At Wall Street's head, in sun-flecked Trinity churchyard, lies the dust of Capt. James Lawrence beneath his self-written epitaph: "Don't Give Up the Ship." Dead with him is the naval tradition of wooden ships and iron men, of boarding parties and the cutlass: the soul of the new navy is in intricate organization, in armorplate, in complex fire-control mechanisms and in 16-inch guns.
Down the hill from Lawrence's grave, where the head of Broad Street nudges Wall Street's pinched bosom, stands the sedate seven-story building of J. P. Morgan & Co., its marble walls still pitted from the famed bomb explosion of Sept. 16, 1920. There last week a tradition no less glamorous than wooden ships, more weighty in world history than the U. S. Navy, symbolically died and was buried. Dust with Lawrence was the personal liability of its partners for the debts of J. P. Morgan & Co.; on April 1 and thenceforth it will be J. P. Morgan & Co., Incorporated. Dust was the tradition of personal responsibility in Morgan banking. For the soul of business today is in intricate corporations and impersonal directorates; it is bound by the steel hoops of Government supervision and of growing accountability to the public. With few exceptions it is no more the mirror of great individuals than are the streamlined Chevrolets that roll off the General Motors assembly lines.
But it was individualistic and it was shamelessly corrupt when the first J. Pierpont Morgan came to Manhattan in 1857 from the London banking house of his father, Junius Spencer Morgan, onetime New England drygoods merchant. Through the "Western Blizzard" panic of that year and for two years more, young, brusque, tough-fibered Morgan listened & learned as a Wall Street junior clerk. By 1860 he was in business as New York agent for his father's George Peabody & Co., bought and sold foreign exchange through the Civil War. Also, he helped finance the sale to the Union Army of 5,000 carbines which later gave rise to a law suit.
Through the red flare of the Tragic Era, while Andrew Johnson was being laid on the cross and Philadelphian Jay Cooke, financier of the Civil War, was riding to ruin in the panic of 1873, J. P. Morgan walked cool and incisive, supremely confident of the future of America. At 32 he whipped Dan Drew, Jim Fisk and Jay Gould in their attempt to loot the Albany & Susquehanna R. R., saw its stock climb from $18 to $118 when he lifted the road out of receivership. It was his first real fight. Before gaudy Jim Fisk had left the Wall Street scene—murdered by the lover of one of his gewgaw women—Morgan was becoming a man to lean on as well as a foe to fight. It was to him that William H. Vanderbilt went to sell 250,000 shares of New York Central without disturbing the market. Morgan sold it all in England at $130 (the market), forced from Vanderbilt a seat on the directorate to guard his clients' interests, took a profit of $3,000,000 besides. Through the financial marts of the world he became known as a man whose word, like that of his father Junius, could be trusted. In bargaining he was cold, sharp and merciless but when the deal was made no signature was needed.