Railroad And Steamship Promoter

Hard-Boiled Apprenticeship.

Born on Staten Island in 1794, Cornelius Vanderbilt left school at eleven to go to work. While still a teenager Vanderbilt started his own ferry service in New York harbor, and the War of 1812 found him investing in his own fleet of sailing ships, competing on some of the major coastal routes to the South and New England. But the ambitious young man wanted to get into the steamship business, and in 1818 he hired on as a steam-ferry captain with Thomas Gibbons, who was in the process of defying the Fulton-Livingston steam navigation monopoly in the profitable New York harbor market, now owned by Aaron Ogden. Until the Supreme Court ended steamboat monopolies in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) Gibbons operated his ferry service in violation of a state court injunction, leaving intrepid young Captain Vanderbilt to drop passengers at constantly shifting...