Mr. Morgan's maternal ancestry goes back to the Huguenot family of Pierpont (or Pierrepont), through James Pierpont of London, whose son John came to Massachusetts at an early date and settled in Roxbury, which town he represented in the General Court of Massachusetts in 1672. He was the father of Rev. James Pierpont, born in Roxbury in 1659, who was graduated from Harvard in 1681, became pastor of the church at New Haven, Connecticut, in 1685, and was one of the three ministers who formulated in 1698 the plan under which Vale was established in 1700. It was chiefly through his influence that Elihu Yale was induced to make his liberal gifts to the college, and Rev. James Pierpont was one of the original trustees of Vale. The grandson of this distinguished divine was also a clergyman, Rev. John Pierpont, who had a notable career as a poet, and as an antislavery and temperance reformer; and was Mr. Morgan's grandfather.
Whatever psychological explanation of Mr. Morgan, based on heredity, the scientist may find in these and collateral lines of ancestry, there is no question as to the influence upon him of his father, Junius Spencer Morgan, who, after giving him a thorough education in the English High School in Boston and in the University of Göttingen, set him to practical work when he completed his studies in 1857. Mr. Morgan began in the banking business for three years with the firm of Duncan, Sherman & Company, in New York City. At the end of that time, in 1860, he started in business for himself and as American representative of his father's firm of George Peabody & Company, later J. S. Morgan & Company. This connection enabled him to give the federal government valuable assistance in the marketing of its securities in Europe. In 1864 he formed the firm of Dabney, Morgan & Company, and in 1871 he joined Anthony J. Drexel of Philadelphia, in the firm of Drexel, Morgan & Company in New York City and Drexel & Company in Philadelphia. In 1893, when Mr. Drexel died, Mr. Morgan became senior partner, although for years before that he had directed the firm's business in New York City. On January 1, 1895, the style became J. P. Morgan & Company in New York and Drexel & Company in Philadelphia, as at present.
The services of Mr. Morgan in behalf oi the government's finances have been called into requisition many times since the Civil War, notably in the floating of government bonds in 1876, 1877 and 1878, and in 1895, when his firm floated the $62,000,000 in gold bonds issued by the Cleveland administration to restore the normal treasury surplus of $100,000,000 and thereby save the treasury from a silver basis. One of the most important commissions executed by his firm for the general government was in connection with the payment to the French Panama Canal Company of the purchase money for the canal. Mr. Morgan has also been the intermediary of foreign governments in obtaining American participation in bond subscription, and secured subscribers for $50,000,000 of the British War Loan in 1901: the largest foreign bond subscription ever made in the United States.
One of the many lines of activity in which Mr. Morgan has operated with distinguished success has been the reorganization of railroads, upon which branch he entered in 1869, when Jay (Gould and James Fisk were contending for mastery in the railroad world, upon methods which often proved extremely disastrous to the properties and securities involved. One of the roads coveted by rival financiers was the Albany and Susquehanna Railroad, which Mr. Morgan quietly secured and put out of reach of further contention by leasing it to the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company. A railroad reorganizer who was not a wrecker was something of a rarity in those belligerent days, but Mr. Morgan's work in that line then and since has always been in the direction of rehabilitation or advantageous consolidation, and never destructive. In 1888 he successfully took hold of the tangled affairs of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad and the "Big Four" System, and put them into good shape; and he performed similar good offices in 1891 for the Richmond Terminal, which he consolidated into the Southern Railway System to the great advantage of that section of the country. In 1895, when the Reading System had collapsed and appeared to be in rigor mortis, because of the over ambitious operations of its president, A. A. McLeod, Mr. Morgan resuscitated it and set it going again. He also reorganized the Erie System about the same time, and in 1896 took the New York and New England Railroad and leased it for a term of years to the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. The Northern Pacific Railroad was in a bad way in 1897, but he took hold of it, secured the aid of German capital, brought opposing elements into harmony, and placed it on a solid basis. The Baltimore and Ohio and several other railroad companies have been added to the list oi those whose reorganization and rehabilitation have been planned and executed by Mr. Morgan, and the same is true with reference to street railway organizations, including the West End System of Boston, and the street railway system of Chicago. In ocean transportation also his genius for organization has benefited several important Atlantic and Gulf lines.
It is, however, in the field of industrial organization that his most noteworthy business successes have been achieved. He was concerned in the anthracite and bituminous coal interests, and in several other successful operations of that kind, but it is his creation of the United States Steel Corporation which best attests his soundness of judgment and broadness of vision. He came into that by first being interested in the organization of the Federal Steel Company, which seemed a gigantic undertaking, and from that was led into the view that a much larger combination of interests was possible and desirable.
It is recognized in the financial world that no other man could have called together the resources necessary to the launching of so great an enterprise. Its original capital of a billion dollars (now increased to $1,400,000,000), put this corporation so high up in a class by itself that many predicted failure, declaring it could never succeed and that the stock would never reach a respectable figure. But Mr. Morgan saw, and he made others see, the possibilities of expansion in the steel industry, and the quotations of the Autumn of 1909 show that the market has come to realize how strongly, as well as how broadly, Mr. Morgan planned, when he and his associates launched "U. S. Steel" on the seas of industry and finance.
Mr. Morgan is not only at the head of the house of J. P. Morgan & Company and Drexel & Company, but also of the London banking house of J. S. Morgan & Company, and the Paris house of Morgan, Harjes & Company. He has large investments in English securities, and his influence in European markets is very great. In the United States he has often demonstrated his power, in times of panic and financial stress, to stay the tempest and to tide over difficulties. This is because the world of finance is so well assured of the soundness of his judgment and the quality of his leadership that it looks to him for guidance in such exigencies. This has been time and again demonstrated, and never more emphatically than in the panic of 1907, when, because he had given his word, the Trust Company of America was saved, although $34,000,000 in cash was paid out over the counters before the run was ended. The meetings of leading financiers in his library resulted in measures by which the panic was subdued and restoration cautiously but surely commenced.
Great as is the prestige held by Mr. Morgan as a financier, a writer in The Nation a year or so ago stated that the day would come when his fame as a bibliophile would outshine his achievements in the world of finance. Though this can hardly be, it is yet a fact that in the collection of books, manuscripts, pictures and objets d'art, he has displayed genius and originality, with a boldness of attack and a broadness of vision comparable to those exercised in his great financial operations, and he is certainly, to-day, the foremost collector, as well as the premier financier, of the United States.
He owns many of the best and most valuable pictures, representing not only the old masters, but also works of the great artists of all the best modern schools. He has an art gallery of his own in London, besides being the possessor of many great paintings in his home and library in New York. The catholicity of his taste and judgment as a collector has been exercised in numerous and divergent directions, including the purchase and gift to the American Museum of Natural History of the Bement Collection of mineral specimens, and the Tiffany Exhibit of gems and pearls, the Ford Collection of books and manuscripts given by him to the New York Public Library, and numerous paintings, porcelains and other art objects given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Of rare books, manuscripts, paintings, porcelains and art objects he has a priceless collection, including the original manuscripts of many of the masterpieces of English literature, illuminated manuscripts of the Seventh to the Sixteenth Centuries, of which a partial yet wonderful exhibit was made in the Columbia University Library in 1906; and many rare specimens of ecclesiastic vesture and ornament dating from the early mediaeval period. In this connection, his purchase of the Ascoli Cope, and his generous return of it to the Church in Italy (from which it had been abstracted many years before), when the facts of its history became known, are fully remembered. His library is housed in a beautiful marble structure adjoining his New York home. Art in all phases has in Mr. Morgan a generous patron. He is the chief supporter of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The New Theatre, opened in November, 1909, owes much to his personal interest and aid.
Mr. Morgan is one of the most active laymen of the Episcopal Church, and has for many years been a vestryman and warden of St. George's Church in New York City, and a strong supporter of the many branches of usefulness and activity of that parish, under the rectorship [sic] of Rev. Dr. Stephen H. Tyng and his successors, and for more than twenty-five years has been a lay delegate to the General Convention Of the Protestant Episcopal Church.
Among the objects benefited by his munificence are the Lying-in Hospital of New York City, to which he has given $1,350,000, covering the purchase of its present site and the erection and completion of its buildings; the Medical College Of Harvard University, to which he has given $1,250,000; also $500,000 each to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and to the New York Trade Schools; besides substantial donations to the Young Men's Christian Association, the Palisades Park Commission, Bronx Botanical Garden, Hartford Public Library, and many other educational, religious and charitable associations and objects.
Since 1881 Mr. Morgan has been prominent as a yachtsman, in which character he finds his most favored recreation. In that year he built the Corsair, an iron steam yacht, which was succeeded in 1891 by Corsair II, which was sold to the United States Government at the beginning of the Spanish- American War. and renamed The Gloucester, after which he built his present yacht Corsair III. Mr. Morgan was commodore of the New York Yacht Club for three years, and in that capacity he built the cup-defender Columbia, which twice defeated Sir Thomas Lipton's yacht Shamrock in the international races for the America's cup in 1899 and 1901.
Mr. Morgan's characteristics are those of skillful generalship in all of the manifold avenues of activity in which his interests and tastes have led him. His plans are in the large; and completely cover every campaign in which he figures, without burdening himself with the minuter details. His strategic skill has in no direction been more strongly manifested than in his remarkable faculty of choosing lieutenants capable of working to his plans.
He has received many honors, including the honorary degree of LL.D. from Yale University and decorations from foreign countries; has been in intimate audience with the King of England, the German Kaiser, the King of Italy and other royalties, and with Pope Leo.
Mr. Morgan has a full appreciation of the social side of life, is a member of the best clubs of New York, London and other cities, and enjoys himself to a degree rarely attained by one so largely identified with great enterprises.
Mr. Morgan married first, in 1861, Amelia Sturgis, daughter of Jonathan Sturgis, of New York, who died in 1862; and in 1865 he married Frances Louise Tracy, daughter oi Charles Tracy, a noted New York lawyer. He has a son, John Pierpont Morgan, Jr., who is associated with him in business, and three daughters: Louise Pierpont Morgan (Mrs. Satterlee), Juliet Pierpont Morgan (Mrs. Hamilton), and Miss Anne Tracy Morgan.
~ History of the City of New York, 1609-1909, by John William Leonard, Copyright 1910, Pages 470-475.
You can visit the memorial page for John Pierpont "J. P." Morgan.
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