Morgan

by Jean Strouse

  While the princely Rothschilds lived surrounded by art in sumptuous town houses and on large country estates, the abstemious George Peabody rented rooms at the Regent Street Hotel and had little interest in culture. He worked ten hours a day, did not drink, smoke, or take vacations, and stood for half an hour one day with a head cold in the London rain passing up a twopenny bus to wait for one that cost a penny. Pierpont sketched him for Jim Goodwin as “a very agreeable gentleman and very full of wit, but a regular old bachelor if you could have seen the quantity of nic-nacs which he carried with him to America … stored away in his trunks with the greatest precision you would most certainly have thought that he was going to Central Africa or to some other unexplored regions.”

  The “regular old bachelor” was fastidious about his appearance: he wore custom-tailored clothes, and dyed his hair as it began to turn gray. He also had a mistress and a daughter in “a secluded but dignified and permanent establishment” in Brighton. According to his biographer, Franklin Parker, Peabody did not marry the woman because of “class and background” and the rigid Victorian code: “a gentleman did not, as a rule, marry his mistress no matter how fond he may have been of her.” The gentleman’s own social stature, if that was the ground of his delicacy, had been recently acquired.

  George Peabody could not know that the dynasty he started by bringing in Junius Morgan would surpass Rothschilds and Barings, the reigning lords of world finance. He did know that the economic future lay in America, and through Morgan he staked a claim to it. As word of the new partnership got out, an English friend told Junius that with Peabody nearing retirement, “we naturally look to you as the future representative of American credit in this country.” Barings’ American agent wrote to his London office: “If Mr. Peabody was safe before, he will be much safer now with Mr. Morgan at his side”—and the competition for Barings in America would be considerably “more formidable than before.”

  Conscious of the social limitations imposed by his bachelor habits and tastes, Peabody wanted his new partner to live in style. A mutual friend found “a splendid palace for you in Grosvenor Square,” he wrote to Junius in May 1854: “I certainly like the location. What think you and Mrs. M. of it at [£]1,000 [$5,000] a year?” Junius thought he had better wait till they arrived.

  He spent his last half year in the United States winding up old business and preparing for his family’s move. Pierpont helped out once he finished school in June. He was chafing to start his own career—he had his eye on the East India shipping trade—but his father decided he should go to school in Europe first to learn French and German. Junius spoke no foreign language, and told Jim Goodwin that “the advantage [of knowing French] … cannot be overstated. I regret so much that I am deficient that I don’t intend my children shall have the same cause for regret.”

  In early September, Pierpont made rounds of farewell visits to family and friends. Boston’s leading merchants honored Junius with a dinner on September 12—testimony to their collective esteem and the prodigious Victorian appetite. The elder Morgan later recalled that as he began to realize the enormity of the step he was taking, “my heart failed me.” The words of encouragement he received from his Boston colleagues “nerved me for the work I had to do.” Perhaps the repast did as well, though not everyone ate every course. It began with raw oysters, two soups, baked bass, and boiled cod, followed by “Removes” (leg of South Shore mutton, caper sauce; Westphalian ham, champagne sauce; filets of beef with mushrooms), “Ornamental Dishes” (boned turkey with truffles, oyster aspic, “Pattie of Liver in Jelly”), entrées (calf’s head with turtle sauce, pigeon cutlets in olive sauce, “Vol au Vent, of Birds, à la Financier,” larded sweetbreads with green peas), game (black ducks, plover, partridges, woodcocks, teal), desserts (omelette soufflé, meringue baskets, charlotte russe, champagne jelly, blanc mange), ornamental sweets (pineapple, bonbons glacés, vanilla and lemon ice creams), coffee, and liqueurs. The next morning, the Morgans sailed for England.

  Having decided against the “splendid palace” on Grosvenor Square, Junius settled his family temporarily at a hotel. On October 2, George Peabody & Co. officially announced its partnership with Mr. J. S. Morgan of Boston. Pierpont wrote in his diary, “Father commenced business in London.” The firm started with £450,000 (roughly $2.25 million) in capital, of which Peabody put up £400,000, Junius £40,000, and their English partner, Charles Cubitt Gooch, £10,000. Each would earn 5 percent interest on his share. Of the net profits and losses, Peabody would take 65 percent, Morgan 28 percent, Gooch 7 percent. Morgan would have an additional £2,500 (about $12,500) a year for entertaining, an integral part of his work. That fall the firm moved into new quarters at 22 Old Broad Street.

  Pierpont showed his brother and sisters the town, and looked at houses with his parents: they took a short-term lease on one in Gloucester Square, just north of Hyde Park. The older girls, Sarah and Mary, soon left for a boarding academy in Westbourne Terrace near Lancaster Gate. Eight-year-old Junius (“Doctor”) went to school in Twickenham, twelve miles from London on the Richmond Road. English boys mercilessly teased him at first, calling him Boston and Yankee Doodle, but the youngest Morgan soon learned to hold his own. The Twickenham headmaster described him as “docile—instantly obedient—exceedingly intelligent frank & affectionate.… He is entirely at his ease with his companions & his Masters.… This is mutually delightful, & must produce the best results.”

  For Pierpont, Junius had chosen a Swiss school near Vevey on Lake Geneva. When the seventeen-year-old departed for the Continent on November 1, 1854, only little Juliet (called Sis to distinguish her from her mother) remained at what now, three thousand miles from New England, constituted home.

  Pierpont left London with a mixture of impatience at the delay of his career and excitement about impending foreign adventures. At the last minute, the American minister in London, James Buchanan, asked him to deliver a packet of government papers to Paris. The junior diplomat wrote to the Reverend Pierpont: “Imagine your senior grandchild taking his departure from the London Bridge Terminus for Calais and Paris as Bearer of Government Despatches on a foreign tour.” Dense fog kept the other passengers on board the steamer at Calais, “whilst I in my official capacity was whizzing along towards Paris.” After delivering the papers, he headed south and east, stopping at the top of the Jura Mountains along the French-Swiss border for “the finest view which I ever had in my life”—the snowy peak of Mont Blanc against a cloudless sky, “below me the lake of Geneva with its magnificent scenery and villages in one of which was to be for a little time at least my residence.” From Geneva a four-hour sail took him to Vevey. His school, Bellerive, was about a mile from the village.

  Run by M. Edouard Sillig, Bellerive had eighty-five students in the autumn of 1854, many of them English and American. Pierpont took private lessons in German and French to help him catch up. He made friends with twins named Payson from Boston, and quickly found a lot to complain about.

  Breakfast consisted of coffee and dry bread. Clothes were meted out like provisions once a week. Too many students and too much spoken English interfered with his learning French. “In a room about the length of our parlors in Boston but much narrower,” he griped, “15 boys find accommodations for the night.” When the headmaster asked him not to smoke, he told his parents: “This is no place for boys over 15.” The Paysons boarded in town—“generally the way those do who know how to take care of themselves.”

  Junius had asked M. Sillig to treat Pierpont as he would his own son, and the headmaster at first reported that “dear Pierpont” with his “rather advanced intelligence” would quickly adjust to “little privations” and find “real happiness” at the school. Soon, however, Sillig’s running notes confirm the boy’s sense of a mismatch. “Adapts himself very slowly,” he wrote after a week, and as time went on: “Makes fun of things. Smokes … Restless at his lessons … Talks after the lights are out … A joker. A talker … Does not behave well
. ‘Answers back.’ … Sulky. In a dreadful temper.”

  Pierpont’s health began to trouble him—he came down with sore throats, stiff necks, “lung fevers,” acne outbreaks, and a corn on one of his toes that required minor surgery. Blaming these illnesses on the “perfectly terrible” climate of “this uncivilized country,” he grumbled to his parents, “I never expect to be well while I am here.”

  Yet his diaries and letters to Jim Goodwin and Mr. Pierpont were not nearly as gloomy as reports he sent home. To the London authorities he exaggerated his misery, reproaching them for condemning him once again to deprivation and exile, while admitting to his chums that he was having a pretty good time. As soon as he moved out of the dormitory to a chalet on the road to Chillon, his rooms became headquarters for the American students at Vevey. He pooled their allowances, and under his jurisdiction the Yankees played whist and billiards, smoked, went sleighing, skating, hiking, and sailing, ate sweet sausages with sour champagne, shared American newspapers—and once in a while worked on their studies.

  Pierpont at eighteen was no less outraged by the injudicious exercise of authority in Switzerland than he had been at thirteen in Hartford when Miss Stevens threw him out of class for laughing. One Sunday, M. Sillig authorized local celebrants of the Fête de la Sainte Barbe, the patron saint of artillery, to fire cannons into Lake Geneva from school grounds. The first explosions woke Pierpont up at 5:00 A.M. (“the very morning when we are allowed to sleep a little later than usual”), and a change in the scheduled festivities caused him to miss lunch after church. Crowning these indignities was a grand ball held “in town on Sunday night,” he exploded to Jim. “I think that take it altogether it was the most disgraceful affair which ever occurred in a Christian country.… I gave Mr. Sillig pretty plainly my opinion of his conduct in permitting the sons of Christian parents who had been brought up to look upon the Sabbath as a day which belongs to God attending any such meetings. He took it very well and thanking me said that he thought he had done wrong in having anything to do with it.”

  Whether or not Sillig was humbled by this tirade (it seems to have been the interference with his sleep and lunch that brought on Pierpont’s denunciation of the “most disgraceful affair” in Christian history), he cannot have liked facing down six feet and 160 pounds of sanctimonious American boy.

  On the subject of religion itself Pierpont said little, but a diary entry at the end of 1854 reflects his sense of personal connection to a discriminating Savior and his faith in divine guidance toward the mercy and reward he will ultimately deserve: “… it has pleased Almighty God to preserve my life to the opening of another [year]. May it please him to forgive all my sins of thought, word and deed and lead me to lead in future a life more devoted to His service … and if it should please the Almighty Father to preserve my life may I so live [that] at the last day I shall receive from thy dear son, ‘Well done good and faithful servant.’ ”

  His appreciation of this world’s pleasures was in no way blighted by fear of punishment in the next. The account books he kept as he traveled in the 1850s reflect his tactile, visual sensibility and mandarin tastes. In Paris he bought himself leather boots, white kid gloves, a coat (115 francs—$23), a vest, “pantaloons,” collars, a beaver hat, and a stash of cigars. He noted the entrance fees at Versailles, Napoleon’s tomb, the Gobelin tapestry factory, the École Nationale des Beaux Arts, and the Louvre. He sent his mother furs. Occasionally he gave money to beggars—2 francs one day “by mistake for one sous.” At Vevey he paid 10 francs ($2) for a Jenny Lind concert, 6 francs for confectionery, 2.50 for cologne, 17.50 for bouquets. He bought Mme. de Staël’s Corinne and a volume on the Guerre de Trente Ans. And he balanced his accounts in pounds sterling, francs, scudi, florins, Austrian gulden, Neapolitan ducats, and Tuscan pauls.

  He also listed frequent payments for medicines and doctors’ fees. In July 1855 he told Jim that “an eruption” had appeared on his face “which injures my looks very considerably.” The Bellerive physician sent him for a cure to Loeche-les-Bains in the Valais, where sulfurous waters boiled out of the ground into vats. Spa guests of both sexes wore long shirts to soak in the baths. Pierpont rose at five and bathed until ten, taking breakfast and playing dominoes and whist on floating trays; then he went back to bed for half an hour (“a necessary penalty for each bath”), had a second breakfast, and exercised (mandatory) from noon until two. The cure exceeded his expectations, he reported, thanks to a Baltimore family named Hoffman, “plenty of excursions, plenty of dancing &c &c &c &c, flirting into the bargain.”

  He quickly indicated what the four etceteras referred to: an eighteen-year-old Italian whom he pronounced “one of the handsomest and most unpretending young ladies I think I ever saw,” with “dark hair & eyes & beautiful skin.” The eruption on his face did not keep him from speaking to the girl (in French), but her “horrid old brother in law” did: this jailer made every effort “to vex her and prevent her talking with any one.”

  One afternoon, as Pierpont was reading aloud to Mrs. Hoffman, an earthquake sent chairs skidding across his hotel room and knocked chimneys off the roof. A few nights later a second tremor shook the guests awake at 2:00 A.M. Dressing quickly, Pierpont raced to the Hoffmans’ rooms and had “hardly been in there three minutes,” he told Jim—excitement turning him into a poet—“when who should make her appearance but Miss Rolaris, the young Italian, in her night dress, panting and pale as marble with fear.… I never had seen such a beautiful expression before. She took a chair and sat for about an hour, totally unconcerned as to her dress, or the position in which she was. Although as beautiful as she well could be, there was not the least affectation or coquettry about her. But enough for Loeche and its belles,” he broke off in midstory, and did not mention the Italian beauty again.

  He teased Jim constantly about girls. “In every letter you mention some new feminine angel who is far handsomer than anyone else you ever saw,” he wrote. “To speak plainly old fellow you are going to fast altogether and need some correction.” And, “If … Cupid has shot his dart into your heart let me advise you to have the wound attended to immediately, for fear that Mortification should ensue and the hole remain in its present state.”

  When one of the Drapers announced her engagement, he mused: “don’t it make you feel old, old fellow to see all these girls that we used to carry on with, going the way of all the world and splicing themselves for life in this manner?” He dropped his jocular tone the minute he guessed that Cupid had dealt his cousin a wounding blow: “Why in thunder when you were writing about being in such low spirits didn’t you make a clean breast of the matter and write me the whole cause of your sadness? Has any young female been treating you badly Jim? I admire your coolness.”

  Coolness was not one of his own attributes in these matters. When Jim accused him of being fickle, he protested: “it is no such thing. I never was so, you very well know, in any of my affections, and sometimes I think it is a very great disadvantage that I am not a little more so, for once I have taken a liking to a person it is very difficult for me to get over it.” The volume of his correspondence with female friends at home and his responsiveness to young women he met abroad suggest that he was capable of taking a liking to several persons at once.

  In August 1855 he met his family for a brief holiday in Paris (as chief linguist, “I was compelled to do all the talking”), then returned to Bellerive to put the finishing touches on his French. That fall he placed first in his class. In the humanities he studied The Aeneid and Louis XVI, read Robinson Crusoe in French, translated Mme. de Sévigné into German, and wrote out in three languages maxims that echo what he had been taught on the other side of the Atlantic. “In all labor there is profit: but the talk of the lips leads only to penury.” “The crown of the wise is their riches: but the foolishness of fools is folly.” His facility with numbers impressed everyone at Bellerive. A fellow student recalled him as “little short of a prodigy,” able to calculate cube roots
in his head. Pierpont advanced quickly through algebra and geometry to trigonometry and physics.

  The Baltimore Hoffmans were spending the winter in Vevey, and he often called on Mrs. Hoffman for tea and confidential talk. “How pleasant it is,” he reflected to Jim after one visit, “to be surrounded with persons who are always glad to see you and with whom you always feel perfectly at home.” His own home was too far away, and his mother too absorbed in her own troubles, to afford him any sort of haven. The Hoffman household gained a further attraction that winter—an American niece who had come to Vevey for her health. Pierpont the expert on illness found in this young lady none of “that uneasiness so common for the generality of persons in the same condition. I tell you what Jim she is a trump and I begin to feel a little queer.” In matters of romance he constantly swore his confidant to secrecy: maybe Hartford was reading over Jim’s shoulder, or maybe Jim had a tendency to gossip; more likely, these warnings reflect Pierpont’s rather grandiose sense that all eyes were trained on him. “I find her (remember this is all strictly between you and me) exceedingly comme il faut. She has the best disposition of any young lady I know, she is lively, agreeable, & although not exceedingly handsome is very pleasing. Dont you breath a word of this to a living soul. I’ll tell you how I get along in that quarter. Being exceedingly intimate with her uncle & aunt I can see as much of her as I wish which makes it very nice.”