Robert Morris

Robert Morris was born in Liverpool, England, in 1734 and emigrated to Maryland as a child after his father, a tobacco factor, was established in the American trade. He arrived in Philadelphia as a teenager and apprenticed with the merchant house of Charles Willing, eventually becoming a full partner in what became the firm of Willing, Morris and Company. By the eve of the Revolution, Morris was among the wealthiest merchants in North America, with commercial interests spanning trade, shipping, land speculation, and currency exchange across the Atlantic world. His business acumen and capital resources made him a figure of extraordinary potential importance to a revolutionary movement chronically short of money.

Morris served in the Continental Congress from 1775 and, despite voting against the Declaration of Independence on the grounds that the timing was not right, signed it once the decision was made. He proved far more valuable as a financier than as a legislator. During the desperate winter of 1776–1777, he worked the Philadelphia merchant community to scrape together money and supplies that helped sustain Washington's army. As Superintendent of Finance from 1781 to 1784, he brought systematic rigor to the Continental government's chaotic fiscal situation, founding the Bank of North America to provide a reliable source of credit, negotiating with foreign creditors, and using his own personal credit — repeatedly and at enormous personal risk — to meet payrolls and procurement contracts that Congress could not otherwise honor. His financial engineering was a critical factor in sustaining the army through the Yorktown campaign.

Morris's post-war career ended in catastrophe. Massive land speculation in the 1790s left him unable to meet his obligations when the real estate market collapsed, and in 1798 he was imprisoned for debt in Philadelphia — the city he had helped save financially during the Revolution. He spent three and a half years in debtor's prison before being released under a new federal bankruptcy law, and he died in 1806 in modest circumstances. His trajectory from revolutionary financier to imprisoned debtor illustrated both the enormous personal risks that sustaining the American cause had imposed and the brutal volatility of early American capitalism.