In 1842 he went to New York City, where after some experience in business, he established a banking house in 1852. In 1856 he organized the banking firm of MK Jesup & Company, which after two reorganizations became Cuyler, Morgan & Jesup. He became widely known as a financier, retiring from active business in 1884.
Philanthropy
Before his retirement, he was already active in a wide variety of philanthropic endeavors. Jesup was one of the organizers of the United States Christian Commission during the Civil War, which helped provide care for wounded soldiers. He was one of the founders of YMCA New York, and served as its president in New York in 1872. After 1860 he helped found and served as president of the Five PointsHouse of Industry in New York, a type of settlement house in Lower Manhattan to teach new European immigrants the skills needed in the United States. In 1881, he became president of the New York City Mission and Tract Society. He donated the funds for construction of the Society's DeWitt Memorial Church in Rivington Street on the Lower East Side, a center of immigrant settlement. Jesup contributed funds and worked personally to better social conditions in New York, in a period when the city was struggling to aid many poor immigrants from rural areas of southern and eastern Europe, including the Russian Empire. The Woman's Hospital in New York City received $100,000. He was best known as a patron of scientific research: Jesup was a major contributor to fund the Arctic expeditions of Robert Peary. He was elected president of the Peary Arctic Club in 1899. Jesup also funded the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, a major ethnographic project led by the anthropologist Franz Boas. He was also an important patron and collector of the visual arts, perhaps best remembered for his support of Frederic Edwin Church, which resulted in the 1871 masterwork The Parthenon that came into the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Jesup's substantial bequest of many important paintings of the Hudson River School and more at the time of his wife's death in 1915. Jesup contributed to educational institutions. His contributions to Tuskegee Institute enabled George Washington Carver to develop a mobile educational station that he took to farmers. Jesup was treasurer of the John F. Slater Fund for the Education of Freedmen at its beginning. He served as a member of the Peabody Educational Board and of the General Education Board. He gave $51,000 to the Yale Divinity School; to Yale University, he gave the Landbery Arabic manuscripts, for which he had paid $20,000. Williams College received $35,000. He presented Jesup Hall to the Union Theological Seminary. In 1881, he was appointed president of the American Museum of Natural History, in New York City, to which he gave large sums in his lifetime and bequeathed $1,000,000. In 1883 he became chairman of the newly formed Forestry Committee of the New York Chamber of Commerce, tasked with "saving the woods and waters of the State ," an early step in a process that eventually led to the creation of New York State'sAdirondack Park in 1894. Jesup also served as trustee for the Syrian Protestant College from 1884 to 1892, and board chair from 1893 to 1908. He also built "Post Hall", which is home to the university's Archaeological Museum and Geology Department. Jesup was president of the New York Chamber of Commerce from 1899 until 1907, and was the largest subscriber to its new building. Jesup was a member of the Jekyll Island Club on Jekyll Island, Georgia along with J.P. Morgan and William Rockefeller among others. To his native town he donated funds to construct the Westport Public Library. He died in New York City on 22 January 1908, aged 77.
Legacy and honors
1905, he was knighted by Tsar Nicholas II of Russia for his philanthropic work aiding immigrants from the Russian Empire.
Columbia University's Jesup Lectureship is named after him.
The Morris K. Jesup Psychological Laboratory on Vanderbilt University's Peabody campus was named for him and was the first building of its kind in the world;
Cape Morris Jesup, the northernmost point of mainland Greenland, as well as Morris Jesup Glacier, were named in his honor.
The American Museum of Natural History's hall of Northwest Coast Indians is named after him.
