by Jean Strouse
Duncan, Sherman recovered as well, but sustained more damage to its reputation. At the end of 1857 R. G. Dun & Co. thought the house ought to close. Pierpont, patrolling Wall Street incognito again, overheard mostly negative talk. Still, by April 1858, the firm’s standing had been restored and its credit rated “reliable & Sound.”
In the depression that followed the 1857 panic, big cities in the Northeast fared worst. Two hundred thousand people were suddenly unemployed, nearly forty thousand of them in New York City. During the harsh winter of 1857–58, enraged mobs broke into coal yards to steal fuel, and rallies to protest the loss of jobs turned into riots. Religious leaders called helplessly for calm; revivalist sects enlisted thousands to atone for the nation’s sins and pray for an end to hard times. Much of the press blamed the crash not on the business cycle, an inadequate banking system, or foreign markets but on Wall Street. The contraction continued until December 1858, after which the economy began once again to expand. Railroad building resumed; $26 million in foreign capital returned to U.S. markets in 1859. Industrial output rose as prices fell, which helped American products compete abroad.
Pierpont’s features still retained the slight blur of late adolescence, but with his cosmopolitan manners, foreign languages, and European clothes he moved easily into the upper reaches of New York society. The names in his first New York address book include a few old Knickerbocker families but chiefly the city’s mercantile and banking elite. The northernmost listing belonged to the banker Isaac Newton Phelps, at the corner of Madison and 36th. Above 42nd Street, Manhattan stretched off into swamps, rocky ledges, and open fields dotted with shantytowns, slaughterhouses, taverns, hospitals, and garbage dumps. An aqueduct system piped water from the Croton River through miles of masonry conduit to a holding lake at 86th Street, then on to a distributing reservoir at 42nd and Fifth. City officials had recently bought 843 acres of land above 59th Street for a central park. Construction of the “Greensward,” designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, began in 1856.
During his first months in Manhattan Pierpont surveyed the city’s cultural fare: he went to the theater, the opera, Philharmonic concerts, and an exhibition of banker August Belmont’s collection of paintings at the new National Academy of Design—a redbrick building at 51 West 10th Street, with studios for artists as well as exhibition space—noting in his diaries the initials of young women who accompanied him.
Wealth and poverty resided much closer together on this narrow island than they did in Hartford or Boston, and not far from the elegant town houses off Union Square were the tenements of the Lower East Side. Pierpont did not reflect on this disparity in the few letters from this period that survive, nor on the protests of the unemployed during his first winter in New York. He gave $10 one day to the Five Points Mission in the notorious slum at the intersection of Baxter, Worth, and Park streets off the Bowery. The church he joined had been one of the first to set up mission chapels for the poor on the Lower East Side.
St. George’s Episcopal Church, on Stuyvesant Square at Second Avenue and 16th Street, occupied a geographical middle ground between New York’s mansions and slums. Its rector, Stephen H. Tyng, was such a charismatic speaker—called “the prince of platform orators”—that his rival, Henry Ward Beecher, refused to follow him on a stage. In the historic Protestant/Catholic tension within the Anglican Church, which dated back to its split from the Vatican under Henry VIII, Dr. Tyng was resolutely in the Protestant camp. He had been trained in the Low Church Evangelical tradition that emphasized verbal inspiration, the authority of the Bible, and personal conversion over holy sacraments and the authority of the bishops, and he became a leading opponent of the High Church movement that was moving, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, intellectually and theologically toward Rome. Under the fiercely partisan Dr. Tyng, St. George’s served as the outpost of the Episcopalian Evangelical position in New York.
Pierpont would have friends in both the High and Broad (social-reformist) Church factions within Episcopalianism, but he remained all his life a devout adherent of the Low Church. Where the Reverend Pierpont looked on life as a perpetual quest for moral and social improvement, Dr. Tyng saw it as a search for refuge from sin in God: individuals would be saved not through good works, moral striving, or sacramental rites, but only through faith in the atoning death of Christ. At Pierpont’s confirmation in 1861, Tyng urged new communicants to “come with a deep sense of your own guilt, and trust in that Gracious Savior, without a doubt or a fear. In him the Gospel reveals to you entire forgiveness.… Look upon your salvation as now accomplished.”
During the crisis of 1857 Pierpont visited his mother in Hartford just for the day at Thanksgiving and Christmas. She remained deeply unhappy, and for months had been begging her father to write or let her come see him, as she was “in great need of council and advise [sic].” Mr. Pierpont did not have much contact with Juliet during her long sojourn in the United States. At the age of seventy-two, he had, much to his descendants’ surprise, fallen in love.
To his son John, Jr., he described Harriet-Louise Campbell Fowler, a forty-six-year-old widow, as “much the most splendid woman, in her appearance, that Medford can show.” It should surprise no one that he loved her “most truly”: the miracle was that “at my age, she should love me.” Splendid appearance aside, Louise Fowler had a qualification that appealed to him above all others—she was a “picture of health … having never been confined to her bed for a day, except in accouchement.” He married her in December 1857, and reported that all he now lacked for “perfect happiness” was enough work to get him out of debt.
A month after the wedding, Juliet proposed to spend part of the winter with her father and stepmother, who was just five years her senior. Mr. Pierpont replied that he could not add the expense of a boarder to his household’s straitened circumstances—particularly, he implied, one with extravagant tastes. The exchange touched raw nerves. Juliet responded with a barrage of self-justification and insult, declaring it “strange” that “knowing & feeling this weight of anxiety you should have thought best to add another to suffer, as she must, if only by seeing you suffer, if she has entered into the connection blindly—if not & she was fully aware of your situation, she can have nothing to say.”
Juliet had not seen her own husband or four younger children for eighteen months when Junius in March of 1858 sent an alarming report. Little “Doctor,” approaching his twelfth birthday, was seriously ill. He had been complaining of pain and numbness in one leg for months. In February, doctors found an infection in the socket of his hip, and ordered the leg immobilized. “The poor little fellow has to lie in one position and be carried from one room to another,” his father reported; the child would probably have to stay off his feet for six months, but bore his suffering “most patiently,” crying only when he thought of the cricket games he was missing. “He is a good boy & I feel will bear with resignation whatever is appointed him.”
Over the next few weeks the pain and weakness increased. Junius remained constantly at his son’s bedside, feeding him with a spoon, cheered at the feeblest sign of recognition. It was no use. At 5:15 A.M. on March 12, the boy died. His exhausted father wrote to Pierpont that night: “his gentle spirit took its flight, as quietly as if going into a sweet sleep.… Our dear little Junius the idol of our little household has been taken from us almost in an instant.”
Juliet was packing for London when Pierpont arrived from New York with this news. She collapsed. All thought of returning to England was indefinitely postponed.
Junius, “worn out with anxiety and grief,” told Pierpont he was trying to “bow in submission to His will who allowed it, but my heart was too much bound up in the dear boy and I cannot be reconciled.” Pierpont had been away from home for most of this child’s life: “You my dear son have lost an only brother,” Junius went on, “& altho you have been much separated I know your love for him must have been strong—who that knew that gent
le, unselfish, affectionate child could help loving him.… May you … lay this admonition to heart & so live that whenever you shall be called you may be found ready.”
Later that month, Junius took little Juliet and her governess to Brighton for a change of scene. “I cannot tell you how lonely I feel and how stricken down by this heavy blow,” he wrote to Pierpont from the seaside. “Nor can I realise that it is really so that I am not again here to see the dear one who was so entwined about my heart.” He had no interest in work—“it seems to me the anxieties, trials, afflictions & disappointments of the last year have been too much for me and that I never shall be in business what I once was.”
Grief for his younger son did not preclude a lecture to the elder, and Junius abruptly changed the subject. Pierpont had bought five shares of stock in the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, at $63 a share. Founded in 1848 by New York merchant William Henry Aspinwall, the company ran ships from San Francisco to South America and Asia, with a large government subsidy for mail.§ Junius scolded: “I do not like your buying stocks or having your mind turned in that direction. How many have been shipwrecked on that one thing—speculation in stocks. I want you to bring your mind quietly down to the regular details of business … [and resolve] never to buy any stock on speculation.” He took up the subject again three weeks later, after consulting Mr. Aspinwall: “I judged he thought it a risky stock to hold. If it pays 10% div. in May had you not better sell & put it into something else?”
Pierpont ignored this advice. He was considerably less averse to risk than his father, and bought 10 more shares of Pacific Mail that June at 76¼ (the company did pay a 10 percent dividend in May), and kept on buying as the price went up. A year later he reported a loss of $1,467.30 on 150 shares purchased at $81 to $82 and sold at $72 to $73.‖ He fared better on a smaller speculation: he bought one share of the Michigan Central Railroad Company for $31.25 in January 1858 and sold it a month later for $65, over 100 percent profit.
Duncan, Sherman promoted him out of correspondence in March 1858 (still paying no salary), and Junius congratulated him on his unspecified new duties. “Be true to those responsibilities and to yourself,” wrote the indefatigable Polonius. “Never under any circumstances do an act which could be called in question if known to the whole world. Remember that there is an Eye above that is ever upon you & that for every act–word & deed you will one day be called to give account.”
Junius insisted that bankers handling large amounts of other people’s money had to put themselves beyond reproach, their authority and expertise unequivocally untainted by greed. The reward for this high detachment was the freedom to work in a well-protected market. A reputation for integrity would earn material as well as moral profit, while abusing a privileged position for personal gain would guarantee the loss of both. Wealth dishonorably acquired was “worse then useless when you consider the awful cost,” continued Junius. He had the highest hopes for his only remaining son: “I depend much upon you and feel that you will not disappoint my expectations—be wise, considerate, thoughtful, ever keeping in mind the great end of your being.”
Pierpont turned twenty-one in April, and for the occasion Junius again sounded the theme of avarice: “Do not let the desire of success or of accumulating induce you ever to do a single action which will cause you regret. Self approbation and a feeling that God approves will bring far greater happiness than all the wealth the world can give.”
When Juliet finally returned to London in May, Junius found “little improvement in [her] case.” She was “still a great invalid and I fear may long continue so,” he told her father: “The effect of this upon the happiness & comfort of a family your own sad experience will enable you fully to appreciate.”
Though Pierpont left no report of its effect on him, he cannot have taken much pleasure in the company of his depressed and demanding mother. Perhaps he found some solace in being able to take care of her as if he were the parent rather than the other way around—managing her finances, making her travel arrangements, trying without much success to cheer her up. All his adult life he would be drawn to people he could take care of, and also to those—doctors, clergymen, sympathetic women—who in one way or another took care of him.
Junius had given up on finding “happiness & comfort” in his marriage. Soon after Juliet arrived in England he made plans to visit the United States that fall with his eldest daughter, Sarah. He had not been home in four years. In August he bought the house at No. 13 Princes Gate, next door to the one he was renting. It would not be ready until November, and his family had to move out of No. 14 by September 1. He and Sarah would be in the United States all fall. Since Junius ordinarily dictated arrangements for everyone in his family (and a good many others besides), his shrug to Pierpont about his wife’s autumn accommodations testifies further to their estrangement: “I don’t know what will be her plans,” he wrote. At the end of August he sailed with Sarah to New York.
Pierpont had been spending weekends that summer at Cozzens’ Hotel near West Point on the Hudson, visiting a family named Osborn. Like most of his friendships, this one mixed business with pleasure. William Henry Osborn was president of the Illinois Central Railroad, whose securities Peabody & Co. had been underwriting since the early 1850s. Osborn and his wife, Virginia, had two small children and an appealing variety of guests. One guest in particular attracted Pierpont’s attention: Virginia Osborn’s sister, Amelia, whom he had met at Newport the summer before.
Called Memie (pronounced “Mimi”), Amelia Sturges had qualities Pierpont had been drawn to in the past—the “unpretending” femininity of the Italian girl at Loeche-les-Bains, and the “lively, agreeable” disposition of Miss Hoffman at Vevey. Small, with a heart-shaped face framed by thick brown hair parted in the middle and knotted at the nape of her neck, Memie had been crowned beauty queen at a New York ball early that winter. One admirer described her as “the most charmingly self-possessed and natural sovereign that imagination could conceive,” concluding with a flourish: “ ‘Loyalty to such a Queen ceases to be a virtue.’ ”
Memie was twenty-three in the summer of 1858—two years older than Pierpont. She studied singing and piano, spoke German and French, and taught sewing to young women at the Wilson Industrial School for Girls on the Lower East Side. At thirteen she had joined the Old North (Dutch Reformed) Church on Fulton Street—her family followed—and in 1858 was translating into English a little tract called La Vraie Croix. She told her mother she enjoyed the work “even if it should not prove good enough to be published.”
Her father, Jonathan Sturges, had started out in the wholesale grocery business as partner to Luman Reed, one of New York’s leading merchants and early art collectors. After Reed died in 1836, Sturges carried on the older man’s commercial and cultural work.a He managed a prospering tea and coffee trade, became a director of the New York, New Haven, & Hartford Railroad, helped found the National Bank of Commerce, and organized a group of men to buy and preserve Reed’s art collection, which eventually formed the core of the New-York Historical Society.
By 1850, Jonathan Sturges had enough capital to invest in enterprises other than his own, and like many other wealthy men at midcentury, he turned to railroads. Illinois had been trying since the 1830s to build a rail line from Galena to Cairo at the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to link midwestern traffic to the South, but political fights, competing groups of speculators, and the collapse of the state’s credit in the forties had made it impossible to raise the necessary funds. In 1850 Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas persuaded Congress to make its first large federal land grant—about two and a half million acres in the Mississippi River Valley—to this railroad. Douglas stood to profit from the venture, since he owned property along the proposed route; he also hoped to ease the antagonism between North and South by engaging both sides in building a continental network of roads. Early in 1851, the state legislature turned over the land grant and charter to a group of eastern cap
italists that included Jonathan Sturges and William Aspinwall, to build the Illinois Central.
In April, eighteen-year-old Virginia Sturges wrote in her diary: “Father was out till half past twelve last evening consulting over a railroad in Illinois 600 miles long, which twelve gentlemen are to build. Mother sighs over it sometimes & I … long to look into the future and see if this great enterprise will succeed.” Four years later it had not succeeded. Less than half the track had been laid, land sales had dried up, and the company was nearly bankrupt. Its president, Robert Schuyler, had been involved in an unrelated fraud, which led investors to sell their IC holdings. At the end of 1855 the gentlemen proprietors appointed a new president, William H. Osborn, a native of Salem, Massachusetts, who had made a fortune in the Philippine shipping trade. Osborn had met the Sturges family on vacation at Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, and married Virginia in 1853. Amelia teased her father for years about being afraid to take her anywhere after he “lost” Virginia at Saratoga.
Osborn rescued the Illinois Central by reviving land sales, hiring new officers and engineers, and working with the road’s outside counsel, Abraham Lincoln. He raised fresh capital by assessing stockholders for cash and selling bonds abroad, and so effectively restored the confidence of the road’s London bankers, including Peabody & Co., that by 1856 foreign investors controlled the company. Traffic fell off dramatically after the 1857 panic, as did the value of Illinois Central securities. That both eventually recovered was due partly to Osborn, who used his own money and credit to keep the company solvent, and partly to external circumstances: the railroad carried Union troops and supplies through the Mississippi Valley during the Civil War.