From 1862 to 1873 Jay Cooke (1821-1905) was the outstanding merchant banker in the United States. During the Civil War he made possible the sale at par of hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of Union government bonds to the American public.

Born at Sandusky, Ohio, on Aug. 12, 1821, Jay Cooke was the son of a frontier lawyer and politician. He stopped his schooling at 14 and worked as a clerk in his own community and in St. Louis, Mo. He arrived in Philadelphia in 1839; from that time on his activities were virtually always associated with this city, which he made the leading financial center of the country for a brief time. He learned banking in the firm of E. W. Clarke and Company, where he worked until 1857. In 1861 Cooke set up his own banking house, a partnership, Jay Cooke and Company, engaging in the characteristic activities of private or merchant bankers...