by Jean Strouse
Pierpont probably renewed his acquaintance with Amelia while helping Osborn in the aftermath of the panic. He saw her as often as he could in the summer of 1858, and that fall called regularly at her parents’ house in New York—a large brownstone at 5 East 14th Street. With four boys and Amelia still living at home, the family spent summers and weekends at an American Gothic “cottage” Mr. Sturges had built in Fairfield, Connecticut. Unlike the well-traveled Morgans, the Sturgeses had never been to Europe, but they lived in more intimate relation to the arts—to literature and music as well as painting, and to contemporary American works as well as reproductions of famous Old Masters.
Frederic Church, a student of Thomas Cole, had produced his panoramic Niagara after visiting the Osborns on vacation at the Falls in the summer of 1856. Memie, also there that July, told her mother: “Our cottage is now decorated by a charming sketch of Niagara from Mr. Church’s brush. He is intoxicated … rises at sunrise, and we only see him at meal times. He is so restless away from the Falls that he cannot keep still, always feeling as if he were losing some new effect of light.”b
Pierpont brought his father, sister, and cousin Sally Goodwin to visit the Sturges household on East 14th Street in the fall of 1858. Junius discussed railroad matters with Jonathan Sturges, and was enchanted with Memie.
In January she reported to an aunt that the elder Mr. Morgan had asked her “in a laughing way, if I would not go out [to London] with him should he stay [in New York] till February. I said, ‘Oh yes if Father will let me.’ So the very next day he went to Father with his petition and it has ended in [Father’s] giving his consent.”
Pierpont would have to stay in New York while his father took Memie abroad. This arrangement would deprive him not only of her company but also of the chance to introduce her to London and the pleasures of foreign travel himself. He knew better than to object to the dictates of paternal plans. Still, this one effectively cut him out in a new situation—a private affair of the heart—and made more explicit than ever just who in the family had seigneurial rights.
Junius was about to turn forty-six. Fearing that a high-spirited young woman half his age might find Princes Gate and the London winter season dull, he promised Memie a tide of pictures once the galleries opened in March, and invited Sally Goodwin to come with her. Mrs. Sturges confided her own sense of excitement to her sister as Memie packed to leave: “We feel as if Amelia’s time is drawing near.… [The Morgans] live at the corner of Hyde Park & Kensington Gardens and have their own horses carriages and every luxury of a well appointed English establishment!”
On February 2, Pierpont and the Sturgeses took a tugboat into the Hudson off Jersey City to see Memie, Junius, Sarah Morgan, and Sally Goodwin off on the SS Persia. The winter Atlantic was rough, with high seas the first few days and ice storms farther out, but Memie’s stomach proved as strong as her sense of adventure. One night she wore Junius’s cloak to walk on deck with the captain in a storm: “Sea a sight never to be forgotten,” she wrote in a journal she kept throughout the trip. “Deck seemed perpendicular at times.… Shipped two seas passed partly over our heads but drenched me pretty well.” She read Tennyson, played backgammon, and toured the ship’s engines with the captain. Sally Goodwin described her as “full of fun and life.”
As soon as Memie had unpacked at Princes Gate, Junius took her for a drive through Hyde Park and London’s famous streets. She pronounced it a “smashing day,” and over the next several weeks proceeded—all fresh American energy—to discover the Old World. With Mr. Peabody she attended the theater and the opera; she toured the National Gallery and Sir John Soane’s museum, rode in Rotten Row, saw French Academy pictures, English landscape paintings, the Duke of Wellington’s funeral car, and Queen Victoria. In quiet moments she played the grand piano Junius had just bought (probably for her pleasure), and wrote to the junior “Mr. Morgan” in New York.
Junius’s preoccupation with his guest did not rule out supervising his son’s digestive system by mail: “You are altogether too rapid in disposing of your meals,” he scolded in March, “and then there is the great irregularity in the matter I so often spoke to you of when in New York. You may depend upon it you can have no health if you go on in this way. I would urge of you to correct it at once—If you do not, dyspepsia with all attendant evils is sure to be upon you.”
Juliet, “low-spirited” when her husband and guests arrived, stayed in her room. “We young people have to entertain the company with Uncle Junius,” Sally Goodwin reported. Junius entertained often, serving French food, champagne, and strawberries he raised under glass. Pierpont kept him supplied with American apples, wild turkeys, oysters, Havana cigars, buckwheat, and water from the Congress spring at Saratoga. Amelia was a great asset at the Princes Gate dinners. “She is pretty and agreeable, and has plenty of confidence,” observed Sally. “I think it is a blessing that those who have do not appreciate.”
Memie’s parents and younger brothers, Arthur and Henry, met her in London for a grand tour that spring. As it was their first trip abroad, Pierpont had drawn up an itinerary. “Having been carefully over most of the ground myself several times,” he wrote with orotund gravity to Mr. Sturges, “I am convinced that you will find the order in which I have arranged your visit to the various cities best conducive to the pleasure of the present trip & to the satisfaction of future retrospection.” He offered just a general outline and a few personal opinions, assuming the travelers would find details in guidebooks. They would see some of Rubens’s greatest paintings in Antwerp, pay dearly in Brussels for lace, find the Berlin Museum “very fine,” and need two weeks for Paris—“tell all the milliners, dressmakers, &c that you must positively have your purchases at least a week before you really do.” The route along the corniche from Marseilles to Genoa was “the finest ride in the world.” Rome would reward “as much time as you can possibly grant it,” as would everything in the vicinity of Naples.
The Sturges letters and diaries from this trip offer a Jamesian picture of novice American aesthetes abroad. In London the travelers went to the Royal Academy and Thomas Baring’s art collection (Memie noted “an excellent Claude. Fine Murillos, very fine Teniers”), heard Dickens read from The Pickwick Papers, and attended a lecture by Charles Kingsley, author of Hypatia and Westward Ho! They crossed the Channel to France in late May, worried that war between Austria and Italy might interfere with their plans, then more or less followed the itinerary Pierpont had drawn up. Memie described her father’s “raptures” among gems of Dutch and Flemish art at The Hague, yet after weeks of looking at pictures found herself, like many another first-time visitor to Europe, “surfeited” with galleries—“one fairly gets an art dyspepsia.”
At Verona, crowded with Austrian soldiers, she located Juliet’s tomb in a “miserable little garden, with … tumbling down walls & dying grape vines,” and Romeo’s house looking over a market “where the odor of cheese bologna sausages & onions combined fills the air & mingles most unpleasantly with dreams of rope ladders midnight serenades & tales of love.” In early November her family made its way back through Paris to London.
While the Sturgeses traveled, Pierpont worked. Jim Goodwin, who had completed his European tour and moved to New York, read him Sally’s London reports; Sarah Morgan kept her brother posted as well. In September Junius decided that his son had spent enough time (two years) as an apprentice at Duncan, Sherman. Pierpont resigned. In a formal letter of farewell, the firm’s partners thanked him for his “voluntary and unpaid services,” and praised his “untiring industry … earnestness, zeal and fidelity of a rare character.” That he had learned a great deal about business and shown himself “practically capable of discharging the duties of any desk in our office” should gratify not only him but also “our Esteemed friend your Good Father.”
Yet in wishing the junior Morgan every future success, his employers had “one word of advice,” which they hoped he would not take amiss. Pierpont had a quick temper a
nd no patience with other people’s mistakes. From his father he had learned an astringent perfectionism, but not the smooth urbanity that eased the workings of Junius’s iron will. Messrs. Duncan, Sherman, and Dabney warned him politely (“instigated by the attachment you must know we feel for you”) that on taking his place in the ranks of commercial life he ought to bear in mind that “liberality in views and acts generally brings better returns than can be hoped for from a course which others can possibly regard as sharp or contracted. —Suavity and gentle bearing toward those with whom we deal goes also a long way towards making up the capital which ensures success.”
Accustomed as he was to reproof, Pierpont met this one with elaborate deference: “I cannot allow your very kind note of today to be received and laid aside,” he replied, “without expressing to you my grateful and heartfelt thanks for the very kind feelings towards me which you have voluntarily expressed, especially for the advice which your interest in my welfare has led you to give and which I fully appreciate.” He could have “no prouder satisfaction than the reception of such a note as you have handed me,” and would attribute any future success he might have to “the counsels which you have given me during the first two years of my business life which I cannot but think will be the happiest.”
Four days later he took the Persia to London, where he spent quiet weeks discussing his future with his father and waiting for Memie to return from the Continent. He had not seen her in nine months.
The Sturgeses reached their hotel late at night on November 10. The next morning right after breakfast “in walked Pierpont and Sarah Morgan … and Sally Goodwin,” wrote Memie’s brother Henry in his diary: “Then the way there [sic] tongues went answering questions and asking them. Soon after … Mrs. Morgan came too so I had a chance of seeing [her] for the first [time].… I do not think she is good looking at all.”
For the next two weeks Pierpont saw Memie every day. He took her to the National Gallery, the South Kensington Museum, the Crystal Palace, and out shopping. “Returned after dark to dinner,” she wrote in her diary one night. “Had a charming time.” Her enthusiasm over touring the Duke of Devonshire’s Chatsworth may have had as much to do with her companion as the weather: a “delicious day like spring[,] soft shadows on the grassy slopes!!!!!”
At the end of November, having designed the Sturgeses’ European tour, Pierpont escorted them home. He went down to Liverpool the day before they sailed to arrange for his party to dine at the captain’s table on the Persia. He booked the chief officer’s room for himself.
A new, teasing tone in Memie’s diary as they crossed the Atlantic suggests that Pierpont was reading over her shoulder. He never traveled light, and turned up at their Liverpool hotel with a “small quantity of luggage,” she noted. The day of departure she was “Up bright and early. More than some of my friends can say for themselves.” Turbulent seas kept most passengers in their rooms. Not Pierpont and Memie. “Breakfasted at 10,” she wrote the third day out: “Mr. Morgan & myself the only ones at table of the party.” At lunch, “Mr. Morgan imitating the example of the Good Samaritan ran up & down with roasted apples, crackers, & rugs! until we were all very comfortable. Driven by the rain into our parlour (i.e. Chief Officer’s room)”—i.e., Pierpont’s room.
The following day, “Most of us were disagreeable to ourselves & everybody else. Sat in our cheerful parlour most of the day.” And the next: “One of my friends very blue all day. Disappeared from dinner very suddenly. No cry of Man Overboard so concluded he was all right.”
Though she does not guess at the cause of Pierpont’s “blues,” it may have been the presence of a rival—the ship’s captain, who showed Memie his engine room and private quarters, and often joined their party for tea. Still, she spent most of her time with Pierpont. The day after she detected no cry of “Man Overboard,” she and her suitor strolled the deck in the morning, spent the afternoon at backgammon, went out after dinner to watch the play of phosphorescence on the water, and stayed up over more backgammon till eleven. Memie reported herself “awfully beaten. Mr. M. decidedly under the weather (not seasick).” He stayed in his room all the next day, appearing only for backgammon after dinner—this time she won, and began referring to him in her diary as “my adversary.”
One stormy night as they approached New York, Memie organized an afterdinner walk: “The air cold and bracing. Captain took one arm Mr. M. the other so there was no fear of slipping on the snowy decks.” When the weather cleared, people came up “like turtles to sun themselves.” The travelers reached home on December 8.
Memie had been away nearly a year, and friends flocked to see her. Pierpont called the day after they arrived, then again the next day, and the one after that. In Memie’s diary the phrase “Mr. Morgan spent the evening” now appears as a regular refrain.
‡ R. G. Dun merged with its chief rival, the Bradstreet Company, in 1933.
§ Aspinwall and his associates had built a 47½-mile railroad across Panama in the 1850s. Before the completion of this line, merchandise, mail, and passengers had to travel 13,000 miles around the Horn from San Francisco to New York; the railroad cut the trip to 5,000 miles. Aspinwall’s railroad company earned more than $7 million in its first six years. It was the first essential “path between the seas,” and led to the building of the Panama Canal.
‖ The Pacific Mail directors were fighting Cornelius Vanderbilt, who wanted his Atlantic and Pacific Steamship Company to run the trans-Isthmus traffic through Nicaragua. Pierpont could have sold the stock at a profit had he held on to it; Pacific Mail prospered over the long run, and was one of the stocks listed in the first Dow Jones average in 1884.
a In the 1830s, after a brief flirtation with European Old Masters—high costs and the difficulty of authentication made the market too risky—Luman Reed turned his attention to contemporary American artists. He sent Thomas Cole, the country’s first popular landscape painter and “father” of the Hudson River School, to study art abroad, and subsidized Cole’s famous five-canvas Course of Empire. He also supported Cole’s disciple Asher B. Durand. Reed converted the third floor of his Greenwich Street house into an art gallery open to the public one day a week, and hosted meetings of the Sketch Club, a small group of artists and writers who met to draw and talk over supper. Early members of the club included Cole, Durand, Samuel F. B. Morse, James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, Reed himself, and Jonathan Sturges.
In 1846 several Sketch Club members decided to form a larger group of men interested in the arts. The first meeting of the Century Association, named for its hundred initial members, took place in January 1847 in rented rooms on lower Broadway. The Century moved to 15th Street off Union Square in 1858—it was a Century Association ball that elected Amelia beauty queen that year—and in 1891 to a clubhouse designed by Stanford White, at 7 West 43rd. Among its first members were Jonathan Sturges, Frederic Church, John Kensett, George Inness, Henry James, Sr., John Jay, Richard Morris Hunt, William Aspinwall, Frederick Law Olmsted, George Templeton Strong, and Joseph Choate.
b Niagara, now at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., made Church famous. Measuring 42½ by 90½ inches, it places the viewer at the edge of the falls in a rush of water and spray under a brooding, rainbow-highlighted sky. The Williams, Stevens and Williams gallery bought it for the then extraordinary sum of $4,500, and crowds paid to see the “Great Picture” on exhibition. One European critic said it provided “an entirely new and higher view both of American nature and art.” Church had an even greater success in 1859 with The Heart of the Andes, which he began on a trip he took to Latin America with Cyrus Field. Exhibited at the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York for three weeks, it attracted twelve thousand viewers, and sold for $10,000—a record price for an American landscape painting. After its New York showing, The Heart of the Andes traveled to England, toured the United States, and was widely reproduced in steel engravings. Pierpont bought a print for $60 in 1863. The painting
now belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Chapter 6
A HOUSE DIVIDED
Nothing had been decided about his future when Pierpont left London in November 1859. From a desk at Duncan, Sherman he did odd jobs for Peabody & Co. while his father considered the options. Then in late December he got word from London that he was to tour the South, to report on the railroads, banks, and cotton merchants with whom the London firm was doing business. Junius no doubt did need an eyewitness report as the conflict between North and South intensified, and professional demands clearly took precedence over romance. Still, if the senior Morgan was promoting an attachment between his son and Amelia Sturges, he had an odd way of going about it. Having separated the pair from February to November 1859, he now decreed another lengthy parting.
Pierpont’s interest in Memie was apparently not exclusive. On a “tremendously cold night” at the end of December, he left New York in such a rush that he did not have time to call on “some of my lady friends up town,” he told Jim Goodwin, who was living with his brother, Frank, on Irving Place: “I was nearly frozen when I reached the cheerful fire at the maiden establishment of our old friends the Misses Peters” in Philadelphia.
The thermometer registered zero when he went on the next day to Baltimore: “I much preferred chatting before a pleasant fire with the charming young ladies of B. than running the risk of being obliged to continue my trip southward minus a nose & ears which would most certainly have required amputation had I ventured out sleighing.” The two days he had allotted for Baltimore turned to four. His old flame Miss Hoffman (“of whom you may have heard”) was about to be married: “I saw her intended but cannot say that I fell into raptures over him as some have done. I hope he is all right for he will have one of the sweetest women for a wife this world ever produced.”