(HOST) During this season of patriotic and presidential themes, commentator Willem Lange has been thinking about a little-known, but once very influential Vermonter.
(LANGE) Three Vermonters have been Vice-President of the United States. Two of them ascended to the Presidency. One did not. Ever heard of Levi Morton?
Not many people have. But lest you consider Levi Morton a hard-luck Henry, you should know that he was one of the United States’ wealthiest and most influential private citizens, who late in life (he lived to 96) merged his eponymous bank with that of J.P. Morgan. A minister’s son, he was born in Shoreham in 1824. The family had little money, so Levi was unable to go to college. Beginning as a country store clerk, he worked his way into accounting and was sent by an employer to manage a branch store in Hanover, New Hampshire.
In Hanover he fell in love with a Dartmouth professor’s daughter, but put off the wedding until he should make his fortune. When the company he worked for went bankrupt, its chief creditor, impressed by the young man, hired him to work in New York City. Soon Levi opened his own business and married his beloved, only thirteen years after their engagement. He then switched from business to banking, another astute move.
Wealth and the Republican Party walked hand-in-hand in the years after the Civil War. When Morton was elected to Congress in 1879, it was often difficult to distinguish between his interests and those of his constituents. He lived in posh quarters in Lafayette Square, and entertained members of both the political class and the haut monde. One friend was a young Ohio congressman, James Garfield.
When the Republican nominating convention of 1880 deadlocked between Ulysses Grant and James Blaine, it picked a dark horse, James Garfield. Garfield needed a New Yorker to balance his ticket. He asked Morton, but Morton’s powerful allies objected. Chester Arthur, another Vermonter, had fewer reservations about defying them, and accepted.
Morton, who’d been Garfield’s campaign finance committee chairman, was appointed Minister to France. Meanwhile, a lawyer and religious zealot from the Midwest, Charles Guiteau, had petitioned for the same position. Finally told by the White House to get lost, Guiteau bought a revolver, and on July 2, 1881, shot Garfield at the B&O railway station in Washington. Garfield died two weeks later, and the Vermonter Arthur succeeded him.
Morton returned from France in 1885 and in 1889 was elected Vice-President under Benjamin Harrison. Presiding over the Senate, he refused to help break a filibuster on a bill which would have required Southern states to permit black men to vote. In the ensuing campaign, Harrison dumped him, and he retired to life as Governor of New York and chairman of the Morton Trust Company, which in 1909 merged with J.P. Morgan.
A few years later Calvin Coolidge succeeded to the Presidency when Warren Harding died of a heart attack. Morton remains obscure and little-known outside Vermont – even, I daresay, outside Shoreham – except that he’s reputed to have been the first government official to climb the Statue of Liberty.
This is Willem Lange in East Montpelier, and I gotta get back to work.
(TAG) You can listen to more commentaries by Willem Lange at vpr-dot-net.