by Jean Strouse
Taking his father’s advice about association with the “right” sorts of people, he joined “the tip top young men of Vevey” in organizing a series of private balls for “very choice and select” company. “It costs me about $1.75 a night,” he told Jim, “but that is dog cheap when you can laugh, talk and dance with such a beautiful girl as Miss Hoffman as much as you choose.”
Pierpont’s acne did not spoil his social life, but it did make him self-conscious. Having a series of photographs taken early that winter, he notified Hartford (mangling his grammar): “Grandmother will be rather surprised … to hear that anyone with such an eruption on my face should have had their portrait taken.” To his delight the pictures showed “no defects of the kind.” Instead, they show an attractive young man with light brown hair slicked across his forehead and flashy sartorial taste: in a huge bow tie, dotted waistcoat, and double-breasted jacket with wide lapels, he looks warily amused, as if not sure this self-display will turn out well. He stopped in Paris later that spring “to see if anything can be done for my face.” Apparently, nothing could.
During his time at Vevey, Pierpont watched Britain, France, and Austria defend Turkey against Russia in the Crimean War with a distinctly American eye. A jingoist two decades before the term was coined, he thought European imperialism should confine itself to the eastern side of the Atlantic and leave America’s nascent expansionism alone. When Sebastopol fell to the Western allies in October 1855, he told Jim: “The whole western part of Europe is in one blaze of triumph & joy occasioned by the victories of the allied armies in the east.” He did not join the cheering. “To tell the truth I am rather sorry.” He feared that England and France, finding they could handle powerful Russia, would “stick their fingers in our affairs at home as respects Cuba or the Sandwich Islands [Hawaii] … I have also the idea that if they attempt it John Bull & Johnnie Crapeau combined will find their match.”
Junius decided early in 1856 that his son had completed half of his scholarly assignment: he was fluent in French. Next, he would go to the university at Göttingen to “starch up” his German.
For all Pierpont’s early dislike of the Swiss school, he was sorry to leave his friends, especially the Hoffmans, who had “for eighteen months through sickness and through health … done all for me that any but a parent could do,” he confessed to Jim. Distancing himself from a painfully familiar subject with conventional wisdom, he went on: “When one leaves home or relations, as I have so often been obliged to do, it is with the satisfaction of knowing that it is only for a season, that not many months will elapse before we shall again be able to take our accustomed seat at the table and our old places among our friends, and it robs parting of its deepest sting.” He had no such consolation now. “When it comes to taking leave of friends and true friends at that, whom in all probability we shall never meet again, then it is hard too hard to part.” He apologized to his cousin for his melancholy mood: “Jim you will hardly thank me for writing to you thus sadly, but I feel to tell the truth rather sad, and if you dont want to read it just skip it over.”
At the end of April 1856, he and Frank Payson arrived at Göttingen, a small university town south of Hanover “situated upon a dead plain about an hundred miles from the Rhine,” he told Jim, with “bookstores and libraries in every street.” (Frank’s twin, Charles, disappeared from Pierpont’s letters after the first few weeks at Vevey.) A railroad under construction would soon disrupt the provincial peace, predicted the student of modern transport, but for the moment “silence reigns supreme.” The university—“the greatest and finest in Germany”—had special strengths in chemistry and math, as well as some of the leading professors in Europe, including Friedrich Wöhler, “considered with [Justus Von] Liebig the greatest living Chemist.”
The German students at the university divided into scholars and dilettantes. Pierpont charted a path between the two: he took advanced trigonometry, chemistry with Professor Wöhler, and daily German lessons—and spent his free time at bowling alleys, billiard halls, garden concerts, beer fests, operas, fencing lessons, and dances.
Pronouncing German “awful to learn,” he swore he would master it in six months (“sink or swim, live or die”) or not at all. He worried about flirting in a new tongue, and was agreeably surprised to learn that “nothing delights a German damsel more than to get hold of a partner who is a raw recruit in the language.” When he wanted to make a “remarkably witty remark I usually dive into French,” he told Jim—but quickly concluded that “there is no way as good to learn a language as to converse with and have your faults corrected by a pretty girl.”
He and Frank fitted out their rooms in “royal splendor and eastern magnificence.” They hired a servant for two thalers a month (the price of fifty good cigars), entertained often, and—personal preference conforming to paternal dicta—made friends with the families who formed the “first society, or in other words, the aristocracy of Göttingen.”
Junius came to visit in the spring of 1856. Father and son talked about U.S. politics and international trade. President Franklin Pierce, a Jacksonian Democrat from New Hampshire with close ties to the South, was failing to keep the pro-slavery forces in check. Pierpont told Jim in disgust that if the country managed to avoid a civil war, no thanks would be due to Pierce, “for he has certainly done his part to create one.”
Democrats had occupied the White House for twenty of the twenty-eight years since Andrew Jackson’s victory over John Quincy Adams, and southern Democrats in Congress had consistently defeated northern proposals for protective tariffs, homestead laws, a transcontinental railroad, and land-grant colleges—effectively relegating the Whig heirs of Hamilton and Clay to the sidelines. In 1854 the fight over the Kansas-Nebraska Act destroyed the ailing Whigs, and redefined national party politics along sectional lines. The act essentially repealed a ban on slavery in the western territories: southern Whigs voted with the Democratic majority to pass it over the violent objection of northern Whigs. Northern Democrats bolted in protest, and opponents of slavery from dissident groups and both major parties in the North gradually drew together into a new party that took the name “Republican.” Its members began to unite around the neo-Hamiltonian ideas that the Union should take precedence over states’ rights, and that local powers posed more threat to individual liberty than the centralized power of the state.*
The Morgans voted Republican—in a mock election at Göttingen in November 1856 Pierpont backed the losing John Frémont against Democrat James Buchanan—but were less concerned with slavery than trade. Cotton accounted for more than half of all U.S. exports in the 1850s, and Peabody & Co. was trading on its own account as well as handling cotton sales for clients. Pierpont proudly quoted to Jim an English admiral who said that while the British fleet was “a capital weapon for a war with most any nation … unfortunately the United States have a ship which we cannot take and which will render our navy useless, i.e., The Ship ‘Cotton.’ ” No one connected with the Peabody firm wanted the United States to sink that ship in a civil war.
Writing to Jim, Pierpont generally had less to say about affairs of state than affairs of the heart. When he suspected his cousin of a serious attachment in the spring of 1856, he delivered a lecture on the subject, sounding very much like his own father. “Although younger, I have seen much more of the world and society than you have,” he began, “… so pray don’t think that it is entirely unadvisedly that I write this.” Jim’s recent letters showed “too plainly that you are really much more interested” in a certain young lady (“I won’t mention names for fear the letter may fall into other hands”) “than you are willing as yet to own to yourself.” Pierpont warned Jim to “look out … that it does not … lead you to commit yourself to such a degree that your honor will be compromised and force you to an act which will be your deepest regret through life.”
As an example, the nineteen-year-old guardian of feminine virtue and masculine honor cited a situation in which he had
recently been “compelled to have a hand.” (He uses the word “compelled” three times in this brief sketch: strong forces were at work.) A fellow student at Vevey, with no thought of marriage, had paid such “very decided” attentions to a “fine young lady, highly educated and very attractive,” that the girl had fallen “desperately” in love. Her parents favored the match. Pierpont, seeing that his friend’s honor was about to become “so compromised that he would have been compelled by public opinion to marry the girl in spite of himself,” had been “compelled to interfere.” Hence his unsolicited advice: “if I felt it my duty in that case how much more is it for me to warn you in time.”
Furthermore, he felt called on to correct his cousin’s “decidedly erroneous ideas” about marriage. The “fair damsel” in question had a gift for music, and Jim was urging her to study abroad. A life on the stage would not do for the wife of James Junius Goodwin, Pierpont explained: “Your career in life, like mine depends on our own individual exertions, our courses … will both be in the mercantile sphere and from this cause it becomes our duty to select for our wives those who, when we go home from our occupations, will ever be ready to make us happy and contented with our homes.”
This pontifical account makes a mercantile career sound like a spiritual calling—which, in Junius’ eyes, it virtually was. The fact that Pierpont’s vision of conjugal bliss did not match the situation in his own home (though not because his mother had a career) did nothing to detract from his conviction: a wife should “be domestic,” he concluded, “her heart must be at home with her husband and children, not in the world.” Jim would not be “happy with a wife who was ever individually before the public, or who in society held any position not connected with yours.”
Jim did not much like this “dull sermon.” He promised to talk the whole thing over in person next time the cousins met.
Pierpont learned German in six months with the help of the obliging Fräuleins, but had to postpone his start in business yet again when his father directed him to spend one more winter on the Continent. In August 1856 he took the waters at Wiesbaden, then went home to London.
His family had finally settled at No. 14 Princes Gate, a five-story town house in Knightsbridge facing Hyde Park.† It was set well back from the road, with Ionic columns framing a portico entrance, Corinthian pilasters under a neoclassical pediment on the first floor, and swags of fruit and flowers decorating the cornice. In the back, French doors opened onto a terrace, and stone stairs led to a large lawn and gardens shared by all the houses in the block. Just a short walk down the Exhibition Road was the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert), built after the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition to educate the British public about industrial arts and innovative design.
Pierpont found his mother in a state of collapse. Everything about the transatlantic move had agreed with Junius, who was fully engaged with his work and Anglo-American social life, but Juliet’s depressions and physical complaints had grown steadily worse. She had left a close-knit world of relatives and friends for the vast, drafty reaches of a foreign capital that made no effort to welcome Americans. Speaking the language did not help her penetrate the dense thickets of English reserve, and a scant education had not prepared John Pierpont’s daughter for the wider sphere of cultural reference she found abroad. She possessed none of the self-confident charm that enabled scores of American women to “conquer” London a little later in the century. With her husband preoccupied, four of her children away at school, and no interests of her own, Juliet took to her bed with vague, protean symptoms, just as her mother had done.
There was probably a genetic basis to the depression that turned the Pierpont family into a sad roster of instability, alcoholism, suicide, and “nerves.” After Juliet’s mother died in 1855, the Reverend Pierpont described how completely her suffering had vitiated their marriage: she had contributed “little toward making our home the scene of confidential and affectionate intercourse which constitutes one’s beau ideal of a truly happy Christian home.” In the next generation, Juliet contributed little to the affectionate intercourse in her household, and her negative example may have helped shape Pierpont’s ideal of the generously domestic woman “ever … ready to make us happy and contented with our homes.” Juliet’s brother, John, Jr., drew an explicit parallel between her diseases and her mother’s—he thought their “constitution and temperament … the same”—and suspected that Juliet’s ailments were “imaginative, not real”—he no doubt meant “imaginary.” Juliet consulted London’s best physicians, but no one ever found an organic illness or a cure.
She decided to spend the winter of 1856–57 in the United States, hoping to leave her indispositions in London with her husband and children. In mid-September, Pierpont escorted her to Liverpool and saw her off on the Baltic.
From Princes Gate that fall he groaned to Jim in mock complaint that his siblings “consider me as a kind of ‘valet de place’ whenever I come home.” He squired them around town until the older three went back to school. Mary was his favorite: active and curious, “she does not care about keeping very still for a long time at once.” Neither did he. Once the “children” left, he found the house too quiet. Visits from Frank Payson and the “exceedingly” agreeable Miss Hoffman from Vevey promised to relieve the “monotony.”
That Miss Hoffman was passing through London with her father on her way home to be married did not diminish Pierpont’s regard. He took her, with her father and Frank, to dinners, theater, Madame Tussaud’s, the Royal Mint, the Queen’s Stables and Mews, and, when the autumn rains let up, on carriage drives. “Between you and I Jim,” he whispered, “Miss H. is one of the finest girls I ever met in delicacy of feeling & taste, in sweetness of disposition & in fact in every charm.… I never may meet her again but if I should live many years I am very sure I shld not see her equal.” Though there seemed no chance now of his winning primary place in her affections, he would be “only too happy if I thought I had such an object to look forward to.”
Frank left at the end of September to start work with one of Junius’s former partners from Boston, Levi P. Morton, now head of a wholesale house in New York. Pierpont went riding every morning in Hyde Park, and spent his afternoons at Peabody & Co. organizing twenty years of correspondence.
The London firm was buying and selling American securities for its clients, offering brokerage and general banking services to select friends, trading on its own account, and promoting a few promising new ventures, one of which in 1856 was a transatlantic cable. Cyrus Field, a wealthy New York paper merchant who recognized what Samuel Morse’s telegraph could do for international communications and trade, had secured a charter to lay a cable between the western point of the British Isles and the eastern tip of North America. George Peabody & Co. agreed to help finance the project in July of 1856.
Four months later Junius reported to Mr. Peabody that the Atlantic Telegraph Company was getting along “famously” and would be a “great property,” sure to “pay largely” once the cable was working. He asked his senior partner, traveling in the United States, to lobby quietly for a federal subsidy: “There can be no doubt that, as a matter of policy, our Government should do something in aid of the enterprise, & … a word from you would have much weight with those in Washington who could bring this forward in a proper way.” He also persuaded Peabody to sit on the company’s board in order to keep its management “honest”: “Our connection with America & its business makes it very desirable that we should have an influence on the organisation of a Co. which is to have so much influence either for good or evil.” The politics of influence and the strict supervision of management would be hallmarks of Morgan banking for over half a century.
Solving the physical and financial problems of transatlantic communication took ten years, even with government subsidies from Britain and the United States. Fires, broken cables, dropped wires, financial panics, storms at sea, and the Civil War intervened. The value
of the stock rose and fell like the surface of the Atlantic. Issued at £1,000, the shares fell to £300 in July 1858, then rose to £900 that August when twenty-nine hundred miles of primitive cable first connected the continents. Queen Victoria’s congratulatory message to President Buchanan took sixteen hours to transmit. Peabody imagined that Field must feel like “Columbus in the discovery of the new world.” Junius told Pierpont: “None of us can properly estimate the effect of this success upon the world, nor do we really grasp in our minds the magnitude of what has been accomplished.” Three weeks later the cable broke, as did the price of the stock.
The operation finally succeeded in July 1866, when the gigantic S.S. Great Eastern finished laying a redesigned, heavily armored ductile cable across the ocean floor from Valentia, Ireland, to St. John’s, Newfoundland. Only then did the property, reorganized as the Anglo-American Telegraph Company and substantially refinanced, begin to pay. Despair often swamped Junius’s hopes in the intervening decade. When Field at one low point accused Peabody & Co. of having caused his ruin, Junius replied, “You do not seem to recollect that we have been large losers by an enterprise undertaken by yourself and into which we entered at your earnest solicitation.” The Atlantic cable changed the way the world worked, making it possible for the United States to communicate with Europe in a matter of minutes rather than weeks. Moreover, after 1866, financiers such as Peabody and Morgan could move quickly in and out of markets, easily trade in foreign currencies, and anticipate the effects of international news. Peabody & Co. gained access to essential information, as well as prestige and profits, from backing this ambitious venture.
Pierpont went back to Göttingen for three months in October 1856. “Lonesome” without Frank Payson, he joined a student society called the Hannovera, and was soon reporting on “capital” Saturday suppers of roast goose and beer, Wednesday-night card games, and balls. In his farewell speech he delighted his German friends by mixing up the words Dauer (length, duration) and Bedauern (regret, pity): he wished them “great sorrow” instead of “long life.” One of his university professors had asked him to stay on and make a career in math, but Pierpont had other plans for his facility with numbers.