In April 1912, John Pierpont Morgan made a last-minute decision that appeared to save his life. The most powerful banker in America had booked a luxury suite on the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic, complete with a private promenade deck. He did not board. When news of the sinking reached him, Morgan knew he had narrowly escaped a gruesome death.
He declared that monetary losses meant nothing compared to the loss of life. But the escape was only temporary. A year later, death came for him anyway, and it was slow and awful in a way no fortune could prevent. Morgan had been born into privilege in 1837 in Connecticut.
His family was already established, and by the time he was ten, his father had inherited a fortune and become a partner in a banking firm. Even his mother’s lineage carried prestige, descending from a line of poets that included the composer of Jingle Bells. But wealth could not shield the young Morgan from illness. At fifteen, he contracted rheumatic fever, a painful condition that his father tried to cure by sending him to Portugal.
It took a full year to recover, and even then, flare-ups of pain would torment him for the rest of his life. That early brush with death seemed to sharpen his ambition. His father sent him to study in Switzerland and Germany, then secured him his first job on Wall Street. For fourteen years, Morgan built a reputation working in his father’s business, but he grew tired of operating in that shadow.
While working for Duncan Sherman and Company in the South, ostensibly to learn the cotton trade, he made an unauthorized coffee trade that turned a profit. The bank chastised him. Morgan, then about twenty-two, took the warning lightly and began planning with his father to go into business for himself. His plans were interrupted by love.
In the summer of 1859, he met Amelia Sturgis and fell deeply in love. After two years of courtship, they wanted to marry, but by then she had contracted tuberculosis. On their wedding day in October 1861, Sturgis was so ill she could not walk to the ceremony. Morgan carried her to the drawing room for a small private ceremony, and afterward carried her to a carriage headed for the pier.
He hoped warm weather would restore her health. They were married a little over four months before she died in February 1862 in Nice. Her death shattered his romantic hopes. He poured his grief into business.
In early 1861, he opened his first private company, J. P. Morgan and Company. It was a disastrous time to start a new venture in America.
The Civil War had erupted, and the Union needed men for the Union Army. Morgan was exactly the kind of man the draft wanted, but he believed he was better used elsewhere. When his name came up in the draft, he solved the problem with money, paying another man three hundred dollars to take his place in the army. The war destroyed his earlier business interests.
Before the war, he had worked in cotton and iron imports for railroads, both of which disappeared as battles began. Morgan proved versatile, and he was willing to bend or break rules. Using his connections in England, he ensured his profits continued while average Americans suffered. Shortly after losing Amelia, he and his partner made a large profit selling gold as the markets moved in his favor.
The move had critics, but worse was to come. Morgan loaned a New York attorney named Simon Stevens twenty thousand dollars. Stevens bought five thousand carbine rifles with the money and sold them to a general in the American government for twice the price. Morgan profited from the exchange.
When the House of Representatives called profiteers worse than traders in arms, Morgan’s reputation suffered. Later, in 1910, new information surfaced that made him look worse. The general had overpaid for defective rifles likely to explode out the back rather than fire properly. By the end of the Civil War, the public regarded his company as a strong and reliable banking house.
Success continued through the 1860s, and Morgan invested in more businesses than almost anything could be traded in, including guano. In 1865, following the advice of the vice president, Morgan became the exclusive importer of guano from Peru, used for fertilizer and gunpowder. That same May, he remarried Frances Louisa Tracy, and together they had four children. The marriage did not stay happy.
By 1890, Morgan was tired of the marriage and spent nearly all his time with other women, practicing serial monogamy, staying with one companion before moving on to another. His personal life carried deeper wounds. By his forties, Morgan suffered from a condition that deformed the skin on his nose, twisting it with pits, nodules, and fissures, giving it a large bulbous purple appearance. He hid from the public, refused to have photographs taken unless professionally retouched, and could lash out at photographers who surprised him.
The public mocked him with taunts about Johnny Morgan’s purple nasal organ. Oddly, he could have chosen otherwise. Medical practices had evolved enough that the growths could have been removed surgically. Morgan refused, likely because of a childhood fear linked to infantile seizures that plagued him alongside rheumatic fever.
He feared the procedure might bring them back. He could not take the risk. He had too much to lose. By the turn of the century, his success had become indispensable to the nation itself.
Twice in 1895 and again in 1907, the United States stood on the brink of financial crisis. When the downturn threatened livelihoods and the government’s gold reserves nearly vanished, Morgan provided what they needed, saving the Treasury, though sinking President Grover Cleveland’s career. In 1907, matters were more complicated. The American banking system faced bankruptcy with no government safety net.
Morgan overpowered the situation, reallocating funds between banks and trusts, and conveniently removing competition. When one firm could not repay its loans, Morgan proposed that his company US Steel absorb it. Receiving special permission from President Roosevelt, US Steel absorbed its competition into a virtual monopoly. The crisis ended, and Morgan ended up better off than before.
By the 1900s, J. P. Morgan and Company had grown well-established. It invested in many companies, including the International Mercantile Marine Company, an Atlantic shipping line controlling smaller lines, including White Star Line and RMS Titanic alike aboard, Morgan intended to sail on the Titanic’s maiden voyage with a luxury suite.
At the last minute, plans changed and the Titanic sailed without him. When it sank, Morgan knew he had saved his life. White Star Line and International Mercantile Marine sank with it. Yet Morgan announced monetary losses amount to nothing in life.
It is the loss of life. But that grim future had only been delayed. The fever from his teen years never fully went away. Near the end of life, it robbed him of the ability to walk.
A year after the Titanic, Morgan went into rapid decline. The decline started with extreme weakness, then his own body rebelled. When he spoke, his throat contracted, stopping him from speaking. Fear overtook him.
He could no longer eat. The muscles in his throat ceased working entirely. All he could do was sleep. He spent his last weeks in a long sinking spell, meeting his end slowly.
JP Morgan died on March 31, 1913, having slipped in and out of consciousness, sustained by injections because he could swallow no food. His life ended in Rome, Italy abroad. Stock markets closed for two hours in observance of his death, a custom usually reserved for heads of state. The man who had saved Wall Street several times over had revolutionized the banking system.
Critics still accused him of creating a culture where the few control bulk wealth. Both things were true. Morgan changed the world for better or worse.