Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: The Story of a Mother and a Daughter in the ‘Gilded Age’

The Vanderbilt fortune was made in transportation. Its origins lay in the first regular Staten Island ferry service to Manhattan, started by the Commodore in a periauger, under sail, while he was still in his teens. From there his career reads like a successful case study in a textbook for business students. He ploughed back the profits from his first periauger ferry service until he owned a fleet. He expanded into other waters and bought coasting schooners. Then, when others had taken the risk out of steamship technology, he sold his sailing ships and embraced the age of steam, founding the Dispatch Line and acquiring the nickname ‘Commodore’ as he built it up.

The Dispatch Line ran safer and faster steamships than any of its competitors to Albany up the Hudson, and along the New England coast as far as Boston up Long Island Sound disembarking at Norwalk, New Haven, Connecticut and Providence. Between 1829 and 1835, the Commodore moved easily into the role of capitalist entrepreneur, profiting from the impulse to move and explore as waves of immigrants fanned out and built a new country. By 1845 he began to appear on ‘rich lists.’ The Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy Citizens of New York City, compiled by Moses Yale Beach that year estimated his fortune at $1.2 million and added ‘of an old Dutch root, Cornelius has evinced more energy and go-aheaditiveness in building and driving steamboats and other projects than ever one single Dutchman possessed’5. The size of the Commodore’s fortune is particularly remarkable when one considers that the word ‘millionaire’ was only coined by journalists in 1843 to describe the estate left by the first of them, the tobacconist Peter Lorillard. In 1845, the millionaire phenomenon was still so rare that the word was printed in italics and pronounced with rolling ‘rs’ in a flamboyant French accent.6

It was only in the last quarter of his life, between the mid-1860s and his death in 1877, that the Commodore moved into railroads – the industry with which the Vanderbilts are usually associated (this came after an adventure in Nicaragua where he forced a steamship up the Greytown River to open a trans-American Gold Rush passage in 1850, fomented a civil war and took his bank account to $11 million by 1853). It took much to convince the Commodore that railroads were the future: 30,000 miles of railroad track had to be laid by others before he accepted that the argument was won. Once convinced, he divested himself of his steamships and began buying up railroads converging on New York in a spectacular series of stock manipulations or ‘corners’ at which he proved extremely inventive and adept.7

The Commodore’s accounting methods may have been pre-industrial – he kept his accounts either in an old cigar box or in his head – but the enterprise he created made him a pioneer of industrial capitalism. He was also a master of timing. The American Civil War (1861–65) confirmed the absolute dominance of the railways at the heart of the growing US economy. On 20 May 1869, he secured the right to consolidate all his railroads into the New York Central, and recapitalised the stock at almost twice its previous market value. He was much abused for inventing the practice of issuing extra stock capitalised against future earnings, or ‘watering’ as it was known, but the practice has since become not only standard practice but a key instrument of modern finance.8

The first version of Grand Central Terminal in New York, which opened in 1871, had serious design flaws, rather like the Commodore himself. Blithely ignoring the impact on the local community, trains ran down the middle of neighbouring streets and passengers wishing to change lines had to dodge moving locomotives and dive across the tracks in all weather conditions (in old age it amused the Commodore to play ‘chicken’ in front of oncoming trains). But this was the first American railroad terminal and it encapsulated an extraordinary achievement. ‘A powerful image in American letters,’ writes the historian Kurt Schlichting, ‘depicts a youth moving from a rural farm or small town to the big city, seeking fame or fortune … As the train arrives, the protagonist confronts the energy and chaos of the new urban society … Great railroad terminals like Grand Central provided the stage for this unfolding drama, as a rural, agrarian society urbanized.’9 In constructing the first version of the Grand Central Terminal (his statue still stands outside the 1913 version), the Commodore constructed a metaphor for both his own life and the industrialisation of America.

That, at any rate, was the business history, the journey from ferryman to railroad king which his first biographer, William Croffut, believed should be held up as an inspiring example to the young. This is not the whole truth, however. He may have been a great entrepreneur, but the Commodore had some disconcerting domestic habits. He is alleged to have consigned his wife, Sophia, and his epileptic son, Cornelius Jeremiah, to a lunatic asylum when they stood up to him; he was rumoured to be a womaniser, especially with the notorious Claflin sisters who were eventually prosecuted for obscenity (though not with him); and he dabbled in spiritualism for advance news from the spirit world on stock prices. There were many who objected to his meanness, for his habit of Dutch frugality was steadfastly extended to anything approaching a philanthropic gesture until very close to his death. ‘Go and surprise the whole country by doing something right,’ wrote Mark Twain in despair in 1869.10 New York society preferred to keep him at a distance too. There was, it was felt, altogether too much of the farmyard about him. He was even rumoured to have spat out tobacco plugs on Mrs Van Rensselaer’s carpet.

Alva later wrote that the Commodore was a charming old man. She came to know him in the last three years of his life, understood that he was a visionary and refused to be cowed by him which he always liked.11 He was certainly forthright, as a love letter he penned to the young woman who would become his second wife demonstrated: ‘I hope you will continue to improve for all time,’ he wrote after she had been ill. ‘Until you turn the scale when 125 pounds is on the opposite balance. This is weight enough for your beautiful figure.’12 It may be untrue that the Commodore spat out tobacco plugs, but he was not the only industrial tycoon unwilling to tone down a forceful style for genteel drawing rooms. Occasionally he was gripped by the urge to show off to snootier members of New York society but even this lacked conviction. In 1853 he commissioned the largest ocean-going yacht the world had ever seen, the North Star, and took his first wife and family to Europe. But though they were greeted by grand dukes, sculpted by Hiram Powers and painted by Joel Tanner Hart, he sold the yacht to the United Mail when he went home, never repeated the experiment and returned to what he enjoyed most, which was making money and doing down his competitors.

Unsurprisingly, the Commodore’s wealth inspired great jealousy as well as admiration. Some of the stories about his coarse behaviour came from his aforementioned competitors, and from embittered members of his own family contesting his will; he may also have played up to his image as a farmyard peasant when it suited him. Whatever the explanation, Frank Crowinshield could still write in 1941: ‘The most persistent myth concerning the family was that they were all, if not boors exactly, at any rate unused to the social amenities. The myth was so pervasive that one may still hear it from the lips of decrepit New Yorkers who, in discreet whispers, recite the risks their fathers ran in crossing the portals … Such people still speak as though their sires had risked calling upon Attila, or visiting, without benefit of axe or bludgeon, the dread caves of the anthropophagi.’13

The force of the Commodore’s personality was so great that it affected society’s perception of his children and grandchildren. For his own part, he left no-one in any doubt that his sons were a disappointment to him, and he was much exercised about the best way to hand on his great fortune until he felt he had solved the problem in the 1870s. There was naturally no question of giving any kind of financial control to his daughters; his favourite son died of malarial fever during the Civil War; and Cornelius Jeremiah, who not only suffered from epilepsy but also an addiction to gambling, was regarded as beyond redemption. This left Consuelo’s grandfather, William Henry Vanderbilt, who was treated with utter contempt well into middle-age, and was habitually addressed as ‘blatherskite’, not to mention ‘beetlehead’. William Henry – or ‘Billy’ as he was known to his family – made matters worse by kowtowing to his father at every turn. Even on the North Star cruise, he responded to the Commodore’s offer of $10,000 if he would give up smoking by refusing the money saying: ‘Your wish is sufficient,’ and flinging his cigar overboard. This tactic was so perfectly calibrated to irritate the Commodore that he slowly lit a cigar of his own and blew smoke in his son’s face.14

William Henry was a far more careful, painstaking and methodical man than the Commodore, showing little of the latter’s startling entrepreneurial flair – one of many causes of the Commodore’s profound scorn. During his early career at a banking house, William Henry worked himself into a state of nervous collapse, attracting further contumely, and was promptly expelled with his wife Maria Kissam to work a small and difficult farm on Staten Island. (The Kissams were an old and distinguished family, and although Alva Vanderbilt later claimed to have propelled the Vanderbilts into society, this match could certainly have taken them into its outer circles if either party had been interested.)

On Staten Island, Maria Kissam Vanderbilt carried on the family tradition by producing a large family of her own – nine children in all. Three of her sons would later become Consuelo’s famous building uncles: Cornelius II of The Breakers, Newport; Frederick of the Hyde Park mansion, New York; and George, who created the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. The fourth – though not the youngest – was Consuelo’s father, William Kissam Vanderbilt, often known as ‘William K.’

In the family mythology, William Henry, the father of these sons, only finally won respect from the Commodore after many years with one of the double-crossing japes over a deal that nineteenth-century Vanderbilts seem to have enjoyed. It involved the definition of a scow-load of manure. William Henry offered to buy manure for his farm from his father’s stables at $4 a load. The Commodore then saw him pile several loads on to one scow and asked him how many he had bought. ‘How many?,’ William Henry is said to have replied; ‘One, of course! I never put but one load on a scow.’15 Finally impressed that his son was capable of getting the better of him, the Commodore, who was a shareholder in the near-bankrupt Staten Island Railroad, decided to turn it over to William Henry to see what he could make of it. Within two years the Blatherskite had put the little railroad on a secure financial footing and proved his value in the only vocabulary the Commodore truly understood by turning worthless stocks into $175 a share.16

The Commodore then moved William Henry and his growing family back from Staten Island to New York, made him vice-president of the newly acquired Harlem and Hudson Railroad, and put him in charge of the daily operation of the lines. Once again, William Henry responded magnificently to the challenge, finding economies and efficiencies wherever he looked, whereupon his father made him vice-president of the New York Central after 1869. The Commodore remained in overall strategic control of the enterprise until the day he died, but increasingly left the day-to-day management to William Henry. In coming to trust his eldest son’s managerial capabilities, the Commodore, always in the vanguard of entrepreneurial capitalism, grasped that the qualities needed to build a fortune were not the same as the qualities needed to maintain it. ‘Any fool can make a fortune,’ the Commodore is said to have told William Henry before he died. ‘It takes a man of brains to hold on to it after it is made.’17

The difficult relationship that existed for so many years between the Commodore and William Henry would have repercussions for Consuelo: her father, William Kissam Vanderbilt (later one of the world’s richest men) grew up in modest circumstances on Staten Island during the period when his parents were out of favour with the Commodore. Munsey’s Magazine found this reassuring, thankful that the humble circumstances principle would hold good for another generation or two: ‘The decline of ancestral vigour and the dissipation of inherited wealth, which sociologists claim is almost inevitable among the very rich, has doubtless been deferred for a very few generations, among the Vanderbilts, by the sturdy plainness in which William Henry had brought up his sons and daughters,’18 it said pompously. This may have been true, but it also meant that William K. would spend much of his adult life having as little to do with sturdy plainness as possible, an attitude to life with considerable implications for his own children.

William K. was also raised in a very different atmosphere from his father, who was a kind and mild-mannered man, an affectionate husband and not in the least given to domestic tyranny. A charming painting of the William Henry Vanderbilt family by Seymour Guy in 1873 suggests a large family at ease with itself, and even allowing for polite obituarists and nineteenth-century sentimentality, there appears to have been none of the contemptuous atmosphere that blighted the youth of the Commodore’s children. Maria Kissam came from a cultivated background and both she and her husband saw to it that their children were properly educated. Willie (as he was known) was taught by private tutors and his parents took the unusual step of sending him to Geneva in Switzerland for part of his education. According to architectural historians John Foreman and Robbe Pierce Stimson: ‘Few Americans of the time possessed the means, let alone the inclination, to send their sons abroad to school. Willie became a true sophisticate at an early age. He was fluent in French, and a connoisseur of European culture, art, and manners. The scandal-mongering tabloids of the era loved to portray the Vanderbilts as coarse parvenus. However, the truth in the case of Willie’s generation – and especially in the case of Willie himself – was precisely the opposite.’19

William K. Vanderbilt grew into an outstandingly good-looking young man who later became famous for his charm, hospitality and agreeable manners. Consuelo adored him. ‘[He] found life a happy adventure …,’ she wrote. ‘His pleasure was to see people happy.’20 The problem for such a gregarious young Vanderbilt was that while his grandfather the Commodore was alive there was little possibility of making an entrée into New York society, or of enjoying a life of leisure. The Commodore’s reputation as a vulgarian put paid to contact with New York’s emerging social elite; and while his grandfather retained an iron grip on the family fortune, it was essential to behave as he wished. ‘What you’ve got isn’t worth anything unless you have got the power,’ was one of the Commodore’s favourite financial saws.21 Even in 1875, two years before he died, he continued to strike fear into the heart of his relations. He believed that extravagance was a weakness, a sign that one was not responsible enough to inherit a cent. ‘He’s a bad boy,’ he said of his son Cornelius Jeremiah. ‘Money slips through his fingers like water through a sieve.’22

In 1868, William K., whom the Commodore liked, had no choice other than to join the family railroad enterprise alongside his brother Cornelius II and start learning the railroad business, some way down the hierarchy of the Hudson River Railroad. For a charming and sociable youth, this cannot always have been easy. For the time being, however, there was little alternative to assenting amiably to the Commodore’s assertion that only ‘“hard and disagreeable work” would keep his grandsons from becoming “spoilt”.’23

The person who would not only solve William K.’s problem but do much to change society’s perception of the Vanderbilts was Alva, nee Erskine Smith, later Mrs Oliver H. P. Belmont and the mother-of-the-bride. The reasons why she was drawn to this challenge lay deep in her own background, about which there remain many misconceptions. She has variously been described – in even scholarly works – as the daughter of the wealthiest couple in Savannah, and so poor that she helped her father keep a boarding house in New York after the American Civil War.24 Whereas Consuelo, her own daughter, thought that her mother was the daughter of a ruined plantation owner.25 Some of this was Alva’s fault for she often exaggerated to suit her purpose, particularly when it came to issues of status and power. Commodore Vanderbilt’s disdain for New York society was particularly unusual; for many others nineteenth-century America was a time of straightforward struggle for social advantage. Alva was one of them, and she was not alone in claiming aristocratic genealogy to assist her case.

On her father’s side, she maintained that her pedigree stretched back to Scotland, and the Earls of Stirling. She was named Alva after Lord Alva, a Stirling descendant, and she called her youngest son Harold Stirling Vanderbilt to underscore the connection. One of her Stirling forebears emigrated to Virginia, and married a Smith of Virginia. Her father, Murray Forbes Smith, was a descendant of this line. The antecedents of Alva’s mother, Phoebe Desha, were much less hazy. She – rather than Alva – was the daughter of a plantation owner, the distinguished and powerful General Robert Desha of Kentucky, who won his rank in the war of 1812, and was twice elected to the House of Representatives. Her uncle, Joseph Desha, was a governor of Kentucky. Thus far, Alva’s claims to a relationship with America’s southern landed aristocracy appear to have been valid, but in her parents’ generation they became diluted. Murray Forbes Smith had just finished training to be a lawyer in Virginia when he met Phoebe Desha. ‘His entire career, like all women’s but unlike most men’s was upset by this marriage,’26 Alva wrote later, for his powerful father-in-law persuaded him to abandon his fledgling legal practice and move to Mobile, Alabama to look after the family cotton interests. This made Murray Forbes Smith, in effect, a superior cotton sales agent working on behalf of the Kentucky Deshas.

While there may be some confusion about her background there is no doubt at all about the strength of Alva’s personality, which impressed itself on everyone who ever met her. ‘When convinced,’ said one witness ‘Not God nor the devil can frighten her off.’27 ‘When she speaks, prudent men go and get behind something and consider in which direction they can get away best,’28 said another. ‘Her combative nature rejoiced in conquests,’ wrote Consuelo. ‘A born dictator, she dominated events about her as thoroughly as she eventually dominated her husband and her children. If she admitted another point of view she never conceded it.’29 If anything, Consuelo, anxious not to appear over-critical of her mother, always downplayed Alva’s forcefulness. Alva, by contrast, seemed to take great pride in her own strength of character to the point of sounding puzzled by the strange impulse within her and writing in her (unpublished) autobiography: ‘There was a force in me that seemed to compel me to do what I wanted to do regardless of what might happen afterwards … I have known this condition often during my life.’30

Alva explained her dominant personality by saying that she had been born forceful, that she was the seventh child and – according to an old saying – the seventh child was always the strongest and the mainstay of the family. Elsewhere she attributed it to her upbringing, particularly her mother. ‘There is, I believe, no stronger influence on the development of character and personality than our early environment, and childhood memories,’31 she wrote. It is difficult to dispute this. Her domineering character was given free rein by her strong-minded mother in childhood, and family circumstances which involved a weakened father in her teenage years conspired to emancipate it entirely.

The Smiths moved to Mobile in boom years for the cotton trade, when Mobile was a great cotton port. In 1858, Hiram Fuller described Mobile as ‘a pleasant cotton city of some thirty thousand inhabitants, where the people live in cotton trade and ride in cotton carriages. They buy cotton, sell cotton, think cotton, eat cotton, and dream cotton. They marry cotton wives, and unto them are born cotton children.’32 Life for the Murray Forbes Smiths was not entirely happy, however. According to one account, Phoebe was determined to show the cotton wives how things were done by grand families such as the Deshas of Kentucky. Sadly, Mobile society was first indifferent and then irritated. Alva omits to mention in any account of her childhood that Phoebe’s attempt to conquer Mobile ended in abject failure, and would not have been pleased by a book which appeared some years later where her mother’s social efforts in Mobile were pilloried. ‘Some people ate Mrs Smith’s suppers; many did not. There was needless and ungracious comment, and one swift writer pasquinaded her social ambitions in a pamphlet for “private” circulation. Then the lady concluded that Mobile was … unripe for conquest,’33 commented Thomas De Leon in 1909.

Mobile must have been a difficult time for the Smiths in other ways. Alva was born on 17 January 1853, the seventh of nine children, of whom four died in infancy. Of the eight children born to the Smiths in Mobile, three are buried in Magnolia Cemetery – Alice, aged twenty months in 1847, one-year-old Eleanor in 1851, and thirteen-year-old Murray Forbes Smith Jr in 1857.34 In her memoirs (which she wrote after her conversion to the cause which would dominate her later life – women’s suffrage), Alva traced intense feelings of resentment towards men back to the death of this brother, Murray Forbes Jr. He died when she was four, and she grew up being made to feel that as far as her father was concerned, the death of his thirteen-year-old son and namesake was a far greater loss than her baby sisters. ‘He was always kind to us, always generous in his provision and care, but atmospherically he made his daughters feel that the family was best represented in the sons … I didn’t suffer with tearful sadness but with violent resentment.’35

In spite of this, Alva remembered the house in Mobile with deep longing. The Smiths were comfortably off and their house stood at the corner of Conception and Government Streets, one of the grandest and most distinctive houses in Mobile with crenellations round the roof, and a Renaissance suggestion to the porches. Memory of the dream house of early childhood would haunt her all her life, influencing the design of the remarkable houses she created as an adult: ‘Always these houses, real and imaginary, reproduced certain features of the home in which I was born and where my early childhood was spent … It had large rooms, wide halls, high ceilings, with high casement windows opening upon the surrounding gardens … apart from the big house, also, was the bath house. The floor and bath were of marble, and marble steps led down into the bath which was cut out and below the level of the floor.’36 When Alva was six, her parents decided to leave Mobile and go to New York. Quite apart from his wife’s problems with Mobile society, Murray Smith sensed that success as a ‘commission merchant’ would be unsustainable if he stayed. His judgement (correct, as it turned out) was that the rapid spread of railroads would tip the balance from Mobile and the ports of the Gulf of Mexico in favour of New York. It was therefore the onward march of the American railroads that would ultimately bring the Smiths and Vanderbilts together.

The Smiths’ move to New York shortly before the Civil War initially seemed well judged. They avoided the depression in the South that came with the Civil War, and profited from a property boom in Mobile. Several characteristics of nineteenth-century southern life moved with them. Like almost every other well-to-do southern antebellum family, the Murray Smiths had slaves, given to Phoebe by her father in lieu of a marriage settlement. These slaves went with the Smiths to New York. Alva had her particular favourite, Monroe Crawford, whom she adored. ‘The reason Monroe Crawford and I got along without conflict for the most part was because I managed the situation, I wanted my own way and with Monroe I got it. I bossed him. It was a case of absolute control on my part,’37 she told Sara Bard Field, the writer and poet to whom she dictated her first set of memoirs in 1917. Though Alva never said so, this early exposure to a system of human relations based on slavery may explain as much about her as Murray Smith’s lack of interest in his daughters. She never entirely lost the habits of mind of a southern slave owner in relation to those she regarded as her inferiors: more profoundly such total control over another human being at such a young age can only have contributed to Alva’s later obsession with power and control, and her almost phobic fear of losing her grip on it.