by Jean Strouse
An interest rate of 9 percent was not unusual in the late summer of 1861. A 25 percent commission was. Morgan knew that Stevens desperately needed financing and stood to earn substantial profit. Probably no commercial bank would have issued the loan that summer, since money in the North was tight. Under the circumstances, the two men probably agreed to a profit-sharing reward for the banker who financed the deal.
By the time Morgan released the rest of the arms for shipment in mid-September, he was no longer part of the transaction. Stevens sent the guns to Frémont with a bill for $58,175. On September 26, the general certified that the guns had arrived “in good order,” but the bill could not be paid “for want of funds.” By early October, when Ketchum presented Frémont’s certificate of indebtedness to the War Department, a congressional committee was investigating profiteering in military supplies, and all arms payments had stopped.
The committee’s 1862 report concluded that “no public functionary of sane mind” would have had the government buy for $110,000 arms that it had just agreed to sell for $17,500—and that even exigencies of war did not justify a charge of $22 for these rifles.
Simon Stevens and Morris Ketchum did not agree. Ripley, thinking the guns worthless, sold them for $3.50; Frémont, a thousand miles away and fighting, thought them worth $22 when brought up to standard. Differing perceptions of value are the basis of all free trade, and when the War Department offered a settlement of $11,000 in June 1862, Ketchum and Stevens sued for the full $58,175. Ketchum argued that bankers in wartime had to rely on vouchers such as Frémont’s agreement to buy guns from Stevens, and that no one would risk lending to the war effort if such contracts could be annulled or altered after funds had been advanced. The Supreme Court ruled in December 1867, on an appeal from the Court of Claims, that the government was bound to honor Frémont’s telegraphed contract with Stevens. The War Department paid Stevens $58,175, plus accrued interest.
Pierpont Morgan never explained his decisions to take part in or get out of this deal. Morris Ketchum testified that in late August 1861 “Mr. Morgan had not sufficient funds under his control to continue his advances”—which may have been true temporarily, but he surely had access to more. Morgan, like Ketchum, probably saw the loan in purely commercial terms, as involving some risk and reasonably assured reward. The moral question that outraged those who considered it profiteering most likely did not enter his calculations.
R. Gordon Wasson, a vice president at J. P. Morgan & Co., Inc., who wrote a book about these events in 1941, claimed that Pierpont had not realized Stevens was selling the government its own arms, and that once he found out, he could no longer stomach the deal. Since Morgan made his loan based on the security of the Frémont telegrams, and since he accompanied Eastman and Stevens to buy the guns from the federal arsenal, he clearly knew the nature of the transaction from the outset. And Morris Ketchum was an old family friend. If Morgan had developed a sudden distaste for the sale, he would not have handed it over to this associate.
The most likely explanation for his withdrawal from the Hall Carbine affair in September 1861 is that he was about to marry Memie and leave for Europe, and wanted to settle his accounts before he left. If the deal had been completed as planned, he would have earned his fees and been free of obligation by the end of August. When the alteration work dragged on, delaying the government’s payment, it probably seemed a good idea to get out.
Once clear of the Hall Carbine loan, Pierpont focused all his attention on Memie, who had come down with one respiratory ailment after another. She divided her time that summer between Fairfield and the Osborns’ new house in Garrison, determined to conquer her “dreadful debility.” At the end of August, racked by chills, fevers, chest pain, and a relentless cough, she told Pierpont she was too sick to marry him. He dismissed her fears: after the wedding, he would take her to the Mediterranean to rest in the sun and get well.
Jonathan Sturges, also wondering whether the marriage should proceed, consulted Junius by mail. The senior Morgan had not been expecting his son to leave New York. He replied that an absence “at this particular juncture would be a sacrifice to [Pierpont] and also some inconvenience and disappointment to us in view of the different matters which he has in charge.” Still, he thought the two fathers should not see the matter only in that light. Pierpont’s future was clearly “bound up” in Memie—“she of all others possesses those qualities of heart and mind best calculated to make his life happy.” In view of Memie’s health and the “future welfare and happiness of our children,” Junius gave his “cheerful assent to the marriage”—not without touching again on its cost to him—“even though it should involve greater sacrifice than is now supposed.” Jim Goodwin would handle Pierpont’s work while the young couple took their therapeutic honeymoon.
A week before the wedding, Memie’s fits of paroxysmal coughing were followed by turns of “violent retching worse than any seasickness I ever had,” she told her mother from Garrison. She slept badly, took long naps during the day, and felt queasy from the porter (dark beer) her doctors prescribed. She worried about how she would look for the ceremony, since “my face in repose is so very very thin.” When Virginia suggested she keep the veil over her face, Memie was delighted: it would be such “a relief not to have so many eyes upon me.”
Juliet Morgan came from London with Sarah for the wedding—they would spend the winter in the house Pierpont had rented for himself and his bride, at 42 West 21st Street, while the newlyweds traveled. Goodwins trooped down from Hartford, and the Reverend Pierpont came from Boston on his way to active duty in Virginia. The day before her wedding, Memie took Communion with Pierpont at St. George’s Church. He wrote on the flyleaf of her Book of Common Prayer, “Memie from Pierpont. St. Georges. Communion Sunday. Octo. 6, 1861.”
Monday, October 7, was sunny and clear. A small wedding party gathered in the Sturgeses’ flower-filled front parlor at 10:00 A.M. Pierpont had grown a mustache, which added a couple of years to his appearance. Memie looked pale and fragile in a dress of ivory-colored, watered ribbed silk, hand-sewn in Paris, with wide “pagoda” sleeves, a full skirt, bustle, and train. Its fitted, high-necked bodice came to deep points in front and back, emphasizing her tiny waist. She did keep the veil over her face throughout the brief service, occasionally leaning on Pierpont’s arm for support. Everyone watched her for signs of strain.
Her parents gave a party that afternoon, and Memie rested most of the next day. On October 9, as John Pierpont’s Massachusetts regiment marched down 14th Street, Mr. and Mrs. Pierpont Morgan and a maid named Anna McAfferty sailed from New York Harbor on the Persia. Pierpont sent Mr. Sturges a note by pilot boat from Sandy Hook: “Memie is very bright & cheerful—& rabid for lunch. She is very much better than I feared & has borne the partings remarkably well. Love to all from herself and myself. Yours in great haste …”
Crossing the turbulent autumn Atlantic, Memie felt better than she had in months. She slept through the night without coughing, and was the only woman on board to appear at every meal. The couple stopped briefly in London to consult the eminent physician Sir Henry Holland. Junius said Pierpont’s mustache made him look as if he ought to get up early and call the roll.
In Paris, Memie was examined by lung specialists Armand Trousseau and Jules A. Béclard, who told Pierpont she had tuberculosis. This news “came upon me most unexpectedly,” he told Mr. Sturges, and he did not share it with his wife. Her left lung seemed worse than the right. There was no cure, but the doctors hoped she might improve with rest, a remedial diet, and warm air.§
Knowing without a diagnosis that she was extremely ill, Memie dutifully followed the experts’ instructions. She took a small pellet of turpentine after every meal—“quite tasteless,” she reported to her mother, “until melted in the stomach & then I like the slight flavor.” Turpentine was supposed to “lessen the great accumulation of mucus which I almost vomit (so loose & abundant is it) night & morning”—and also to calm t
he “feverishness which follows my internal shakes.” In addition, she swallowed cod liver oil, a teaspoon of “nice jelly” twice a day, and asses’ milk whenever she could get it. The one prescription she objected to was painting her left shoulder with iodine: she often forgot, and soon let it go, trusting to “the lovely air, nourishing food, the above medicines & most loving care.”
She had only praise for the provider of this loving care. Pierpont carried her up seven flights of stairs one day in Paris. “It is an anxious charge for him,” she told her parents, “& at present I can do but little to repay him.” Another day: “I wish you could see his loving devoted care of me, he spares nothing for my comfort & improvement.” He took solitary walks through the romantic city, and brought back flowers, her favorite foods, and a foot warmer lined in velvet.
In early November the honeymooners proceeded south to Algiers, where the Mediterranean sun glinted off turrets and whitewashed walls. Memie loved sitting in the open French doors of their bedroom at the Hôtel de la Régence, watching the street life in the square below, reading and writing letters in air “soft as July.” The proprietor sent up fresh fruit and flowers every day.
Her menstrual periods had stopped that summer, probably because she had lost so much weight. From Algiers five weeks after her wedding she confided to her mother that though her “visitor” had not returned, the Paris physicians thought it just as well, given the state of her health. “Now don’t beloved Mother fancy anything else for such is not the case.” Memie’s certainty that she was not pregnant suggests that her marriage may not have been consummated: perhaps doctors had advised the couple to wait until the rest cure restored her strength.
Pierpont went out riding every day, jumping fences and “scouring” the Algerian countryside. At the beginning of December, Memie’s health took a sharp turn for the worse. She came down with intestinal trouble, and “nervous” fevers set in every afternoon. Having felt better crossing the ocean than at any point since leaving home, she now longed for the sea: “I think oh if some one only would take me in their arms & lay me down upon a ship at sea.”
Someone did take her in his arms and carry her down to the town square every morning to sit in the sun, then back upstairs to rest. He ordered special foods from Marseilles, brought home roses, geraniums, and mignonette, took her for drives in the afternoons, roasted apples in their fireplace, and, as he had done for himself in the Azores, bought birds to keep her company—two nightingales and three canaries. Memie could have enjoyed all this if she were well, she told her mother, “but I believe that when anyone has a nervous fever upon them everything looks dark and sometimes one’s spirit even rebels against the dispensation of a loving all wise God.” Though having a “kind and loving husband makes me happy in spite of many adverse circumstances,” she missed her family intensely, being so ill so far from home: “it is only 9 weeks today since we were married & it seems a year.”
Mrs. Sturges had offered to join them if Pierpont thought it necessary. He hesitated to have her cross the winter Atlantic, but Memie was now too weak to stand or get dressed—he and Mrs. McAfferty had to help her walk across the room—and so thin that lying down made her bones ache. In late December, certain at last that she needed her mother’s care, he asked Mrs. Sturges to come, telegraphing Junius to write for him, since the message would reach New York faster from London than Algiers. Jonathan Sturges was deeply worried about his daughter, but questioned the urgency of the situation in light of Pierpont’s hypochondria: “he is very easily alarmed when he is sick or any one else[;] so is his Father.”
As if in answer to this charge, Pierpont followed Junius’s letter with a long explanation of his own: “I do not wish to alarm you,” he told Mr. Sturges, “nor do I think there is any immediate danger but I should not think I was doing right to hide from you the true state of her health. I can but feel that she is very sick.” He blamed her rapid deterioration on the Algerian climate—and himself: “The greatest mistake I ever made was coming here at all. I fear it will take all winter to bring our dear Memie back to where she was when she arrived.…”
Sharing her hopes for a sea cure, he booked passage for three on a steamer to Marseilles. When his party arrived at the Algiers harbor, however, the ship’s captain took one look and refused to let them board; he did not think Memie would survive the trip. The trio returned in defeat to the hotel, and Pierpont resumed his sad report to Mr. Sturges: “I cannot hide from myself that Memie is very very sick.” The disease in her left lung had progressed with “fearful rapidity”—acute consumption such as Memie’s was said to “gallop”—and a local homeopath said the right lung had worsened as well: “I need not tell you what a blow it is to me & I know it will be to you & yours. We can only trust & hope although it may be against hope that our Heavenly Father may yet let the cup pass with out our drinking.… I hope I may say His will not ours be done.”
At last he informed his wife of the Paris doctors’ diagnosis. She was too ill to be much affected by the news, he told her father, and continued “most hopeful and happy, although the tears frequently come into her eyes when she thinks of herself so sick away from you all.” He anxiously awaited Mrs. Sturges’s arrival. “I don’t know what we would do without Mrs. McAfferty—she nurses Memie most devotedly & as Memie is now so weak that she requires such tender nursing as only women can give I am compelled most reluctantly to yield my place.”
Mary Sturges left New York on January 15 with her son Edward, who was on military leave. At Queenstown (now Cobh, the seaport on the southwest coast of Ireland) they found a letter from Junius saying the younger Morgans had somehow crossed the Mediterranean to Nice. Mary and Edward went quickly through London and Paris to Marseilles, where they caught a steamer to Nice. On February 2, Pierpont met them at the dock and drove them up a winding, stone-walled road to their Niçoise residence, the Villa St. Georges. Set amid groves of olive, orange, and lime, it had a spectacular view of the snow-covered Maritime Alps. Canaries flew around freely in a plant-filled conservatory off Mrs. Sturges’s room, and the pair of nightingales lived in a little salon adjoining Amelia’s. On warm days Pierpont had been wheeling his wife out to the gates of the villa in a Bath chair, then back through rose gardens and shady lanes of trees. When it was colder, he built wood fires indoors. By the time her mother arrived, Memie rarely felt up to going out. Her cough kept her awake most nights; she slept during the day.
Junius had been urging his son to come to London to discuss business, and four days after the Sturgeses arrived, Pierpont left. Mary Sturges wrote to him daily, reporting on the alternating good and bad spells to which he had become all too accustomed. “We miss him very much,” she noted in her diary.
The news from New York was largely about the war. “Whenever we are not absorbed in anxiety about our dear absent ones,” wrote Virginia in February, “our country’s troubles take up all our thoughts.” The North had just had its first real triumph: General Ulysses S. Grant and Flag Officer Andrew Foote had blocked the advance of the rebel army up the Mississippi River, and captured two Confederate forts on the Kentucky-Tennessee border. Encouraged by strong expressions of Union feeling in Tennessee and northern Alabama, Virginia continued: “What a feeling of thanksgiving will thrill through our country if we see a prospect of soon quelling this terrible rebellion.”
She had a special message for her brother-in-law: “Tell Pierpont I begin to hope that I shall be able to prove to him that the Constitution is not a failure but a very good thing to live under, that we have a government strong in the affections of the people, wherever its present representatives may stand, and that before you all return from Europe you may be proud to call yourselves citizens of the United States.”
Most people expected the fighting to be over by spring. Jonathan Sturges asked his wife to “tell Ed he’ll miss all the glory if he don’t get back soon.”
Memie lost what little strength she had during the ten days of Pierpont’s absence. Her cough
grew worse, and her mouth so sore she could eat only egg whites and bouillon with rice. In London, Junius urged his son to stay a few more days, but Pierpont was desperate to get back to Nice. He made the journey in forty-eight hours, arriving, exhausted, early Sunday morning, February 16. Memie “threw her wasted arms around his neck and kissed him so lovingly,” reported her mother.
He sat with his wife all day, yielding his place to Mrs. Sturges and Anna only when he went to bed. At midnight, Memie ordered her mother to sleep. Six hours later Mary was back. “Oh Mother,” said Memie, “Annie and I have had a hard night.” Mary sent Anna to bed, and fed her daughter fresh eggs, warm barley water, and her own special tea.
“As I knelt by her side and bent over her hand she said, ‘Oh Mother you are praying for me it is so sweet to think so.’ ” Memie then seemed to sleep, although she kept opening her eyes. Suddenly, at 8:30, she began to breathe strangely, and her expression changed. “I tried to raise her,” continued Mrs. Sturges, “and called Anna; as soon as she looked at her she said death was in her face. I ran to call Pierpont he got down just in time to see her breathing her last. Eddie did not get into the room till after she was gone. Poor Pierpont knelt by her in an agony of grief calling upon her only to speak to him once more.”
It rained all day. Pierpont went out to telegraph the news to his father.
No one slept much that night at the Villa St. Georges. On Tuesday, a nurse embalmed the body—“Mr. Morgan not very well,” wrote Mrs. Sturges in her diary—and on Thursday an Anglican Reverend C. Childers came to conduct a private funeral service. He read from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians (1:21–24): “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. But if I live in the flesh, this is the fruit of my labour: yet what I shall choose I wot not. For I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better: Nevertheless to abide in the flesh is more needful for you.”