by Jean Strouse
When Jim reported a rumor—probably of a Morgan/Sturges engagement—making the rounds in New York, Pierpont denounced it as containing “no truth … whatever.” If there should be any such news, his cousin would be the first to know. And he went on, in a less than romantic vein: “Now that you have become acquainted with the Sturges’ I would advise you to nourish the acquaintance. Should you see any of the family, please remember me most kindly to them. You will find … that there are few if any more desirable families to be on intimate terms with in the City of N.Y. This between us and the post.”
He “tore” himself away from Baltimore on January 4 to attend a session of Congress, where Democrats were blocking the nomination of Ohio Republican John Sherman to be Speaker of the House. Sherman had endorsed a book (The Impending Crisis, by Hinton Rowan Helper) that blamed “all the shame, poverty, ignorance, tyranny and imbecility of the South” on the slave system, and urged nonslaveholding whites to overthrow it. Southern extremists threatened to secede. Politicians came to the Capitol that January armed with knives and guns, and fistfights broke out on the House floor.
After watching several hours of this bitter dispute, Pierpont pronounced the House of Representatives a “disgrace.” Like his federalist father, he hated the prospect of internecine war. Also like Junius, he was quick to see the worst in a difficult situation. Saying nothing about the moral and ideological issues at stake for America’s embattled democracy, he thundered to Jim: “Of all the legislative bodies which I have seen in this country & in Europe never did I see so little dignity.” He left Washington after one day, “completely disgusted & disappointed with everything.”
Intense cold weather followed him to Richmond—he had to go over the Virginia mountains, since the Potomac was frozen. In North Carolina he noted “1000 slaves on train.” He stayed for ten days in Charleston with Peabody’s local agent, H. W. Conner, studying the cotton trade, then proceeded to Savannah, where he met with bankers and merchants, toured cotton presses, and saw a production of Othello (“very poor”). At Macon, Georgia, he called on his uncle, John Pierpont, Jr. Traveling by steamboat from Montgomery to Mobile took three days: “On the River all day,” he noted in his diary. “Stopped every few moments to take on cotton. Novel sight to me.”
In New Orleans, the major port of the South, he set himself up in the branch office of H. W. Conner & Son, called on businessmen in the commercial district along Corondelet Street, attended church with Mr. Conner, drove out to Lake Pontchartrain, and escorted Conner’s daughter to Il Trovatore. Every few days he reported to his father on prices and shipments of cotton, bonds of the Mississippi Central Railroad, and conditions in southern markets.* The 1860 cotton crop—almost four million bales—sold abroad for $191 million, more than half the value of all U.S. exports that year.
Turning back north in April, Pierpont stopped in Charleston for the Democratic convention. Junius expected he would find Watts Sherman there, “& others desirous of having a hand in making the new President”—assuming that the next president, like six of the last eight, would be a Democrat. The convention turned out to be so bitterly divided between northern supporters of Stephen Douglas, still hoping for peace based on states’ rights, and southern radicals looking for provocation to secede, that the delegates could not agree on a candidate; they adjourned to try again in June.
The Republicans met in Chicago in May. Both their leading candidates opposed the expansion of slavery—William H. Seward, the powerful New York senator, and Abraham Lincoln, the articulate but relatively little-known Illinois lawyer. Running for the Senate against Stephen Douglas in 1858, Lincoln had made his famous argument for national union, citing the Gospel according to Mark: “ ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” It would have to become “all one thing, or all the other.” Four months later Seward explicitly connected the struggle over slavery to economic centralization. Though separate systems of free and slave labor had long coexisted within the Union, Seward declared, changes in commerce, transport, and population had brought the states “into a higher and more perfect social unity or consolidation,” and set the two systems on a collision course: “an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces” would require the country finally to choose between loosely coordinated sectionalism and federal union.
After much horse-trading and tumult, the Republicans in 1860 nominated Lincoln on a platform that opposed any extension of slavery and promised to increase the tariff, pass homestead laws, and build a transcontinental railroad. The Democrats, meeting again in June, failed to reach a consensus: they split into sectional factions, the northerners putting up Stephen Douglas, the southerners John Breckinridge of Kentucky.
Pierpont reached New York in late May, having been away five months. He spent most of his time that summer with Memie in Fairfield. Junius fretted by mail about cotton, and even more about not being able to find his son the right job on Wall Street. Perhaps he was defining the “right” connection too narrowly, or perhaps Pierpont had a reputation for the “sharp … contracted” behavior Duncan, Sherman had warned him about. By July, Junius was considering the China trade: “I feel so much solicitude to have you well settled & it is now time,” he wrote, “but if nothing offers then I think your time will be more profitably employed in travelling East than in remaining in New York without occupation.”
The junior Morgan had longed to go to China in 1857, when his mother weighed in with a veto. Now, as his father reconsidered the proposition, Pierpont had a compelling reason to stay in New York. Early in August, just before he went to see his family in England, he asked Memie to marry him, and she gave him the answer he wanted.
She wrote to her youngest brother, Henry, with whom she had been planning another trip abroad: “something has happened which will be likely to cut our plans short. I hope one of these days that you will have for a brother Mr. Morgan, & a good kind one I am sure you will find him, so you see I have engaged another courier for life … [And] now I want you to write to me, & tell me if you are pleased with the choice I have made.”
Both families were pleased—and under the circumstances, Junius agreed not to dispatch his son halfway around the world. “You see,” he teased Memie from London early in the new year, “I sent your young friend back to New York instead of to China as you seemed to prefer, but I don’t seem to have offended either party by so doing.”
Pierpont bought Memie a locket in Paris and a ring at Tiffany’s as soon as he returned to New York. They planned a year’s engagement; the wedding would take place in October 1861.
Virginia Osborn told one of her aunts in mock complaint that no one in the family went to parties that winter, “for Memie has become very domestic in her tastes and prefers talking to Pierpont in her comfortable home to doing the same thing in the midst of a crowd.” At the beginning of January, Memie came down with a severe cough that hung on for weeks. Pierpont hovered in constant attendance, taking her out for walks whenever she felt strong enough.
He was so delighted with her and their engagement that he had “some difficulty in coming down to things below,” noted his father. “Things below” meant work, and with the question of his affiliation still unresolved, Pierpont took a one-room office at 53 Exchange Place. “We are sending him something to do,” Junius told Memie, “no great profit in it to him, but much better than being idle.” The elder Morgan found a silver lining in his son’s professional limbo: “I think he is most fortunate in being out of business in such times.… he ought to be thankful that the present is not his first year’s experience in business on his own account.”
There had never before been “such times” in America’s history. A Republican coalition elected Abraham Lincoln in November 1860, with the hopelessly divided Democrats splitting their vote. The victory of a President and party avowedly hostile to slavery brought the long-standing sectional conflict to a head. In the four mo
nths between Lincoln’s election and inauguration, seven southern states left the Union: South Carolina led the way in December 1860, followed by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.†
Junius found “nothing short of sacrilege” in the idea of “dis-union.” To a colleague that January he denounced the “pitiable” President Buchanan who had proved himself “entirely incapable … & imbecile at a time when the blood of every true patriot & lover of his country is boiling with indignation against those who are threatening its dissolution.” A number of northern businessmen hoped to conciliate the South, since war would cut off cotton supplies, close factories and textile mills, curtail the transatlantic shipping trade, disrupt European markets for American securities, and stop southern purchases of northern manufactured goods. Junius, however, thought there could be no temporizing with rebellion: “I trust the North will make no concessions or propose any compromise which their good judgement will not approve after the excitement of the moment is over.” And he predicted that secession would prove “suicidal” for the South: “The day which dawns on a Southern Confederacy will see ‘the beginning of the end of Slavery’ in those states.”
When delegates from the seven seceding states drew up a Confederate constitution in early February, Junius told Memie he was glad to be so far away from the “terrible state of things … on your side of the water,” and concluded on a familiar note of disgust: “Whatever may be the result of the present troubles, I look upon the reputation of our country as gone. We have shown to the world how little real strength it has & how powerless for good is our government. Hereafter we must take our stand before other nations on the same level with the petty states of Central America. I cannot tell you how I mourn all this.”
Lincoln passed through New York at the beginning of March on the way to his inauguration. Mrs. Sturges, watching as he rode along 14th Street in an open barouche, found him a “bright pleasant looking” man who appeared younger than she expected, with “a hard lot before him.” On March 4, the new President promised in his inaugural address not to interfere with slavery where it already existed but to preserve the Union at any cost. Confederates took the speech (which had been considerably toned down by Lincoln’s advisers) as a declaration of war. Southern troops fired on Fort Sumter, a Union garrison on an island off Charleston, South Carolina, on April 12. Two days later a Confederate flag flew over the fort. The Civil War had begun.
Henry Adams, looking anxiously for some sign of Lincoln’s character at the inaugural ball, saw “a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kid gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism …; above all a lack of apparent force.” Shortly after the firing on Fort Sumter, Virginia Osborn told a friend in California that “it would be hard to find any one anywhere who has confidence either in Mr. Lincoln or Mr. Seward [the Secretary of State].” Even to members of Lincoln’s own cabinet, the rawboned novice in the Executive Office seemed indecisive, excessively cautious, and appallingly unprepared to deal with the national crisis.
Still, patriotic fervor ran high. Henry Sturges, age fifteen, saw “the Gallant Seventh Regiment off to the WAR” at New York’s Cooper Institute on April 19, and attended a rally in Union Square the next day: “Everybody wears Union cockades—thousands of people—splendid speeches—the greatest time I ever saw.” His twenty-one-year-old brother, Edward, left for Washington with the regiment’s next detachment. The Seventh took with it “one out of almost every family of standing and respectability,” noted Virginia: many “delicately nurtured, fastidious boys” were volunteering to fight.
Not Pierpont, who apparently shared Junius’s feeling that the American form of government had failed. Virginia was still arguing with him several months later in defense of the Constitution. He spent the spring and summer of 1861 handling cotton sales, railroad bonds, and Southern state bonds for Peabody & Co., and forwarding loans from London to the War Secretary in Washington. At a sale to raise money for the Union he bought copies of Asher B. Durand’s Sketches from Nature, Henry Inman’s Black Your Boots Sir, and James Suydam’s Moonlight.
In Medford, Massachusetts, that spring, an exultant John Pierpont turned out sheaves of poetry urging the North to victory in bloody battle, and over the summer persuaded Massachusetts Governor John Andrew to get him a job as a Union army chaplain. At age seventy-six, the old crusader—whose second marriage had turned out to be everything he hoped—marched off to war. “Well done! hero of 76!” cheered his son John.
Chaplain Pierpont of the 22nd Massachusetts Volunteers did not prove to be much of a soldier. From a tent pitched at Hall’s Hill on “the ‘seceded soil of Virginia,’ ” he described his camp life to John, Jr.: “alone by day and night, in a cotton cloth tent, without window or floor other than the ground, without a seat beside my camp bed, without a light … without a fire … with the most jejune of all possible diet [boiled potatoes, hard biscuit fired in salted swine fat, less than two ounces of meat in two weeks]. But n’importe. There is employment connected with it, useful employment, work to which while in camp, I feel myself competent, and by which I have some faint and forlorn hope that my country may be served.” Even that faint hope gave way as the temperature dropped and the aged warrior found himself “tramping and puffing up and down Hall’s Hill” at 3:00 A.M. to keep warm. Concluding that it was not his duty to self, family, or country to “get my living by freezing myself to death,” he resigned his commission and took a desk job in the Treasury Department under Secretary Salmon P. Chase. Reunited with his wife, he crowed to John from Washington: “I am here in the service and pay of the United States at $100 a month.”
His youngest son, James, was in the service and pay of the other side. Now married to Eliza Jane Purse, the daughter of a Savannah businessman who kept him in line with an “iron rod,” James signed up with the 1st Georgia Cavalry and rode off to war. He would never know the fate of the little song he had composed in 1850 called “One Horse Open Sleigh.” Published in Boston in 1857, then again as “Jingle Bells, or the One Horse Open Sleigh” in 1859, it did not gain widespread popularity until the twentieth century, and James died in 1893. Locally, he earned renown for the tunes he wrote to cheer on the Confederacy in the early 1860s—“We Conquer or Die” and “Strike for the South.”
Late in the summer of 1861, Pierpont took part in a business deal that provoked years of controversy. In the wake of the Union defeat at Fort Sumter in April, the ill-prepared Northern army urgently needed guns. A man named Arthur Eastman, who later described himself as not in any regular business but “familiar with firearms and ordnance,” had located five thousand breech-loading rifles called Hall Carbines, left over from the Mexican War, in a federal warehouse on Governors Island off the southern tip of Manhattan. In May, Eastman offered to alter the obsolete guns for the army and bring them up to modern standard. Ordnance Chief James W. Ripley considered them worthless and turned him down, observing that alterations generally made things worse. Eastman then proposed to buy the carbines outright, and Ripley agreed to sell the lot for $3.50 each—but Eastman did not have the necessary $17,500.
After the Union suffered a second defeat, at Bull Run on July 22, Lincoln ordered his armies in the west to take the offensive. General John C. Frémont, the new commander of the Western Department (and Buchanan’s 1856 opponent for the presidency), began buying arms for his troops from anyone who had them to sell. One of his agents, a New York lawyer named Simon Stevens, learned that Eastman had five thousand carbines at his disposal, and contracted to buy them for $12.50 each ($62,500), with an advance of $20,000. Like Eastman, however, Stevens did not have ready cash.
He telegraphed General Frémont on August 5, offering to sell him five thousand 58-caliber carbines—altered and brought up to government standard—for $22 each. When Frémont agreed to these terms by return wire and ordered the guns sent to Missouri at once, S
tevens had to admit that the rifles were not yet up to standard: he could send them right away for $21 each, or have them fixed and send the first lot, as originally priced, in ten days. Frémont told him to proceed with the alterations, and “hurry up.”
Eastman had agreed to pay the government $17,500 for guns that Stevens would buy from him for $62,500 and sell back to the government for $110,000. But neither man had the means to set the deal in motion.
In early August, Stevens applied to Pierpont Morgan, who lent him $20,000 on the security of General Frémont’s purchase order.‡ On August 7, Morgan went with Eastman and Stevens to the arsenal on Governors Island. He made out a draft to the officer in charge for $17,486, in exchange for 4,996 carbines, and a second draft to Eastman for $2,514—a total of $20,000. He would lend Stevens the remaining $42,500 due Eastman in twenty days, if he had begun to receive government payments. The guns would remain in the federal warehouse in his name, as security for his loan, until Eastman could have them altered.
The alterations took longer than expected. The first shipment of 2,500 guns went off to Frémont in St. Louis at the end of August. Morgan then decided to remove himself from the deal, and Junius’s former partner Morris Ketchum agreed to take his place. On September 10, Frémont’s ordnance officer in St. Louis paid Morgan $55,550 for 2,500 re-rifled carbines ($22 each plus packing and freight). Morgan deducted $26,344 to cover his own advances, interest, and commission, and sent the balance to Messrs. Ketchum, Son & Co. He had earned about 9 percent interest ($156) on his $20,000 loan, and a commission of $5,400—more than 25 percent.