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Cornelius Vanderbilt's Impact On The Industrialization Of America

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In the 1860’s America started building the first continental railroad. It provided a cheap and efficient way to transport products from one side of the country to the other. One man in particular had a great impact on the industrialization of America, Cornelius Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt had a poor upbringing, but at the age of 16 he bought a ferry, over the next 40 years he built the largest shipping empire in the world. Vanderbilt sold all of his ships and invested everything in railroads. He owned 40% of all the railroads in America, but he wanted them all. So he closed down the Albany bridge creating a blockade prohibiting the rest of railroad from entering the busiest port, New York City. Other railroads started going bankrupt, so the presidents …show more content…

Vanderbilt realized he had been tricked and he never would let someone do that to him again. Vanderbilt saw the demand for kerosene skyrocket and he knew that the makers of the kerosine would need a new way to ship their oil. Vanderbilt reaches out to Rockerfeller a young oil businessman. The two men make a deal, Rockefeller will give 60 train carts full of kerosine a day to fill Vanderbilts trains. But Rockerfeller can produce that much kerosine a day, he needed to find a way to get Vanderbilt the kerosine. The demand for kerosene began to drop, because people thought it was dangerous. Rockefeller created the company Standard Oil and got investors to buy stocks. The demand for kerosene started to rise again and Rockerfeller can now meet his promise. Except, he now has more kerosene than Vanderbilt can ship. Thomas A. Scott wanted to take Vanderbilt over, so he made a deal with Rockefeller. Rockefeller created a monopoly with the refinery businesses and Scott and Vanderbilt decided to pull out of business with Rockefeller to make him pay going rates. Instead of caving in Rockefeller builds pipelines to transport the oil, and he no longer needs

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Cornelius Vanderbilt: Captain of Industry When America began its journey into industry, the country immediately flourished. Inundated with immigrants, factories were easily staffed; jobs were given out to any individual who wanted one. However, some of these large industrial companies flourished more than others. Cornelius Vanderbilt, for example, became one of the richest men in the country. Many Americans believe that business owners like Vanderbilt should be given the name “Robber Barons” because of their great accomplishments; however, in contrast, others like to deem them as America’s “Captains of Industry”.

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America has been changed due to the accomplishments of many entrepreneurs, such as Cornelius Vanderbilt. Cornelius Vanderbilt started as the owner of one steamboat, and slowly built his one boat into a fleet of many boats. As the International Railroad was nearing completion Vanderbilt did the unthinkable he sold his entire company of boats and bought a rail line. Vanderbilt then began to slowly buy out other lines, until he eventually owned most of the lines in the east. Vanderbilt's net worth was eventually an astonishing 215 billion dollars in today's money.

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The death of President Lincoln sparked a new era in the United States. It set forth new boundaries for what would take place in the American frontier. At age 16, Cornelius Vanderbilt bought his first ferry boat with a loan of $100. With his shipping industry well under way, he was given the nickname of “The Commodore”. He was very competitive and earned the reputation of being a “cut-throat” business man.

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Cornelius Vanderbilt was called Commodore for becoming synonymous with the shipping. He was going to provide infrastructure for the government. Later on, Vanderbilt’s shipping became one of the biggest empires in the world. When beginning the transcontinental the Commodore realized that it was a completion to transform America. The railroads were the only way the transportation was low cost and efficient from one side of America to the other.

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In the stage following the Civil War, Industrialization had many leaders. These leaders helped boom the growth of the economy and the industry in the United States. As historians have looked closer at the people who helped America become one of the leading industrial powers of the world, they’ve come to question the honesty of how these leaders really obtained their fortunes. The industrial and business leaders of the 1865-1900, also known as “Robber Barons, used various methods in order to build up their own wealth and power. These would use mechanisms that would go against the public population more often than not and those that would go near extremes.

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With Standard Oil being the leading oil company, this limits other oil companies to sales because Standard Oil had the rights to many companies to produce and sell oil leaving very few businesses that other oil companies could sell to. This puts the little companies into a decrease in sales while Standard Oil makes a huge increase in sales. Small businesses worry about becoming bankrupt while Rockefeller becomes wealthy. Rockefeller was the reason why there were limits to big businesses because he was in control with oil companies not allowing others to succeed as

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Overall, I thought that the term Robber Barron to describe Cornelius Vanderbilt was justified. For example, in the article Robber Barons or Captains of Industry, we learned that Vanderbilt was “one who either destroyed his enemies or extracted a ransom in return for leaving a market”. Basically, he was so competitive that he ran other business out of the market in order gain more wealth. Even though he helped the economy with building steamships and providing transportation of goods though the railroad systems he still was looked at in a negative way because of how competitive and ruthless he was. I thought that Andrew Carnegie was more like a captain of industry because he was more focused on bettering society as a whole rather than just

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John D. Rockefeller Sr: How did John D. Rockefeller impact the Industrial Revolution John Davison Rockefeller Sr. once stated “If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success” (John D. Rockefeller Quotes). John D. Rockefeller was the founder of Standard Oil in which then became one of the wealthiest men in the world. Rockefellers ongoing funding as a philanthropist and trust in oil is how the man's name still lives on to this day (The Rockefeller Archive Center). For thousands of years oil has been a main resource for human consumption, and remains the same.

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There was no stopping the forward progress of the railroads in the 1800s. Trains, even before the mid-century, went twenty miles per hour; that was twice as fast as the stagecoach and four times as fast as the canal boat. To the entrepreneur that meant one thing: profit. These profit-minded Americans wasted no time in laying down track in America. The Transcontinental Railroad was one of these important railroads contributing to trade and economy; it was connected by the Central and Union Pacific Railroads.

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Several industrialists had a major impact on the Gilded Age. These industrialists were Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Thomas Edison, and Alexander Gram Bell. Andrew Carnegie made steel from iron which helped to build railroads and buildings. He also developed a process that sped up the production of steel by 96 times. This process is known as the Bessemer Process.

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Industrialist had a huge impact on the gilded age. The gilded age was a rapid expansion of industrialism and a massive jump in the population of immigrants in america. The industrialist during the gilded age such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt had a big impact because of their businesses. Vanderbilt was the first of the three to be a leader of industry. Vanderbilt made millions using the railroad system and built an empire with them.

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Alexander Hamilton’s innovative vision has remained relevant throughout the development of the United States’ financial system. The First Bank of the United States, championed by Hamilton, serves as the first model for the American financial system and banking structure. Remnants of Hamilton’s framework endure to this day. After nearly eight decades without a central bank, Congress revived Hamilton’s “notion of a centralized, quasi-governmental bank” in 1914, when the Federal Reserve System was created (Davies). Even so, Hamilton’s vision never fully disappeared.

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In a time after the Civil War, when a transcontinental railroad was created connecting the East and West, people began to move and settle across the country, creating new urban cities and manufacturing hubs. It was because of the railroad that the Second Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age took place which rapidly increased the manufacturing of products through the new machines in factories and the spread of ideas by the telegraph and railroad. It was in this context that many farmers, as well, began to move West and experience a loss in the prices of their crops. It is also in this context that many workers were forced to work long, laborious hours with little pay. Farmers responded to industrialization in the Gilded Age by forming organizations such as the Granger movement and the Farmers Alliance as well as creating the Populist Party.

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With the advent of the railroad, many of these issues disappeared. Railroads had a major impact on advancing the American economy, transforming America into a modern society, and improving an antiquated transportation system. The building of railroads created rapid economic growth in America. Railroad companies employed more than one million workers to build and maintain railroads. At the same time, coal, timber, and steel industries employed thousands of workers to provide the supplies necessary to build railroads (Chapter 12 Industrialization).

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Was Cornelius Vanderbilt a Robber Baron or Captain of Industry? A cruel businessman or an industrious leader? Henry J. Raymond believed that Vanderbilt was “a monopolist that crushed other competitors”(T.J Stiles). While he is also deemed one of America’s leading businessmen, and is also credited for helping shape the United States. His fortunes were made unfairly in some cases but his million dollar contribution to the Navy was very generous.

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