by Jean Strouse
He began to keep diaries in 1850—small “Line-a-Day” books. Like most masculine journal writers of his time and social class, he was far more interested in registering what happened than in exploring subjective responses or ideas. “Sleighing, skating; beat father in backgammon,” he wrote in early January 1850. The next day, “wound 7 skeins of cotton for mother. A man fell off one of the towers of the new depot & killed.” He rarely mentions his siblings. Over the following months he recorded: “Dancing school. Ladies to tea.” “Father did not come home.” “Mother ill.” “Bought shad for 25¢.” “No school on account of bile [boil] on my neck which was very painful.” “Finished 3rd Book of Virgil. Picked some cherries.” Not even death evoked a comment: “Mr. S. B. Paddock [with whom he was living] died at 10 o’clock aged 56. In evening staid at home and read.”
Once in a while emotion breaks the surface. After a long illness he wrote, “Glad to get back to school again.” In March of 1851, after not hearing from home for several weeks: “Think it strange mother don’t write.” In Hartford one night, “Very lonesome at home with no one here.”
What the diaries chiefly portray is a young mind intent on order and control. Next to the day and date printed on each page, Pierpont entered the number of days gone by and remaining for the year—on October first, for instance: “Days past, 274,” “To come, 91.” At the end of 1851 he tabulated “Places Resided” between January and July—there were seventeen—and the diary pages covering each place. He kept lists of his income, expenses, the initials of girls he liked, and all the letters he sent and received, including postage paid.
His evasion of emotion and meticulous attention to detail probably served several ends at once. To be stoical, prudent, and self-controlled was to be the upright “little man” Joseph and Junius urged him to become, not an impractical wastrel of the Pierpont line. Making lists and keeping track of things may have provided a sense of mastery he did not have over larger areas of his life, such as family conflict, his mother’s moods, changes of address, friends, and schools, a grandfather’s death, and his own illnesses. It is hard to imagine a more terrifying loss of control than suffering a seizure.
Jared Sparks, writing about George Washington’s early interests, observed: “It is singular that a boy of 13 should occupy himself in studying the dry and intricate forms of business, which are rarely attended to till the affairs of life call them into use.” Pierpont also took a singular early interest in business. At his father’s store he learned to keep books and copy letters, and the math problems he worked on at school amounted to practice sessions for a life in finance. He converted dollars to pounds sterling, calculated interest rates, and worked out divisions of partnership profits. One day he had to “calculate the cost of an inland bill of exchange at Boston on New Orleans for $15,265.85 at 1% advance.” Also, “78 oz. avoirdupois pure gold will yield me what value in coin if from the proceeds 1/10 of 1% be taken for coinage.” Another day, given a capitalist’s annual income of $2,940—the interest on property four fifths of which paid 4 percent interest, while the remainder paid 5 percent—he had to calculate the amount at interest. (The answer is $70,000.)
Pierpont was fourteen when he left Cheshire in July 1851. That August his family moved to a Boston town house that Junius had rented from the merchant/philanthropist Amos Adams Lawrence at 15 Pemberton Square. Pierpont set out at once to explore his new surroundings. He spent hours watching ships in the harbor, sailed a kite on the Common, and took his little brother, nicknamed the “Doctor,” to the Bunker Hill Monument. After evenings at the theater, he pronounced The Hunchback & How to Settle Accounts with Your Washerwoman “very good,” but had no comment on Hamlet. He heard President Fillmore speak at the State House, and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes on “Love of Nature.” In Cambridge he secured the autograph of Jared Sparks, now president of Harvard. And he went out to Medford to visit the Reverend Pierpont, who had recently moved back to the Boston area from Troy.
In September, Pierpont passed the entrance exam for Boston English, a high school that specialized in math to prepare young men for commercial careers. (Boston Latin offered a more scholarly education in the classics.) After a few days, he noted, “Begin to like school very well.” He placed eleventh in a class of thirty-three the first term, and got an “excellent” mark for character. In math he worked on second degree equations, infinite decimals, and the multiplication of radicals.
Someone saved several of his essay assignments. In Thoughts and Resolutions on Entering the English High School, he said he intended to go straight into business after graduation, “to act and think in all cases for myself.” In order to obtain “a good situation in a store or office … I must have a good character in the school I last attended as no one will want a clerk who is not strictly correct and gentlemanly in his conduct and attentive to his business.…” In a paper on Industry: “perhaps the most essential” of virtues can “raise a person from the lowest stages of poverty and misery to wealth and an honorable station in society.” Elsewhere Pierpont proudly compared primitive means of transport to railroad trains “drawn by the ‘iron horse’ ” at thirty to forty miles an hour, and reflected that in 1652 America had been all forest and wilderness—two hundred years later, with cities studding the continent, “Commerce comes in to aid us … bringing the wares of other shores to us and taking ours to them.”
Indirectly striking a more personal note, he worried about young men forced to leave home—“the poor sailor” who braves deadly storms to bring back goods for wealthy merchants, and soldiers who enter “the bloody contest, not knowing, whether it is the will of God that they should breathe out their last expiring breath, away from home, and all who could pity them.” On the subject of slavery, he wrote in 1852 about “free and inoffensive negroes … snatched” from their “much loved home and country” by “cruel and heartfelt” (more likely, heartless) enslavers who drag the captives to “other shores, where no friend watches over or preserves them from the cruel lash.”
Slavery “has shook the pillars of this vast republic,” he continued, as “one by one the admission of Texas, the boundary of slave rule and the Fugitive Slave Law have issued from the capitol of the nation.” The Compromise of 1850 had postponed direct conflict between North and South, but sectional battle lines were etched into the nation’s consciousness. Several prominent northerners—including Junius but not the Reverend Pierpont—worried more about preserving the Union than about abolition, and Pierpont Morgan echoed their concern. “If the North refuse the entreaties of the South the ‘Flag of our Union’ must inevitably fall,” he declared. “… The proud eagle which for less than a century has spread his wings over a free and independent nation will fly away with disgust. Our national pennant will fall into disgrace and the Republic of the United States will be known no more for ever.”
In moving to Boston, Pierpont had left his childhood, extended family, and best friend behind. He and Jim corresponded weekly, setting up a mock partnership called “Goodwin Morgan & Co.” Pierpont ordered items available in the big city—shoes, engravings, books—and sold them to his cousin at no profit. In return, he asked for detailed news about Hartford, especially “the Drapers,” and volumes of genealogy: he was updating the family tree.
Though two years younger than Jim, he assumed command, dispensing autographs among their friends and issuing orders like a sergeant at arms: “Did you deliver to W.R. Lawrence the autograph of O.W. Holmes which I asked you to. If you did why didn’t you ask him for R.C. Winthrop’s. Go & ask him for it, and he will give it to you. I told him to.” He reported on the anomalies of transportation costs (it was cheaper to take a train from Boston to New York—two dollars—than from Hartford, even though the distance was twice as great). And he had become quite the authority on art. Sending to England for a special set of Illustrated London News covers, he advised Jim to order them as well: “I would if I was in your place for they are so much handsomer” than the ordinary issues; “you will want them un
bound.”
Illness interrupted the business of “Goodwin Morgan & Co.” in the spring of 1852. Pierpont came down with rheumatic fever, which caused such painful inflammations of his hip and knee that he could not walk. He missed twenty-nine days of school between March and May, and stayed home most of the summer. He went out to Medford to visit his grandfather in October “to see what good the pure air of the country would do me,” he told Jim. He had “a first rate time,” and soon felt well enough to “wish I was back again in Hartford. How about the Drapers?”
Country air and the company of Mr. Pierpont improved his spirits, but he was still too sick to go back to school. At the end of October his parents decided that a more radical “change of air” would do him good. Junius arranged for Charles W. Dabney, a shipowner/businessman and U.S. consul in the Portuguese Azores, to take Pierpont with him when he sailed. Although the boy had planned to go straight through high school into business, ill health forced a detour. On November 8, 1852, he left home for a rest cure in the sun.
Pierpont had to be carried on board the square-rigged bark Io in Boston Harbor. Before this illness he weighed 150 pounds; now, fifteen years old and five feet ten inches tall, he weighed 126. As the ship left Boston he noted in his journal: “Wind NW … Passed Cape Cod Light at 8 p.m.,” and the next day, “On the broad Atlantic out of sight of land for the first time in my life.”
Rough weather kept the seven other passengers belowdecks, but not Pierpont or Mr. Dabney. The young man’s health improved dramatically at sea: “I did not feel neuralgia [nerve pain] at all,” he wrote to his parents in Boston. Heading off into the unknown, leaving home and family like the soldiers, sailors, and slaves of his high school essays, he kept closer track than usual of exactly where he was in place and time. His journals record daily measures of latitude, longitude, barometric pressure, wind direction, and distance traveled.
With strong westerly winds, the Io reached the Azores—three island groups about nine hundred miles west of Portugal—in eleven days, sailing into the port of Horta on the island of Faial. Pierpont took a hotel room overlooking the harbor. At home, November meant bare trees and cold, gray days. Winter temperatures in exotic, sun-splashed Faial ranged from 55 to 70 degrees. Gardens bloomed with hydrangea, azalea, japonica. Pierpont sent oranges and local wine home for the Morgan family Christmas, hoping that “Santa Claus wont forget me in his annual visitation to Pemberton Square.”
He soon made a friend at his hotel, a consumptive English physician named Cole who had also come to Faial for reasons of health. The invalids ate together, played chess after dinner, and took long walks through Horta’s narrow streets. Still, Pierpont was lonely. He told his parents: “I don’t believe I should live … if Mr. Dabney’s family were not here.”
Three generations of Dabneys represented American interests in Faial between 1807 and 1892. Pierpont went to the consular residence and the Dabney mansion for dinners and private Sunday services (there was no Protestant church on the Catholic island), and had free run of the family’s libraries, billiard tables, gardens, stables, and grounds.
As his health slowly improved he spent hours at the Faial harbor learning about ships—who owned them, what they carried, how fast they traveled, how they were repaired. He mastered this information not only out of an inveterate fascination with commerce and transport, but also because he was entirely dependent on these vessels for news from home. In involuntary exile, trying to keep his attachments alive by mail, he sent letters, journals, and presents by every departing ship, ordered five American newspapers, and expected to hear from home once a week. Even the smallest details would interest him, he promised. Every time a ship came in he raced down to search her hold for items addressed to himself. Week after week found him “woefully disappointed.”
His pleas for mail grew more intense as the silence from Boston grew more protracted. Dispatching a stack of letters by the Io in mid-December, he wailed, “O! how anxiously I shall look for her return,” and when a gale came up he consoled himself that it would speed her round-trip passage. Seven weeks after he left Boston, an American schooner brought his first letter from home, on Christmas Day. The Pemberton Square Santa Claus had forgotten him, or else had failed to send packages to Faial in time. Putting the best face on the situation, Pierpont declared the letter “a very good Christmas present,” making the day “very happy … indeed.”
Why his parents did not write more is not clear. Some of the silence had to do with vagaries of weather and transport. Steamships were just beginning to replace sailing packets in the 1850s, and most mail went via England; sailing from Liverpool to Faial could take twenty-eight days, which, added to the transit time from the United States, meant that letters might spend two or three months en route. Still, Pierpont had reached Faial in eleven days, and several clippers arrived direct from Boston with mail for the Dabneys but none for him. Perhaps his parents thought that frequent contact with home would diminish his self-reliance.
He bought canaries and a blackbird “in order to have something to take care of and to make the time pass pleasantly,” but it didn’t help. Stormy weather in December brought several “lame duck” ships back to the harbor and long days indoors. Pierpont tried to occupy himself with billiards, whist, letter-writing, and reading—a book on the queens of England, and James Fenimore Cooper’s appropriately titled Homeward Bound. He was too anxious to read: after an hour “I get so nervous and twitchy … there is no pleasure in it.”
As always, he kept close track of expenses. His hotel room cost five Spanish dollars a week, plus 40¢ to 50¢ for laundry. And he was learning about foreign exchange. He concluded that he should not have brought American quarters, since they were worth only 24¢, while American dollars fetched $1.10 in Spanish currency, and English sovereigns $5.40 to $5.60—“according to the wants of the jews here to send money to England.”
Though he attended a few Portuguese ceremonies and dances, Pierpont took little interest in the local population. His sympathy for sailors and slaves had to do with the idea of separation from home, not with social compassion. If, as he had been taught, industry and initiative promised prosperity, the poor had only themselves to blame. “The people here are very poor indeed,” he told his parents, and “very lazy. They go around begging and it is very difficult to get through the street with out being accosted … for money and food.” Another day, surveying ruined houses and crumbling streets, he concluded: “These lazy Portuguese haven’t the pride enough to keep any thing in repair.”
Early in January he came down with influenza. Dr. Cole kept him company. “I don’t know what I should do if it were not for him,” the invalid sighed. “We can amuse ourselves together very well. He intends if nothing happens to go to America in the spring.” He wanted to go to America sooner than that. At the end of January, “very lonesome and unhappy,” he asked permission to return by the next Liverpool steamer, and repeated his familiar complaint: “I wish I received letters as often as you do. I have received but one in 10 weeks.”
Just as he recovered from the flu, one of his toes swelled up until once again for a few days he couldn’t walk: “It seems,” he moaned, “as though as soon as I get over one thing another comes.” Still, his health was improving. He ate twenty oranges a day, and was so fat he couldn’t button his pants “within at least an inch and a half.”
One night in February a flag went up in the harbor to signal the Io’s arrival from Boston. Racing to the consul’s residence, Pierpont found the Dabneys “jumping and dancing in high glee. Until it has been experienced I don’t think the pleasure can be imagined of a vessel coming into a place like this bringing letters &c from your friends when you can only receive them every two or three months.” He boarded the ship as soon as she anchored, and found a letter from Junius. With Mr. Dabney’s help he brought the rest of the mail ashore, and when “no more could be found for me then I began to feel very bad indeed.… I thought perhaps they had been left behind and a
ll those kind of sad foreboding. That night I slept very little.” Early the next morning he went back to search again, and found a packet of letters from relatives and friends. Another foray the following day produced still more. He had been gone three months; this mail was his first substantial contact with home.
Packages had to clear customs, and he waited in agony as days went by with nothing further landed from the Io. Then early one morning, shouting voices woke him up. People were calling to the bark’s captain, who was staying in the hotel room just below his, to look out at the harbor. Pierpont jumped out of bed to see the beach strewn with the wreckage of ships driven ashore overnight by a storm. The Io, still afloat, had been converted from a three-masted barkentine into a sloop, her crew having cut away two masts to keep her from running aground. Pierpont ran down to the beach to inspect the damage. Two days later—ten days after the Io’s arrival—he got his packages, which included new pants, slippers, molasses candy, and a watch.
While the ship was being repaired he felt more cut off than ever. “Franklin Pierce I suppose was this day inaugurated President of the United States of America,” he reflected on March 4, 1853, underlining his sense of isolation with a flourish: “Should like very much to know who composes his cabinet but on this lone island on the broad Atlantic’s bosom news is very old ere it reaches us & especially when the messenger lies here at anchor dismasted.”
During the early weeks of his “cure” he tried to keep a certain amount of starch in his upper lip, but by February he had had enough: “I continue to like Fayal as much as ever I did,” he told his parents, “which is not much.” Only the Dabneys and Dr. Cole made his stay bearable. Then in mid-March, Cole suffered a lung hemorrhage. Pierpont sat up with him most of the night. On March 29 he reported: “My poor friend here Dr. Cole died last evening at 5 o’clock he was a very nice gentleman and was a great source of pleasure to me.… He is to be buried tomorrow morning.” A few days later he added, “I miss him very much, for he was a very agreeable person.”
