Author: Pierpont, John
Biography:
PIERPONT, John (1785-1866: WBIS)
After a few false starts, Pierpont found his métier as a Unitarian minister engaged in social reform. He was born in Litchfield CT, one of the ten children of James and Elizabeth (Collins) Pierpont. After graduating from Yale in 1804 and spending a few years as a tutor in a private home, he studied law, was called to the bar, and practiced first in Newburyport MA and then in Boston. In 1810 he married Mary Sheldon Lord. The couple had six children; J. P. Morgan was one of their grandchildren. Pierpont, however, had so few clients that he gave up his legal practice and joined his brother-in-law in a dry-goods business. In 1816, after that too failed, he turned to divinity. He graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1818 and was ordained in 1819. From then until 1845, with a break in 1835-6 when he travelled in Europe and Asia Minor, he served as the minister of the Hollis St. Church in Boston. He published a volume of poems against slavery in 1843. But he was increasingly at odds with his congregation for preaching on his favourite topics of temperance and anti-slavery; in the end he resigned his position and moved on to serve churches in Troy NY and Medford MA--from which, ultimately, he also had to resign. Dexter says he was "conspicuously lacking in tact and the ability to deal with men." After the death of his first wife he married a widow, Harriet Louise (Campbell) Fowler, in 1857. On the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, he volunteered as chaplain to a Massachusetts regiment but was obliged to leave on account of ill health. His final posting was as a clerk in the Treasury Dept. in Washington DC, 1861-66. He died in Medford and is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge MA. (Dexter; DAB; ancestry.com 24 June 2020) HJ