[1] After attending public school, he took his first paying job at the age of 15, working in the counting room of a bank in New York City.

[4] The Grinnell was the first pilot boat to show the fully developed long entry that was to become the New York schooner's trade mark.

[6] However, unlike his brother Joseph Grinnell, who represented Massachusetts for four terms as a Whig, Moses did not stick to a single political party.

[7][8] In February 1860, president-elect Abraham Lincoln, on his way to Washington, D.C., visited the Manhattan home of Grinnell's daughter, whose father had invited many of New York City's most prominent businessmen to meet the first Republican president.

Grinnell subsequently wrote Lincoln with introductions for others, becoming something of a conduit of political power, if not a wielder of such himself.