Morgan welded U.S. Steel and calmed panic-era finance
John Pierpont Morgan Sr. (1837–1913) dominated Wall Street through the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, organizing giants such as U.S. Steel, International Harvester, and General Electric while preaching efficiency to a reforming America. When the Panic of 1907 struck, he rallied fellow financiers to shore up the system.
John Pierpont Morgan, born in Hartford, Connecticut, on 17 April 1837, headed the bank that eventually became JPMorgan Chase and drove a wave of industrial mergers around 1900. He helped create U.S. Steel, International Harvester, and General Electric, and with his partners controlled companies such as Western Union, the Pullman Car Company, Aetna, which his grandfather Joseph had co-founded, and 21 railroads. Adrian Wooldridge called him America's greatest banker, and in the Panic of 1907 he assembled a coalition of financiers to steady the markets.
His father, Junius Spencer Morgan, was a partner in Hartford's largest dry goods wholesaler, and the family grew rich when grandfather Joseph died in 1847. Pierpont studied at the English High School of Boston, which trained boys in mathematics for business careers, and in August 1857 joined his father in London at George Peabody & Co. For the next fourteen years he acted as his father's American agent through a series of New York banking houses.
As a junior clerk at Duncan, Sherman & Company from 1858, he learned railroad finance, personally negotiating loans for the Ohio & Mississippi and Illinois Central lines. Early in 1859 he toured the cotton trade in Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana and visited Cuba, acquiring a lifelong taste for Cuban cigars. In 1861 he opened J. Pierpont Morgan & Company in a one-room office at 53 Exchange Place. The Civil War killed his cotton business but brought profits from Union bonds after Antietam and from gold; in October 1863 he and Edward B. Ketchum shipped $1.15 million in gold to England, driving up its price.
A 1861 loan of $20,000 to the attorney Simon Stevens, who used it to buy 5,000 carbines for resale to General John C. Frémont, became a lasting controversy after an 1863 congressional report branded the profiteers worse than traitors, though Morgan himself was not censured. By the end of 1862, with his father succeeding George Peabody in London, his firm ranked among Wall Street's stronger private banks. He died in his sleep in Rome in 1913, aged 75, leaving a fortune Ron Chernow put at $80 million to his son, J. P. Morgan Jr.
Source: J. P. Morgan
