Chapter 3

A MORAL EDUCATION

Between the ages of seven and twenty, Pierpont changed schools nine times. He boarded at Hartford’s Pavilion Family School, his third, for nearly two years. Early in 1848 he recited in class a poem called “Warren’s Address to the American Soldiers,” which hundreds of American schoolboys had delivered to the sound of cheers and stomping feet. It began,

and had been written for the laying of the cornerstone at the Bunker Hill Monument in 1825—by John Pierpont.

That night, orator reported the event to author in a playful tone he used with no other adult. His grandfather had just sent him a gold pen—“ the very [thing] I was wanting this long time”—but “ I am sorry to say I shall not like Santa Claus any more because he did not do as you wanted him to do about getting it to me on New Years day … therefore if I was in your place I would not trust Santa Claus any more to bring presents.”

Looking forward to visiting the Reverend Pierpont in upstate New York for his spring vacation, the boy wrote again in March: “I am almost ready to think that April will never come I think so much of going to Troy.” He teasingly refused to disclose what day he would arrive, since he wanted it to be a surprise—“but perhaps Mother will write you what week.” And he had an assignment for his famous literary progenitor. He needed an essay to recite for an exam, “and I don’t know any good ones so I would be very much obliged to you if you can to write me a piece not a very long one in prose.” After concluding with news of his family and his own health (not good), he added a postscript: “Please answere [ sic ] this letter as soon as possible and send that piece.”

If he did receive an original essay from his grandfather’s pen, no record of it has survived. He made the trip to Troy on April 11. Whenever he left home, his parents reached across the distance with anxious, admonitory notes. Junius warned his father-in-law: “ Pierpont goes tomorrow to make you a short visit. I think he needs some restraining, & hope you will [have him] ^* devote a certain part of each day to reading & study. I hope he will be a good boy & [not] give his grand mother nor yourself any trouble.” A week later, writing on Pierpont’s eleventh birthday, which he did not mention, Junius repeated those directives to his son and scolded: “ I noticed some words in your last letter not correctly spelt which I hope will not occur in the next.”

Though the boy was hoping to spend his entire month’s vacation in Troy, his parents summoned him home after two weeks. Juliet thought he should not stay so long as to make his grandparents “ twice glad” at his departure. Besides, Junius had signed him up for an entrance exam at the Hartford Public High School.

Junius was intensely invested in Pierpont’s moral and practical education. Holding adamant views about the proper way to raise a son, he chided the Reverend Pierpont for failing to guide Juliet’s brothers in the “right path,” and moralized after the death of the alcoholic William, “ It only shows the importance of bringing up children in such a way that they may either prove a blessing or a curse.”

Like most mid-nineteenth-century American Protestants, Junius saw male childhood not as a time for exploration and play but as training ground for the serious business of adult life. Some of the moral lessons he directed at his son addressed specific behavior, but most of them prescribed the Yankee virtues of industry, prudence, restraint, veracity, thrift—qualities summed up in the term character . When Pierpont started yet another school at thirteen, Junius warned him to be “ very careful with what boys you associate not to get intimate with any but such as are of the right stamp & whose influence over you will be good. You must bear in mind that now is the time for you to form your character & as it is formed now so it will be likely to remain. You cannot have this too strongly impressed upon you.”

Junius kept disrupting his son’s life with moves to new schools and hectoring him with unsolicited advice, yet much of his surveillance had a positive cast. He took Pierpont on stockholders’ excursions, assigned him tasks at Howe, Mather, taught him about history, great men, commerce, and books. One night in Hartford the two spent hours going over an arithmetic problem until they proved that the boy’s answer, which did not agree with the text, was correct.

There were fewer congenial notes in Pierpont’s relations with his mother. A decade into her marriage, Juliet Morgan had lapsed into cranky self-absorption. Her letters to her son alternated cautionary platitudes with complaints about her own troubles, and offered far more criticism than motherly comfort. When he left for school one winter, at age thirteen, she wrote: “ I think you will continue to be [happy and well] if you are true to yourself, and do what you can for the good of others, keep to the right path. Be open—correct & never swerve from the truth on any consideration.” He had been gone only a week, and was homesick: “Don’t write too often to multiply postage,” Juliet scolded—“if you write home once a week I think it will answer.” She sent love from the family, then issued another long-distance reprimand: “10½ o’clock is rather too late a bed hour for you.”

As the term went on, she forgot to send things he requested, reproached him for not liking what she did send, and corrected his spelling. Informing him that some pigeons he had been keeping at home had been stolen, she reflected that it would be a loss to Junius and a disappointment to the neighbor taking care of them, but not that it might be painful to her son.

The adult Morgans augmented their lessons with books. When Pierpont was seven, Junius gave him a story called Marco Paul’s Adventures and Travels in the Pursuit of Knowledge: On the Erie Canal . The lessons in this well-thumbed volume have to do with commerce, credit, and profit as the just reward of special intelligence. One day as Marco and his cousin Forester watch trains go by, Marco says he would rather collect fares than drive the locomotive. Forester points out that the man in charge of the locomotive gets better pay. Why? Marco asks. “Because,” Forester explains, “it requires patience and skill and steadiness of mind. Those employments which require high mental qualifications are always better paid than others. There is great responsibility attached to them usually.”

On the subject of great responsibility, Juliet presented her son with a biography of George Washington by Jared Sparks for Christmas in 1845. Sparks, a Unitarian clergyman educated at Harvard with John Pierpont, looked at America’s first President through the lens of his own time and saw a model of hard work, self-discipline, and common sense. ^† Pierpont checked off chapters in the table of contents as he read them.

A book called Young Men Admonished , on the dangers of drinking, gambling, extravagance, and straying from the truth, came from Junius’s sister, Lucy Goodwin. Character counts “ more than any other possession” as security against dishonesty, declared the author: “It is worth more than any stock in Wall-street.” Pierpont said much the same thing to the Pujo Committee sixty years later.

A more entertaining form of instruction came from John Pierpont, who gave his grandson for Christmas in 1847 The Youth’s Historical Gift … containing familiar descriptions of civil, military, and naval events by the Old English chroniclers, Froissart, Monstrellet, and others, and also the history of Joan of Arc and her times . The cover featured a charging mounted knight stamped in gold.

Pierpont transferred to the Hartford Public High School in the fall of 1848. The steady stream of parental stricture had not brought him into line. A Hartford classmate later recalled him as “ full of animal life and spirits … and not renowned as a scholar”—he “never got a lesson if [he] could help it.” Told of that recollection in old age, Morgan agreed, “Never,” with a look of “grim humor in his face.”

Humor got him thrown out of class one day, but there was nothing funny about his response. He sent a formidable letter of protest to the teacher, indicating on the envelope that it came from “a persecuted pupil ,” and was “very important in my mind.”

“ Miss Stevens,” he began: “I should like to enquire of you the reasons why you as a teacher and of course over me only a scholar should treat me in such an inhumane manner as to send [me] out of the class for laughing a little too loud which I can assure you I am perfectly unable to control and which no punishment will cure me of.” She could not deny, he went on (undermining his point with a double negative), “that I have not tried to behave better in class lately. If I wanted I could sit still (without saying a word) in a corner.” However, if the other students followed suit, “would not you think that all the class were very stupid indeed and you would have to do all the talking[?]” Who would look stupid then?

Sounding more like an exasperated parent than a mischievous twelve-year-old, he warned that if Miss Stevens did not change her ways he would go to another class or skip it altogether: “I do not say this hastily in anger but you cannot say but what I have stood it a great while and I think that upon reflection you cannot say but what I have been treated unjustly.… Going into [a different class] is a long contemplated step. J. Pierpont Morgan.”

J. Pierpont Morgan’s partner in adolescent crime was his cousin James Junius Goodwin, two years ahead of him at the high school. Jim’s father was president of the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company and also, like Pierpont’s father, a neo-Federalist, an Episcopalian, and a Whig. The boys spent most of their free time contriving to see the girls at a nearby school called Miss Draper’s Seminary. At first they watched from a distance as “the Drapers” took a carefully chaperoned group walk every afternoon. Then one day Jim pretended he had left his lessons in a house along the route. Cutting through the column of girls, he managed to introduce himself to several of them. Every afternoon after that the boys intercepted the promenade with flowers, candy, and notes. Once in a while a benevolent teacher allowed them to walk a little way beside the line. When the cousins encountered sterner guards, they split up, one proceeding down the right side of the procession and the other the left, to elude simultaneous capture—then raced around the block or cut through a yard to make a second pass, trying not to appear out of breath.

Pierpont occasionally climbed a tree next to what he called Drapers Convent, and from those “ lofty summits” managed to “converse with the fair damsels in the third story.” Reflecting to Jim on these capers a few years later, he found it surprising that the girls still liked them “after all the lectures &c &c we caused them to receive.”

On the flyleaf of his Hartford High geometry text he wrote to a friend: “ I promised Miss Dina I would go home with her to-day.” He had something special to tell her—“I will say it tomorrow in recess or before or after school.” In the back of the book, this nascent connoisseur of feminine attire wrote, “I can’t say that I do like that dress much. It is rather old womanish, I think. How do you like Miss P’s dress?” These engaging matters took up more of his attention than the text: “Tell Miss Peabody that Gertrude has gone and ask her if we cannot wait and say the geometry tomorrow for I don’t know mine.”

Some notes he wrote backward, to be read only with the help of a mirror. On the flyleaf of his Virgil text he asked a friend in reverse script to “write as soon as possible telling about the first girl who you have seen naked etc.” and then “Mary Doyle – ditto – I should like to have seen.” It cannot have been easy in Hartford in the 1850s to see girls naked. Perhaps the boys caught glimpses of servants with Irish names like Mary Doyle through keyholes at home—or maybe they commandeered the “lofty summits” of the Draper trees at night to do a little spying.

In the spring of 1850, Junius went to England for three months. Now a senior partner in his firm, which changed its name to Mather, Morgan & Co., he had joined the ranks of New England’s mercantile elite. He was probably the first Morgan to cross the Atlantic since Miles sailed the other way in 1636, and he sent Pierpont detailed accounts of his trip. He went first to the Lake District, where he saw the residence of “ the celebrated Rev. Dr. Arnold” and Harriet Martineau’s cottage at Ambleside. Wordsworth had just died. Visiting the poet’s fresh grave at Grasmere, Junius told his son: “If you will look in the works of Wordsworth & Southey, you will see frequent mention of the places I have described.”

Proceeding to London, this Connecticut Yankee was powerfully moved by England’s history, institutions, and traditions. He saw the chair in which generations of monarchs had sat for coronation, and attended a debate on the Corn Laws in the House of Lords—between Earl Grey (for) and Lord Stanley (opposed): “as they are both men of whom I had heard a great deal, I was much interested in seeing & hearing them,” he told Pierpont. By mail he guided the boy through the City, London’s financial district, describing Baring Brothers, the Bank of England, and the Royal Stock Exchange (much like “the Exchange which you saw in New York, but … in some respects much handsomer”). The American minister in London, Abbott Lawrence, had a “fine house near the Duke of Wellington & lives in considerable style.” The English generally dined at “6½ o’clock, rather later than we dine in Conn.”

At home Junius had a picture of Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington. In London he went to see Apsley House, the residence of the Duke—“who you remember conquered Napoleon at Waterloo,” he reminded his son—and the carriage taken from Napoleon in defeat. In May he spotted the Tory “Iron Duke” himself near the House of Commons, “the man I wanted to see more than any other in England—he was on horseback & stopped to speak to persons just opposite where I stood so that I had a good opportunity of seeing him, the likeness we have is very good.”

Junius addressed Pierpont as the lieutenant in command while the captain was away: “I expect much from you as you are now old enough to take charge of affairs somewhat yourself.” By return mail, the boy kept his father up to date on business, the family strawberry garden, and local politics.

Just as Joseph had moved with America’s urbanizing markets from Springfield to Hartford in 1817, Junius by 1850 was ready for a larger venue than Hartford. In London that spring he met international bankers and leading figures in world trade. Four months after returning home, he dissolved Mather, Morgan and went into business in Boston with the owner of an import wholesale house that had sold $2 million worth of dry goods in 1849. J. M. Beebe, Morgan & Co. opened for business on January 1, 1851.

Junius’s family moved in with his mother on Asylum Street while he made arrangements for them in Boston. Pierpont stayed home from school much of that term with earaches and boils on his face, ears, and neck. In February 1851 he transferred to the Episcopal Academy at Cheshire, which he had attended briefly before Joseph died. This time he boarded with the principal, the Reverend Seth Paddock. Though plagued by sore throats, headaches, and ulcerated chancres on his lip, he played football and chess, studied Latin and Greek, and in the spring spent his free time fishing, frogging, riding, sailing rafts, hunting wildflowers, and planting a garden.

For all his “animal spirits” and disinclination to study, he had at fourteen some solemn interests. He attended temperance lectures at Cheshire, and kept track of the proceedings at Episcopal conventions the way boys a hundred years later would follow baseball—even collecting autographs of the bishops. He also collected presidential autographs, scoring a coup with a letter from Millard Fillmore, the free-soil Whig who succeeded to the White House in 1850 when Zachary Taylor died. Home from school for spring vacation in 1851, he attended Whig meetings at City Hall, and spent the state’s election day at the offices of The Hartford Courant , getting news the minute it came in.

He began to keep diaries in 1850—small “Line-a-Day” books. Like most masculine journal writers of his time and social class, he was far more interested in registering what happened than in exploring subjective responses or ideas. “ Sleighing, skating; beat father in backgammon,” he wrote in early January 1850. The next day, “wound 7 skeins of cotton for mother. A man fell off one of the towers of the new depot & killed.” He rarely mentions his siblings. Over the following months he recorded: “Dancing school. Ladies to tea.” “Father did not come home.” “Mother ill.” “Bought shad for 25¢.” “No school on account of bile [boil] on my neck which was very painful.” “Finished 3rd Book of Virgil. Picked some cherries.” Not even death evoked a comment: “Mr. S. B. Paddock [with whom he was living] died at 10 o’clock aged 56. In evening staid at home and read.”

Once in a while emotion breaks the surface. After a long illness he wrote, “Glad to get back to school again.” In March of 1851, after not hearing from home for several weeks: “Think it strange mother don’t write.” In Hartford one night, “Very lonesome at home with no one here.”

What the diaries chiefly portray is a young mind intent on order and control. Next to the day and date printed on each page, Pierpont entered the number of days gone by and remaining for the year—on October first, for instance: “Days past, 274,” “To come, 91.” At the end of 1851 he tabulated “Places Resided” between January and July—there were seventeen—and the diary pages covering each place. He kept lists of his income, expenses, the initials of girls he liked, and all the letters he sent and received, including postage paid.

His evasion of emotion and meticulous attention to detail probably served several ends at once. To be stoical, prudent, and self-controlled was to be the upright “little man” Joseph and Junius urged him to become, not an impractical wastrel of the Pierpont line. Making lists and keeping track of things may have provided a sense of mastery he did not have over larger areas of his life, such as family conflict, his mother’s moods, changes of address, friends, and schools, a grandfather’s death, and his own illnesses. It is hard to imagine a more terrifying loss of control than suffering a seizure.

Jared Sparks, writing about George Washington’s early interests, observed: “It is singular that a boy of 13 should occupy himself in studying the dry and intricate forms of business, which are rarely attended to till the affairs of life call them into use.” Pierpont also took a singular early interest in business. At his father’s store he learned to keep books and copy letters, and the math problems he worked on at school amounted to practice sessions for a life in finance. He converted dollars to pounds sterling, calculated interest rates, and worked out divisions of partnership profits. One day he had to “calculate the cost of an inland bill of exchange at Boston on New Orleans for $15,265.85 at 1% advance.” Also, “78 oz. avoirdupois pure gold will yield me what value in coin if from the proceeds 1/10 of 1% be taken for coinage.” Another day, given a capitalist’s annual income of $2,940—the interest on property four fifths of which paid 4 percent interest, while the remainder paid 5 percent—he had to calculate the amount at interest. (The answer is $70,000.)

Pierpont was fourteen when he left Cheshire in July 1851. That August his family moved to a Boston town house that Junius had rented from the merchant/philanthropist Amos Adams Lawrence at 15 Pemberton Square. Pierpont set out at once to explore his new surroundings. He spent hours watching ships in the harbor, sailed a kite on the Common, and took his little brother, nicknamed the “Doctor,” to the Bunker Hill Monument. After evenings at the theater, he pronounced The Hunchback & How to Settle Accounts with Your Washerwoman “very good,” but had no comment on Hamlet . He heard President Fillmore speak at the State House, and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes on “Love of Nature.” In Cambridge he secured the autograph of Jared Sparks, now president of Harvard. And he went out to Medford to visit the Reverend Pierpont, who had recently moved back to the Boston area from Troy.

In September, Pierpont passed the entrance exam for Boston English, a high school that specialized in math to prepare young men for commercial careers. (Boston Latin offered a more scholarly education in the classics.) After a few days, he noted, “Begin to like school very well.” He placed eleventh in a class of thirty-three the first term, and got an “excellent” mark for character. In math he worked on second degree equations, infinite decimals, and the multiplication of radicals.

Someone saved several of his essay assignments. In Thoughts and Resolutions on Entering the English High School , he said he intended to go straight into business after graduation, “to act and think in all cases for myself.” In order to obtain “a good situation in a store or office … I must have a good character in the school I last attended as no one will want a clerk who is not strictly correct and gentlemanly in his conduct and attentive to his business.…” In a paper on Industry: “perhaps the most essential” of virtues can “raise a person from the lowest stages of poverty and misery to wealth and an honorable station in society.” Elsewhere Pierpont proudly compared primitive means of transport to railroad trains “drawn by the ‘iron horse’ ” at thirty to forty miles an hour, and reflected that in 1652 America had been all forest and wilderness—two hundred years later, with cities studding the continent, “Commerce comes in to aid us … bringing the wares of other shores to us and taking ours to them.”

Indirectly striking a more personal note, he worried about young men forced to leave home—“the poor sailor” who braves deadly storms to bring back goods for wealthy merchants, and soldiers who enter “the bloody contest, not knowing, whether it is the will of God that they should breathe out their last expiring breath, away from home, and all who could pity them.” On the subject of slavery, he wrote in 1852 about “free and inoffensive negroes … snatched” from their “much loved home and country” by “cruel and heartfelt” (more likely, heartless ) enslavers who drag the captives to “other shores, where no friend watches over or preserves them from the cruel lash.”

Slavery “has shook the pillars of this vast republic,” he continued, as “one by one the admission of Texas, the boundary of slave rule and the Fugitive Slave Law have issued from the capitol of the nation.” The Compromise of 1850 had postponed direct conflict between North and South, but sectional battle lines were etched into the nation’s consciousness. Several prominent northerners—including Junius but not the Reverend Pierpont—worried more about preserving the Union than about abolition, and Pierpont Morgan echoed their concern. “If the North refuse the entreaties of the South the ‘Flag of our Union’ must inevitably fall,” he declared. “… The proud eagle which for less than a century has spread his wings over a free and independent nation will fly away with disgust. Our national pennant will fall into disgrace and the Republic of the United States will be known no more for ever.”

In moving to Boston, Pierpont had left his childhood, extended family, and best friend behind. He and Jim corresponded weekly, setting up a mock partnership called “Goodwin Morgan & Co.” Pierpont ordered items available in the big city—shoes, engravings, books—and sold them to his cousin at no profit. In return, he asked for detailed news about Hartford, especially “the Drapers,” and volumes of genealogy: he was updating the family tree.

Though two years younger than Jim, he assumed command, dispensing autographs among their friends and issuing orders like a sergeant at arms: “ Did you deliver to W.R. Lawrence the autograph of O.W. Holmes which I asked you to. If you did why didn’t you ask him for R.C. Winthrop’s. Go & ask him for it, and he will give it to you. I told him to.” He reported on the anomalies of transportation costs (it was cheaper to take a train from Boston to New York—two dollars—than from Hartford, even though the distance was twice as great). And he had become quite the authority on art. Sending to England for a special set of Illustrated London News covers, he advised Jim to order them as well: “I would if I was in your place for they are so much handsomer” than the ordinary issues; “you will want them unbound.”

Illness interrupted the business of “Goodwin Morgan & Co.” in the spring of 1852. Pierpont came down with rheumatic fever, which caused such painful inflammations of his hip and knee that he could not walk. He missed twenty-nine days of school between March and May, and stayed home most of the summer. He went out to Medford to visit his grandfather in October “to see what good the pure air of the country would do me,” he told Jim. He had “a first rate time,” and soon felt well enough to “wish I was back again in Hartford. How about the Drapers?”

Country air and the company of Mr. Pierpont improved his spirits, but he was still too sick to go back to school. At the end of October his parents decided that a more radical “ change of air” would do him good. Junius arranged for Charles W. Dabney, a shipowner/businessman and U.S. consul in the Portuguese Azores, to take Pierpont with him when he sailed. Although the boy had planned to go straight through high school into business, ill health forced a detour. On November 8, 1852, he left home for a rest cure in the sun.

Pierpont had to be carried on board the square-rigged bark Io in Boston Harbor. Before this illness he weighed 150 pounds; now, fifteen years old and five feet ten inches tall, he weighed 126. As the ship left Boston he noted in his journal: “ Wind NW … Passed Cape Cod Light at 8 p.m.,” and the next day, “On the broad Atlantic out of sight of land for the first time in my life.”

Rough weather kept the seven other passengers belowdecks, but not Pierpont or Mr. Dabney. The young man’s health improved dramatically at sea: “I did not feel neuralgia [nerve pain] at all,” he wrote to his parents in Boston. Heading off into the unknown, leaving home and family like the soldiers, sailors, and slaves of his high school essays, he kept closer track than usual of exactly where he was in place and time. His journals record daily measures of latitude, longitude, barometric pressure, wind direction, and distance traveled.

With strong westerly winds, the Io reached the Azores—three island groups about nine hundred miles west of Portugal—in eleven days, sailing into the port of Horta on the island of Faial. Pierpont took a hotel room overlooking the harbor. At home, November meant bare trees and cold, gray days. Winter temperatures in exotic, sun-splashed Faial ranged from 55 to 70 degrees. Gardens bloomed with hydrangea, azalea, japonica. Pierpont sent oranges and local wine home for the Morgan family Christmas, hoping that “Santa Claus wont forget me in his annual visitation to Pemberton Square.”

He soon made a friend at his hotel, a consumptive English physician named Cole who had also come to Faial for reasons of health. The invalids ate together, played chess after dinner, and took long walks through Horta’s narrow streets. Still, Pierpont was lonely. He told his parents: “I don’t believe I should live … if Mr. Dabney’s family were not here.”

Three generations of Dabneys represented American interests in Faial between 1807 and 1892. Pierpont went to the consular residence and the Dabney mansion for dinners and private Sunday services (there was no Protestant church on the Catholic island), and had free run of the family’s libraries, billiard tables, gardens, stables, and grounds.

As his health slowly improved he spent hours at the Faial harbor learning about ships—who owned them, what they carried, how fast they traveled, how they were repaired. He mastered this information not only out of an inveterate fascination with commerce and transport, but also because he was entirely dependent on these vessels for news from home. In involuntary exile, trying to keep his attachments alive by mail, he sent letters, journals, and presents by every departing ship, ordered five American newspapers, and expected to hear from home once a week. Even the smallest details would interest him, he promised. Every time a ship came in he raced down to search her hold for items addressed to himself. Week after week found him “woefully disappointed.”

His pleas for mail grew more intense as the silence from Boston grew more protracted. Dispatching a stack of letters by the Io in mid-December, he wailed, “ O! how anxiously I shall look for her return,” and when a gale came up he consoled himself that it would speed her round-trip passage. Seven weeks after he left Boston, an American schooner brought his first letter from home, on Christmas Day. The Pemberton Square Santa Claus had forgotten him, or else had failed to send packages to Faial in time. Putting the best face on the situation, Pierpont declared the letter “a very good Christmas present,” making the day “very happy … indeed.”

Why his parents did not write more is not clear. Some of the silence had to do with vagaries of weather and transport. Steamships were just beginning to replace sailing packets in the 1850s, and most mail went via England; sailing from Liverpool to Faial could take twenty-eight days, which, added to the transit time from the United States, meant that letters might spend two or three months en route. Still, Pierpont had reached Faial in eleven days, and several clippers arrived direct from Boston with mail for the Dabneys but none for him. Perhaps his parents thought that frequent contact with home would diminish his self-reliance.

He bought canaries and a blackbird “in order to have something to take care of and to make the time pass pleasantly,” but it didn’t help. Stormy weather in December brought several “lame duck” ships back to the harbor and long days indoors. Pierpont tried to occupy himself with billiards, whist, letter-writing, and reading—a book on the queens of England, and James Fenimore Cooper’s appropriately titled Homeward Bound . He was too anxious to read: after an hour “I get so nervous and twitchy … there is no pleasure in it.”

As always, he kept close track of expenses. His hotel room cost five Spanish dollars a week, plus 40¢ to 50¢ for laundry. And he was learning about foreign exchange. He concluded that he should not have brought American quarters, since they were worth only 24¢, while American dollars fetched $1.10 in Spanish currency, and English sovereigns $5.40 to $5.60—“ according to the wants of the jews here to send money to England.”

Though he attended a few Portuguese ceremonies and dances, Pierpont took little interest in the local population. His sympathy for sailors and slaves had to do with the idea of separation from home, not with social compassion. If, as he had been taught, industry and initiative promised prosperity, the poor had only themselves to blame. “The people here are very poor indeed,” he told his parents, and “very lazy. They go around begging and it is very difficult to get through the street with out being accosted … for money and food.” Another day, surveying ruined houses and crumbling streets, he concluded: “ These lazy Portuguese haven’t the pride enough to keep any thing in repair.”

Early in January he came down with influenza. Dr. Cole kept him company. “ I don’t know what I should do if it were not for him,” the invalid sighed. “We can amuse ourselves together very well. He intends if nothing happens to go to America in the spring.” He wanted to go to America sooner than that. At the end of January, “very lonesome and unhappy,” he asked permission to return by the next Liverpool steamer, and repeated his familiar complaint: “I wish I received letters as often as you do. I have received but one in 10 weeks.”

Just as he recovered from the flu, one of his toes swelled up until once again for a few days he couldn’t walk: “ It seems,” he moaned, “as though as soon as I get over one thing another comes.” Still, his health was improving. He ate twenty oranges a day, and was so fat he couldn’t button his pants “within at least an inch and a half.”

One night in February a flag went up in the harbor to signal the Io ’s arrival from Boston. Racing to the consul’s residence, Pierpont found the Dabneys “jumping and dancing in high glee. Until it has been experienced I don’t think the pleasure can be imagined of a vessel coming into a place like this bringing letters &c from your friends when you can only receive them every two or three months.” He boarded the ship as soon as she anchored, and found a letter from Junius. With Mr. Dabney’s help he brought the rest of the mail ashore, and when “no more could be found for me then I began to feel very bad indeed.… I thought perhaps they had been left behind and all those kind of sad foreboding. That night I slept very little.” Early the next morning he went back to search again, and found a packet of letters from relatives and friends. Another foray the following day produced still more. He had been gone three months; this mail was his first substantial contact with home.

Packages had to clear customs, and he waited in agony as days went by with nothing further landed from the Io . Then early one morning, shouting voices woke him up. People were calling to the bark’s captain, who was staying in the hotel room just below his, to look out at the harbor. Pierpont jumped out of bed to see the beach strewn with the wreckage of ships driven ashore overnight by a storm. The Io , still afloat, had been converted from a three-masted barkentine into a sloop, her crew having cut away two masts to keep her from running aground. Pierpont ran down to the beach to inspect the damage. Two days later—ten days after the Io ’s arrival—he got his packages, which included new pants, slippers, molasses candy, and a watch.

While the ship was being repaired he felt more cut off than ever. “Franklin Pierce I suppose was this day inaugurated President of the United States of America,” he reflected on March 4, 1853, underlining his sense of isolation with a flourish: “Should like very much to know who composes his cabinet but on this lone island on the broad Atlantic’s bosom news is very old ere it reaches us & especially when the messenger lies here at anchor dismasted.”

During the early weeks of his “cure” he tried to keep a certain amount of starch in his upper lip, but by February he had had enough: “ I continue to like Fayal as much as ever I did,” he told his parents, “which is not much.” Only the Dabneys and Dr. Cole made his stay bearable. Then in mid-March, Cole suffered a lung hemorrhage. Pierpont sat up with him most of the night. On March 29 he reported: “My poor friend here Dr. Cole died last evening at 5 o’clock he was a very nice gentleman and was a great source of pleasure to me.… He is to be buried tomorrow morning.” A few days later he added, “I miss him very much, for he was a very agreeable person.”

After four months in the semitropics his health was restored. He could now walk “as fast as anybody,” he told Boston, and had gained back all the weight he lost the previous fall: “The object of my coming here being accomplished, I think it is about time to turn my face homeward.” His parents finally agreed that he was cured. Instead of bringing him home, however, they arranged to meet him in England for a new phase of his—and their—cultural education.

Pierpont left Faial on April 15, 1853, on the steamship Great Western . Eight days later, having turned sixteen en route, he reached London and put himself up at the Castle & Falcon Hotel in the City. He did errands for Mr. Dabney, visited Lloyds, and in one day took in Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, Apsley House, Hyde Park, and the House of Lords. At the end of April he met his parents in Manchester. He took his mother walking and shopping; with Junius he made professional calls. The Americans toured Stratford-on-Avon, Warwick Castle, and Oxford before heading in mid-May to London.

Junius’s firm, J. M. Beebe, Morgan & Co., had posted $7 million in gross annual sales for 1852, and England’s leading traders knew it. At the beginning of 1853 George Peabody, the most prominent American banker in England, had invited Junius to join his London firm—an offer the latter declined with regret on account of his obligations to his Boston partners. On May 18, Mr. and Mrs. Junius Morgan attended a dinner Mr. Peabody gave for the new American minister in London. Pierpont had to miss it because he was sick.

He got some recompense the next day when he and his father toured the Bank of England, the leading financial institution in the world, set behind a massive, Corinthian-columned facade built by Sir John Soane at the end of the eighteenth century. Pierpont wrote in his diary that night: “ I held £1,000,000 in my hand.”

The American trio set off for the Continent at the end of May, sped through Belgium and Germany (catching sight of the Prussian King Frederick William IV in Dresden), then spent two leisurely weeks in Paris. Staying at a hotel in the Rue Saint-Honoré, they went to the Opéra, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Luxembourg Palace, and the Jardin des Plantes. Pierpont noted excellent dinners at the Palais Royal and the Café de Paris. One day he saw Napoleon III and his Empress, Eugénie. Another, he visited Napoleon’s tomb at the Invalides, rode in “the woods of Boulogne,” and toured Versailles.

Back in London in June, he continued his royalty watch, spotting Queen Victoria (who had been crowned the year he was born) and Prince Albert early one morning at Cobham. The next night he saw them again at the opera. He took a day trip to Windsor, and heard the archbishop of Canterbury preach at St. George the Martyr in Bloomsbury. His journals note visits to the Crystal Palace at Sydenham and the Duke of Devonshire’s residence, Chatsworth. In July the Morgans made a quick trip through Wales, Ireland, and Scotland—where they visited Abbotsford, home of Sir Walter Scott—before sailing home.

Pierpont had been away for nine months. After a cursory stop in Boston he went straight to Hartford and spent most of August visiting the Goodwins, “the Drapers,” and his Morgan grandmother. In a diary note about one day’s outing he sounds positively rhapsodic: “ Had 1st rate time. Helen Wells rode with me. Most splendid in every respect.” When he returned to Boston in September, he told Jim: “Father thinks we had better be joined like the Siamese twins don’t you think it would be a good plan.” Also, “I do wish I knew some first rate girls here to wait upon to Lectures Concerts &c.” At Boston English he rejoined his class even though he had missed an entire year: “Have to study pretty hard to keep up.”

Keep up he did, in Astronomy, Theology, Moral Philosophy, and Evidences of Christianity (all “ very dull”), complaining that he studied from 8:00 A.M. till 12:00 P.M. and had “hardly … a single moment that I can with truth call my own.” He did manage to find moments to attend Whig meetings at Faneuil Hall and lectures by Wendell Phillips, Edward Everett, Henry Ward Beecher, and Oliver Wendell Holmes—all increasingly preoccupied with questions of slavery and sectional conflict—and to see a stage production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin . Partisan politics did not keep him from writing to Mississippi Democrat Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War, for an autograph: “ it would give me great pleasure to add yours … to the already numerous collection of your illustrious predecessors in office.”

The only allusion in his diaries to the “peculiar institution” of slavery appears in June 1854. An escaped slave named Anthony Burns had been arrested in Boston under the Fugitive Slave Act and held in federal custody for his master. Antislavery Bostonians did everything they could to prevent Burns’s extradition. A biracial group led by the prominent abolitionist T. W. Higginson tried to rescue him by force, which led President Pierce to call in the cavalry and marines. On June 2, federal troops escorting Burns to Boston Harbor had to march through a lamentation of church bells, past buildings draped in black and displays of Old Glory hanging upside down. “ We went to bed one night old fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs,” wrote the Morgans’ landlord, A. A. Lawrence, “& waked up stark mad Abolitionists.” William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution, calling it a covenant with death. If Pierpont shared New England’s moral outrage, he left no record of it. “ Great excitement in Boston on account of the slave Burns who was remanded today,” he wrote in his diary. “Beautiful day.”

The subjects he discussed in letters to Jim Goodwin included sartorial trade (caps, coats, boots), comparative religion (Hartford’s Christ Church versus Boston’s St. Paul’s), a pretentious acquaintance (“ I should present him with a few beans some evening and see whether he knows beans or not”), and the opposite sex. He warned Jim about a Hartford belle named Ellen Terry (no relation to the British actress) whom he “positively disliked,” explaining: “she is all self. She thinks everything must be done for her that she desires and when you do it she seems to think it is nothing but what you had to do.” Still, he asked Jim to talk to Miss T. “and see if you cannot get something out of her about me.”

He had finally met some “first rate girls” in Boston, whom he referred to by their initials. One in particular—“E.D.”—accompanied him to concerts, parties, lectures, and museums. She was Elizabeth Darling, a former “Draper,” three years older than her admirer. He walked her home whenever possible, and made friends with her father and brother. He called on other girls in Boston and Hartford as well, but Lizzie Darling appears to have been his favorite.

In the early summer of 1854 he divided his attention between Lizzie and an essay he was writing for graduation. On July 22 he announced in his diary: “Thus ends school with me.” And on the twenty-fourth, Exhibition Day, he read his essay aloud before an audience of teachers, students, their families, and friends.

Other graduating seniors spoke on “Eloquence,” “Is Conscience Paramount to Human Law?” and “Effects of Intellectual Pursuits upon the Character.” Pierpont had chosen to discuss a historical figure. “In the year 1769,” he began, with an almost audible roll of drums, “when the wicked and profligate Louis XV, goaded by his own guilty conscience and laden with the execrations of his subjects, was sinking into his grave, in the little island of Corsica, the most remarkable being of his age made his appearance on the arena of life.”

Napoleon galvanized the nineteenth-century imagination. Books about him coursed off the presses decades after his defeat. “Empire” defined fashions in clothing, architecture, furniture, and art. Mental patients claimed to be the Man of Destiny. Military leaders celebrated Napoleon’s strategies, statesmen studied his rise to power, schoolboys fought for the right to play him in mock battle. To Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dismay, the French Emperor held Americans in singular thrall.

Pierpont bowed to the legendary stature of his subject: “The name and fame of Bonaparte have spread from one extremity of the earth to the other, and glowing delineations of his unequalled bravery, his consummate genius, and his indomitable perseverence [ sic ], have been drawn by the master spirits of every civilized land.” His own portrait highlighted the great man’s humble start: “Descended, as he was ever proud to own, from no princely progenitor, Napoleon Bonaparte was, in an extraordinary degree, a self-made man.” Any boy might imagine himself setting off on the same path. What especially interested this one was the general’s indomitable will: “No obstacles fell in his way which seemed to him insurmountable.… He might be defeated, as he sometimes was, but he shrunk from no hardship through impatience, he fled from no danger through cowardice.”

Pierpont’s parents had offered him other kinds of heroes: Sparks’s George Washington was a model democratic leader—honest, industrious, self-abnegating—while Junius’s Duke of Wellington stood for the hallowed power of military and aristocratic tradition. Yet to the junior Morgan, as to generations of Americans, the morally ambiguous Corsican adventurer had far more appeal than the virtuous father of the American Revolution or the conservative British Duke. ^‡

The seventeen-year-old author returned repeatedly to Bonaparte’s place in history—to the measure ultimately taken of a controversial man and his myth—in overblown passages that eerily prefigure the mixed assessments of his own career. “No human being, whose life has been the subject of a biographer, has been so differently estimated, both in the popular mind and in elaborate memoirs,” he wrote. Though one historian “lavishly praises” and another “indiscriminately condemns” the Corsican, none doubted his courage or genius. The experts failed to agree largely on the question of motive .

Pierpont took skeptical yet admiring exception to Napoleon’s claim that he had worked only for “the prosperity of France”: “Unmitigated personal ambition led him to prefer his own private advancement to the future welfare of his country.” It was ambition plus “preeminent genius” that “made him master of many surrounding countries which yielded to his victorious sword.”

Not long after his own exile on a lonely island, Pierpont imagined Napoleon at St. Helena: “What must have been his feelings, on finding himself no longer his own master, surrounded on all sides by the ocean, and closely watched by sentinels placed there by his enemies? And when, after many many years, he lay upon his death bed, his spirits crushed, his hopes of liberation vanished, and his body languishing away with severe sickness, how often must his thoughts have reverted to those brighter days in his existence, when he was the idol of France and the conqueror of the world!”

The essay concludes with a nod to the historical long view: “No human tribunal can yet settle the main points in Napoleon’s life satisfactorily to all.” Nonetheless, the writer has settled some points himself, since “bigotry and hatred” characterize Bonaparte’s critics, while “admiration of genius and bravery” distinguish his fans. In the end, “time, that great modifier of political sentiments and opinions, must glide along many years more before a correct estimate can be made of Napoleon’s motives. Private animosities and private attachments must be buried in oblivion. The personal enemies and friends of the conqueror must pass away. The institutions of France which were commenced during his reign must be more fully developed.

“When this shall have been accomplished; then, and not till then, can a just judgment be given of the life and motives of NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.”