Chapter 2

PIERPONTS AND MORGANS

Unlike most of the Americans who made large fortunes in the last third of the nineteenth century, Morgan traced his lineage back to the early settlement of New England. Both sides of his family had arrived before the Revolution. Two hundred years of American heritage, however, was about all the intellectual, ecclesiastical Pierponts and the enterprising, managerial Morgans had in common.

Descended from French Pierreponts who crossed the English Channel with the Norman conquest, John Pierpont emigrated to Boston from London in 1640. His son, James, a Harvard graduate and pastor of the Congregationalist First Church of Christ in New Haven, was a founder of Yale College, where he taught moral philosophy and wrote a book on Congregational Churches in Connecticut . James’s daughter, Sarah, married the young theologian Jonathan Edwards, and their daughters brought other eminent men into the family: Mary married the merchant Timothy Dwight, and gave birth to another Timothy (author, Congregational clergyman, president of Yale) and Theodore (lawyer and leading Federalist); Esther Edwards married the Reverend Aaron Burr, a founder of Princeton—it was their son who served as Thomas Jefferson’s Vice President, shot Alexander Hamilton, and stood trial for treason.

Down the Pierpont line came two more generations before the birth, in 1785, of Pierpont Morgan’s grandfather, John, in Litchfield County, Connecticut. He graduated from Yale in 1804, when his distant cousin Timothy Dwight was president, then went to work in South Carolina as private tutor to the children of a wealthy planter. Appalled at the contrast between slavery and the extravagant style of plantation life, he told a friend that “ the vinegar of poverty renders disgustful to the taste every other pleasure and embitters even the cup of Friendship.” This incipient reformer came back north to study law, and was admitted to the Essex County (Massachusetts) Bar in 1812, but spent all his time writing poetry. Soon he gave up law to try the retail dry goods business. His firm went bankrupt in 1816.

Mr. Pierpont married his fourth cousin, Mary Sheldon Lord, in 1810, and the couple had three children while he continued to search for a calling. He pawned the family silver in 1816 to publish a volume of poetry called The Airs of Palestine . More notable for its nationalist sentiment and romantic animation of nature than for literary quality, the book nonetheless captured the imagination of a young country in need of homegrown cultural heroes. John Pierpont was briefly hailed as America’s leading poet.

Next he took up the study of theology, first in Baltimore, then at Harvard’s new Divinity School, where Unitarianism reigned. Unitarians, in the liberal wing of Congregationalism, rejected the Calvinist doctrines of predestination and original sin; they believed instead in free will, spiritual democracy, and the possibility of universal salvation. Making no distinction between religious and secular concerns, they urged all men to act in the interests of individual freedom and social reform. The historian Sydney Ahlstrom has characterized the denomination as “ perfectabilitarian.”

John Pierpont turned out to be well suited to the moral climate of Harvard and the Unitarian cloth. He studied privately with William Ellery Channing, and boarded with the Divinity School’s founder, Henry Ware. On being ordained in 1819, he was appointed minister of Boston’s Hollis Street Church, at a salary of $2,200 a year. Finally at thirty-four, in poetry and the pulpit, he had found his life’s work.

The Reverend John Pierpont was six feet tall, with intense blue eyes and a flaming red nose caused by a mild version of the rhinophyma that afflicted his grandson. He preached with such conviction that audiences noticed only his passionate intensity: “ his eyes fairly blazed and made you forget his nose and everything else.”

He and Mary now had six children—William, Mary, Juliet, John Jr., James, and Caroline—and not enough money to go around. The Reverend Pierpont supplemented his clerical salary by writing and lecturing. He also took up a roster of radical causes, including temperance, the abolition of slavery, prison reform, the education of girls (not including his own), the disbanding of the state militia, and phrenology—the study of mental faculties based on the physiognomy of the skull. His dedication to his ideals bordered on the fanatical, and when his temperance lectures brought him into conflict with wealthy rum merchants who rented storage space in his church basement, his employers arranged for him to take a sabbatical in Europe and the Middle East to ease the antagonisms at the church.

His family stayed in Boston. Mrs. Pierpont suffered from mysterious ailments—a combination of emotional instability and “ an irritating cutaneous affection” (possibly scabies), which her husband described as a “careless and utterly desperate [disease] … that must have worn out the patience of Job, and soured the temper of any one short of an angel.” The angel in his house was unable to perform the duties of mother and wife, he went on, “and when, at times, she has appeared irritable, I have marveled not that she was so, but that she was not more so.”

Nonetheless, he left her for a year in 1835–36. She took in boarders for income. The younger children were still in school, but Mr. Pierpont hoped the two older girls, Mary and Juliet, would “ do all to aid you that lies in their power.”

Juliet had other things on her mind besides helping her mother run a boardinghouse. She had been engaged for a year to a young merchant from Hartford, Connecticut, named Junius Spencer Morgan. Early in 1836, Junius wrote to the traveling Reverend Pierpont to say that he had just joined a wholesale dry goods firm in Hartford called Howe, Mather & Co., and could now offer his fiancée the prospect of a good living and a home. He named the first of May as their wedding date, “ as I think the quicker these things are settled after we are ready the better. I hope this arrangement will meet your approval, & regret exceedingly that I cannot receive her from a Father’s hand, but I hope her parents will never have cause to repent of her choice.”

Little is known about the young Juliet Pierpont except that she helped take care of her mother and chose a man whose interests and abilities could not have been more unlike her father’s. Junius later referred to the “ beautiful countenance of her early years,” but from her father she inherited the skin disease rosacea, which runs in families, tends to be more common in women but more severe in men, and is sometimes, as it was with her son, a precursor of rhinophyma.

The man she was about to marry was by all accounts “ a perfect beauty.” With prominent cheekbones and eyes full of intelligent light, Junius Morgan looked as though he could charm a salon or command an army with equal ease. An American journalist who visited the Morgan estate outside London some years later surveyed its attractive decor and described his host as “ the most beautiful thing in the house … a man used to giving orders and having them obeyed; taking decisions quickly and taking the right ones.” Junius at twenty-one had mastered the material world from which Dr. Pierpont had turned away in distaste and defeat.

Junius’s first American ancestor was Miles, a Welshman who sailed to Boston in 1636. (Morgans were so abundant in Wales that many women never changed their names: Miles’s grandmother, Bridget, was the daughter of one Anthony Morgan and the widow of another—her full name was Bridget Morgan Morgan Morgan.) When twenty-year-old Miles reached Boston, he joined a party headed by Colonel William Pynchon and set off to explore the Connecticut River Valley. At a place they named Springfield, Miles staked claim to land that stayed in his family for two centuries. Though he was the youngest member of the party, he quickly became second in command. He farmed his land, raised cattle, bought more acres, took on civic and religious office, and had nine children—the youngest, Nathaniel, when he was fifty-five. Nathaniel’s grandson, Joseph, fought as a captain in the Revolutionary War and fathered another Joseph, the paternal grandfather of Pierpont Morgan.

Born in 1780, this Joseph moved from Springfield and yeoman farming into the wider world of commerce and capital that opened up with the nineteenth century. In 1807 he married Sarah Spencer of Middletown, with whom he had three children: Mary, Lucy, and Junius Spencer, born in West Springfield—now Holyoke—in April 1813. Beauty was not among the attributes of the Morgan women; Junius got his handsome features from his father.

Joseph was working the family land and dealing in real estate when his father died at the end of 1813, leaving him property worth $15,000. ^* Two years later he spent $10,000 on a stagecoach line and tavern, then in 1817 moved his family down the Connecticut River to Hartford, where he acquired another tavern—the Exchange Coffee House—that served as a meeting place for travelers, politicians, and the local gentry. The Morgans lived at the Exchange Tavern until 1829, when Joseph traded it up for the fifty-room City Hotel. He sent his son to boarding school at Middletown, and his daughters to the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York.

A new urban culture was taking shape in early-nineteenth-century America, with taverns and hotels at its center, and Joseph turned out to have instincts perfectly suited to the transition from country to town. His early innkeeping enterprises were small enough to be owned and managed by him, but with his accumulating capital he moved into every important aspect of the country’s market revolution: he helped organize banks to finance Hartford’s economic boom, and was a founder of the Aetna Insurance Company; he invested in steamships, railroads, bridges, and canals—large-scale enterprises that reached beyond the physical boundaries of Hartford, were financed by selling shares of stock, and operated by hired managers. Most of Joseph’s ventures succeeded. He bought one hundred shares of stock in the Hartford & New Haven Railroad when the books opened in 1835, and noted in his diary on December 14, 1839: “ Locomotive first came to [Hartford] Engine House on N. Haven Rail Road.” The Aetna’s stock, worth $150,000 in 1819, grew to $4 million by 1881.

Politically, Joseph supported the nationalist programs of John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, ideological descendants of Alexander Hamilton. As the country’s first Treasury Secretary, Hamilton had set out to free the newly independent states from economic dependence on England. He sought to build a national economy by structuring into the new state as much favoritism for business as he could; and in 1791, aiming to rationalize the country’s financial markets and facilitate the growth of interregional trade, he set up a central bank—the First Bank of the United States. His efforts met with fierce opposition, especially in the agrarian South.

Americans brought to their political philosophy a deep-seated fear of big government and concentrated wealth. The Jeffersonian republicans who challenged Hamilton’s vision of the future looked to an economy based not on a strong federal government and national commercial markets but on decentralization, individual freedom, and agriculture. They believed that a relatively weak government would foster local autonomy and egalitarian democracy; the country’s natural economic order would be ruled not by aristocratic elites in distant cities but by the self-sufficient farmer on his rural acre. “ Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people,” Jefferson wrote in 1781: “… generally speaking the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any state to that of its husbandmen, is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good enough barometer whereby to measure its degree of corruption.”

Carrying the commercial/industrialist position forward into the 1820s, Kentucky Congressman Henry Clay proposed an American System in which tariffs would protect U.S. industry against competition from European manufacturers, federal funds would maintain and improve public roads and canals, and a central bank would provide the country with a stable supply of money and credit. John Quincy Adams, President from 1824 to 1828, adopted Clay’s system and made its author his Secretary of State.

Joseph Morgan stood firmly on the side of the Clay/Adams economic policies and against their outspoken critic, the popular 1812 war hero, Andrew Jackson. “Old Hickory” attacked the Adams administration as aristocratic and elitist, charging that it catered to the special privileges of plutocrats while ignoring the farmers and workers whom Jackson, following Jefferson, saw as the true constituents of a democratic government. In the 1828 presidential campaign, the general from Tennessee ran on his military record and plebeian origins, promising to stand up for ordinary Americans. ^†

Joseph lost a beaver hat betting against Jackson, who won 56 percent of the popular vote in 1828. Once in office, the anticentrist, broadly populist new President turned the “Monster” Second Bank of the United States into a symbol of the eastern moneyed interests that he would bring down. Early in 1832, as the next election campaign got under way, Joseph Morgan made a trip to Washington. He talked with the charismatic Henry Clay, listened to speeches about South Carolina’s threat to nullify the notorious Tariff of Abominations that helped the manufacturing North and hurt the agricultural South, and met the President: “ Was introduced to Gen. Jackson found him very polite & dressed very well upon the whole he appeared better than I expected.”

Jackson easily defeated Clay that fall, with 219 electoral votes to his opponent’s 49. Joseph wrote in his diary: “ Abroad the Political Horizon is overcast, disunion threatens us from the South, there is danger of the Manufacturers losing a protective tariff[.] Jackson is again re-elected President everything looks squally.”

The President immediately took up his promise to destroy the Second Bank of the United States. Hamilton’s charter for the First Bank had not been renewed in 1811, after an intense debate over whether a national bank violated the Constitution by giving too much power to the government; state-chartered banks resented having to compete with and be regulated by the federal institution. In 1816, however, the financial chaos created by the War of 1812 and the explosive growth of state banks led Congress to charter a Second Bank for twenty years. Headquartered in Philadelphia under the direction of an arrogant patrician named Nicholas Biddle between 1823 and 1832, the Second Bank proved no less controversial than the First.

Biddle’s bank—like its predecessor, a private corporation operating with quasi-governmental authority—served as a cautious, reasonably effective regulator of the growing economy. It issued banknotes, lent money, sold government bonds, held federal reserves, stabilized domestic and foreign exchange, tried to control the international balance of payments, disciplined state banks by requiring them to maintain adequate reserves—and made more enemies than friends. Its anti-inflationary credit restrictions helped lenders in the money centers of the East, and hurt borrowers—speculators as well as farmers, workers, shopkeepers, and mechanics in the South and West. State bankers denounced it as a government-sponsored monopoly that stifled private enterprise. Wall Street resented its location outside New York. Southern states-rightists saw it as an unconstitutional usurpation of local authority. House Democratic leader James K. Polk said it had set itself up as a rival to the government and asked “ whether we shall have the republic without the bank, or the bank without the republic.” The maladroit Biddle magnified the bank’s “Monster” image by telling Congress it could destroy state banks at will, even though he pointed out that it did not, and his payments to politicians and journalists confirmed his critics’ worst fears.

Early in 1832 Jackson vetoed a bill to renew the bank’s charter, warning of the evils that “ might flow from such a concentration of power in the hands of a few men irresponsible to the people.” When Biddle came out for Henry Clay in the 1832 election, Jackson told Martin Van Buren: “The Bank … is trying to kill me, but I will kill it .” He had to get rid of two Treasury secretaries to do it, but over the next four years he effectively dismantled the bank.

While Joseph Morgan worried about the political and economic climate, he was preparing his son for a commercial career. As soon as Junius graduated from school at sixteen, he went to Boston to clerk for a merchant and banker named Alfred Welles. He stayed five years. By the time he completed his apprenticeship in 1834 he was twenty-one and engaged to Juliet Pierpont. Joseph secured him a partnership with a banker named Morris Ketchum at 40 Wall Street in New York; the new firm would be called Morgan, Ketchum & Co.

Business was booming in New York’s markets and harbors. The Erie Canal, completed in 1825 to link the city by water to the Great Lakes, had increased the speed and reduced the cost of transport in both directions. By the time Junius arrived, Manhattan had become the major “money center” in the United States, handling 40 percent of the country’s foreign trade.

Speculation on Wall Street was wild, however, and the national financial weather dangerously “squally” in 1834. Railways, roads, bridges, and canals were opening up vast new markets in the West. Local land prices soared at the hint of a new railroad line; factories and towns were sprouting like weeds on the open plains. The United States had 329 banks in 1829, and more than twice that number by 1837. Most of them made loans almost as readily as they accepted deposits, with minimal security requirements: between 1829 and 1837 the amount on loan jumped from $137 million to $525 million. With no federal braking mechanisms after the crippling of the Second Bank, gambling and inflation surged out of control.

Junius had planned to start his married life in New York, but after eighteen months, prudence won out over ambition. Early in 1836 he accepted a partnership with the dry goods firm of Howe, Mather & Co. in Hartford, telling the Reverend Pierpont, “ altho’ I may not realise a fortune as soon, yet it seems safer” than Wall Street. He put $10,000 into the business (probably borrowed from his father), and hoped to move it to New York “as soon as we feel a little stronger & have added to our capital.”

He finished up the last of his New York work and returned to Hartford early in March. Joseph had finally built his family a house, at No. 26 Asylum Street on Lord’s Hill just west of downtown. ^‡ At the beginning of May, Junius went to Boston, where the Reverend Samuel K. Lothrop married him to Juliet Pierpont at her father’s church. The couple took a ten-day honeymoon in Providence. Joseph wrote in his diary on May 11: “ Junius came home with his new wife.” The new wife’s sister, mother, and grandmother came to stay with the Morgans that summer. By mid-August, Juliet was pregnant.

Joseph’s diary does not mention an impending grandchild. It lists Aetna losses, Junius’s business trips, a visit from the returned Reverend Pierpont, the purchase of a pew at Hartford’s Center (Congregational) Church, farming details, local deaths, and political news: Democrat Martin Van Buren ran against four Whigs in 1836 and won. At the beginning of March 1837 Andrew Jackson announced in his last address as President: “ I leave this great people prosperous and happy.” Joseph was delighted to see him go: “ This day Andrew Jackson retires to Hermitage. We ought to rejoice.”

Then on April 17, Joseph wrote: “Junius 1st child a son born 3 a.m.” Junius and the Reverend Pierpont had birthdays in April. The young couple chose not to make their firstborn a junior. They named him John Pierpont Morgan.

Three weeks later the bill for the 1830s’ expansion came due. Set off by a chain of events that included credit restrictions imposed by the Bank of England, domestic crop failures, an adverse trade balance, and a fall in the price of cotton, the panic of 1837 started in New York and was followed by one of the worst depressions in American history. The nineteenth century would see a new economic crisis every 10 to 20 years: in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1884, and 1893. According to John Kenneth Galbraith, the intervals between panics corresponded “ roughly with the time it took people to forget the last disaster.”

Junius stayed in Hartford for two weeks after the birth of his son. In early May, as the financial crisis threatened Howe, Mather clients with default, he went south to collect on precarious debts. “ Don’t give out!” Mather urged him. “Stick to them for good.” Junius’s mail from the firm that spring included cheerful news about his family: “Your wife & baby is fine & write today,” and “Your wife was at the store yesterday looked very smart & she said young Mr. Morgan was also doing nicely.”

The store was doing nicely as well, under the circumstances. “ Our own affairs look better than when you left,” reported the partners on May 8, “& we feel confident we shall stem the tide.” The news from New York was “Bad. Bad – Bad.” In mid-May, New York’s banks stopped payment in specie—metal coin with a fixed value—and banks throughout New England followed suit. “We are after all in a devil of a stew without any basis to our currency,” Howe and Mather told Junius, instructing him to collect the southern debts in cotton or the notes of strong banks. By the time Junius came home in late June he had secured most of the money owed to the firm in the South.

Three generations of Morgans now lived under Joseph’s ample roof. Junius paid his father $9 a week in board for “ Self & Family,” and there was a constant stream of guests. Juliet’s sister Mary came from Boston to help with the baby; Junius’s sister Lucy, who had married into Hartford’s prominent Goodwin family, often brought her children over for the day. The Morgans had a large staff of white and “coloured” help—farmhands, gardeners, cooks, serving girls, chambermaids. For Juliet, life as Mrs. Junius Morgan in this affluent Hartford household was radically different from the straitened circumstances of her life as Miss Pierpont in Boston.

She took her son to be baptized by her father at the Hollis Street Church in July 1837. The baby’s cumbersome name gave rise to several alternatives. Family letters and diaries refer to “Junius Child,” “Junius Boy,” “young Mr. Morgan,” and “ Master J.P.” His parents nicknamed him “Bub.” Schoolmates later called him “Pip.” As soon as he was old enough to write, he signed himself “J. Pierpont Morgan,” and was known as Pierpont Morgan for the rest of his life.

Illness descended on his childhood with the unpredictable regularity of bad weather. Two months before his first birthday, in February 1838, “young Mr. Morgan” began having convulsions. Joseph wrote in his diary on the nineteenth: “Junius Child had a fit.” Early in March: “Junius Boy has had a sick week better to day no fits for several days Mary Pierpont came here from Boston.” And on March 24: “Junius Boy worse has many fits.”

Then Juliet came down with scarlet fever. When she took the baby with a nurse to see her parents at the end of April, Joseph noted: “Child very unwell I fear I never shall see him again.” Mother, son, and nurse stayed in Boston for six weeks, then moved to Guilford on the Connecticut shore to escape the city heat. Junius came from Hartford whenever he could get away. “Boy far from being well,” wrote Joseph in late July.

Next, Junius developed a fever that kept him in bed for two months. Late that fall the child’s convulsions finally stopped. “Master J.P. improves daily,” Junius told his father-in-law in November, and in December, “Bub very well & an astonishing boy.”

The specter of infant mortality haunted mid-nineteenth-century parents. Three of Lucy Goodwin’s children died before the age of three. Pierpont’s terrifying seizures left his parents extremely solicitous about his “delicate” health, and as he grew older, vague, unnamed maladies often kept him out of school. He retained a hypochondriacal sense of frailty all his life. Some mysterious affliction seemed to have him permanently in its grip, and he feared that if it disappeared in one form, it would come back in another.

“ Whatever the nature of the [seizure] illness,” wrote his son-in-law in an unpublished recollection, “it left a strong impression of anxiety and concern on the family even after it appeared to have been entirely outgrown. This accounts for a sort of tradition about the facial infirmity that later appeared”—Morgan’s grotesque nose—“that it was another manifestation of the early trouble. It was believed that the growth could very easily have been removed. This was, in fact, the opinion of several eminent physicians. But a cure was never attempted. The supposed reason was that Mr. Morgan had an idea that if he should have the growth removed from his nose the other trouble might come back.”

The contrast between Morgans and Pierponts sharpened during the childhood of the boy with both names. The competent, close-knit, energetic Hartford relatives were exacting and somewhat stern. The Bostonians—feckless, impecunious, at odds with one another, plagued by physical and psychological troubles—were a mess; they were also, for a child, more fun.

The Morgan grandparents played an integral role in Pierpont’s daily life, serving in effect as a second set of parents. Junius and Juliet moved into a rented house in 1838, and when they went away for a month’s vacation in June of 1839 (Juliet was pregnant again), their two-year-old stayed with Joseph and Sarah on Asylum Street. Joseph, busy managing the construction of his wedding present to Junius—a house near his own on Lord’s Hill—wrote to the traveling pair that “ your beautiful Dog breathed his last” and “Pierpont makes us no trouble, he behaves like a man.”

That Christmas, Juliet’s parents visited Hartford. Junius reported that for several days after their departure, “Bub” was “ quite troubled because no plate was put upon the table for Mama P and Papa P – & he now often talks about them.” Mama and Papa P. had brought a new puppy for Christmas, and it was the boy’s “great favorite.”

One of the Reverend Pierpont’s admirers wrote that “ he had not the limitations, either in character or thought, of the old Puritan mind,” but a “child-like character, one in which the direct sense of truth and right outran all other considerations.” Listening intently to the dictates of truth and right sometimes made Mr. Pierpont deaf to the world around him. Giving a lecture at Hartford’s Young Men’s Institute in 1838 on his travels in Constantinople, he described, among other things, the astonishing fertility of Ottoman women—one had married before the age of twelve and died at forty-seven, having given birth to twenty-seven children. The rural Connecticut River Valley subscribed to a more conservative Puritan orthodoxy than Boston did in the late 1830s, and Hartford’s nose was too blue for this sort of talk. Joseph reported the lecture “ very long & not very well liked. Gave some displeasure to some of our very modest Ladies in speaking of the Fecundity of the Turkish ladies, etc …”

For all Mr. Pierpont’s zeal on behalf of truth and social justice, he had little empathy with the troubles in his own family. His wife’s father and brother were alcoholics, and when his own son William started down the same path, John Pierpont turned away in disgust. William died mysteriously in his late forties. His sister Mary told their father that “ he was a thoroughly honest upright loving spirit … ‘Charity for others faults’ he had. Would, my Father, you had more of it.”

Mr. Pierpont’s second son, John, Jr., followed more closely in the paternal footsteps. After graduating from Harvard, he joined the Unitarian ministry, then took a preaching job in Savannah, Georgia. The elder John Pierpont worried about the younger’s ability to keep faith with abolitionist orthodoxy while in the South, to which his son replied, “ My ideal of duty is not as high as yours.” In 1854 John, Jr., could speak fearlessly from the southern pulpit on any topic except slavery—the one topic on which his father would have wanted him to speak out: “Dear Father,” he tried to explain, “I am different from you in much. I look not upon life with your eyes.… But I trust that I am honest, even tho I am weak.”

The youngest son, James, had a penchant for trouble. He married at twenty-four, had two children, then headed off to the California gold rush leaving his father to look after his family. Failing to strike it rich, he tried and failed at several jobs. After his wife died in 1856, he deposited their children with her father and moved to Georgia to be near John, Jr., and their sister Caroline, who had married a southern businessman. James composed music, played the organ at John’s church, and far surpassed his brothers in the realm of Pierpont heresy by riding with the Confederate cavalry in the Civil War. He eventually outbid his father for literary immortality by writing a song called “Jingle Bells.”

John Pierpont’s sabbatical had not moderated his visionary fervor. In the fall of 1839, after he stepped up his attacks on slavery and “demon rum,” the Hollis Street proprietors censured him for “ too busy interference with questions of legislation,” for lacking “discretion, moderation, charity and Christian meekness and humility,” and for his “unkind and excited manner of preaching.” They voted to fire him, 63 to 60.

Junius told his father-in-law that though “ indignant” at the way the matter had been handled, he was glad it was over. It was not over. Mr. Pierpont refused to resign. Claiming that his adversaries had rigged the censure motion by having wealthy rum sellers buy up pews and cast more votes than they were entitled to—they had—he fought back for the freedom of the Unitarian pulpit in what became known locally as the Seven Years War. He demanded to hear the specific charges against him. When his accusers said he had entered into “ every exciting topic that the ingenuity of the fanatic … could conjure up to distract & disturb the public mind, such as Imprisonment for Debt , the Militia Law, Anti-Masonry, Phrenology, Temperance , and … above all, the Abolition of Slavery ,” Mr. Pierpont declared himself “Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!” Engaged in what he saw as a holy fight for the spiritual health of a nation threatened by economic materialism and the widespread worship of Mammon, he invoked Daniel Webster—“If the pulpit be silent … the pulpit is false to its trust ”—and took his case before a Unitarian Ecclesiastical Council.

Popular sentiment throughout New England ran strongly in Mr. Pierpont’s favor, although Ralph Waldo Emerson held off: writing about the fracas to Theodore Parker, the Sage of Concord observed, “ I think the people almost always right in their quarrels with their ministers, although they seldom know how to give the true reason of their discontent.”

Junius, trying to rein his father-in-law in, recommended a good lawyer and kept an eye on the proceedings. When he learned from a Hartford newspaper that Mr. Pierpont was considering running for Congress on the antislavery Liberty Party ticket early in 1842, Junius dispatched a lecture in which he either failed to see or chose to ignore the fact that the older man cared more for his moral rectitude than for his career: “ I hope you have not given your assent to any such measure but will come forward at once & put a stop to it,” Junius ordered—“… if you allow such use of your name you lose at once all respect as a Christian minister, & it will be such an injury to you as can never be remedied.… I write for your sake not mine, & trust you will excuse, but I could not keep still.”

John Pierpont declined the nomination, but not because of Junius’s warnings: the loyalists at the Hollis Street Church wanted him to save his energies for his own fight. The case of the church proprietors versus John Pierpont turned into an “ecclesiastical circus,” with more testimony about book publishing, phrenology, and the price of courtesans in ancient Corinth than about slavery or temperance. When the Unitarian elders finally reached a verdict in 1845, ending the Seven Years War, they hedged—finding that the proprietors had insufficient grounds for dismissal, yet feeling called on to express “disapprobation of Mr. Pierpont’s conduct on some occasions.” The verdict amounted to exoneration with censure. Mr. Pierpont resigned from the Hollis Street Church in a rage, and accepted a Unitarian ministry in Troy, New York.

Joseph Morgan, approaching sixty, showed no signs of slowing down. Between April and August 1839, he recorded the progress on Junius’s wedding present: “Setting out Peach Trees on Junius Lot … Staked out the ground for Junius New House … raised Barn … digging cellar … began to lay cellar wall … raising Junius House.” Juliet had her baby—Sarah Spencer, named for her paternal grandmother—in December. Three months later the younger Morgans moved into 108 Farmington Road, a two-story wood building with dormer windows in a gambrel roof, a wide bay on the second floor, two chimneys, and views of downtown Hartford and the surrounding farms. Junius hired a gardener to take care of the grounds and a black woman named Mary Ann to help in the house. Joseph worked on the place all spring, putting up fences, grading the land, planting strawberries and more trees.

He remained loyal to Henry Clay, whom he visited on a trip to Kentucky in 1844 and supported as the Whig candidate for President that fall. Clay lost to James K. Polk—a southern slaveholding Democrat who promised to lower tariffs, annex Oregon and Texas, and oppose a national bank. On March 4, 1845, Joseph mourned: “James K. Polk of Tennessee takes the helm of Government to day. Dreadful.”

Junius agreed. In politics and business, he was following in his father’s footsteps. Howe, Mather & Co. continued to prosper, and when the depression finally ended in the mid-forties, Junius bought an additional $25,000 share in the firm with Joseph’s help. He also bought stock in banks, insurance companies, and railroads, and served on their boards. In religion, however, he chose a different path.

As the revolutionary struggle against England receded into the past, wealthy urban New Englanders in the middle of the nineteenth century gravitated to the Anglican Church. In part they were reacting against a revival of Puritan orthodoxy, the radical social activism of Unitarians and Transcendentalists, and fundamentalist extremes. The sumptuous architecture of Anglican churches and cathedrals, with vaulting arches, monumental columns, elaborate stained-glass panels, and neo-Gothic spires, stood in sharp contrast to the white clapboard meetinghouses on New England town squares. Junius turned in the 1840s from his father’s ascetic Congregationalism and his father-in-law’s strenuous Unitarianism to the liturgical, ritualized worship of the Episcopal Church. By 1853 the affiliation of Episcopalianism with wealth and social prestige was so pronounced that its clergymen worried about presiding over a “ church … only for the rich.”

Pierpont Morgan was growing into a serious, good-looking boy with his father’s dark brown hair, hazel eyes, and confident gaze. Ill health continued to trouble him—he came down with “lung fever” in the winter of 1841, and scarlet fever six months later—but he managed to do physical chores alongside Joseph in Hartford and to pay long visits to John Pierpont in Troy as soon as he was old enough to travel alone. His mother gave birth to a second girl, Mary Lyman, in 1844, and two years later to another boy, Junius Spencer, Jr. That fall Pierpont, age nine, went away to school at the Episcopal Academy in Cheshire, between Hartford and New Haven. He came home three months later because his Morgan grandfather was ill.

Joseph, who rarely mentioned his own health in the hundreds of pages of his diary, now complained of back pains and chronic dyspepsia. “ Without I get relief soon, this frail earthly tenement of mine will soon wear out,” he wrote shortly before his sixty-seventh birthday. “God grant that … I may find a dwelling not made with hands, eternal in the Heavens, there to go no more out forever.” After Christmas, Pierpont was sent away to board at the Pavilion Family School on the outskirts of Hartford. Joseph in early April reported himself “Quite unwell I feel my race is almost run.… making my will.” He invited his grandchildren to tea for Pierpont’s tenth birthday on April 17, and at the end of June finished hoeing potatoes and shipping his hay to market. He died on July 23 at home, surrounded by his family.

Joseph left an estate worth roughly $1 million—about $90,000 in real estate, the rest in stocks of banks, canal companies, steamship lines, railroads, bridges, and the Aetna. When Pierpont began to keep a diary three years later, he marked significant events (“Father’s birthday,” “my birthday”) on a printed list of days in the front. Next to July 23, he wrote, “Grandfather died 1847.”