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JP Morgan Born: April 17, 1837 in Hartford, Connecticut, United States J. P. Morgan Born: April 17, 1837 in Hartford, Connecticut, United States Died: March 31, 1913 in Rome, Italy Other Names : Morgan, J. Pierpont; Morgan, J.P. Nationality: American Occupation: Banker UXL Biographies. Detroit: UXL, 2011. ​ Full Text: COPYRIGHT UXL, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning Full Text: J. P. Morgan, a symbol of an era of aggressive capitalism, grew powerful through an unusual combination of boldness and good sense, ruthlessness and responsibility. An extraordinarily successful investment banker and a noted philanthropist, as well as one of the most prominent art collectors of his day, J. P. Morgan symbolized an era of aggressive capitalism. Remarkable parents Born on April 17, 1837, in Hartford, Connecticut, John Pierpont Morgan had remarkable parents. Junius Spencer Morgan (1813-1890) owned part of a large mercantile house (trading company) in Hartford, advanced to a larger one in Boston, Massachusetts, and finally became partner, then successor, to the very wealthy George Peabody (1795-1869), an American who made his career banking in London, England. Junius settled there in 1854 and lived in England for the remainder of his life. Morgan's mother, Sarah Pierpont, came from the family of a brilliant preacher in Boston, much given to abolitionism (advocating the end of slavery) and other reforms. Young J. P. Morgan received his formal education in Hartford; Boston; Vevey, Switzerland; and Germany, at the University of Göttingen. Seriously ill as a teenager, he had a long and successful recovery in the Azores (a group of islands in the North Atlantic located about eight hundred miles west of the coast of Portugal). At age twenty, he began his career as a clerk in Duncan, Sherman, and Company, a banking house in New York. Two years later, while traveling in the Caribbean to study the sugar and cotton markets, he bought, without authorization, a cargo of unwanted coffee using his employers' money. They complained but accepted the profit of several thousand dollars he earned by wholesaling the coffee in New Orleans (wholesalers sell goods to retailers, who in turn resell the goods to their customers). In 1860 Morgan set up his own company. He had plenty of business from his father in London and also took advantage of many opportunities to buy and sell in the booming commercial city of New York. In 1861 he married Amelia Sturges, after courting her for several years. She was clearly in the advanced stages of tuberculosis (a communicable disease of the lungs), but Morgan, daring in love as well as in business, gave up all commercial activities and took his stricken bride to Algiers, Algeria, and then to Nice, France, hoping to cure her. He failed, returning to the United States as a widower in 1862. He formed a partnership with his cousin, Jim Goodwin, and called the firm J. P. Morgan and Company, Bankers. Civil War profiteer? Writers hostile to Morgan claim that he selfishly pursued profit during the Civil War years (1861-65). They charge that he traded in gold against the government's fluctuating dollars, and on one occasion bought obsolete arms from the federal government in the East and then sold them to General John Charles Frémont (1813-1890) in the West at an enormous profit. Morgan never apologized for his own actions, but writers friendly to him have argued that recurrent fainting spells, from which he suffered as a young man, made him unfit for military duty. These writers claim that he served the Union cause well as an agent for his father, who was staunchly pro-Union. As to the affair of the arms, Morgan's supporters say that two other men arranged and carried out the plan. Morgan was involved only as their banker, extending a short-term loan. Furthermore, the weapons were improved by rifling the barrels (making spiral grooves in them), and the young entrepreneurs, whatever their motives, did what the disorganized Department of the Army could not manage: deliver arms at a reasonable price to the desperately needy Western army. On one point, however, there is no dispute: Morgan spent that part of the war that followed his short-lived first marriage in making money as rapidly as he could. In September 1864 he took in new partners and reorganized as Dabney, Morgan and Company. At twenty-seven, he was a leader in the financial life of the United States's largest city. Yet he was already launched in his career of philanthropy, helping to raise money for the wounded and widowed and working effectively to establish and enlarge the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), an organization devoted to improving the lives of young men. In 1865 he married Frances Tracy, one of the six daughters of attorney Charles Tracy. The Tracys were fellow members of St. George's Episcopal Church, which Morgan had joined in 1861 and attended for the remainder of his life. Largely free, at this point, of the illnesses and spells that had marred his youth, Morgan stood well over six feet, with powerful shoulders, penetrating eyes, and the air of one born to command. In later life, he would grow portly and suffer painfully from acne rosacea, an inflammation of the skin, which settled especially in his nose. He doted on his and Frances's four children, Louisa, Jack (John Pierpont Morgan Jr. [1867-1943]), Juliet, and Anne. In the summer of 1869, Morgan and his wife, accompanied by two relatives, rode the new transcontinental railroad to Utah and to California, where they toured extensively by stagecoach and horseback. Returning East, the Morgans occupied a comfortable new home at Six West Fortieth Street in New York. In 1871, troubled by nervous disorders, Morgan briefly considered retiring. Instead, he accepted a new partnership with the powerful Drexels of Philadelphia. He would be a full partner and would head their New York office under the title of Drexel, Morgan, and Company. Railroad financier Morgan was drawn into railroad affairs by a desire to see that railroads were properly and efficiently managed, so that stockholders (the owners of a company) and bondholders (those who lend money to companies) would be properly rewarded for their investments. Furthermore, he clearly saw what American businessmen Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), Thomas A. Scott (1823-1881), and Jay Gould (1836-1892) had seen earlier: The future of American railroading lay in building large, integrated systems, in which a single corporation controlled not only trunk (main) lines but also feeders (branches) and operated without competition. Morgan's first railroad adventure was a colorful skirmish with the most notorious railroad pirates of the age, Gould and James "Diamond Jim" Fisk (1834-1872), in a battle for the control of the Albany and Susquehanna railroad. There is a legend that Morgan kept control of a crucial stockholders meeting by hurling the burly Fisk down a flight of stairs, scattering his henchmen as though they were bowling pins. If true, this was the only time Morgan gained control of a railroad by hand-to-hand combat. In 1879 he performed a more sedate but much more lucrative feat in selling William Vanderbilt's 250,000 shares of New York Central Railroad stock (87 percent of those in existence) without suffering any depreciation (loss in value) or inciting anyone to try to displace the railroad's management. The year 1880 brought another enormous challenge, converted into enormous profits. In this case, it was a question of selling $40 million in bonds for the improvement of the Northern Pacific, a transcontinental that had suffered bankruptcy and reorganization in the Panic of 1873 (a general financial crisis). Great though his resources were, Morgan could not finance such enormous sales of stocks and bonds entirely through his own and his father's partnerships. He brought in other major banking houses, in the United States and abroad, discreetly organized in syndicates (a syndicate is a group of companies working together to complete a financial transaction). To help protect the investments so arranged, Morgan, or one of his trusted partners or friends, became director of the refinanced railroad. Morgan later helped to finance and manage dozens of railroads. Financier to U.S. government Morgan was involved in the finances of the federal government on four major occasions. With other leading bankers, he helped refinance the federal debt under President Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885). In the summer of 1877, Morgan committed another of his unexpected and extraordinary moves when he lent the U.S. Army money with which to pay its troops, after a distracted Congress had adjourned without setting aside the money. Since the army was not authorized to borrow, Morgan paid out more than $2 million at his own risk; Congress, however, appropriated funds to repay the banker. Much more effort was required to save the U.S. Treasury's gold reserve in the depression of 1893. A combination of laws, more popular than wise, had forced the Treasury to sell gold until it was on the brink of bankruptcy. The Panic of 1893 had further started a general flight of gold back to Europe. To save the situation, Morgan had to form a syndicate of American and European bankers both to lend gold to the government at acceptable rates and to stop the flow of gold from the Treasury out of the country. Formed U.S. Steel Corporation Morgan's greatest triumphs and defeats came at the end of his life. In 1901 he formed the United States Steel Corporation, the world's first billion-dollar corporation. Morgan then turned to a merger of the Northern Pacific railroad with its regional rival, the Great Northern.
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