In the spring of 1912, John Pierpont Morgan made a last-minute decision that seemed to cheat death. The legendary financier had booked one of the most luxurious suites aboard the RMS Titanic, complete with a private promenade deck, intending to sail on the maiden voyage of the largest, most celebrated ship ever built. He changed his plans and stayed behind. When news arrived that the supposedly unsinkable liner had gone down in the North Atlantic, taking more than 1,500 people with it, Morgan understood that he had narrowly escaped a horrific end.
He offered a public statement of grief, insisting that monetary losses meant nothing compared to the loss of life. Yet the escape proved temporary. Just one year later, in March 1913, death came for him anyway, and it came slowly and painfully. The man who had built one of the greatest financial empires in American history spent his final weeks unable to speak, unable to swallow, and barely able to hold onto consciousness.
He died in a hotel room in Rome, far from home, sustained only by injections because his body had stopped accepting food. The stock market closed for two hours in his honor, a gesture usually reserved for heads of state. For all his power and wealth, Morgan had been unable to buy the one thing so many people take for granted: a quick and peaceful end. Morgan’s extraordinary rise had begun in Connecticut in 1837.
He was born into a family that already commanded respect and money, and by the time he was ten years old, his father had inherited a fortune and become a partner in a banking firm. Even his mother’s lineage carried cultural prestige, descending from a family of poets that included the composer of Jingle Bells. But privilege could not protect the boy from illness. At fifteen, Morgan contracted rheumatic fever, a painful condition that took a full year to shake off and left him with recurring flare-ups for the rest of his life.
The brush with death seemed only to sharpen his ambition. His father sent him to Switzerland and Germany to study, then secured him his first job on Wall Street, where Morgan spent fourteen years building a reputation inside his father’s business. He quickly showed that he was willing to act on his own instincts. While working for Duncan Sherman and Company, Morgan was sent south to learn the cotton trade.
When he spotted a profitable opportunity in the coffee market, he made the trade without authorization. His superiors chastised him, but the young man, then around twenty-two, hardly took the warning to heart. He was already planning with his father to strike out on his own. Then came a personal blow that reshaped his life.
In the summer of 1859, Morgan met Amelia Sturgis and fell deeply in love. They courted for two years, but by the time they planned to marry, Sturgis had contracted tuberculosis and was clearly failing. Most people would have accepted that she was too far gone. Morgan refused.
He carried his bride to the drawing room for their small private ceremony in October 1861, then carried her to the carriage that took them to the pier for a honeymoon in Algiers, hoping the warm climate would restore her health. They were married barely four months when she died in Nice in February 1862. The loss shattered whatever romantic hopes Morgan had carried. He poured his grief into business and never really looked back.
Even as he grieved, a new conflict forced him to make a choice that would stain his reputation. In early 1861, Morgan opened his first private firm, J. P. Morgan and Company, just as America plunged into civil war.
The Union needed men to fight, and men like Morgan were exactly the kind of recruits the army wanted. When the draft pulled his name, he solved the problem with money, paying another man three hundred dollars to take his place. Freed from military service, he turned his full attention to profiting from the war economy. The cotton trade and iron imports that had sustained him dried up as battles began, but Morgan adapted.
Using his connections in England, he continued to make money while much of the country suffered. Shortly after losing Amelia, he and his partner made a large profit by selling their holdings in gold, manipulating the markets at a time when ordinary Americans were going under. His most damaging wartime venture involved a twenty-thousand-dollar loan to a New York attorney named Simon Stevens. Stevens used the money to buy five thousand carbine rifles, then sold them to a Union general for twice the price.
Morgan turned a tidy profit from the exchange. In 1910, when the deal came under renewed public scrutiny, new details made him look far worse: not only had the government overpaid, but the rifles were defective, likely to explode out of the back rather than fire properly. At the time, the House of Representatives condemned such profiteering in the harshest terms. The war years nonetheless cemented his position.
When the Civil War ended, the public regarded Morgan’s company as a strong and reliable banking house. He continued investing in one venture after another, and there was almost nothing he would not trade in, including animal waste. In 1865, acting on advice from the vice president, Morgan negotiated a contract to become the exclusive importer of Peruvian guano, used in fertilizer and gunpowder. The same year, he remarried.
His second wife, Frances Louisa Tracy, bore him four children. Outwardly, Morgan’s life appeared to be one of unbroken success. The truth was more complicated. By 1890, he had grown thoroughly tired of his marriage and spent nearly all of his time with other women.
He did not keep several mistresses at once but practiced a kind of serial monogamy, devoting himself to one companion at a time before moving on to the next. His wealth and forceful personality made it easy to find new company. One acquaintance described a visit from Morgan as being like a gale blowing through the house. But no amount of money or charm could fix the affliction that ravaged his face.
By his forties, Morgan suffered from a condition that deformed the skin of his nose, leaving it swollen, bulbous, and discolored with pits, nodules, and fissures. He hid from the public whenever possible, refused to be photographed unless the images were professionally retouched, and could lash out if surprised by a photographer. The public was merciless, and he heard taunts about his purple nose. What made it worse was that he did not have to live this way.
By then, surgeons could have removed the growths, but Morgan refused to undergo the operation. His son-in-law suspected the fear ran back to Morgan’s childhood, when he had suffered from infantile seizures, and that he dreaded the procedure might bring them back. He could not take the risk. He had too much to lose.
By the turn of the century, everyone depended on him, including the United States government. Twice, in 1895 and again in 1907, the nation teetered on the edge of financial ruin. In 1895, with the Treasury’s gold reserves nearly exhausted, Morgan stepped in and saved the government, though the rescue helped sink President Grover Cleveland’s political career. In 1907, the banking system itself was in crisis, with major banks facing bankruptcy and no government safety net to save them.
Morgan once again took control, orchestrating the reallocation of funds between banks and trusts. He also made sure he came out ahead. When one firm could not repay its loans, Morgan proposed that his own company, US Steel, absorb it. With special permission from President Theodore Roosevelt, US Steel swallowed its competitor and became a virtual monopoly.
The crisis ended, and Morgan emerged richer and more powerful than before. His empire extended even into the Atlantic. J. P.
Morgan and Company held investments in the International Mercantile Marine Company, a shipping conglomerate that controlled several smaller lines, including the White Star Line. In 1912, White Star pinned all its hopes on a new luxury liner, the largest ever built, marketed as unsinkable: the RMS Titanic. Morgan bought one of its grandest suites and planned to sail on the maiden voyage. Then, at the last moment, he changed his mind.
The Titanic went down, taking White Star and the International Mercantile Marine Company down with it. Other wealthy Americans perished, including John Jacob Astor IV, the richest man aboard. Morgan had saved his own life, but his financial losses were real. He responded with studied grace, saying that monetary losses amounted to nothing in life and that it was the loss of life that counted.
He did not have long to reflect on his luck. The rheumatic fever from his youth had never truly left him, and near the end it robbed him of even the ability to walk. The decline came quickly after the Titanic disaster. Extreme weakness set in, then the muscles of his throat rebelled.
When he tried to speak, his throat contracted and stopped him. Soon he could not eat at all. The only relief he found was in sleep. For all his fortune, he could not buy a quick death.
Instead, he spent his final weeks in a long, sinking decline, slipping in and out of consciousness while doctors sustained him with injections. He died on March 31, 1913, in Rome. The man who had seemed larger than life returned home in a coffin, and the empire he built waited to honor him. He had saved Wall Street more than once and revolutionized American banking.
His critics, then and since, accused him of creating a culture in which a few powerful men control the bulk of the nation’s wealth. Both things are true. And both truths are part of the legacy of the man who escaped the Titanic only to be overtaken by something he could not buy his way out of.