an injunction against Gibbons and Vanderbilt from the New York courts, Gibbons hired Daniel Webster and appealed the case to the Supreme Court. A powerful current then running through