Levi P. Morton

Levi P. Morton

Levi Parsons Morton (* 16th May 1824 in Shoreham , Vermont ; †  16th May 1920 in Rhinebeck , New York ) was an American politician of the Republican Party and from 1889 to 1893 the 22nd  Vice President of the United States under President Benjamin Harrison . He then held the post of governor of New York from 1895 to 1897 .

Life

Official portrait as US Vice President

Levi Morton came from a pastor family ; his father was a Calvinist - Congregational preacher who moved frequently with his family to the New England states . Morton himself was named after his uncle, Levi Morton , who was the first US missionary in Palestine . His family was not wealthy enough to give him a college education; instead he had to start a job in a grocery store early.

During two jobs in Concord and Hanover , New Hampshire in the 1840s, he learned bookkeeping. After his employer went bankrupt, Morton moved to Boston , where he joined the city's largest importer. There he soon became a partner alongside Junius Spencer Morgan , the father of JP Morgan . In the 1850s Morgan built up his own successful trading house in New York City , but since it specialized in trade between the Southern and New England states , it had to be abandoned in 1861 due to the Civil War . Instead, he founded a bank on Wall Street that had grown into one of the largest in the United States by the mid-1870s. The bank processed the reparations payments made by Great Britain for its violations of neutrality in favor of the southern states during the war.

By marrying his second wife Anna Livingstone Reade Street in 1873 - his first wife died in 1871 - he approached the New York political caste; Because of his great financial ability, the Republicans made Morton responsible for the finances of their national governing body in 1876. From 1879 to 1881 he was a brief member of the United States House of Representatives . In 1880, the later victorious presidential candidate James A. Garfield Morton offered to run for vice president; However, this refused because of his own connection to Garfield's internal party rival. So instead of him in September 1881, after the assassination of Garfield, Chester A. Arthur became US President.

In the spring of 1881, just before Garfield's inauguration, he offered Morton the office of Secretary of the Navy , but he also refused. Instead Garfield sent Morton as envoy to France , where he succeeded Edward F. Noyes . In this role he was responsible for the delivery of the Statue of Liberty to the United States on the American side .

In 1888 Morton became vice president at Benjamin Harrison's side when the two Republicans prevailed against Democratic incumbent Grover Cleveland and his running mate for the vice presidency, Allen G. Thurman . Political differences between the two politicians meant that Harrison decided in the run-up to the election of 1892 to run not with Morton, but with Whitelaw Reid as the vice-presidential candidate. These two then lost the election to Grover Cleveland and Adlai Ewing Stevenson .

In 1894, Morton successfully ran for governor of New York State . During this time he was considered one of the best governors in the state. Before the 1896 presidential election , he ran for the Republican nomination, but at the Republican National Convention in St. Louis , he received only 58 votes and finished fourth. The candidate was William McKinley , who later won the election .

Levi Morton renounced another term as governor of New York in the same year and turned his back on politics. In 1909 his bank merged with that of JP Morgan , but the resulting bank no longer bore Mortons, but only Morgan's name, which he later regretted as a major mistake.

Morton died forgotten on May 16, 1920 on his 96th birthday. He is the second oldest American Vice President, after John Nance Garner , who died in 1967 at the age of 98.

Honors

The city of Morton Grove in Illinois is named after Morton.

literature

• Jules Witcover: The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power. Smithsonian Books, Washington, D. C. 2014, ISBN 978-1-5883-4471-7 , pp. 204-209 (= 22. Levi P. Morton of New York ).
• Marc O. Hattfield (with the Senate Historic Office) Vice Presidents of the United States, 1789–1993 pp. 269–274 as .pdf on the homepage of the US Senate
• Robert MacNutt MacElroy: Levi Parsons Morton: banker, diplomat and statesman ; New York 1930
• Lew Wallace : Life of Gen. Ben Harrison and Life of Hon. Levi P. Morton ; 1888, reprinted 2003; ISBN 1-4102-0306-9

Web links

Commons : Levi P. Morton  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Levi P. Morton in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)
• Levi P. Morton in the Miller Center of Public Affairs of the University of Virginia (English)
• Levi P. Morton in the database of Find a Grave (English)