The Great Pierpont Morgan Read Online Free PDF Page A

tall building in the whole town; the city skyline was broken, not by skyscrapers, but by church spires.) Pierpont’s account books for his earliest months in New York throw a glimmer or two of light upon his life as well as upon the prices of 1857–58: they contain such items as Lunch .30, Dinner 1.00, Omnibus .06, Paper .02; To Hartford 2.65, Supper .37, Collection .25, Tolls .20, Feed .35, Horse and buggy to Middletown 3., To New York 3.25; Cap 2., Gloves 1., Barber .12, London News .15, Lunch .28, Dinner at Everett House 1., Tickets to Philharmonic Concert 3., Church collections 1.25, Charity Five Points Mission 10., Seidlitz powders and sugar .37, Opera tickets 8., Adele 1., Sleighride 13.62.
    Gradually, young Morgan made a considerable acquaintance among the substantial families of the city; and he threw himself with as much gusto into Sunday-evening hymn singing at the Babcocks’, or country walks at the Osborns’ in the Highlands of the Hudson, as into evening gatherings of young people at the Sturgeses’, who owned what was said to have been the first grand piano in New York. He had a sizeable income from his family, good prospects, high spirits, and the sort of gusto that made every party of young people revolve about him.
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    One might have foreseen for him a wholly reasonable and orthodox marriage. A few years before, when he was at Göttingen, he had written to Jim Goodwin, who had expressed a tender interest in a Hartford girl who was studying to be an opera singer, a letter that was positively elderly in its counsels of prudence: “Your career in life like mine,” he had written, “depends on our own individual exertions, our courses though widely apart will both be in the mercantile sphere, and from this cause it becomes our duty to select for our wives those who, when we go home from our occupations, will ever be ready to make us happy and contented with our homes.” Pierpont might have seemed to be following his own sage advice when he soon fell in love with Amelia Sturges, a girl of impeccable Manhattan antecedents. Yet what happened next took him clean out of the pattern of frugal and ambitious calculation which he seemed to have been setting for himself up to this time.
    We must bear in mind, however, that in his inheritance, along with the blood of the shrewd Morgans, there was a more romantic and headlong strain: his maternal grandfather had been the Reverend John Pierpont, clergyman, poet, andman of reckless principle, who as pastor of the Hollis Street Church in Boston had been threatened with the loss of his pulpit if he would not stop preaching abolitionism and other indiscreet measures of social reform, and had defied the pillars of the parish, preached a last undaunted sermon, and then resigned.
    In the spring of 1861, just as the Civil War was beginning, Amelia Sturges—or Mimi, as she was generally called—came down with tuberculosis. By autumn she was gravely ill. Pierpont decided that she must be taken to a warmer climate—and that he would marry her and take her there. His business? That could go hang; and anyhow his loyal cousin Jim Goodwin could be persuaded to come down from Hartford and look after the office for an indefinite time. Nothing—nothing in the world—mattered but Mimi.
    So on October 7, 1861, he and Mimi were married, though by that time she was so weak that she could not stand alone. A few close friends gathered in the front parlor of the Sturges house on East Fourteenth Street in New York; in the back parlor, behind folding doors, the minister took his place; then Pierpont carried Mimi downstairs in his arms to the back parlor, the folding doors were opened, and he held her upright during the brief wedding ceremony. Then he carried her to a carriage outside, drove with her to the pier, and took her abroad with him—first, by way of England, to Algiers, and then, in desperation when her strength continued to fail,