The people of the United States were treated to an ironic sight. Here was a man who only eight years before had been shown up in Congress as an arch plunderer; a man who had bought his railroads largely with his looted millions; a man who, if the laws had been drafted and executed justly, would have been condoning his frauds in prison;— this man was contemptuously and openly defying the very people whose interests the railroads were supposed to serve. In this conflict between warring sets of capitalists, as in all similar conflicts, public convenience was made sport of. Hudson River trains going north no longer crossed the Hudson River to enter Albany; they stopped half a mile east of the bridge leading into that city. This made it impossible to transfer freight. There in the country the trains were arbitrarily stopped for the night; locomotive fires were banked and the passengers were left to shift into Albany the best they could, whether they walked or contrived to hire vehicles. All were turned out of the train—men, women and children—no exceptions were made for sex or infirmity.
The Legislature went through a pretense of investigating what public opinion regarded as a particularly atrocious outrage. Vanderbilt covered this committee with undisguised scorn; it provoked his wrath to be quizzed by a committee of a body many of whose members had accepted his bribes. When he was asked why he had so high-handedly refused to run his trains across the river, the old fox smiled grimly, and to their utter surprise, showed them an old law (which had hitherto remained a dead letter) prohibiting the New York Hudson Railroad from running trains over the Hudson River. This law had been enacted in response to the demand of the New York Central, which wanted no competitor west of Albany. When the committee recovered its breath, its chairman timidly inquired of Vanderbilt why he did not run trains to the river.
"I was not there, gentlemen," said Vanderbilt.
"But what did you do when you heard of it?"
"I did not do anything."
"Why not? Where were you?"
"I was at home, gentlemen," replied Vanderbilt with serene impudence, "playing a rubber of whist, and I never allow anything to interfere with me when I am playing that game. It requires, as you know, undivided attention."
As Vanderbilt had foreseen, the stock of the New York Central went down abruptly; at its lowest point he bought in large quantities. His opponents, Edward Cunard, John Jacob Astor, John Steward and other owners of the New York Central thus saw the directorship pass from their hands. The dispossession they had worked to the Pruyns, the Martins, the Pages and others was now being visited upon them. They found in this old man of seventy-three too cunning and crafty a man to defeat. Rather than lose all, they preferred to choose him as their captain; his was the sort of ability which they could not overcome and to which they must attach themselves. On November 12, 1867, they surrendered wholly and unreservedly. Vanderbilt now installed his own subservient board of directors, and proceeded to put through a fresh program of plunder beside which all his previous schemes were comparatively insignificant.