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Levi Parsons Morton

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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LEVI PARSONS MORTON (1824-), American banker and politician, was born at Shoreham, Vermont, on the 16th of May 1824.1 He was in business at Hanover, New Hampshire, in1843-1849and in Boston in 1849-1854. He then became a partner in a New York dry-goods house. He established in 1863 the banking house of L. P. Morton & Company (dissolved 1899), with a London branch which had Sir John Rose (1820-1888) as its principal member. The American firm assisted in funding the national debt at the time of the resumption of specie payments, and the London house were fiscal agents of the United States government in 1873-1884, and as such received the $15,50o,000 awarded by the Geneva Arbitration Court in settlement of the "Alabama Claims" against Great Britain. In 1899 Morton became president of the Morton Trust Company in New York City. He was a Republican representative in Congress in 1879-1881, United States minister to France in 1881-1885, vice-president of the United States during the presidency of Benjamin Harrison in 1889-1893, and in1895-1896was governor of New York, signing as such the "Greater New York" bill and the liquor-tax measure kliown as the "Raines law." In 1896 he was a candidate for the presidential nomination in the Republican national convention.