by Jean Strouse
Joseph, who rarely mentioned his own health in the hundreds of pages of his diary, now complained of back pains and chronic dyspepsia. “Without I get relief soon, this frail earthly tenement of mine will soon wear out,” he wrote shortly before his sixty-seventh birthday. “God grant that … I may find a dwelling not made with hands, eternal in the Heavens, there to go no more out forever.” After Christmas, Pierpont was sent away to board at the Pavilion Family School on the outskirts of Hartford. Joseph in early April reported himself “Quite unwell I feel my race is almost run.… making my will.” He invited his grandchildren to tea for Pierpont’s tenth birthday on April 17, and at the end of June finished hoeing potatoes and shipping his hay to market. He died on July 23 at home, surrounded by his family.
Joseph left an estate worth roughly $1 million—about $90,000 in real estate, the rest in stocks of banks, canal companies, steamship lines, railroads, bridges, and the Aetna. When Pierpont began to keep a diary three years later, he marked significant events (“Father’s birthday,” “my birthday”) on a printed list of days in the front. Next to July 23, he wrote, “Grandfather died 1847.”
* The equivalent of that sum in the 1990s would be roughly $225,000. Joseph had recently bought 36 acres of land for $370, and a house on 18 acres for $750; he paid his farmhands $6 to $12 a month.
† Adams, Clay, and Jackson were all Democratic Republicans in 1824. Four years later, Jackson ran as a Democrat, while Clay and Adams called themselves National Republicans. In the 1830s the National Republicans became Whigs in opposition to what they saw as Jackson’s virtually monarchical power.
‡ In the 1840s, other wealthy families seeking to escape the crush of urban commerce would follow Joseph’s lead, making Lord’s Hill—also called Asylum Hill—the city’s premier residential site. Asylum Street, laid out as the Litchfield Turnpike in 1800, took its name from the Connecticut Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons, built in 1821 on the north side of the road; its first principal was Thomas Gallaudet.
Chapter 3
A MORAL EDUCATION
Between the ages of seven and twenty, Pierpont changed schools nine times. He boarded at Hartford’s Pavilion Family School, his third, for nearly two years. Early in 1848 he recited in class a poem called “Warren’s Address to the American Soldiers,” which hundreds of American schoolboys had delivered to the sound of cheers and stomping feet. It began,
Stand! the ground’s your own, my braves!
Will ye give it up to slaves?
and had been written for the laying of the cornerstone at the Bunker Hill Monument in 1825—by John Pierpont.
That night, orator reported the event to author in a playful tone he used with no other adult. His grandfather had just sent him a gold pen—“the very [thing] I was wanting this long time”—but “I am sorry to say I shall not like Santa Claus any more because he did not do as you wanted him to do about getting it to me on New Years day … therefore if I was in your place I would not trust Santa Claus any more to bring presents.”
Looking forward to visiting the Reverend Pierpont in upstate New York for his spring vacation, the boy wrote again in March: “I am almost ready to think that April will never come I think so much of going to Troy.” He teasingly refused to disclose what day he would arrive, since he wanted it to be a surprise—“but perhaps Mother will write you what week.” And he had an assignment for his famous literary progenitor. He needed an essay to recite for an exam, “and I don’t know any good ones so I would be very much obliged to you if you can to write me a piece not a very long one in prose.” After concluding with news of his family and his own health (not good), he added a postscript: “Please answere [sic] this letter as soon as possible and send that piece.”
If he did receive an original essay from his grandfather’s pen, no record of it has survived. He made the trip to Troy on April 11. Whenever he left home, his parents reached across the distance with anxious, admonitory notes. Junius warned his father-in-law: “Pierpont goes tomorrow to make you a short visit. I think he needs some restraining, & hope you will [have him]* devote a certain part of each day to reading & study. I hope he will be a good boy & [not] give his grand mother nor yourself any trouble.” A week later, writing on Pierpont’s eleventh birthday, which he did not mention, Junius repeated those directives to his son and scolded: “I noticed some words in your last letter not correctly spelt which I hope will not occur in the next.”
Though the boy was hoping to spend his entire month’s vacation in Troy, his parents summoned him home after two weeks. Juliet thought he should not stay so long as to make his grandparents “twice glad” at his departure. Besides, Junius had signed him up for an entrance exam at the Hartford Public High School.
Junius was intensely invested in Pierpont’s moral and practical education. Holding adamant views about the proper way to raise a son, he chided the Reverend Pierpont for failing to guide Juliet’s brothers in the “right path,” and moralized after the death of the alcoholic William, “It only shows the importance of bringing up children in such a way that they may either prove a blessing or a curse.”
Like most mid-nineteenth-century American Protestants, Junius saw male childhood not as a time for exploration and play but as training ground for the serious business of adult life. Some of the moral lessons he directed at his son addressed specific behavior, but most of them prescribed the Yankee virtues of industry, prudence, restraint, veracity, thrift—qualities summed up in the term character. When Pierpont started yet another school at thirteen, Junius warned him to be “very careful with what boys you associate not to get intimate with any but such as are of the right stamp & whose influence over you will be good. You must bear in mind that now is the time for you to form your character & as it is formed now so it will be likely to remain. You cannot have this too strongly impressed upon you.”
Junius kept disrupting his son’s life with moves to new schools and hectoring him with unsolicited advice, yet much of his surveillance had a positive cast. He took Pierpont on stockholders’ excursions, assigned him tasks at Howe, Mather, taught him about history, great men, commerce, and books. One night in Hartford the two spent hours going over an arithmetic problem until they proved that the boy’s answer, which did not agree with the text, was correct.
There were fewer congenial notes in Pierpont’s relations with his mother. A decade into her marriage, Juliet Morgan had lapsed into cranky self-absorption. Her letters to her son alternated cautionary platitudes with complaints about her own troubles, and offered far more criticism than motherly comfort. When he left for school one winter, at age thirteen, she wrote: “I think you will continue to be [happy and well] if you are true to yourself, and do what you can for the good of others, keep to the right path. Be open—correct & never swerve from the truth on any consideration.” He had been gone only a week, and was homesick: “Don’t write too often to multiply postage,” Juliet scolded—“if you write home once a week I think it will answer.” She sent love from the family, then issued another long-distance reprimand: “10½ o’clock is rather too late a bed hour for you.”
As the term went on, she forgot to send things he requested, reproached him for not liking what she did send, and corrected his spelling. Informing him that some pigeons he had been keeping at home had been stolen, she reflected that it would be a loss to Junius and a disappointment to the neighbor taking care of them, but not that it might be painful to her son.
The adult Morgans augmented their lessons with books. When Pierpont was seven, Junius gave him a story called Marco Paul’s Adventures and Travels in the Pursuit of Knowledge: On the Erie Canal. The lessons in this well-thumbed volume have to do with commerce, credit, and profit as the just reward of special intelligence. One day as Marco and his cousin Forester watch trains go by, Marco says he would rather collect fares than drive the locomotive. Forester points out that the man in charge of the locomotive gets better pay. Why? Marco asks. “Bec
ause,” Forester explains, “it requires patience and skill and steadiness of mind. Those employments which require high mental qualifications are always better paid than others. There is great responsibility attached to them usually.”
On the subject of great responsibility, Juliet presented her son with a biography of George Washington by Jared Sparks for Christmas in 1845. Sparks, a Unitarian clergyman educated at Harvard with John Pierpont, looked at America’s first President through the lens of his own time and saw a model of hard work, self-discipline, and common sense.† Pierpont checked off chapters in the table of contents as he read them.
A book called Young Men Admonished, on the dangers of drinking, gambling, extravagance, and straying from the truth, came from Junius’s sister, Lucy Goodwin. Character counts “more than any other possession” as security against dishonesty, declared the author: “It is worth more than any stock in Wall-street.” Pierpont said much the same thing to the Pujo Committee sixty years later.
A more entertaining form of instruction came from John Pierpont, who gave his grandson for Christmas in 1847 The Youth’s Historical Gift … containing familiar descriptions of civil, military, and naval events by the Old English chroniclers, Froissart, Monstrellet, and others, and also the history of Joan of Arc and her times. The cover featured a charging mounted knight stamped in gold.
Pierpont transferred to the Hartford Public High School in the fall of 1848. The steady stream of parental stricture had not brought him into line. A Hartford classmate later recalled him as “full of animal life and spirits … and not renowned as a scholar”—he “never got a lesson if [he] could help it.” Told of that recollection in old age, Morgan agreed, “Never,” with a look of “grim humor in his face.”
Humor got him thrown out of class one day, but there was nothing funny about his response. He sent a formidable letter of protest to the teacher, indicating on the envelope that it came from “a persecuted pupil,” and was “very important in my mind.”
“Miss Stevens,” he began: “I should like to enquire of you the reasons why you as a teacher and of course over me only a scholar should treat me in such an inhumane manner as to send [me] out of the class for laughing a little too loud which I can assure you I am perfectly unable to control and which no punishment will cure me of.” She could not deny, he went on (undermining his point with a double negative), “that I have not tried to behave better in class lately. If I wanted I could sit still (without saying a word) in a corner.” However, if the other students followed suit, “would not you think that all the class were very stupid indeed and you would have to do all the talking[?]” Who would look stupid then?
Sounding more like an exasperated parent than a mischievous twelve-year-old, he warned that if Miss Stevens did not change her ways he would go to another class or skip it altogether: “I do not say this hastily in anger but you cannot say but what I have stood it a great while and I think that upon reflection you cannot say but what I have been treated unjustly.… Going into [a different class] is a long contemplated step. J. Pierpont Morgan.”
J. Pierpont Morgan’s partner in adolescent crime was his cousin James Junius Goodwin, two years ahead of him at the high school. Jim’s father was president of the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company and also, like Pierpont’s father, a neo-Federalist, an Episcopalian, and a Whig. The boys spent most of their free time contriving to see the girls at a nearby school called Miss Draper’s Seminary. At first they watched from a distance as “the Drapers” took a carefully chaperoned group walk every afternoon. Then one day Jim pretended he had left his lessons in a house along the route. Cutting through the column of girls, he managed to introduce himself to several of them. Every afternoon after that the boys intercepted the promenade with flowers, candy, and notes. Once in a while a benevolent teacher allowed them to walk a little way beside the line. When the cousins encountered sterner guards, they split up, one proceeding down the right side of the procession and the other the left, to elude simultaneous capture—then raced around the block or cut through a yard to make a second pass, trying not to appear out of breath.
Pierpont occasionally climbed a tree next to what he called Drapers Convent, and from those “lofty summits” managed to “converse with the fair damsels in the third story.” Reflecting to Jim on these capers a few years later, he found it surprising that the girls still liked them “after all the lectures &c &c we caused them to receive.”
On the flyleaf of his Hartford High geometry text he wrote to a friend: “I promised Miss Dina I would go home with her to-day.” He had something special to tell her—“I will say it tomorrow in recess or before or after school.” In the back of the book, this nascent connoisseur of feminine attire wrote, “I can’t say that I do like that dress much. It is rather old womanish, I think. How do you like Miss P’s dress?” These engaging matters took up more of his attention than the text: “Tell Miss Peabody that Gertrude has gone and ask her if we cannot wait and say the geometry tomorrow for I don’t know mine.”
Some notes he wrote backward, to be read only with the help of a mirror. On the flyleaf of his Virgil text he asked a friend in reverse script to “write as soon as possible telling about the first girl who you have seen naked etc.” and then “Mary Doyle – ditto – I should like to have seen.” It cannot have been easy in Hartford in the 1850s to see girls naked. Perhaps the boys caught glimpses of servants with Irish names like Mary Doyle through keyholes at home—or maybe they commandeered the “lofty summits” of the Draper trees at night to do a little spying.
In the spring of 1850, Junius went to England for three months. Now a senior partner in his firm, which changed its name to Mather, Morgan & Co., he had joined the ranks of New England’s mercantile elite. He was probably the first Morgan to cross the Atlantic since Miles sailed the other way in 1636, and he sent Pierpont detailed accounts of his trip. He went first to the Lake District, where he saw the residence of “the celebrated Rev. Dr. Arnold” and Harriet Martineau’s cottage at Ambleside. Wordsworth had just died. Visiting the poet’s fresh grave at Grasmere, Junius told his son: “If you will look in the works of Wordsworth & Southey, you will see frequent mention of the places I have described.”
Proceeding to London, this Connecticut Yankee was powerfully moved by England’s history, institutions, and traditions. He saw the chair in which generations of monarchs had sat for coronation, and attended a debate on the Corn Laws in the House of Lords—between Earl Grey (for) and Lord Stanley (opposed): “as they are both men of whom I had heard a great deal, I was much interested in seeing & hearing them,” he told Pierpont. By mail he guided the boy through the City, London’s financial district, describing Baring Brothers, the Bank of England, and the Royal Stock Exchange (much like “the Exchange which you saw in New York, but … in some respects much handsomer”). The American minister in London, Abbott Lawrence, had a “fine house near the Duke of Wellington & lives in considerable style.” The English generally dined at “6½ o’clock, rather later than we dine in Conn.”
At home Junius had a picture of Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington. In London he went to see Apsley House, the residence of the Duke—“who you remember conquered Napoleon at Waterloo,” he reminded his son—and the carriage taken from Napoleon in defeat. In May he spotted the Tory “Iron Duke” himself near the House of Commons, “the man I wanted to see more than any other in England—he was on horseback & stopped to speak to persons just opposite where I stood so that I had a good opportunity of seeing him, the likeness we have is very good.”
Junius addressed Pierpont as the lieutenant in command while the captain was away: “I expect much from you as you are now old enough to take charge of affairs somewhat yourself.” By return mail, the boy kept his father up to date on business, the family strawberry garden, and local politics.
Just as Joseph had moved with America’s urbanizing markets from Springfield to Hartford in 1817, Junius by 1850 was ready for a larger venue than Hartfo
rd. In London that spring he met international bankers and leading figures in world trade. Four months after returning home, he dissolved Mather, Morgan and went into business in Boston with the owner of an import wholesale house that had sold $2 million worth of dry goods in 1849. J. M. Beebe, Morgan & Co. opened for business on January 1, 1851.
Junius’s family moved in with his mother on Asylum Street while he made arrangements for them in Boston. Pierpont stayed home from school much of that term with earaches and boils on his face, ears, and neck. In February 1851 he transferred to the Episcopal Academy at Cheshire, which he had attended briefly before Joseph died. This time he boarded with the principal, the Reverend Seth Paddock. Though plagued by sore throats, headaches, and ulcerated chancres on his lip, he played football and chess, studied Latin and Greek, and in the spring spent his free time fishing, frogging, riding, sailing rafts, hunting wildflowers, and planting a garden.
For all his “animal spirits” and disinclination to study, he had at fourteen some solemn interests. He attended temperance lectures at Cheshire, and kept track of the proceedings at Episcopal conventions the way boys a hundred years later would follow baseball—even collecting autographs of the bishops. He also collected presidential autographs, scoring a coup with a letter from Millard Fillmore, the free-soil Whig who succeeded to the White House in 1850 when Zachary Taylor died. Home from school for spring vacation in 1851, he attended Whig meetings at City Hall, and spent the state’s election day at the offices of The Hartford Courant, getting news the minute it came in.