American History Revised (44 page)

In what must have been the only time John Quincy Adams ever got called a horse, the defense leaped at the opportunity to hoist the plaintiff on her own petard: “Are not the improbabilities of a race horse, impossible for a draft horse?” Sylvia Howland, they argued, had been too infirm to write anything but her name, so how was it possible for an infirm old woman to write so clearly unless the signature was not hers? To rebut the allegations of forgery, Hetty Robinson’s lawyers reached into the bowels of the
Harvard faculty and retained the renowned scientist Louis Agassiz and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (father of the future Supreme Court justice). Holmes testified that he had examined the signatures under a microscope and found no traces of lead on the paper that would have been used for tracing, nor had he found any squiggles in the penmanship that suggested the work of a nervous hand. He was followed as an expert witness by the equally venerable Louis Agassiz, who treated the court to a lengthy and undoubtedly most edifying discourse about the microscopic interactions of ink and paper fiber.

Not to be outdone, the estate recruited the leading mathematician of the day, professor Benjamin Pierce. Now shifting gears, the estate argued that the two signatures indeed matched—too perfectly, in fact, for a human hand. Benjamin Pierce’s son Charles began with a discourse on the mathematical probabilities of loops and strokes. He described how he had analyzed forty-two samples of Sylvia Howland’s signature, superimposed them on top of each other, and found that one out of five downstrokes coincided. But in the case of the first will and the Second Page, all thirty downstrokes coincided exactly. He counted the number of times the formation of a letter requiring a downstroke coincided. The number of available comparisons was 831, which, when multiplied by the thirty positions in the signature, yielded 25,830 possibilities. The question then became, What are the odds that each position will match exactly? Was it even remotely possible that the very exact identicalness of the two signatures could have been achieved by chance? Or was it obvious that more sinister motives were at play?

Enter the father, Benjamin Pierce. He presented a table with the number of coinciding downstrokes on the left column, from three to twelve. On the right column he assembled the number of cases of actual coincidence for each number (ninety-seven in the number-3 row, 131 in the number-4 row, etc.). Multiplying all the numbers, Professor Pierce informed the court that he had calculated the odds that Sylvia Howland could have produced two signatures in which all thirty downstrokes coincided. The answer was one out of five for each downstroke. But there were thirty downstrokes, so the total answer was one out of five to the thirtieth power, or “one out of 2,666,000,000,000,000,000,000”—clearly impossible.

The estate won.

With the specter of a criminal fraud charge hanging over her head, Hetty Robinson changed her name by getting married and moving to London to lie low for eight years. After a proper interlude, she came back to America, settled in New York, and began her prodigious investment career. “Buy cheap and sell dear!” was her investment philosophy (though exactly how she did this, she never
revealed). She wore a beat-up black petticoat lined with pockets to hold the bonds, stock certificates, and large sums of cash for the day’s trading, earning for herself the sobriquet “The Witch of Wall Street.” A fierce competitor, she once warned another trader, “When I fight there is usually a funeral, and it isn’t mine.”

Hetty Green

She took no prisoners: she once foreclosed on a church. She hated to spend money: when her son hurt his leg in a sledding accident, she put the boy in a charity ward and refused to pay for a doctor; eventually the boy’s leg had to be amputated. During her lifetime she constantly moved from one apartment to another to avoid establishing a residence permanent enough to attract the attention of the New York State tax authorities. Over a thirty-year period, Hetty Green parlayed her $1-million inheritance into $125 million (equivalent to $17 billion today). When she died, the
New York Times
called her the richest woman in America.

Had it not been for Benjamin Pierce, she might have started out with $3 million—and died worth $375 million, making her richer than any other man. The only reason she did not is that she loved money too much.

1877
He was the world’s richest man, worth more than the U.S. Treasury—$104 million.
*
In the delightful phrase of the time, he was “puffed with divine greed.”

He didn’t write his will until he was
eighty-one. When he became ill a year later and his family gathered around for the last rites, he showed the stamina that had made him rich. He battled death for eight more months, exhausting everyone in the process (including two of his physicians, who died). Every day the newspapers carried stories about his various ailments, his net worth, and what the impact of his death would be on the stock market. Hardly a week went by without some newspaper announcing he was dead. “Commodore Vanderbilt dying!” some newsboys yelled one day outside his bedroom window. The next day, when a reporter came to his house, he crawled out of bed and screamed from the top of the grand staircase, “I am not dying!”

His deathbed would have merited a scene in
Macbeth
or
Hamlet.
Lying helpless in the sweltering summer heat, he was besieged by his eight daughters, each seeking a bigger slice of his fortune. “Get out, Ethelinda!” he roared. “Leave me alone, Sophia! Enough of you, Phoebe!” He had already made out his will, he said, and he would not change it. Everyone had been taken care of: his wife, his ten children, and fifty-two grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Except for his young second wife, who had signed a $500,000 prenuptial agreement, no one had the faintest idea how much he or she would get. The only person to learn anything was one of the physicians, Dr. Jared Linsly, to whom the sick man confided, “If I had died in 1835 or 1836 or even 1854, the world would not have known that I had lived, but I think that I have been spared to accomplish a great work that will last and remain, for I have taken care that it is to be secured in such a way that the stock cannot be put on the market after I die….Had I given one daughter $3,000,000 and another daughter $5,000,000 … in six months the stock would have been down to 40.”

Called “Commodore” because he once owned so many ships (this was before he bailed out of shipping at age sixty-nine and went into the railroad business, where he made 80 percent of his money), Cornelius Vanderbilt was a cold, imperious man who demanded total obedience from his employees and wife and children. When his first wife objected to moving from their bucolic farm on Staten Island to a townhouse in New York, he had her put away in an insane asylum for two years until she relented. He gave the same treatment to one of his sons who had run up a string of gambling debts. He paid scant attention to his daughters, and treated them with the same disdain he did his wife. His was a man’s world, where men were supposed to be athletic and virile. Like George.

George was George Washington Vanderbilt, his youngest son, a youth of powerful physique like his father. Except that the son was better: he could bench-press an unbelievable nine hundred pounds. That’s my boy! But George was dead. He
had gone to West Point to become a professional soldier, then contracted malaria during the Civil War. For the Commodore this was a double tragedy: the best of his sons had chosen not to enter the world of business (at least not yet), and the boy had died when it would have been so easy to hire a “substitute” as so many others had done during the Civil War. The Commodore never got over it, and for the rest of his life he paid quacks and charlatans to help him communicate with his son through séances.

With his first two boys the Commodore was much tougher. William, the oldest, was an acquiescent, gentle person, incapable of saying an unkind word about anybody. His thorough decency would irritate his father and provoke him to yell, “Bloody fool! Idiot! Blatherskite!” But as the Commodore grew older, he showed the same mellower attitude toward William that he did toward George: he gave him a chance. When William turned his modest Staten Island farm into a thriving operation, the Commodore was impressed. He invited William to join him at the New York Central, and quickly promoted him to vice president. William was a man whose judgment could be trusted. The only concern was—and it could be a major one—did William have fire in his belly? William’s true love in life was his family and his horses: his idea of a good time was to spend an evening at home with his wife and children and grandchildren, whereas the crusty Commodore preferred to stay out all night playing whist with “the boys.”

The Commodore had a clear view of human nature, which he applied to his sons: “If a boy is good for anything you can stick him down anywhere and he’ll learn his living and lay up something: if he can’t do it he ain’t worth saving, and you can’t save him.” Early on he had warned each of his sons not to expect any of his wealth until the son had demonstrated his capacity to support himself on his own. Certainly the middle son, “Corneel,” could never pass the test. Forever incurring gambling debts and borrowing money on the strength of his father’s name, Corneel caused his father to despair, “I would give $10,000 were his name not Cornelius!” The Commodore refused to pay his son’s debts, but on one occasion he made an exception. Corneel’s biggest creditor was the kindly newspaper editor and 1868 presidential candidate Horace Greeley. When Greeley died in 1872, leaving behind a mountain of bills, the Commodore sent $10,000 checks to each of Greeley’s daughters.

Now, in 1875, at the age of eighty-one, as he sat down to write his will, he had to decide what to do with his money. He had little interest in philanthropy, other than some gifts to please his wife, who wanted to help her church and found a university (now Vanderbilt University). He had his enormous brood of children and grandchildren, but like many self-made men he felt they were taking advantage of him.
He was not interested in leaving them a lot of money. “A million or two is as much as anyone ought to have,” he said.

The one thing that consumed his attention was his railroad empire, threatened every day by the jackals and speculators of Wall Street, not to mention ruthless competitors all ganging up to short the stock at the slightest whiff of weakness. True vigilance was required. “What you have is not worth anything unless you have the power,” he said, “and if you give away the surplus, you give away the control.” He therefore resolved that control of his empire would rest in the hands of one man. For lack of anyone better, that man would have to be William. To be sure, William’s two oldest sons, Cornelius Junior, age thirty-one, and William K., age twenty-four, were fine young men and hard workers, but it was still too early to tell how they would turn out. After making some quick calculations, he called in three witnesses and dictated a simple three-page will. He signed it on January 9, 1875.

He died on January 4, 1877. Four days later the will was read. Leaving out the ninth and last point, which deals with the appointment of executors, the will is constructed in a logical format obviously designed, like a mystery novel, to lead up to a powerful surprise ending. That it certainly did.

Point 1 left the New York townhouse and $500,000, as agreed, to his wife. Point 2 left $250,000 apiece to daughters Phoebe, Emily, Marie Louise, Sophia, and Mary Alicia. Point 3 dealt with trust funds for other children: $400,000 to Ethelinda, $300,000 to Eliza, $500,000 to Catharine, and $200,000 to Corneel. Point 4 gave small annual stipends to his sister and niece, and Point 5 made numerous $5,000 bequests to grandchildren and other relatives. Points 6 and 7 addressed certain procedural details concerning the purchase of bonds and the modest payment of taxes.

What about all the rest of the money? And where was the tenth, still-unnamed, heir, William?

One imagines the deadly silence in the room as Point 8 starts to be read: “All the rest, residue, and remainder … of the property and estate, real and personal, of every description, and wheresoever situated, of which I may be seized or possessed, and to which I may be entitled at the time of my decease, I give, devise, and bequeath unto my son, William H. Vanderbilt, his heirs, executors, administrators and assigns, to his and their use forever.”