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Summary
Thomas Gibbons was a Savannah lawyer turned New York steamboat tycoon. With his son, William Gibbons , and his captain, Cornelius Vanderbilt, he took on New York ferry monopolies and won a Supreme Court decision regulating interstate commerce. Gibbons died in 1826.
Biography
It was two years after George Washington's inauguration as the first president of the United States. His ceremonial tour of the South was a smashing success. Everywhere his presence symbolized the personal popularity of the president and the hope and unity of the thirteen states under its new constitution. On May 12, 1791, when he came to Savannah, he was rowed from Pureysburg by nine American captains dressed in light blue silk jackets, black satin breeches, while silk stockings and round hats with black ribbons having the words in gold letters - "Long Live the President."
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Thomas Gibbons had been elected alderman on April 14th, and the next chosen mayor. In this year 1791 he was one of the most prominent of Savannah's citizens, prominent in several senses, since one source indicates that he weighed something like three hundred pounds. Lawyer, plantation owner, pillar of the local Presbyterian church, Gibbons was still only 33 when he ended his formal address to the president:
<blockquote>May "May it please the Great Ruler of Events to grant you long residence on earth...that the advantage of the present government may be permanently established.</blockquote>"
If Gibbons' words on this occasion brought cheers and a presidential handclasp, there are ironies in the situation. His career had its paradoxes and mysteries, then and later. And it is strange that there is still no biography of this larger-than-life, anti-Jeffersonian Federalist who became one of the wealthiest men in American, whose stubborn insistence on his rights had a permanent effect on life in these United States, and without whose fortune and influence we would not be celebrating as historically significant, Mead Hall, the building erected by the only one of his children who did not deeply disappoint him, his son William.
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For Jackson's words before Congress, Gibbons challenged him. The two men met. Three shots were exchanged. None hit, whatever this says about Jackson's marksmanship or intention when Gibbons' bulk is remembered, and perhaps it is enough conclusion to the episode to set down the testimony of Thomas Spalding, who, years later, recalled his law study under Gibbons in the 1790s:
<blockquote>After "After my own father, he was the best friend I ever knew. He was a great lawyer...The result from his professional labors were three thousand pounds sterling a year. This I knew, as I was his collector and Mrs. Gibbons his treasurer.
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Gibbons was not a very fluent speaker. He was very quick in discovering the weak point of his opponent, and his memory was always ready to give the law that bore upon it...sometimes he indulged in witticism, which increased as he grew older. Mr. Gibbons in his nature was very open, frank, manly, and very determined. This gave him a few warm friends and many bitter enemies.
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And finally Spalding describes a conversation with James Jackson, after Jackson had gone on to become Governor of Georgia. Jackson, he says, called "Mr. Gibbons, as a whole...the greatest lawyer in Georgia."
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He purchased property in New Jersey in and near Elizabeth-town Elizabeth-town (now Elizabeth) and Perth Amboy. He formed an alliance with Aaron Ogden and with Jonathan Dayton, whose daughter Molly married Gibbons' oldest son in an ill-fated match apparently ruined in a few years by Thomas Heyward's drinking and gambling away the plantation his father had given them as a wedding present. Gibbons invested in steamboats, hotels, stock farms, stage coach lines, and turnpikes, including the Morris Union Turnpike through Bottle Hill (now Madison). From his Elizabeth-town headquarters, he worked out his investments carefully and at the same time kept in close touch with developments in Georgia, traveling back and forth so long as he was physically able and, thereafter, using his son William, who withdrew from Princeton for these purposes, as his agent and right arm.
In the early years in Elizabeth, his establishment of bachelor quarters involved him in a paternity suit. A little later his son-in-law earned his everlasting enmity (including one of the most vindictively exclusive wills in history) by remonstrating with him about the morality of his conduct and bringing Ann's mother into the picture. The terms of Gibbons' will, by which Gibbons ensured that no child of John Trumbull's would ever inherit one scrap of property from their grandfather, testify to that enmity, but also to the success of Thomas' business ventures. The will also explains why, when Aaron Ogden attempted to intervene on behalf of Trumbull and Ann, Thomas Gibbons turned against Ogden and began the comic opera affair that had him nailing a challenge to a duel on Ogden's door. Ogden's response was a suit for trespass which brought a court judgment against Gibbons that cost him a few thousand dollars. But, ultimately, it brought Ogden, war hero and New Jersey Governor though he was, to prison for indebtedness. The will only partially explains, however, the persistence with which Gibbons pursued the Supreme Court case that immortalizes both their names, Gibbons vs. Ogden."<blockquote>
In the name of God, amen. This is the last will and testament of me, Thomas Gibbons, at present of the city of New York, but late of Elizabethtown in the state of New Jersey,
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First I recommend my soul to the mercy of my God, through the intercession of my blessed Redeemer.
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Second. I submit my body to the grave, to be sealed up in expectation of a happy resurrection.
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Wiki Markup
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\]To my son William Gibbons, of Savannah, I give all the rest and residue of my estates...my plantation Rosedew in Chatham County, and Tusculum in Scriben County, with all my negro slaves in the states of Georgia and South Carolina...all my lots of ground in the city of Savannah...And in New Jersey, my Rose-hill farm, my Wheat-patch farm, a house and lot on the turnpike road, my two farms, Rising Sun and Howard's Farm, and the three lots in New Brunswick...at present in the occupation of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and in Elizabethtown, the Union hotel, with all the houses, lots and premises thereto belonging...I also give, devise and bequeath to my said son William Gibbons my swamp plantation in South Carolina, my plantation in Chatham County called Long Payment, and the lot it Morris County called the Mountain Lot*...also all my bank stock in New York, New Jersey, and Georgia, and all money in any bank in either of the states, and also all my steamboats and sailboats and all money due to me, and all my plate, household furniture, and stock of liquors, in Georgia or elsewhere.
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*Schooley's Mountain
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All this he gave to his son William, provided no bit of it ever reached Trumbull or any of his descendants. D.B. Ogden's assessment is understandable: "I considered Thomas Gibbons a man of very strong mind, of very strong passions, of very strong prejudices, and very strong will." But let us give Gibbons' steamboat captain the last word. Cornelius Vanderbilt put it: "I think he was one of the strongest minded men I ever was acquainted with; I never knew any man that had any control over him...I do not know that William Gibbons ever started a project which his father did not originate. I never saw any failure in his mind. I did business with him (in April, 1826, before he died in May); I thought him as capable of business then as he ever was."
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Courtesy of the Drew University Archives</html>