older brothers went off to the College of New Jersey( now Princeton University) to further their educations. They weren’ t wealthy, and it wasn’ t easy to keep up with the costs. Leonard’ s older brother Addison quit after a few years and went off to seek his fortune in Wall Street. Leonard had the same problem, but he solved it by leaving Princeton after two years and finishing up at Union College in nearby Schenectady.
Leonard read the law and joined a firm in Albany. The competition for work in the capital city was fierce, and Leonard decided to move west and work in his uncle’ s law office in Syracuse. The work routine there was more to his liking, so when Uncle Hiram moved to Rochester, Leonard moved with him.
Leonard’ s brother Lawrence joined him at Uncle Hiram’ s firm, and the two got along well. The many Jerome brothers do not appear to have been particularly competitive with one another and seemed to regard their siblings as assets and confidants, rather than rivals. They were almost universally remembered as wits, which— when combined with their manners and healthy good looks— made them excellent company. One Rochester hostess remembered the Jerome boys as“ always screamingly funny.” That natural charm would be a distinguishing feature of Leonard Jerome’ s entire life.
Leonard married Clara Hall of Rochester in April 1849, and the two embarked on a life of adventures that their community in western New York could scarcely imagine.
Leonard was not a life-long lawyer by temperament, and when the opportunity arose to buy a newspaper in Rochester, the Daily American, using some of his fiancée’ s capital, he and his brother Lawrence jumped at the chance. They allied their newspaper with the Whig cause, and their stewardship of the paper’ s editorial stance increased circulation dramatically and drew national attention. New York was the most populous state in the Union in the late 1840s, its 36 electoral votes a big prize. So when the Whig candidate for president in 1848, Zachary Taylor, emerged the winner both in New York and nationally, Leonard Jerome stood to benefit.
The Taylor administration offered Leonard the position of consul to Ravenna, an Italian province, and Leonard accepted. Before departing, however, Leonard signed up with the Merchants State Telegraphic
Jennie Churchill, with her sons John( left) and Winston( right), 1889.
Company as secretary-treasurer and took an equity stake. His work there kept him busy arranging telegraph lines across New York State— and too busy to take up a diplomatic post. When Samuel Morse and his Magnetic Telegraph Company sensed a threat to their dominant market position and bought out Merchants State in 1850 for the princely sum of $ 65,379, Leonard had his first financial success.
Decently fixed, Leonard and Clara accepted another consul post, this time to Trieste on the Adriatic, a major seaport of the Austro-Hungarian Empire headquartered in Vienna. The two of them were enchanted with the place. Leonard enjoyed the opera, learned to sail and developed a love of horses, which was piqued by visits to the nearby Lipizzaner training grounds. Clara became mesmerized by the manners and social charm of the aristocratic leaders in Trieste and Vienna, and it became a life-long fascination for her. Leonard enjoyed this titled crowd too, but he also found them hopelessly impractical.
Leonard’ s success with the Merchants State Telegraphic Company must have sharpened his interest in finance. Clara recalls that on returning to the United States,“ Leonard did not wait to unpack before he plunged. Every dollar he didn’ t settle on me was in constant use on the market.” Leonard’ s brother Addison’ s Wall Street partnership had declared bankruptcy just before Leonard returned, but this does not appear to have concerned Addison or his brother. The two men set their families down at 8 Amity Street in Brooklyn— near today’ s Van Voorhees playground and conveniently close to the ferries that would take them to Wall Street— and went to work.
Commerce boomed in the 1850s: railroads, telegraph, gold discoveries.“ Of all the decades in our history,” English historian G. M. Young concluded in the 1930s,“ a wise man would choose the 1850s to be young in.” The bullish zeitgeist even got to the normally bearish Karl Marx, who wrote in 1852,“ There is no more splendid time to enter the world than the present. Australia and California and the Pacific Ocean! The new world citizens won’ t be able to comprehend how small our world was.”
The Jerome brothers had a good deal of investing success that decade, and they made the most of their failures. Leonard lost a bundle on shares of the Cleveland and Toledo Railroad due to some devious stock issuance, but Leonard made“ lemonade from lemons” by publicly championing better control of such issuance, a popular stand to take on behalf of Wall Street’ s many small investors. The 1850s boom in railroad finance saw Leonard at the forefront. His connections with newspaper editors and the lavish lunches he hosted may have been responsible for the placement of stories that could be expected to influence certain stock prices.
www. MoAF. org | Fall 2025 | FINANCIAL HISTORY 29