The Great Pierpont Morgan Read Online Free PDF

across the Mediterranean to Nice.
    It was all to no avail. Mimi died only a little over four months after the wedding.
    A widower at the age of twenty-four, Pierpont Morgan returned to New York. Slowly he began to pick up the pieces of his life and put them together again. On the first of September of that year 1862 there appeared in the New York Times a modest advertisement to the effect that he was now ready to engage in business under the style of J. Pierpont Morgan & Co.

III
    GROPING FOR DIRECTION
    1
    The New York to which young Morgan returned after his brief and tragic adventure in marriage was seething with Civil War business.
    For us of today, who instinctively think in terms of total war, it is hard to realize how very untotal was the conflict of 1861–65, at least in the industrial North. Morgan did not enlist because for some time his health had been a source of concern to him: he had been subject to dizzy spells, even fainting spells (these seemed to have some obscure relation to the state of his complexion, for when his skin was clear the dizzy spells were more severe). But even for many of the healthiest young business men of that time the question of enlisting hardly rose to the level of consciousness; of those who rose to the top in American business in later years, very few had ever put on a uniform. When the draft was instituted in 1863, Morgan took advantage of the curious regulation which permitted one to hire a substitute to take one’s place in the Army; but this too was a fully accepted practice. It is a striking fact that in the draft of July 1863—immediately after the critical Battle of Gettysburg—only a little over three per cent of those whose names were drawn actually became “draftees held to personal service”; the rest failed to report, or were exempted for physical disability or other reasons, or were exempted by paying a $300 “commutation,” or furnished substitutes!
    Meanwhile the industrial boom which led Charles A. Beard to call the Civil War the Second American Revolution was beginning its reckless course. The shifting fortunes of battle, the sharp expansion of manufacturing under the impact of war orders, and the westward push of trade toward the Pacific kept the speculative markets in turmoil. And under these circumstances the marts of the Wall Street district of New York seethed with energetic speculative activity. There was plenty of excitement for anybody in the gyrations of Erie stock, the gold dealings in Mr. Gilpin’s Exchange and Reading Rooms, and the wild attempts of the aldermen of New York City to make a killing in Harlem Railroad shares—so much excitement, in fact, that to many men in the street the news from the bloody battlefronts of the South was interesting chiefly for its possible effect upon the course of prices.
    During these wild years young Morgan, just starting in business for himself, got mixed up in two dubious enterprises which in recent years have been made much of by hostile writers. One was the Hall Carbine Affair. In the summer of 1861—just before he married Mimi—Morgan lent $20,000 to one Simon Stevens, who was engaged in selling to General Frémont, for $22 apiece, carbines of an outmoded style which had been bought by one Arthur M. Eastman from the War Department itself for only $3.50 apiece. The deal was a scandalous one, reflecting both gross incompetence on the part of the War Department and profiteering greed on the part of Stevens. More than forty years later the record of the episode was combed over by Gustavus Myers in his History of the Great American Fortunes and Morgan’s part in it was represented as that of a fellow-conspirator with Stevens; and this version of the story thereupon appeared in book after book and article after article. But a later and even more diligent piece of research by R. Gordon Wasson of J. P. Morgan & Co. has unearthed a wealth of detailed information from