by Jean Strouse
After four months in the semitropics his health was restored. He could now walk “as fast as anybody,” he told Boston, and had gained back all the weight he lost the previous fall: “The object of my coming here being accomplished, I think it is about time to turn my face homeward.” His parents finally agreed that he was cured. Instead of bringing him home, however, they arranged to meet him in England for a new phase of his—and their—cultural education.
Pierpont left Faial on April 15, 1853, on the steamship Great Western. Eight days later, having turned sixteen en route, he reached London and put himself up at the Castle & Falcon Hotel in the City. He did errands for Mr. Dabney, visited Lloyds, and in one day took in Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, Apsley House, Hyde Park, and the House of Lords. At the end of April he met his parents in Manchester. He took his mother walking and shopping; with Junius he made professional calls. The Americans toured Stratford-on-Avon, Warwick Castle, and Oxford before heading in mid-May to London.
Junius’s firm, J. M. Beebe, Morgan & Co., had posted $7 million in gross annual sales for 1852, and England’s leading traders knew it. At the beginning of 1853 George Peabody, the most prominent American banker in England, had invited Junius to join his London firm—an offer the latter declined with regret on account of his obligations to his Boston partners. On May 18, Mr. and Mrs. Junius Morgan attended a dinner Mr. Peabody gave for the new American minister in London. Pierpont had to miss it because he was sick.
He got some recompense the next day when he and his father toured the Bank of England, the leading financial institution in the world, set behind a massive, Corinthian-columned facade built by Sir John Soane at the end of the eighteenth century. Pierpont wrote in his diary that night: “I held £1,000,000 in my hand.”
The American trio set off for the Continent at the end of May, sped through Belgium and Germany (catching sight of the Prussian King Frederick William IV in Dresden), then spent two leisurely weeks in Paris. Staying at a hotel in the Rue Saint-Honoré, they went to the Opéra, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Luxembourg Palace, and the Jardin des Plantes. Pierpont noted excellent dinners at the Palais Royal and the Café de Paris. One day he saw Napoleon III and his Empress, Eugénie. Another, he visited Napoleon’s tomb at the Invalides, rode in “the woods of Boulogne,” and toured Versailles.
Back in London in June, he continued his royalty watch, spotting Queen Victoria (who had been crowned the year he was born) and Prince Albert early one morning at Cobham. The next night he saw them again at the opera. He took a day trip to Windsor, and heard the archbishop of Canterbury preach at St. George the Martyr in Bloomsbury. His journals note visits to the Crystal Palace at Sydenham and the Duke of Devonshire’s residence, Chatsworth. In July the Morgans made a quick trip through Wales, Ireland, and Scotland—where they visited Abbotsford, home of Sir Walter Scott—before sailing home.
Pierpont had been away for nine months. After a cursory stop in Boston he went straight to Hartford and spent most of August visiting the Goodwins, “the Drapers,” and his Morgan grandmother. In a diary note about one day’s outing he sounds positively rhapsodic: “Had 1st rate time. Helen Wells rode with me. Most splendid in every respect.” When he returned to Boston in September, he told Jim: “Father thinks we had better be joined like the Siamese twins don’t you think it would be a good plan.” Also, “I do wish I knew some first rate girls here to wait upon to Lectures Concerts &c.” At Boston English he rejoined his class even though he had missed an entire year: “Have to study pretty hard to keep up.”
Keep up he did, in Astronomy, Theology, Moral Philosophy, and Evidences of Christianity (all “very dull”), complaining that he studied from 8:00 A.M. till 12:00 P.M. and had “hardly … a single moment that I can with truth call my own.” He did manage to find moments to attend Whig meetings at Faneuil Hall and lectures by Wendell Phillips, Edward Everett, Henry Ward Beecher, and Oliver Wendell Holmes—all increasingly preoccupied with questions of slavery and sectional conflict—and to see a stage production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Partisan politics did not keep him from writing to Mississippi Democrat Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War, for an autograph: “it would give me great pleasure to add yours … to the already numerous collection of your illustrious predecessors in office.”
The only allusion in his diaries to the “peculiar institution” of slavery appears in June 1854. An escaped slave named Anthony Burns had been arrested in Boston under the Fugitive Slave Act and held in federal custody for his master. Antislavery Bostonians did everything they could to prevent Burns’s extradition. A biracial group led by the prominent abolitionist T. W. Higginson tried to rescue him by force, which led President Pierce to call in the cavalry and marines. On June 2, federal troops escorting Burns to Boston Harbor had to march through a lamentation of church bells, past buildings draped in black and displays of Old Glory hanging upside down. “We went to bed one night old fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs,” wrote the Morgans’ landlord, A. A. Lawrence, “& waked up stark mad Abolitionists.” William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution, calling it a covenant with death. If Pierpont shared New England’s moral outrage, he left no record of it. “Great excitement in Boston on account of the slave Burns who was remanded today,” he wrote in his diary. “Beautiful day.”
The subjects he discussed in letters to Jim Goodwin included sartorial trade (caps, coats, boots), comparative religion (Hartford’s Christ Church versus Boston’s St. Paul’s), a pretentious acquaintance (“I should present him with a few beans some evening and see whether he knows beans or not”), and the opposite sex. He warned Jim about a Hartford belle named Ellen Terry (no relation to the British actress) whom he “positively disliked,” explaining: “she is all self. She thinks everything must be done for her that she desires and when you do it she seems to think it is nothing but what you had to do.” Still, he asked Jim to talk to Miss T. “and see if you cannot get something out of her about me.”
He had finally met some “first rate girls” in Boston, whom he referred to by their initials. One in particular—“E.D.”—accompanied him to concerts, parties, lectures, and museums. She was Elizabeth Darling, a former “Draper,” three years older than her admirer. He walked her home whenever possible, and made friends with her father and brother. He called on other girls in Boston and Hartford as well, but Lizzie Darling appears to have been his favorite.
In the early summer of 1854 he divided his attention between Lizzie and an essay he was writing for graduation. On July 22 he announced in his diary: “Thus ends school with me.” And on the twenty-fourth, Exhibition Day, he read his essay aloud before an audience of teachers, students, their families, and friends.
Other graduating seniors spoke on “Eloquence,” “Is Conscience Paramount to Human Law?” and “Effects of Intellectual Pursuits upon the Character.” Pierpont had chosen to discuss a historical figure. “In the year 1769,” he began, with an almost audible roll of drums, “when the wicked and profligate Louis XV, goaded by his own guilty conscience and laden with the execrations of his subjects, was sinking into his grave, in the little island of Corsica, the most remarkable being of his age made his appearance on the arena of life.”
Napoleon galvanized the nineteenth-century imagination. Books about him coursed off the presses decades after his defeat. “Empire” defined fashions in clothing, architecture, furniture, and art. Mental patients claimed to be the Man of Destiny. Military leaders celebrated Napoleon’s strategies, statesmen studied his rise to power, schoolboys fought for the right to play him in mock battle. To Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dismay, the French Emperor held Americans in singular thrall.
Pierpont bowed to the legendary stature of his subject: “The name and fame of Bonaparte have spread from one extremity of the earth to the other, and glowing delineations of his unequalled bravery, his consummate genius, and his indomitable perseverence [sic], have been drawn by the master spirits of every civilized land.” His own portrait h
ighlighted the great man’s humble start: “Descended, as he was ever proud to own, from no princely progenitor, Napoleon Bonaparte was, in an extraordinary degree, a self-made man.” Any boy might imagine himself setting off on the same path. What especially interested this one was the general’s indomitable will: “No obstacles fell in his way which seemed to him insurmountable.… He might be defeated, as he sometimes was, but he shrunk from no hardship through impatience, he fled from no danger through cowardice.”
Pierpont’s parents had offered him other kinds of heroes: Sparks’s George Washington was a model democratic leader—honest, industrious, self-abnegating—while Junius’s Duke of Wellington stood for the hallowed power of military and aristocratic tradition. Yet to the junior Morgan, as to generations of Americans, the morally ambiguous Corsican adventurer had far more appeal than the virtuous father of the American Revolution or the conservative British Duke.‡
The seventeen-year-old author returned repeatedly to Bonaparte’s place in history—to the measure ultimately taken of a controversial man and his myth—in overblown passages that eerily prefigure the mixed assessments of his own career. “No human being, whose life has been the subject of a biographer, has been so differently estimated, both in the popular mind and in elaborate memoirs,” he wrote. Though one historian “lavishly praises” and another “indiscriminately condemns” the Corsican, none doubted his courage or genius. The experts failed to agree largely on the question of motive.
Pierpont took skeptical yet admiring exception to Napoleon’s claim that he had worked only for “the prosperity of France”: “Unmitigated personal ambition led him to prefer his own private advancement to the future welfare of his country.” It was ambition plus “preeminent genius” that “made him master of many surrounding countries which yielded to his victorious sword.”
Not long after his own exile on a lonely island, Pierpont imagined Napoleon at St. Helena: “What must have been his feelings, on finding himself no longer his own master, surrounded on all sides by the ocean, and closely watched by sentinels placed there by his enemies? And when, after many many years, he lay upon his death bed, his spirits crushed, his hopes of liberation vanished, and his body languishing away with severe sickness, how often must his thoughts have reverted to those brighter days in his existence, when he was the idol of France and the conqueror of the world!”
The essay concludes with a nod to the historical long view: “No human tribunal can yet settle the main points in Napoleon’s life satisfactorily to all.” Nonetheless, the writer has settled some points himself, since “bigotry and hatred” characterize Bonaparte’s critics, while “admiration of genius and bravery” distinguish his fans. In the end, “time, that great modifier of political sentiments and opinions, must glide along many years more before a correct estimate can be made of Napoleon’s motives. Private animosities and private attachments must be buried in oblivion. The personal enemies and friends of the conqueror must pass away. The institutions of France which were commenced during his reign must be more fully developed.
“When this shall have been accomplished; then, and not till then, can a just judgment be given of the life and motives of NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.”
* Junius left “have him” out of the sentence, then added it in above the line. He was so accustomed to issuing instructions to both John Pierpont and John Pierpont Morgan that this omission—which has him telling the older man to devote a certain part of each day to reading and study—seems a funny but not surprising mistake.
† Called the American Plutarch, Sparks taught history at Harvard, and edited a series called the Library of American Biography, on America’s great men. His Writings of George Washington took up twelve volumes, the last of which was a biography. Juliet gave her son an abridgment.
‡ A. L. Guérard found in 1924 that Harvard freshmen, asked to name their favorite historical character, repeatedly gave Napoleon first place. “Indeed,” noted Howard Mumford Jones and Daniel Aaron in the 1930s about the Napoleonic legend in America, “the ‘Child of Destiny’ was more interesting than the Olympian Washington, who was neither besmirched nor humanized by Napoleon’s horrible but fascinating feats.”
Chapter 4
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
George Peabody, the American banker in London who wanted Junius to join his firm, had not given up. He renewed his offer at the end of 1853. Junius went to England to discuss it. His Boston partnership agreement was about to expire, and early in the new year he agreed to join Peabody’s Anglo-American bank as of October 1.
Peabody’s rise to the position he held in 1854 had been steep. It was commonly said around Salem, Massachusetts, that “you were either a Peabody or a nobody,” but young George was both. Born into a poor branch of the family in South Danvers (now Peabody), Massachusetts, in 1795, he left school at eleven to work in a general store, fought in the War of 1812, then went into the wholesale dry goods business in Washington, D.C. By 1827 he was no longer a nobody: his firm had branch offices in Philadelphia and New York, and he was worth $85,000. In 1837, trading $700,000 worth of goods a year with England, Europe, India, and China, he moved to London and opened an office in the City.
There he watched London’s premier investment houses finance international trade without actually buying or selling goods, and made the lucrative transition from merchant to merchant banker. He began to supply commercial credit for a fee to U.S. farmers, cotton planters, and foreign buyers, and to manage international currency exchanges for export-import markets, becoming a specialist in short-term trade. He financed long-term investment as well, channeling European capital to the United States.
America’s booming 1830s went bust just as Peabody set himself up in London. By 1842 British capitalists held roughly $100 million in defaulted U.S. state bonds, and as a result not even the federal government could sell new paper in London. The bonds had been issued for just the kinds of enterprises Joseph Morgan financed—railroads, turnpikes, canals, and local banks. Like Joseph, Peabody believed that careful investment in the emerging American market would ultimately pay. The problem was that the Europeans who held the money the United States needed had no way to gauge the caliber of ventures three thousand miles away.
Capital markets are essentially the organized processes through which money for long-term investment is raised, distributed, traded, and above all valued, and Peabody made it his business to certify value. He minimized the risk to his clients’ capital by vouching, insofar as possible, for the quality of the securities he underwrote—chiefly, bonds for railroads and states. He also waged an effective campaign from London to get state governments out of default, since legislatures that reneged on their debt jeopardized all U.S. access to foreign capital. Working through reporters, politicians, clergymen, and other bankers, Peabody helped persuade the governments of Maryland and Pennsylvania to resume servicing their debt. His personal interest, as a banker taking responsibility for properties he represented, coincided with America’s interest in reopening channels through which money flowed westward across the Atlantic.
Within a few years foreign anxiety about American defaults had subsided, and wealthy Europeans, uneasy about the 1848 upheavals on the Continent, were once again looking for investment opportunities in the United States. Six thousand new miles of railroad track were laid down in the 1840s. Peabody’s reputation for backing “sound” ventures brought him ample business, and as the new construction boom created a large demand for rails, he moved into the iron trade as well. In the spring of 1852, commenting on the English market for American securities and speaking for his firm, he told friends: “We believe we pretty much regulate prices & are the principal controlers of the Market.”
The world’s haute banque investment houses such as Rothschilds and Baring Brothers did not solicit clients or steal one another’s business. They waited for kings, states, and entrepreneurs to come to them. To compete in this market without violating Old World rules, Peabody discreetly promoted
his services through financial acumen and statesmanship.
In 1851, the U.S. government failed to finance American participation in Prince Albert’s international exhibition of industrial products at the Crystal Palace. The U.S. displays consisted of a few wineglasses, a pair of saltcellars, and a square of soap—until George Peabody put up $15,000. As a result, between May and October 1851 six million people saw Cyrus McCormick’s reaper, Samuel Colt’s revolvers, and Richard Hoe’s printing press. Congress eventually paid Peabody back for an act that had earned him diplomatic standing and the permanent affection of Albert’s wife, the Queen.
That Fourth of July he gave a banquet in honor of Anglo-American friendship. Abbott Lawrence, the American minister in London, had advised him against it, since the Fourth celebrated England’s defeat at American hands. Undeterred, Peabody invited the eighty-four-year-old Duke of Wellington, and once Wellington accepted, social London followed. A thousand people attended the party at Almack’s in St. James’s Street, under portraits of George Washington and Queen Victoria decorated with Union Jacks and American flags. When Wellington arrived at 11:00 P.M., the band played “See, the Conquering Hero Comes.” Peabody presented him to Mr. Lawrence in quiet triumph.
By 1852 the bachelor Peabody had a thriving business, an international reputation, and nearly $3 million. He did not, at age fifty-seven, have an heir, which was why he needed Junius Morgan. The great nineteenth-century international banks were family dynasties with offices all over Europe. In the high-risk business of raising and lending large amounts of money across great distances for long periods of time, they chose to work through affiliates related by blood or marriage. The Rothschilds, beginning with Mayer Amschel in eighteenth-century Frankfurt, had built an empire on hereditary ties: family members headed branches in Paris, London, and Vienna. Jewish, multilingual, politic, private, the Rothschilds occupied a unique place in the upper echelons of European culture, and their allegiance to the bank transcended all other claims. Partly because they had few peers and partly to keep the business and the assets in the family, sixteen of Mayer Amschel’s eighteen grandchildren married relatives.
