Anthony Joseph Drexel was born in Philadelphia in 1826 to Catherine Hookey and Francis Martin Drexel, an Austrian immigrant portrait painter who opened a banking house in 1837. Anthony started there at 13, learning to value and authenticate the many banknotes of the wildcat banking era, and became a partner in 1847. After his father died in 1863, he closed the firm’s Chicago and San Francisco branches to keep wartime capital under close watch, reorganized the New York office as Drexel, Winthrop, and in 1867 opened Drexel, Harjes and Company in Paris. In 1871 Junius Spencer Morgan, a London banker worried about his son, proposed a partnership in which Drexel would mentor John Pierpont Morgan. The result was Drexel, Morgan and Co. in New York, with Drexel as senior partner.
The firm took board seats at the industrial companies it financed, opening American manufacturing to European capital. When Congress failed to fund the Army in 1877, Drexel, Morgan cashed soldiers’ pay vouchers at face value minus a small fee. At home Drexel converted to the Episcopal faith of his wife Ellen Rozet, lost several of their nine children young, and in 1858 took in his brother’s infant daughter Katharine, later canonized as Saint Katharine Drexel. He founded the Drexel Institute in 1891 and died of a heart attack in Carlsbad in 1893. Two years later the firm became J.P. Morgan and Company.
- He served as vestryman and warden of the Church of the Saviour, now Philadelphia’s Episcopal cathedral.
- He named a son after his friend, publisher George William Childs, and that son inherited a reported $10 million.
- He was the first president of the Fairmount Park Art Association, now the Association for Public Art.
- He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1892.
- His descendants included Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle Jr., a U.S. ambassador during World War II.
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