Robert Morris: Financier of the American Revolution

ALSO BY CHARLES RAPPLEYE

Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade,

and the American Revolution

All American Mafioso: The Johnny Rosselli Story (with Ed Becker)

Simon & Schuster

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Copyright © 2010 by Charles Rappleye

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rappleye, Charles. Robert Morris : financier of the American Revolution / Charles Rappleye. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references. 1. Morris, Robert, 1734—1806. 2. United States—History—Revolution,

1775—1783—Biography. 3. United States—Politics and government—1775—1783—

Biography. 4. Governors—Pennsylvania—Biography. I. Title. E302.6.M8R37 2010 973.3092—dc22

[B] 2010020461

ISBN 978-1-4165-7091-2

ISBN 978-1-4165-7286-2 (ebook)

To my wife Tulsa Kinney:

mind, body, soul.

CONTENTS

Introduction

PART I • REVOLUTIONS

1. A Character I Am Proud of

2. Suing for Peace, Arming for War

3. Independence

4. War and Politics

5. Master of the Secret Network

6. Congress in Exile

7. The Return of Silas Deane

8. Backlash

PART II • THE FINANCIER

9. Private Fortune, Public Penury

10. The Office of Finance

11. Yorktown

12. Executive Action

13. Fighting for Funds

14. A Desperate Gambit

15. Final Settlements

PART III • THE NEW REPUBLIC

16. The Great Bank Debate

17. The Constitution

18. The First Federal Congress

19. The Compromise of 1790

20. Ruin

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustration Credits

ROBERT MORRIS

INTRODUCTION

I first came across Robert Morris in the research for my last book, Sons of Providence, a story from the time of the American Revolution. John Brown, a prominent Rhode Island merchant, was spearheading opposition to the prospect of new, federal taxes, which he considered just as oppressive as the taxes imposed by Parliament. Morris was the leading advocate for the new funding plan; I was struck by his compelling arguments in support of the national government, and at his audacity in dispatching Thomas Paine to Providence to lobby for the cause.

The source material for this remarkable episode was contained in The Papers of Robert Morris, a nine-volume collection issued under the stewardship of historian E. James Ferguson over the course of twenty-five years, with the last volume published in 1999. The scope of Morris’s endeavors, the depth of his frustration, and the lucidity of his prose stuck with me in the months it took to finish my manuscript.

Once that book was published I returned to Morris. I was surprised to find that despite the publication of the Morris papers, no modern-day biographer had taken advantage of Ferguson’s labors to produce a full treatment of this central figure in America’s founding saga. Indeed, Morris had been all but forgotten in the recent surge of interest in the nation’s founding era.

This was more than just a disservice to a remarkable career. Morris’s absence from the story leaves a gaping hole in our understanding of the social and political struggles that bedeviled the revolutionary war effort, led to the writing of the Constitution, and helped launch America as a financial powerhouse. The more I learned of Morris, the easier became the choice of what my next project should be.

The most recent books on Morris, prior to this biography, are major works from 1954 and 1961 covering his four-year tenure as superintendent of finance in the revolutionary government. In this position Morris acted in the capacity of treasury secretary at a time when finances were the most urgent and vexing problem confronting the new nation. More than that, Morris was the chief civil officer in the government, with full authority to hire and fire any employee of Congress or the armed forces. In a very real sense he was, as one of his critics complained, a pecuniary dictator.

His ascendance may not have been a great moment for American democracy—though his appointment was made by a unanimous vote in Congress—but it was very good for the progress of the Revolution. Faced with an empty treasury, a worthless currency, and an economy in disarray, Morris leaned heavily on his own personal fortune to provide crucial aid to General George Washington and salvage the credit of the rebel government with key allies in Europe, and he projected in detail the scheme for federal revenues that came to be known as Alexander Hamilton’s funding program.

At the same time, Morris laid the foundation for a financial system that would establish America as the world’s economic leader. He introduced the concepts of banking and commercial finance on a national basis, and persuaded a skeptical public to endorse his vision and set it in motion. He conceived, and in the years to come would implement, measures to restore the nation’s credit and encourage capital formation that speak directly to the financial crisis that confronts the world today.

This was the period of Morris’s greatest influence, a time of prominence and prodigious exertion acknowledged—albeit in passing—by most of our more sagacious historians. But as I delved further, I found that Morris was deeply engaged in the war effort and the affairs of Congress from the very onset of America’s split with England. He was active in the early opposition to the Stamp Act, was instrumental in the clandestine and today little-known effort to arm the rebel colonies, and worked closely with Benjamin Franklin in forging ties to France, a critical source of support throughout the Revolution. For three critical months in the winter of 1777, when Congress fled Philadelphia for the relative safety of Baltimore, Morris ran the operations of the American government virtually single-handed.

Just as interesting was Morris’s political odyssey. By nature open, warm, and gregarious, just as comfortable in a grog shop as in the parlors of Philadelphia’s mercantile elite, Morris was in the beginning of the war a reluctant but consensus candidate for a series of important state and national offices. Over time, as the old social order was shaken by the new political forces of democracy and liberty, Morris came to be identified as a spokesman for wealth and stability, and was excoriated by early radicals like Samuel Adams as a corrupting influence on the Republican virtue they hoped the Revolution would foster.

But Morris was no ideologue. Pragmatic, creative, addicted to hard work, as one student of his career put it, Morris shrugged off his critics and focused his exceptional energies on problems that crashed in waves against the rickety bulwark of the nascent national government. His perseverance and his steadfast integrity won him the allegiance of his fellow founders—Franklin, Hamilton, James Madison, John Adams (though never his cousin Sam), and especially Washington—and he became the leader of the faction that, four years after the peace with Britain, wrote the new Constitution.

Among this collection of imposing and often brilliant men, Morris was a principal character, a leader and an icon who dominated the councils of the Revolution. Yet he was also enormously controversial. He was rich in an era when popular ideology celebrated austerity. He was skeptical of the virtues of democracy and an unabashed global capitalist—a man ahead of his time. During the Constitutional Convention and in the first sessions of the novel United States Senate, he often let surrogates handle the floor debates because he knew that the simple fact of his endorsement could kill the measures he supported.

This infamy has persisted to the present day, taken up by historians still grinding axes that were fashioned at the time. The consequence is a curiously warped version of our national story, one that prizes the rhetoric and ideology of the founding epoch and fails to credit the essential pragmatism that distinguishes the American Revolution from so many other subsequent social upheavals. To paint Morris out of the picture ignores the fundamental ways in which his instincts and insights helped shape the nation that America became.

Another source of fascination was Morris’s commercial career. His critics then and later held that Morris made his fortune by graft and corruption, siphoning off precious funds from the public efforts to finance the war. But a close study of his business activities demonstrates that his deep engagement in government procurement usually cost him dearly, losses he sustained by his unparalleled mastery of trade and international markets. Foreign merchants and even the courts of Europe sought him out, granting him exceptional and exclusive franchises simply because he was the best-connected and most capable entrepreneur in America.

All this made more poignant and more arresting the final chapter of Morris’s life and career. His deals and his endeavors expanded steadily in scope, reaching heights that can only be termed phenomenal—sole management of tobacco trade with France, land deals that encompassed literally millions of acres. In the end, perhaps inevitably, Morris overreached, convinced that his salvation would arrive with one more sale, the emergence of one more critical trading partner. That reprieve never arrived, and in 1797, at sixty-three years of age, Morris surrendered to the sheriff of Philadelphia and was confined to debtor’s prison.

This somber denouement comes as little surprise to anyone familiar with the rollicking, boom-and-bust cycles of early American capitalism. But for Morris it helped becloud a remarkable career of private and public enterprise, of risk and painful dilemma in the context of the unprecedented break between Britain and her former colonies. As a consequence, and in a twist of historiographical irony, Morris’s memory today is preserved best by his critics and his enemies. Take, for example, the recent book Taming Democracy, a broad-brush polemic which holds that the true story of the Revolution is one of the popular will being usurped by a small, self-interested elite. Here, leftist historian Terry Bouton finds Morris to be the most powerful man in America—aside, perhaps, from George Washington. Indeed, the degree of authority he possessed over the economy was probably never matched in the subsequent history of the United States. Bouton presents Morris in caricature, and ignores the hard lessons of experience that pushed him to the fore. But his grand appraisal of Morris’s stature, and his high estimate of Morris’s power, are beyond dispute.

What follows, then, is the full story of Robert Morris, his ascent, his political evolution, his tenure as the chief executive of the revolutionary government, and his seminal contribution to the formation of the republic. Among the most powerful and influential of America’s founding fathers, his career wends its way through the central events of his time, providing new light on the key controversies of the Revolution and its aftermath. There is much in the way of policy and legislation, but there is also a very human tale of struggle and triumph, of ambition and tragedy. I tried to steer carefully through the shoals of controversy, the political debates that bedeviled the founders and resonate to the current day. I sought to deal fairly with the many charges leveled against Morris in the course of his career, and with his vigorous and generally successful rebuttals. But most of all, I strove to illuminate the character and vision of a self-made man who shaped the destiny of a new nation, helping to make America what it is today.

PART I

REVOLUTIONS

— Chapter 1 —

A CHARACTER I AM PROUD OF

In the angry, dark days of the Revolution, and in the epochal political struggles that followed, the foes of Robert Morris denounced him as the leader of the aristocratical party, seeking to restore the social order that the American patriots had done so much to overturn. But to those who knew his story, this was one accusation that made no sense. In a time when fate was often determined by rank of birth, Morris hailed from obscurity.

Robert Morris was born in the booming British port of Liverpool on the last day January 1734. His grandfather was a sea captain; his father, who shared his name, was a broker, or factor, in the employ of a shipping firm. His mother was recorded as an Elizabeth Murphet, but there is no record of her marriage to Morris. It appears the child was born out of wedlock. According to family lore, Murphet was soon out of the picture, and young Robert was raised by his maternal grandmother. Morris later professed no recollection of his mother.

When his namesake was still a toddler the senior Robert Morris shipped out to the New World, dispatched by his employers to Oxford, a small trading port at the mouth of the Tred Avon River on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He soon established a reputation as a shrewd and savvy businessman, a mercantile genius thought to have no equal in the land. His base in trade was in tobacco, the primary export of the Chesapeake region, raised on slave plantations carved out of lush primeval forest. Morris bought leaf from growers and stored it in a company warehouse on the Oxford wharf, but soon branched out. He formed partnerships with factors at other ports, won contracts to provide uniforms for Maryland troops during King George’s War, and invested in at least one slaving voyage from Africa.

He was an innovator, a pioneer who helped modernize the early tobacco trade. According to one contemporary account, he was the first who introduced the mode of keeping accounts in money, instead of so many pounds of tobacco . . . as was formerly the case. And he persuaded his fellow tobacco factors to appoint independent inspectors to assay the quality of the crop offered at different warehouses. This practice gave rise to an inspection law that Morris pushed through a reluctant legislature. If he had any public political point to carry, one associate recalled, he defeated all opposition.

Well liked among his friends, Morris was remembered for his cheerful wit and sound judgment; as a companion and bon vivant, he was incomparable. He could also be haughty and sometimes overbearing, severe with servants and slaves. Over the course of a decade, he came to dominate commercial life in Oxford, and helped raise the port to a prominent position on the Chesapeake.

When his son reached thirteen years of age, Morris sent for him to join him in America. Young Robert arrived sometime in 1747 and lived briefly at Oxford. He stayed in the handsome wood-frame house his father maintained on the town’s main street, and studied under an Anglican clergyman. Robert was tutored in mathematics—the universal language of business—and gained a smattering of Latin.

As the years went by, Robert demonstrated many of the qualities that marked his father—the gregarious nature, the business acumen, the spirit of innovation—but these traits had to be inherited, not instilled. Just two years after his arrival, the father decided his son needed more than the hamlet of Oxford could provide. He sent Robert off to Philadelphia in charge of a friend named Robert Greenway, a merchant who doubled as a librarian at the Library Company, one of the civic projects fostered by Ben Franklin.

Situated on a tongue of land between the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers, home at that time to roughly twenty thousand people, Philadelphia rivaled Boston as the largest settlement in British North America. Designed by founder William Penn to embody a stolid practicality, the houses were tidy, compact, and built of pale red brick; the streets broad and straight, with right-angle corners, flagstone sidewalks, and beginning around 1750, lit by whale-oil lamps, the first on the continent. The main street in town was High, or Market, which featured an arched arcade of market stalls down the middle—brick, of course—and which was thronged three days a week with country vendors and city shoppers.

It was a cosmopolitan city, the original Quakers living at close quarters with recently arrived Germans, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, a handful of Catholics, a small set of British Anglicans, and roughly a thousand African slaves, many of them domestic servants. There were capacious stone churches, grassy commons, and several libraries. People prided themselves on their civic works; the Quakers operated a hospital, and the Anglicans staffed America’s first college of liberal arts. Ben Franklin had helped organize both, a testament to his political dexterity and his broad influence in his adoptive home.

The pride of the town was the new State House, two stories tall, with a handsome bell tower and flanked by two blocky office buildings, all spare, straight, and brick with trim painted white. Behind, to the south, lay a spacious public yard enclosed by a wall seven feet high where legislators liked to stroll between sessions. But Philadelphia was also urban, and subject to blight. Many side streets were unpaved. Dung, dirt, and trash collected waist high on the roadsides and a boggy, sometimes fetid swamp snaked from the Delaware almost to the center of town. In the summer, when flies, gnats, and mosquitoes descended in clouds, the heat could be overbearing. The only respite was to find a seat under the awnings that tented city stoops.

For young Robert Morris, tall and sandy-haired, with a Celtic complexion and pale blue eyes, the crush of people in the streets and the din of wagons and livestock clattering over the cobblestones probably felt a bit like home. Bustling Philadelphia bore more resemblance to Liverpool than the tiny hamlet of Oxford. And there were plenty of distractions for a teenage boy—taverns and coffeehouses of every description, and on the north edge of town, in a district known as Helltown, cockfights and bull baits drew raucous crowds.

Robert lived with his sponsor Greenway, but the long-limbed youth showed little interest in books. He was soon placed as an apprentice in a shipping firm, contracted to spend the next seven years learning the modes and the skills of the commercial life, or as papers confirming another apprenticeship of the time described it, the Art, Trade, or Mystery of Merchandize.

The firm that took him on was headed by a British-born merchant named Charles Willing. Quartered at the southern end of the Philadelphia waterfront, Willing operated a countinghouse, warehouse, a retail store, and below those, a wharf, berth to his several square-rigged frigates. To the north, sixty more piers stretched two full miles along the west bank of the Delaware. This was the seat of the Pennsylvania shipping trade, the industrial heart of the city and the busiest port in the colonies. It was a scene of constant hubbub: smiths and sailmakers toiling in their shops, captains and mates hollering after jack-tar seamen, stevedores and draymen wrestling the great wooden barrels called hogsheads used to ship the staples of trade—flour or sugar, wine or rum. It was the perfect setting for Robert to start in the path followed by his father.

As a teenage trainee, Robert began at the bottom, sweeping floors and helping to sort the various imported goods that arrived on the firm’s several ships. Before long he was brought into the countinghouse as a clerk, churning out the voluminous, painstaking correspondence that was the lifeblood of the shipping trade. In the days before Xerox, before telegraph or typewriters, it was all done longhand—sailing orders for captains, detailed cargo lists, and letters to foreign factors, especially Thomas Willing, Charles’s brother and financial broker in Bristol, England—all with copies drawn up for the home office. These early papers Morris signed with his initials, and the subscription for my masters.

In his youth Morris longed to return to his home in England, but he never had the chance. Instead, the young apprentice impressed Charles Willing with his jovial nature, his energy, and his diligence. The Willing trading house, overlooking the river craft, the coastal schooners, and the tall masts of the seagoing ships that rode the easy current of the Delaware, became his home.

In July 1750, when he was thirty-nine years old, the senior Robert Morris was awakened by a troubling dream. One of his vessels had just arrived from England, and the ship’s captain was to host a party to celebrate a safe voyage. In his dream, Morris envisioned the party ending in tragedy: on his way back to shore, a salute fired from the ship would somehow deal him a fatal blow. Upon awakening, Morris considered begging off the afternoon engagement, but that would be a breach of protocol. Instead, when he arrived on board ship, he confided to the captain his premonition, and asked him to forgo the customary salute. The captain agreed, but he apparently neglected to inform the crew. When the festivities wound down, Morris and his party climbed into a longboat for transport back to the Oxford wharf. As they pulled away, the ship’s cannon roared out a broadside salute. The guns weren’t loaded but the charges were live, and the cotton wadding from one of the guns caught Morris above the elbow, breaking his arm. The wound became infected, and within three days Morris was dead.

Robert Morris learned of his father’s decease in a letter. The senior Morris had always been distant from his son, and now he was gone. All that was left was a will, which provided that the father’s assets be liquidated and placed in the hands of his teenage boy, an estate appraised at two thousand five hundred pounds sterling. Also named in the will were the father’s two sisters, who remained in England. There was no mention of Elizabeth Murphet, but there was a bequest for Sarah Wise, a Maryland resident, who was to receive two hundred fifty pounds in local currency for the good will and affection I have for her, as well as one hundred pounds for her daughter, and one hundred more for the child of which Sarah Wise is now with child. This infant appears to have been another illegitimate son, a half-brother to young Robert, who recorded later that, "no sooner had I fixed myself in the world than I took charge of this brother." Thus did Robert Morris find himself, at sixteen years of age, an orphan in the New World, an apprentice possessed of a modest fortune, living with Robert Greenway and looking after the affairs of a baby half-brother.

The estate left by his father was substantial for the time, but it was probably superfluous; the Willing firm was fast assuming a leading position in colonial trade, and Robert grew with the company. Before long he was shipping out as cargo master on trading ventures, sailing the Caribbean to select the most promising markets and driving dockside bargains to obtain the best cargo for the return trip. He landed at Kingston, Havana, and Port-au-Prince on Hispaniola, learning the ways of ships and sailors on seas that were sometimes hostile.

In 1761, during one of the recurrent European wars, his vessel was captured and Morris was briefly confined to a French jail. As the story goes, he was released at the behest of an itinerant preacher and turned out on a barren shore in Cuba. He was penniless, but he encountered a Frenchman and won his favor by repairing his broken watch. With the assistance of his new friend Morris made his way to a port, and from there back to Philadelphia. The adventure was considered a mark of his ingenuity; it also afforded Morris insight into the perilous life of the mariners who helmed the ships of the great trading houses.

But it was in the Willing home office in Philadelphia that Morris made his mark. Here he spent long hours keeping ledgers and accounts, and tracking valuations in the bewildering array of currencies that crossed his desk—British pounds, French livres, Dutch florins, Spanish reales, and of course the currencies of the several colonies, each of which fluctuated against each other and against the trade standard, the British pound sterling. More arcane still were the primary medium of international trade, bills of exchange, promissory notes drawn by a merchant or factor against a distant creditor, usually on the other side of the Atlantic. These paper obligations provided a critical channel for commercial capital, and were marketed in their own right.

Besides his aptitude for numbers, Morris demonstrated a natural feel for markets and the nerve to put his instinct into action. The story is told of one early occasion, when Charles Willing was away on business, Robert learned from an arriving ship captain that the price of flour had jumped in the foreign market. Robert promptly purchased all the flour then available in Philadelphia, leaving competing merchants to pay advanced prices while Willing & Co. shipped the available supply to Europe. This was an astonishing display of bravura for a boy still in his teens, an early example of the adroit maneuvers that would carry Morris to the heights of power and influence in the world of American commerce.

Morris seemed impervious to the looming threat that shadowed the life of the colonial trader—constant, gnawing risk. A successful trading venture could yield a fortune, especially in wartime, but such voyages were plagued by shipwreck, spoilage, shifting markets, and privateers—freelance pirates licensed by one belligerent state or other to raid rival shipping. Loans had to be supported when they came due, and impatient creditors assuaged. The constant prospect of failure was enough to drive some to distraction; George Clymer, a prominent Philadelphia merchant, longed to leave the trade due to its peculiar precariousness. Robert Morris, on the other hand, seemed energized by the high-stakes game of international shipping. One of his earliest surviving letters, written in November 1759, captures his saucy audacity. He writes to celebrate a recent infusion of cash: a debtor has paid us a good deal of money which reprieves us from gaol one month more, Morris wrote. But the respite would only be temporary. Our damned creditors are hungry as the Devil and we tumble hogsheads of sugar and bills of exchange and paper money down their throats every day but all won’t do unless a fresh supply comes soon.

Morris’s counterpart in the Willing firm, a colleague who soon became his friend, was Thomas Willing, his father’s eldest son and his partner in the trading house. Two years older than Robert, Thomas Willing had the social polish and family connections that an outsider like Robert lacked. Through his mother, Mary Shippen, Thomas was related to one of Philadelphia’s most prominent families, pillars of the Anglican church and influential in the politics of the colony. And by his father, Thomas was born into a mercantile concern with one foot in Philadelphia and the other in England, where his uncle and namesake ran a trading house of his own. Following the opposite path to Robert’s, Willing was sent to England in his early teens, to live with his paternal grandmother and enroll in a private academy; the last six months of his stay he studied law at London’s famed Inner Temple.

Thomas returned to America in 1750 and joined his father in business. He was formally admitted as a partner the next year, and the trading house renamed Charles Willing & Son. Their practice followed the contours of the British imperial economy: the firm exported Pennsylvania produce, primarily wheat, to Europe, and imported wine, manufactured goods, and immigrants—usually indentured servants from the continent, but also slaves from Africa and from British plantations in the Caribbean. Within the house, it appears that Morris managed shipping activities, while the Willings focused on building their credit in Europe and extending the firm’s reach in western Pennsylvania through trade with the Indians. Charles Willing also embraced the high profile that attended mercantile success: he was a justice of the peace and served twice as mayor of Philadelphia.

Morris’s position with the firm, and his bond with Thomas Willing, were altered dramatically with the death of Charles Willing in 1754. There was an element of irony in the circumstances of his demise: the thousands of indentured servants arriving in Philadelphia, many of them on Willing’s ships, had introduced jail or ship fever to the local population, the sickness spreading in the town . . . owing to the unhealthiness of the vessels and the Palatine passengers. Obliged as mayor to make rounds of the pest house, Charles Willing contracted the fever and died on November 29.

This left Thomas, twenty-three years old, in charge of the family business and the male head of a household that included his mother and eight younger siblings. The weight of these obligations only reinforced his dutiful and instinctively conformist nature; before long, even his friends referred to him as Old Square Toes.

Thomas quickly assumed his father’s public functions as well. He took a seat on the City Council in 1755, and held a variety of offices for the next twenty years, including stints in the Assembly, two terms as mayor of Philadelphia, and ten years as an associate justice on the colony’s Supreme Court. As his responsibilities multiplied, Willing came to rely more and more upon Robert Morris. When Morris turned twenty-one, his seven-year apprenticeship was complete, and he became a full-fledged employee, a virtual partner with Thomas. In the spring of 1757, Willing decided to make it official, dissolving the old firm and creating Willing Morris & Company. It marked an extraordinary leap for Morris: his rapid transition from apprentice clerk to vested partner was an unprecedented ascent for an outsider at a time when family connections were largely determinative, especially in staid Philadelphia.

Announcing his decision, Willing credited Morris as a sober honest lad, and declared that the two of them would team up to more advantage than either could do singly. That Morris brought a rare degree of acumen and vigor to the partnership is evident; his sobriety, however, appears to be a bit of an embellishment. Letters Morris received from friends around this time suggest that he was a young man who enjoyed a drink and a night on the town. One such correspondent, a friend and trading partner in Jamaica, boasted to Morris that, drunk I shall be today, having a half dozen friends and a batch of true London claret. This town is turned devilishly debauched. There’s no record of Morris’s answer to his friend, but in the years to come he gained a reputation for grand parties and a bountiful wine cellar. At a time when business was routinely conducted by a numerous body of twelve o’clock punch drinkers, when Philadelphia boasted more than one hundred taverns, and a hundred more houses licensed to sell rum by the quart, Robert Morris was a first-class carouser.

On at least one occasion, Morris’s revelries led to more than just a hangover. That is to say, sometime around 1763, Morris sired a baby girl. She was born out of wedlock, like Morris himself, and little is known about the mother. The child was named Mary, and known to her family and friends as Polly; she did not live with Morris, but he appears to have provided for her room and board, and she apparently obtained a good education in Philadelphia. Polly was married in 1781, around age eighteen, and remained in touch with Morris during her adult life. Robert was also managing the affairs of his half-brother, Thomas; he enrolled him in school and, around the time the boy turned sixteen, took him on as a clerk in the counting-house.

Morris’s family life, then, was a bit chaotic, but his focus was on business. He lived close by the docks on Front Street, just a short stroll from the Willing business complex. His day entailed drudgery at his writing desk in the countinghouse, attending arrivals and supervising the lading of outgoing vessels, and meeting with vendors and other merchants at the City Tavern, at the India Queen, or at any of a dozen other dens where merchants did their business. Working days were long, varied, and convivial, and perhaps best captured in this observation by a foreign traveler of the life of the American merchant:

They breakfasted at eight or half-past; and by nine were in their counting houses, laying out the business of the day; at ten they were on their wharves, with their aprons around their waists, rolling hogsheads of rum and molasses; at twelve, at market, flying about as dirty and diligent as porters; at two back again to the rolling, heaving, hallooing, and scribbling. At four they went home to dress for dinner; at seven, to the play; at eleven, to supper, with a crew of lusty Bacchanals who would smoke cigars, gulp down brandy, and sing, roar, and shout in the thickening clouds they created like so many merry devils, till three in the morning.

The next morning, of course, it started all over again.

In pursuing the day-to-day business of the trading house, Robert Morris was performing the same duties as most of the other traders on the Philadelphia waterfront. What set the firm of Willing & Morris apart, what helped elevate them above their competitors, was their spirit of creativity.

Underwriting insurance was one typical innovation; with rates in England high and sometimes prohibitive, Willing in 1756 pooled eighty thousand pounds with five other Philadelphia merchants to insure their own vessels and offer policies to other traders. The firm’s advance position in the Indian trade gave rise to another fiscal experiment. This substantial line of business was regulated by the colony to prevent abuses and the frontier violence that resulted; Willing was named to a nine-member Indian Affairs board that was empowered to finance the trade by borrowing private capital at 6 percent interest. This opened a whole new practice of underwriting government projects through bonds and other promissory notes, and Willing took a direct hand in most of the early negotiations.

It’s hard to say what role Morris played in designing these novel arrangements; most of the paperwork that survives is subscribed by Willing. But Morris was working closely with his partner, gaining hands-on insights into the process of credit and capital formation at a time when most entrepreneurs engaged only in those operations they could finance from their own funds. Even as a passive observer, he may have recognized the same creative spirit at work that his father had introduced to the Maryland tobacco trade. In retrospect, these early projects look seminal: Morris later put the same principles to work on a grand scale, endeavoring to restore the finances of a beleaguered national government. It was a mercantile world, but Morris and his partner were practicing capitalism.

Borrowing and pooling private funds became especially attractive at the close of the French and Indian War, when the British government levied a series of new tariffs and trade regulations. These included the Currency Act, which barred colonial governments from issuing paper money. Colonial currencies were commonly issued as loans against real property and recalled through taxes, but they suffered destabilizing inflation during the course of the war, and so were abolished. The resulting squeeze on commerce, combined with a surge in the exchange rates for British pounds, stripped the colony of capital; said one Pennsylvania trader, Cash is monstrous scarce—I believe we must learn to barter.

Rather than curtail their operations, Willing and Morris sought to raise funds. In 1766 they combined with seven other leading merchants to issue joint and several promissory notes, available to the public, payable in sterling after nine months, and bearing 5 percent interest. This was a daring new approach to the problem of capital scarcity, the functional equivalent of a bond market operating with paper that could serve as an alternate medium of exchange. So daring, in fact, that it sparked a panic of sorts among competing traders who feared the authors of the new notes might corner the export market for flour. That December, nearly two hundred merchants and retailers announced in the Pennsylvania Gazette they would refuse to accept the promissory notes for any payment whatsoever. Two weeks later, a great Number of Inhabitants broadened the critique in a petition to the Assembly. The opposition denounced the plan as the partial schemes of private men, and suggested many other Companies, actuated by Motives of private Gain, would issue their own notes, leading the entire mass of new paper to depreciate. They asserted as well that the power and right to issue currency is, and ought to be, lodged in the Legislature of the Province alone.

No record survives of an answer to the petition, but Morris offered the obvious counterarguments in similar controversies years later—that private financing would allow the merchants to assemble ventures, and that such ventures would benefit the community as a whole; enhancing, literally, the commonwealth. As to issuing currency, that was a gray area. It was true that the commercial paper was intended to pass for money. But using the bonds would always be a private decision, a transaction between consenting individuals. Commercial houses did business through letters of credit all the time; this would just make interest-bearing debt more widely available. Whether private issues would hold their value was hard to predict, but if the notes were redeemed on schedule, depreciation would appear unlikely.

The critics of the plan lodged their complaint with the king’s attorney general for Pennsylvania. Surprisingly, the ruling was amenable. Banks were expressly forbidden in the colonies under the mercantile code of the empire. But the official opinion held that transactions in the merchants’ paper represented a private association, and as such were probably legal. The fears of the public carried more weight with the Assembly, however, which found that the notes carried a manifest tendency to injure the trade and commerce of this Province. In a place and time when routine banking operations were still a foreign practice, the idea of a trading market in private securities was simply ahead of its time.

The promissory notes were a financial response to the British revenue acts; Willing and Morris took an active role in formulating a political response as well, and here they moved in concert with popular sentiment. Willing was already a politician, but for Morris the controversy marked his first appearance on the public stage. Tellingly, it was brought on by the initial rupture between Britain and her colonies in America.

The spark was a new revenue measure called the Stamp Act, a schedule of fees that would apply to virtually any transaction involving paper—official stamps were to be required for all court papers, deeds, bonds, and leases, as well as newsprint, advertisements, almanacs, even playing cards. Parliament passed the act in March 1765, to take effect November 1. Legislatures throughout North America reacted sharply, and patriot merchants and artisans organized chapters of the shadowy Sons of Liberty to lead the opposition in the colonial ports.

The response in Pennsylvania was muted, however, the consequence of local factions that had dominated the politics of the colony for a generation. Power was divided between the Quakers, who dominated the Assembly, and the Penn family, the founders of the colony who shared the governorship as a hereditary right. William Penn’s sons had long since left the Quaker church, and feuded with the legislature over taxation, political appointments, Indian policy—any pretext for a fight. Ben Franklin, no Quaker but very much a politician, shared the opposition’s antipathy for the proprietors, and served as a leader of the Quaker party in the Assembly. So deep was the party divide that in 1764 the Assembly sent Franklin on a lobbying mission to England. He spent the next ten years pressing the king’s ministers to revoke the original colonial charter and replace the Penns with a governor appointed by the crown.

With both the Penns and the opposition Quakers busy courting royal favor, the government was all but immobilized in the face of the Stamp Act crisis. Even Franklin was nearly caught on the wrong side of the nascent rebellion; once the act was announced, early in 1765, he collaborated with officials in London to name John Hughes, one of his Assembly allies, as the local commissioner administering the new tax. In the months that followed, indignation swept the colonies. Riots broke out in Boston, New York, and Newport, Rhode Island; in September, Hughes wrote to Franklin, The spirit or flame of rebellion is got to a high pitch amongst the North Americans, and it seems to me that a sort of frenzy or madness has got such hold of the people of all ranks, that I fancy some lives will be lost before this fire is put out.

By now, the popular movement fully outpaced Pennsylvania’s elected government, and when the actual stamps arrived, on the morning of Saturday, October 5, leaders of the resistance gathered at the London Coffee House to lay their plans. A committee was selected to treat with Hughes and demand that he resign his commission: they included James Tilghman, a prominent attorney; Charles Thomson, an ironmonger and leader of the local Sons of Liberty; William Bradford, owner of the coffeehouse and publisher of the Pennsylvania Journal; and several merchants, among them Robert Morris.

At the direction of this committee, boys were sent out with muffled drums to beat a tattoo through the broad avenues of the city, and the bells in the church steeples and the State House were tolled with muffled clappers. The low, insistent tones spread across Philadelphia like a whispered rumor, and by afternoon more than a thousand people had gathered on the lawn behind the State House. They were ill-tempered and boisterous; Hughes had been hanged in effigy the night before. The committee offered a series of rousing speeches, then headed off as a group to confront Hughes at his home. There they found that another crowd had assembled—this a body of several hundred, led by the White Oaks, an association of shipwrights allied with Franklin and the Quakers, who vowed to protect Hughes, stamps or no.

From inside the house, Hughes sent word that he was ill and confined to bed, but the committee insisted, and with the grudging consent of the Oaks, a conference was held at bedside. Speaking for the committee, Tilghman and Morris demanded that Hughes resign. Hughes was intransigent; if the committee wanted him to resign, they would have to indemnify friends in England who had put up bond against his performance. Still, there was a mob nearby ready to tear the house down—as had already happened to stamp collectors in several other colonies—and another mob stood ready to battle them. Morris and Tilghman presented a compromise: Hughes could simply promise not to enforce the act unless Maryland and Delaware did so first. Hughes asked for time, and the committee gave him two days to deliberate. The group then returned to the State House yard to report their progress.

This was a primitive form of shuttle diplomacy, the committee navigating between two angry mobs and one recalcitrant collector. Shouts were raised that the patriots should march on Hughes’s house after all, but Morris and Tilghman pleaded patience, citing Hughes’s infirmity, and promising resolution the next Monday. The grumbling assembly settled for a stalemate, and as darkness fell over the city, the angry crowd dispersed into the cool evening. As the threat faded, the White Oaks headed home as well.

The episode marked a turning point for Pennsylvania, and for Robert Morris. No longer would the critical decisions facing the colony be confined to the Assembly, where Quakers wrangled for control with the Penns and their adherents. Now the fundamental questions of war and peace, of loyalty to or separation from Britain, would be debated out-of-doors, subject to the surging and unruly passions of tavern caucuses and mobs in the street. For Morris, it was a ticklish first foray into the realm of popular democracy. Accustomed to the more finite responsibilities of shipmaster and business executive, he now found himself attempting to steer a political movement. Already he was learning that while a leader might point the way with argument and reason, what course the crowd would follow was hard to predict.

Morris and the committee visited Hughes the following Monday and obtained a signed statement suspending his powers. The immediate crisis had been neutralized, but the Stamp Act itself remained in effect. In Pennsylvania as in the other colonies, the movement shifted ground: Parliament and the British ministry had ignored pleadings and petitions; now they had to be pushed.

The means settled upon was economic boycott. First in Boston and New York, then in Philadelphia, the leading merchants agreed to stop all imports of British goods, thus depriving England of the crucial colonial market. There was a distinct element of self-interest in the boycott, as many merchants were already burdened by a backlog of imports, but the movement was couched in terms of colonial rights, and the slogan No taxation without representation became a rallying cry in town squares from New England to South Carolina.

In Philadelphia, Morris’s partner Thomas Willing now assumed the lead position. He was the most prominent on a committee of eleven merchants that met in early November to draw up formal resolutions vowing to end all imports from Britain until the Stamp Act and the revenue laws were repealed. Copies were drawn up and circulated throughout the city, and within weeks, more than four hundred merchants and shopkeepers, Robert Morris included, signed on to the boycott. The effects were immediate, and pronounced. In Philadelphia, the merchants’ committee inspected all incoming ships to ensure that no contraband was unloaded; in Britain, trading houses and manufacturers sustained a sharp decline in trade. This pressure combined with factional divisions in Parliament to force a stunning retreat in British policy: in March 1766, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act.

News of the repeal touched off a season of celebration throughout the colonies. In Philadelphia, Morris joined the mayor and scores of other leading citizens in a festive banquet at the State House. The evening closed with twenty-one toasts, each marked by a seven-gun salute from cannon arrayed on the yard. In the surrounding streets fireworks and bonfires lit the night, while on the waterfront, the White Oaks led a parade—now everyone was a patriot—and revelers were treated to drafts from huge bowls of punch set outside the doors of the London Coffee House. But events were soon to show that the protests against the Stamp Act were to be the beginning, not the end, of the quarrel with England.

The logic of the British ministry was simple: Britain had run up an enormous debt in her war with France. The people of England were already heavily taxed, and the king and Parliament thought it only reasonable that the colonies should contribute to the defense of the empire. The colonists had an equally simple response, famously articulated by John Dickinson, a wealthy, London-trained attorney aligned with the Penn family in the colonial legislature, in his Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer. For more than a century, Dickinson argued, American settlers had faced all the dangers and hardships of the new world on their own. They owed England their allegiance, but that was all.

The dispute festered for most of the next decade, with Charles Townsend, King George’s chancellor of the exchequer, imposing one revenue measure after another, and the colonists increasingly defiant. Boston was the most confrontational, but in all the major ports, committees were formed to institute boycotts, to write petitions, and to organize resistance to the Townsend Acts.

Robert Morris sat on a number of these committees, but it would be a stretch to call him an activist. He was a committeeman, garrulous and sociable, and when the merchants were called to associate, he usually went along. But more than that, Morris was a merchant, twenty years along in a career that had brought him from obscurity to wealth and prominence. War with England was a distant prospect, the worst of several possible outcomes, and still just a distraction. In the mid-eighteenth century, life in Philadelphia had much to offer a rising member of its civic elite.

With a population of roughly thirty thousand in 1774, Philadelphia had grown by half since Morris had arrived, and it was growing still. There was a new hospital, a new jail—four stories high, with a cupola for a crown—a new poorhouse, and the ornate new Carpenters’ Hall. City Tavern was built by subscription in 1773 and immediately supplanted the London Coffee House as the most elegant suppertime destination. Business was conducted behind drawn curtains in paneled booths; larger assemblies convened in the fabled Long Room.

Social life was constrained by the dour modes of the Quakers, but there were a few well-loved diversions: the Jockey Club sponsored races in the springtime, balls were held at the State House, and a Dancing Assembly met every Thursday evening, enlivened with a punch that called for two hundred limes and five gallons of rum. Despite occasional straitlaced protests, plays were performed at the Southwark Theatre, built of brick—a real playhouse, one memorialist recalled, albeit a poor, shabby little structure.

The city nurtured a lively intellectual scene, anchored by Franklin’s American Philosophical Society. There were more than twenty print shops, more than thirty bookstores, and, in 1776, seven newspapers, each catering to its own slice of the social and political spectrum. But Morris found little attraction in the charms of a literary salon; he was drawn more to the clubs—associations, societies, and fraternal orders that cited a variety of civic causes as reasons to congregate, usually over a bountiful meal. Morris was a great joiner, and famous for his appetite. Even when he didn’t qualify, he was invited—the members of the Hibernian Club, which met at Griffith’s Tavern to celebrate their Irish ancestry, made Morris an honorary member, along with governor John Penn and other luminaries. In 1772, Morris helped found a club of his own, the Society of the Sons of St. George. Their vocation was to assist and support British immigrants; in one case, they put up bond to release three of their countrymen from debtor’s prison. They met at Byrne’s Tavern, under the Sign of the Clock, just a block from Morris’s dockside home. The president of the society was the rector at the Anglican church, but the vice president, and master of ceremonies, was Morris.

During the summers, when the plains by the Delaware stifled in sultry humidity, the town’s gentry would retreat several miles up the Schuylkill, to where that quiet stream slipped over an abutment and dropped 150 yards in a frothing cascade. There was an old aristocratic tavern there, which served as the weekend headquarters of the Mount Regale Fishing Company. Formed in rivalry to the Quakers’ own exclusive club, Mount Regale hosted the city’s affluent Anglicans—the Penns, George Clymer, Thomas Willing, and, by the middle 1760s, Robert Morris. Women were admitted only on special occasions. These fishing societies were only nominally devoted to trolling the river; their primary function was feasting. A typical Mount Regale menu included beef, fowl, ham, tongue, lamb, salad, peas, pies, cream cheese, lemons, wine, and, of course, rum.

The one mark of status that Morris tended to eschew was government office. At a time when commercial success was often reflected in an appointed or electoral post, Morris was content to let Thomas Willing serve as the public face of the firm. The sole exception was job-related; in 1766, Morris was among seven men appointed as port wardens for Philadelphia, responsible for licensing river pilots and inspecting arriving cargoes. He held the post for ten years, solidifying his position as a leader on the busiest waterfront in North America.

Morris confirmed his membership in Philadelphia’s civic elite with his marriage in the spring of 1769 to Mary White. She was the daughter of Thomas White, a lawyer who had assembled an estate of seven thousand acres near Annapolis, then moved to Philadelphia. White was as close to an aristocrat as colonial society would admit, a leader in the city’s small but influential Anglican enclave. As members of Britain’s official religion, the Anglicans rivaled the Quakers in enterprise, and aligned against them in politics by supporting the proprietors. White had two children by his second marriage; Mary’s older brother, William, was in training for Anglican priesthood.

The wedding was performed in March under the tallest spire in the city, at Christ Church just above Market Street; Robert was thirty-five years old, and his bride was nineteen. The couple promptly set about raising a family in Morris’s home on Front Street. Mary took up the duties of a Philadelphia matron, supervising servants and managing a social calendar; Robert obtained a family pew at Christ Church, their tenancy reserved by a small brass plaque engraved with their names. The highborn Anglican congregation included the Willings, Ben Franklin, several judges, and Philadelphia mayor Samuel Powel.

In December, Mary bore the couple’s first child, a boy named after his father. He was the first of seven children they would raise together. Morris’s family circle also included his half-brother, Thomas. Around the time the boy turned sixteen, Morris brought him into his firm, to instruct him in the profession from which he was to draw his future support. Thomas thrived there, but in his off-hours fell into a hard-drinking crowd, worthless companions, in Robert’s eyes, who soon carried him into the practice of their follies and vices. To break this pattern, Morris sent his brother to Spain, to work for a trading company and learn Spanish and French. Around the time of his marriage, Morris recalled his brother to Philadelphia, where Robert and Thomas Willing agreed to take him on as a junior partner at Willing & Morris.

The following year Morris moved to join the select set of gentry that maintained second homes outside the city. He purchased a farm on a low bluff overlooking the Schuylkill a couple of miles northwest of Philadelphia, and soon set about erecting his country seat. Morris dubbed his new estate The Hills, and built a two-story mansion with a complex of smaller structures, including a coach house, several greenhouses, and quarters for a full-time gardener. The grounds were cultivated in the British style, with meandering walks and ornamental ponds among groves of trees. From the raised piazza flanking the house, Mary and Robert Morris could gaze over the spires of the churches in town and the topmasts of the ships docked along the Delaware, all to the serenade of rustling leaves and the sonorous hum of cicadas.

The Hills served as a weekend retreat for Robert and Mary; it also served as a forum for Robert to cultivate his commercial connections. Guests would make the trip out from town to wander through the gardens, enjoy a banquet at the Morris table, and drink from a cellar stocked with the finest wine and spirits that Europe could produce. A large man, his six-foot frame already filled out with two decades of Philadelphia cuisine, Morris was a warm and generous host, and he loved nothing better than to sit late after dinner trading stories over a glass of wine. I dine at The Hills every Sunday, he wrote to a friend a few years later. Thus you see I continue my old practice of mixing business and pleasure and have ever found them useful to each other.

It was not recorded if Mary brought a dowry to the marriage, but Morris was likely able to finance his new acquisition himself. In the early 1770s, as the crisis with Britain deepened, the pace of business at Willing & Morris only accelerated. They expanded their commercial fleet to nine ships owned outright, with shares held in several more. Their operations were generally secret, as was customary for a competitive firm. Yet they were so extensive that, even before word of its trading patterns leaked out, rivals could track them by the shifting price of commodities.

The scope of the firm’s commerce was reflected in the correspondence of a competitor named William Pollard, who wrote in bafflement to a Liverpool correspondent that, despite a drop-off in trade to the British plantations in the Caribbean, the price of flour, bread, and wheat in Philadelphia remained the highest ever known. What Pollard didn’t realize was that, beginning in 1769, a series of severe hurricanes had forced the Spanish government to suspend its strict embargo on trade with foreigners and enlist a small circle of Philadelphia traders to stave off impending famine. Old Square Toes and his audacious partner were the first to seize on this new opportunity, sending cargoes of flour to Spanish posts in New Orleans and Puerto Rico; still other ventures, in conformance with Spanish trade regulations, went all the way to Cádiz before being transshipped back to Havana.

So dominant was the position of Willing & Morris in this new trade that in 1772, the Spanish monopolists charged with provisioning the Caribbean posts complained to royal authorities that the Philadelphia firm was supplanting their operations. The king’s ministers rejected the petition; the monopoly had proved to be an embarrassment to itself and to the Spanish nation, the ministers declared, and the private trade would continue. That same year, with local supplies exhausted, Willing & Morris sent half a dozen ships as far as Quebec in search of flour to satisfy Spanish demand.

All this trade rested on a framework of international contacts, agents in overseas ports who would see to distribution in local markets, negotiate with sovereign authorities, and arrange financing for return shipments. Key to these deals was credit: in the days before commercial banks or other means of international exchange, merchants had to rely on loans extended from distant trading houses, collectible against third parties who in turn maintained accounts for the original borrower. Notes were paid over time—thirty, sixty, even ninety days from the date they were presented for collection—which meant that, given the months involved in crossing the Atlantic, accounts could take a year or more to settle. Morris became a master of exploiting these time intervals to satisfy lenders, extend his purchasing power, and maximize the carrying capacity of the Willing & Morris commercial fleet.

Morris ran this trading operation from his desk on the Philadelphia waterfront, writing detailed sailing orders, juggling bills of exchange, relaying reports on commodity prices, and building trust and confidence with foreign factors he would never meet. His tools were rudimentary—a quill pen and leaves of parchment—but he was a globalist, practicing international finance at its most sophisticated.

Morris was just a junior partner at his firm, but his rapid advance and his social skills marked him as a leader in Philadelphia’s commercial fraternity. His growing stature was showcased in 1773, when John Penn was dispatched from England to replace his brother Richard as governor of Pennsylvania. The merchants of Philadelphia held a dinner in their honor to mark the occasion, but as the richest and most powerful men of the colony gathered for the fete, the hosts recognized an awkward predicament: the Penn brothers detested each other. The solution was devised through the seating chart: "Mr. Bob Morris, the head man at the merchants’ feast, placed Governor Penn