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Updated: May 25, 2025
Tears and pleadings prevailed; in a moment of sentimental weakness a weakness which turned out to be costly Vanderbilt relented. A bargain was agreed upon by which Drew was to resume directorship and represent Vanderbilt's interests and purposes. Reinstated in the Erie board, Drew successfully pretended for a time that he was fully subservient.
"All I want," said the long-bearded man, "is enough to be comfortable. I would n't have Vanderbilt's wealth if he'd give it to me." "Nor I," said the landlord. I heard tell of a young man who went to Vanderbilt to get employment. Vanderbilt finally offered to give the young man, if he would work for him, just what he got himself.
"What is the secret of success in business?" asked a friend of Cornelius Vanderbilt. "Secret! there is no secret about it," replied the commodore; "all you have to do is to attend to your business and go ahead." If you would adopt Vanderbilt's method, know your business, attend to it, and keep down expenses until your fortune is safe from business perils.
Protest as it did against Vanderbilt's merging of railroads, the middle class found itself quite helpless. In rapid succession he put through one combination after another, and caused theft after theft to be legalized, utterly disdainful of criticism or opposition.
To make their corner certain, the Vanderbilt pool had bought 27,000 more shares than the entire existing stock of the road. "We busted the whole Legislature," was Vanderbilt's jubilant comment, "and scores of the honorable members had to go home without paying their board bills."
Yet no one hitherto seems to have taken the trouble to disinter them; even serious writers who cannot be accused of wealth worship or deliberate misstatement have all, without exception, borrowed their narratives of Vanderbilt's career from the fiction of his literary, newspaper and oratorical incense burners.
By the most favorable account that of Croffut his own allotment of the plunder amounted to $26,000,000. This sum, immense, and in fact of almost inconceivable power in that day, was enough of itself, independent of Vanderbilt's other wealth, to force through almost any plan involving a seizing of competing property. Vanderbilt did not wait long.
Though he loved his race-horses, had a fondness for music, and could sit through long winter evenings while his young wife sang old Southern ballads, Vanderbilt's ungovernable temper had placed him on bad terms with nearly all his children he had had thirteen, of whom eleven survived him who contested his will and exposed all his eccentricities to public view on the ground that the man who created the New York Central system was actually insane.
Judge Barnard granted a temporary injunction, and two days later Vanderbilt's attorney petitioned for the removal from office of Treasurer Drew. The papers presented in the case exposed a new fountain of Erie stock which had up to that time been entirely overlooked.
It is interesting to inquire who Vanderbilt's associates were in this transaction. They were John D. Rockefeller, William Rockefeller, D. O. Mills, Stephen B. Elkins, William C. Whitney and other founders of large fortunes. For once in his career, Vanderbilt met in the Pennsylvania Railroad a competitor powerful enough to force him to compromise. Elsewhere, Vanderbilt was much more successful.
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