America's Magick Money Man

Robert Morris Paid the Price of American Independence

Harlow Giles Unger

Robert Morris, Jr. was America’s richest man in 1776. The stroke of his pen sent waves of currencies and coins bounding over oceans, lapping every shore, spilling in and out of vaults, enriching merchants, planters, friends, family—and above all Robert Morris himself. His money bought and sold gold, silver, tea, tobacco, grain, iron ore, timber, cotton, silks and satins, silverware, china, foodstuffs, fine wines, furniture, cannons, cannon balls, rifles, slaves, and land—millions of acres of land—often without his personally acquiring any tea, tobacco or anything else his fleet of ships carried.

What Robert Morris, Jr., did acquire was money--capital­--lots of it; more than any other American in history at the time. While others bought, sold, and stored things, Morris bought, sold, and stored capital--borrowing more when he thought it profitable, lending it if that seemed even more profitable, or reinvesting it to increase still more. His capital financed traffic in every imaginable commodity on his fleet of ships—the world’s largest privately owned fleet, including the first American ships to trade with China. To safeguard his capital and speed its flow around the universe, he founded America’s first national bank to hold, invest, or lend money, and he laid the foundation of American free enterprise and capitalism, at the time, unfettered by government interference of any sort. In effect, he invented capitalism and transformed the American economy into the richest, most prosperous the world ever saw.

 In an even more important investment, however, Robert Morris used his capital to enhance America’s political liberties by financing George Washington’s Continental Army in the American War of Independence. Morris was not only a daring American capitalist, he was a daring American patriot, risking his life with fifty-five other intrepid Founding Fathers who signed the Declaration of Independence—a treasonous act in British America, punishable by death. Morris then risked his business, his fleet of ships, his three palatial homes, and his personal fortune to purchase and smuggle military supplies for and pay the troops in Washington’s army and free thirteen North American colonies from British rule.

Driven when pursuing wealth, Morris was one of the most easy-going Founding Fathers in a tavern or at home--warm, jolly, hospitable, a loving husband, doting father of seven, and an unswervingly loyal friend. With his wife Mary, he welcomed an endless parade of American and foreign notables to his mansions in Philadelphia and the nearby countryside along the beautiful Schuylkill River. Their most frequent visitors—indeed, their closest friends—were George and Martha Washington, with whom private suppers together saw Mary and Martha giggle together like school-aged sisters. Though Washington’s false teeth pained him too much to giggle, he and Robert were equally close and they and their wives often spent holidays together fishing or hunting.

Born in Liverpool, England’s waterfront slums in 1734, Morris sailed to America when he was thirteen. With no formal education, he worked on Philadelphia’s docks, worked his way into his employer’s counting house, educated himself in Benjamin Franklin’s library, and gradually mastered every element of domestic and international trade.

With eyes and ears absorbing every sight and sound on the piers, Morris discovered a trading flaw that would make him rich: why, he asked, spend capital one day to acquire and store goods you plan to sell the next day? Answering his own question, he defied principles of what was then the world’s governing economic system—mercantilism—with a new way of doing business—a system the world now calls capitalism.

The economic foundation of the world’s autocracies at the time relied on acquisition of resources by conquest, with autocrats and royal despots exhausting national treasuries and men’s lives in battle to acquire the wealth of captured lands and enslaving the masses in fields and mines to enrich themselves and a small coterie of royal families, noblemen, and churchmen. Morris undermined mercantilism with a more efficient, less costly type of trade that dispensed with wars of conquest and used capital instead of cannons to amass national and private wealth. Instead of accumulating and storing resources, he sold or traded them—often, before he even owned them--freeing ever more capital to amass ever more wealth.

In the end, Morris’s economic machinations stripped the British crown of its dominion over American wealth and resources and allowed American free enterprise to stage an industrial revolution that would make the United States and the American people the richest on earth.

A hugely popular figure in Philadelphia, Morris was a member of the Continental Congress, where he was one of only two Founding Fathers who signed all three of the nation’s founding documents—the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and Constitution.

Elected Superintendent of Finance by the Continental Congress, Morris spent tens of millions of his own money to feed, clothe, and arm Washington’s troops when they faced starvation in the arctic winter of 1777 at Valley Forge. When he exhausted his own money, he teamed with money broker Haym Solomon to work the financial miracle that produced Washington’s military miracle at Yorktown. Washington called it “art magick.” By war’s end, Robert Morris had made the greatest personal financial sacrifice of any Founding Father and contributed more to winning American independence than anyone except George Washington. 

The years after Yorktown saw a surge in demand for unsettled lands in the American West. Tens of thousands of European farmers and artisans fled poverty and Old World bondage for New World opportunities in America’s unpeopled plains and forests. Western land values doubled, tripled, quadrupled…. Morris invested his every last sou, buying upwards of 10 million acres, becoming America’s largest land owner. Other Founding Fathers joined him, including his friend George Washington, who bought 60,000 acres. With Morris, they envisioned millions migrating across the American continent, building towns, cities, roads, canals, and businesses.

To convert his and their visions into reality, Morris used his wit, wile, and wealth to coax the Constitutional Convention to strip states of power over interstate commerce and allow people, capital, and goods to flow freely across state lines in a new and then-unique economic common market, devoid of internal import-export duties and government controls. In the century that followed, the American common market that Morris created, with its ever increasing territory and population, evolved into history’s richest, most productive economic empire.

Neither Morris nor Washington would profit from that empire however. A decade-long war between Britain and France suddenly halted the flow of European emigration across the Atlantic to America and all-but-ended demand for land in the West. Land prices collapsed, dragging Morris into bankruptcy. After a fierce gun fight at the entrance to the Morris country home, a sheriff’s posse crashed through the door and dragged the king of capitalism to debtor’s prison.

When his friend George Washington visited him in his prison cell, however, he found Morris undeterred. Beaming with optimism, Morris reminded Washington, “My dear General, I can never do things in the small. I must either be a man or a mouse.” As he had been throughout his life, Morris remained determined to write another chapter in one of the most remarkable and thoroughly American rags-to-riches stories.

A model for poor immigrants in the century that followed, the life of Robert Morris depicts the dramatic rise of an intrepid, penniless, immigrant boy to success, incredible wealth, and a position of enormous power among the greatest leaders of his adopted land.

(C) 2020, Harlow Giles Unger

[Harlow Giles Unger is the best-selling author of thirty books, including more than a dozen biographies of America's Founding Fathers. Among these are Lafayette (three book awards), The Last Founding Father, Lion of Liberty, and John Quincy Adams.]