The Great Pierpont Morgan Read Free Page A

enterpriser of the early nineteenth century.
    Joseph Morgan’s son, Junius Spencer Morgan, was born in 1813, before his father arrived in Hartford; and Junius, too, was put into business without benefit of a college education. He got a taste of commercial life in New York and then spent a number of years in a drygoods merchant’s firm in Hartford. But in his late thirties he moved to Boston to become a partner in the booming firm of James M. Beebe & Co., which conducted and financed foreign trade transactions, particularly in cotton; and by that time, as a result of his father’s expanding wealth, he was able to bring considerable capital with him to put into the Boston firm, which thereupon became J. M. Beebe, Morgan & Co. But Junius Morgan did not remain long in the work of financing those exports and imports which made the Boston of the eighteen-fifties a hustling center of clipper-ship trade with Europe and Asia. After only a few years he was invited to go to London to become a partner of George Peabody, a Yankee who had built up a respected and very profitable international banking house there. And when, during our Civil War, George Peabody retired, the Peabody firm—an important link in the system of financial communications between imperial London and industrializing America—took the name of J. S. Morgan & Co. In short, Junius Morgan, helped along on his career by his Hartford father’s well-invested savings, became a man of wealth and of international influence.
    Thus it happened that Junius Morgan’s son, John Pierpont Morgan, grew up in an atmosphere of financial security, rising business prestige, and rising worldly consequence.
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    The house in which Pierpont Morgan was born on April 17, 1837, was an ample one, his grandfather’s house at 26 Asylum Street, Hartford; nothing palatial, but a substantial urban building three stories high and six windows wide across the front. (It is gone now; in 1948 its site, in a somewhat run-down commercial district between more progressive business areas, was part of a lot occupied by a six-story branch office building of The Travelers—with a paint shop and a record shop on the ground floor, and bowling alleys next door, and a technical institute and movie theater across the way.) At the time of Pierpont Morgan’s birth, his father was still a young Hartford merchant, but his grandfather was already a man of considerable means.
    Young Pierpont—“Pip,” as they called him in his boyhood—went first to a small private school for young children in Hartford, then to a public grammar school, then to a boarding school at Cheshire, Connecticut (while his father was moving to Boston and becoming established there); then to the English High School in Boston, a public school of exceptionally high standards; then (as the family moved abroad to London) to a private school in Vevey, Switzerland; and finally for over a year to the University of Göttingen in Germany. There was always plenty of money behind him, and of educational opportunity, and of New England belief in breadth of education.
    Inevitably he early absorbed, through inheritance and through the very air of the commercial Hartford of the eighteen-forties, certain traditions and tastes characteristic of the Yankee business community. First, there was the tradition of businesslike thrift. There was nothing finer than to be a good business man, and the very mechanics of a business operation were alluring. When Pierpont was just reaching his twelfth birthday, he and his cousin Jim Goodwin, after the immemorial fashion of twelve-year-olds, got up a show for which they sold tickets to their families and indulgent friends—a Grand Diorama of the Landing of Columbus ;not only did Pierpont keep strict account of every penny received and disbursed, but he prepared afterward an accurate balance sheet of the whole operation, headed “Morgan & Goodwin, Grand Diorama Balance