Cornelius Vanderbilt

A detailed Summary of Cornelius Vanderbilt

Cornelius Vanderbilt, known for most of his life as the Commodore, is perhaps the best known of American rags to riches stories. Lacking any real education, the hard work, personality, and keen business sense possessed by Vanderbilt catapulted him from being a poor child on a farm to being the wealthiest industrialist in America.

Vanderbilt was born the fourth child to a poor farmer and his wife during America?s early, agrarian society of 1794 in rural Staten Island, New York harbor. Not only was he financially unable to get a respectable, formal education past the age of eleven, but also he had a dislike for schools and books, and understandably so, for the norm of education in the 18th century (a plodding one of memorization without thought or understanding) did not suit the young Vanderbilt?s clever mind. But what Vanderbilt lacked in academia, he made up for in with his intense competitiveness throughout his life.

From childhood, when he nearly drowned a horse while racing with it against a neighboring slave boy two years older , to later in his life, when his business ventures were more inspired by his desire to win than by his desire for wealth, he displayed a remarkable will to succeed. At the age of 16, Vanderbilt

?I have been insane on the subject of moneymaking all my life,? Vanderbilt once professed. But Vanderbilt was not a big spender. Possessions meant little to the Commodore, but his intense competitiveness is what drove his wealth to the then unimaginable magnitude of $105 million by his death. The truth is that he may have lived the rest of his life after his European vacation in luxury, vacationing and enjoying the fortune he had already made, if it weren?t for Morgan and Garrison. He may have left all his entrepreneurial duties in the hands of others. He certainly would not have punished his competitors, Drew and the like, in the intensely merciless way that he later did. Before Morgan and Garrison, the Vanderbilt that we see is much less concerned with the affairs of others than his own, and he was relatively easily appeased and kept off certain waterways. He began to lighten up as time passed, until the betrayal of Morgan and Garrison. Instead of continuing this lightening up trend, Vanderbilt not only defeated his enemies, he wanted to humiliate them. He went into railroading for the sake of having another area in which to prove himself and exert his force, as well as to further tighten his control on the transportation of Americans; he did it to make more money with which to defeat others. Thanks to a minor setback during his vacation, the Commodore continued to aggressively shape the route of American history by forcing potential competitors to compete, or to be exterminated.

From that point on, Vanderbilt controlled his own future. Vanderbilt, wisely using his connection to Gibbons, would fiercely undersell his competition to the point that he was losing money; he did this to win more than to make the opposition lose. They thought Gibbons was still backing him and agreed to pay him a certain sum of money to withdraw from the New York/New Jersey route- enough money to build another large steamboat. In a sense, this is how Vanderbilt always beat the existing cartel that controlled a certain route: he would wage a rate-war in which he would ruin the competition by operating more efficiently so that he would turn a profit, or at least lose less than they. On more than one occasion, he was paid a substantial amount to leave certain waters; and he would accept this amount eagerly. At that time, Vanderbilt was more concerned with accumulating money for the sake of winning than for the sake of beating competition. While he had the capability of eradicating his competition, he didn?t.

Some common words found in the essay are:
Vanderbilt Drew, Morgan Garrison, York/New Jersey, Court Gibbons, Island York, Staten Island, Garrison Instead, Knowing York, Robert Livingston, Central America, morgan garrison, stock price, price stock, business ventures, robert fulton, low fares, rest life, pass bill, vanderbilt decided, allowed drew,

Approximate Word count = 2377
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: People