A Failed Nation - The Financier

He was the richest man in America, and for most of the Revolution he was also its treasury. When the United States had no money and no credit, it borrowed on the name of Robert Morris — a Philadelphia merchant who put his own fortune and signature behind a bankrupt government, kept General Washington’s army fed, and personally financed the campaign that won the war at Yorktown. This is the story of the Financier of the Revolution: the reluctant patriot who voted against independence and then signed it, the pragmatist and money-chaser who saved the country and grew rich doing it, the man who tried to build a real government out of nothing — the first national bank, the paper notes backed by his own name, the tax that could have funded it all — and who finally resigned in despair because no amount of one man’s credit could fix a government too weak to fund itself. And it is the story of how that same name, the strongest credit in America, would carry him all the way to a debtor’s prison. He floated a nation. It did not float him.