Levi P. Morton

May 16, 1824 – May 16, 1920

Levi P. Morton (1824–1920) was the 22nd Vice President of the United States, serving from 1889 to 1893. He also served as U.S. Ambassador to France, as a U.S. Representative from New York, and as the 31st Governor of New York.

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Biography

Levi Parsons Morton was born in Shoreham, Vermont, in 1824, the son of a Congregational minister. He left school at fourteen to clerk in country stores in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, moved into the import trade in Boston, and then settled in New York, where he prospered as a dry-goods merchant and cotton broker before founding the investment bank Morton, Bliss & Co.

A Stalwart Republican allied with Roscoe Conkling, he was finance chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1876 and was elected to the House of Representatives from Manhattan in 1878. In 1880 he declined James Garfield's offer of the vice-presidential nomination, a place that went to Chester Arthur. Garfield instead made him minister to France, where from 1881 to 1885 he oversaw commercial relations and took part in the ceremonies for the Statue of Liberty.

Morton was elected vice president with Benjamin Harrison in 1888. Presiding over the Senate, he refused to help Republicans break a filibuster against the Lodge elections bill, which cost him Harrison's favour and renomination in 1892. In 1894 he was elected governor of New York, serving two years in which he backed civil service reform and the consolidation of Greater New York.

Afterwards he returned to banking until his firm merged with J. P. Morgan's Guaranty Trust in 1909, presided over the New York Zoological Society, and supported many civic causes. He died at Rhinebeck on his 96th birthday in 1920.