Chapter 4

THE ONRUSH OF THE VANDERBILT FORTUNE

With the outbreak of the Civil War, and the scouring of the seas by privateers, American ship owners found themselves with an assortment of superfluous vessels on their hands. Forced to withdraw from marine commerce, they looked about for two openings. One was how to dispose of their vessels, the other the seeking of a new and safe method of making millions.

Most of their vessels were of such scandalous construction that foreign capitalists would not buy them at any price. Hastily built in the brief period of ninety days, wholly with a view to immediate profit and with but a perfunctory regard for efficiency, many of these steamers were in a dangerous condition. That they survived voyages was perhaps due more to luck than anything else; year after year, vessel after vessel similarly built and owned had gone down to the bottom of the ocean. Collins had lost many of his ships; so had other steamship companies. The chronicles of sea travel were a long, grewsome succession of tragedies; every little while accounts would come in of ships sunk or mysteriously missing. Thousands of immigrants, inhumanly crowded in the enclosures of the steerage, were swept to death without even a fighting chance for life. Cabin passengers fared better; they were given the opportunity of taking to the life-boats in cases where there was sufficient warning, time and room. At best, sea travel is a hazard; the finest of ships are liable to meet with disaster. But over much of this sacrifice of life hung grim, ugly charges of mismanagement and corruption, of insufficient crews and incompetent officers; of defective machinery and rotting timber; of lack of proper inspection and safeguards.

THE ANSWER FOUND.

The steamboat and steamship owners were not long lost in perplexity. Since they could no longer use their ships or make profit on ocean routes why not palm off their vessels upon the Government? A highly favorable time it was; the Government, under the imperative necessity of at once raising and transporting a huge army, needed vessels badly. As for the other question momentarily agitating the capitalists as to what new line of activity they could substitute for their own extinguished business, Vanderbilt soon showed how railroads could be made to yield a far greater fortune than commerce.

The titanic conflict opening between the North and the South found the Federal Government wholly unprepared. True, in granting the mail subsidies which established the ocean steamship companies, and which actually furnished the capital for many of them, Congress had inserted some fine provisions that these subsidized ships should be so built as to be "war steamers of the first class," available in time of war. But these provisions were mere vapor. Just as the Harris and the Sloo lines had obtained annual mail subsidy payments of $900,000 and had caused Government officials to accept their inferior vessels, so the Collins line had done the same. The report of a board of naval experts submitted to the Committee of Ways and Means of the House of Representatives had showed that the Collins steamers had not been built according to contract; that they would crumble to pieces under the fire of their own batteries, and that a single hostile gun would blow them to splinters. Yet they had been accepted by the Navy Department.

In times of peace the commercial interests had practiced the grossest frauds in corruptly imposing upon the Government every form of shoddy supplies. These were the same interests so vociferously proclaiming their intense patriotism. The Civil War put their pretensions of patriotism to the test. If ever a war took place in which Government and people had to strain every nerve and resource to carry on a great conflict it was the Civil War. The result of that war was only to exchange chattel slavery for the more extensive system of economic slavery. But the people of that time did not see this clearly. The Northern soldiers thought they were fighting for the noblest of all causes, and the mass of the people behind them were ready to make every sacrifice to win a momentous struggle, the direct issue of which was the overthrow or retention of black slavery.

How did the capitalist class act toward the Government, or rather, let us say, toward the army and the navy so heroically pouring out their blood in battles, and hazarding life in camps, hospitals, stockades and military prisons?

INDISCRIMINATE PLUNDERING DURING THE CIVIL WAR.

The capitalists abundantly proved their devout patriotism by making tremendous fortunes from the necessities of that great crisis. They unloaded upon the Government at ten times the cost of manufacture quantities of munitions of war--munitions so frequently worthless that they often had to be thrown away after their purchase. [Footnote: In a speech on February 28, 1863, on the urgency of establishing additional government armories and founderies, Representative J. W. Wallace pointed out in the House of Representatives: "The arms, ordnance and munitions of war bought by the Government from private contractors and foreign armories since the commencement of the rebellion have doubtless cost, over and above the positive expense of their manufacture, ten times as much as would establish and put into operation the armory and founderies recommended in the resolution of the committee. I understand that the Government, from the necessity of procuring a sufficient quantity of arms, has been paying, on the average, about twenty-two dollars per musket, when they could have been and could be manufactured in our national workshops for one-half that money."--Appendix to The Congressional Globe, Thirty-seventh Congress, Third Session, 1862-63.