In December 1854, when Kamehameha III died suddenly, his nephew, Alexander Liholiho, succeeded as Kamehameha IV.* While he resisted American encroachment, he fell in love with another member of the Young family, a granddaughter of the Conqueror’s gunner, Emma Rooke, regarded as startlingly beautiful by both Europeans and Hawaiians. Once they had married, the couple spent much time with the king’s good-looking American secretary, Henry A. Neilson. After the queen gave birth to a son in 1858, the king started to drink and become jealous of the American: in September 1859, he shot Neilson in the chest. Neilson, grievously wounded, survived for two years during which the king tried to redeem himself by caring for him. Shortly afterwards, the couple lost their son, aged four. They were poleaxed; Emma assumed the name Flight of the Heavenly Chief.
As America turned west, a pugnacious but visionary entrepreneur, Cornelius Vanderbilt, who already operated steam-powered ferries in New York, switched to steamships, which became the fastest way to reach California: passengers would cross the Panamanian isthmus by boat and then rail, before re-embarking on his steamships to reach San Francisco. Hefty and menacing, Vanderbilt, descended from the pirate’s son Janszoom of Salee, had started working on his father’s boats, owning his first at sixteen. A superb predictor of the market and exploiter of new technologies, autocratic and harsh, dubbing himself the Commodore, he punched his enemies, bullied his family, betrayed his friends, bribed judges and politicians, manipulated the stock market and ruined his rivals: ‘I for one will never go to a court of law when I have the power in my own hands to see myself right.’ Intense and vigilant, he existed in a world of vigorous competition: ‘I’m not afraid of my enemies, but by God, you must look out when you get among your friends.’ The first American railways were built in 1827; by 1840, there were 2,700 miles of track; by 1860, there were 30,000, built, floated and controlled by aggressive entrepreneurs led by Vanderbilt, who soon joined the octogenarian Astor as the richest men in America.
In New York, the Commodore and the brash railway barons were forgiven for their wealth and invited into the refined quasi-British world of the older families in return for philanthropic donations to institutions still controlled by American aristocrats. The older families were not afraid of commerce; they were just not as good at it. The Roosevelts, descended from the first Dutch settlers, had made money in linseed oil and Manhattan property, but they also entered public life, serving as aldermen and US congressmen; they built mansions upstate and tended to marry within a genteel circle. That changed with Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, born in the eighteenth century and the last Dutch-speaking member of the family, descended from Schuylers and Van Schaacks. CVS, short, red-haired, solemn and energetic, had demonstrated his spirits as a boy one Sunday by jumping on the back of a male pig, one of those that still wandered Manhattan streets at the start of the century, and riding it until it bucked him off. Aiming to become ‘a man of fortune’, he manufactured plate glass, essential for the building boom to house new immigrants, then invested in property, making over $3 million.
As CVS aged, he bought his five children houses around his mansion on East 20th Street and Broadway: one son became a congressman while the youngest, Theodore, was less interested in glass. Described by his namesake son as ‘a handsome, good-natured lion’ and ‘best man I ever knew’, Theodore funded charities and founded the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When he was nineteen, he travelled through the south where the northern Knickerbocker heir met Martha ‘Mittie’ Bulloch, a Georgian planter’s daughter, brought up at Bulloch Hall, a pillared mansion. Like all daughters of planters, she had grown up sharing her room with an enslaved companion, known as her ‘shadow’ – Lavinia, nicknamed Toy. The teenagers came from different worlds that were about to collide.
As America gained an empire, the monarchies of Europe were shaken by revolution. Twenty days after Guadalupe Hidalgo, on 22 February 1848, Parisian crowds, crying ‘
