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"MAKERS OF AMERICA'^ 
 
 ROBERT MORRIS 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER 
 
 PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE IN YALE 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
 
 1892 
 

 a r mi l 
 
 A. ^^! ^^ 
 
 Copyright, 189S, 
 By Dodd, Mead and Company. 
 
 All rigtUs reserved. 
 
 SInibctsits |3wBS : 
 John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 In this book I have reduced into a current 
 narrative the most essential information about 
 the life of Robert Morris w^hich is contained 
 in " The Financier and the Finances of the 
 American Revolution" (Dodd, Mead & Co., 
 1891). 
 
 The reader who desires more detailed in- 
 formation on either branch of the subject, or 
 who desires to know the authorities for the 
 statements made, may consult the larger 
 
 book. 
 
 W. G. SUMNER. 
 
 July, 1892. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Page 
 Morris's Birth, Youth, and Entrance into Public Life . 1 1 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Party Strife in which Morris was involved. — Silas 
 Deane. — Agency of the Committee of Commerce. 
 — The Ship " Farmer." — Attempts to enforce Le- 
 gal Tender and Embargo. — Morris's Wealth. — 
 His Position on Paper Money, Embargoes, and Con- 
 fiscation. — The Situation in 1780. — Appeals to 
 France. — Mission of John Laurens and its Results 27 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Morris becomes " Superintendent of Finance." — His 
 Plan of Action and his Exertions. — Reasons why 
 his Exertions were Fruitless. — Faults of Adminis- 
 tration at Home and Abroad. — Waste of Resources 
 in Holland 53 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 The Banks of Pennsylvania and North America. — 
 Army Contracts. — Sectional Prejudices and Jeal- 
 ousies. — The Attempts to get a Revenue. — Dis- 
 content in the Army, and Over-drafts on the Bank- 
 
Vill CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 
 ers in Europe. — Morris resigns, but is persuaded 
 to continue. — He issues Notes to pay off the 
 Army. — Tlie Pledges to him are broken. — Loans 
 in Holland. — Morris's Drafts are protested. — 
 He redeems his Notes, and escapes from Office . . 79 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Morris's Public Life continued. — The Bank War. — 
 The Union. — The Commercial Convention. — The 
 Constitutional Convention. — Morris in the Senate loi 
 
 CHAPTER VL 
 
 Morris's Accounts as Agent of Pennsylvania. — Super- 
 intendent of Finance, and Agent of the Committee 
 of Commerce 113 
 
 CHAPTER VIL 
 
 Morris's Social Position and Relations. — His Resi- 
 dences 125 
 
 CHAPTER VHL 
 
 Morris's Business Enterprises. — The Tobacco Con- 
 tract. — The China Trade. — His Share in the Po- 
 litical Intrigues about the Federal Capital. — His 
 Speculation at Washington. — His Speculations in 
 Wild Lands. — The Fallacy of those Enterprises . 137 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Morris's Embarrassments. — Bankruptcy. — His Im- 
 prisonment. — His Death. — His Family. — His 
 Estate 155 
 
MORRIS'S BIRTH, YOUTH, AND EN- 
 TRANCE INTO PUBLIC LIFE. 
 
ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Morris's Birth, Youth, and Entrance into 
 Public Life. 
 
 Robert Morris was bom January 31, 1734. 
 He was the son of a Liverpool merchant, and was 
 bom in LiverpooL He was sent to Philadelphia 
 when fourteen years of age, and placed in the 
 mercantile house of the Willings. His father 
 came to America, and had a residence at Oxford, 
 on the eastern shore of Maryland. The father 
 died in 1750. He had been making a visit to 
 a vessel, on leaving which a salute was fired in 
 his honour. He was wounded in the arm by the 
 wadding of the gun, and the wound caused his 
 death. He left nearly all his estate to Robert, Jr. 
 The personal property was nearly ? 7,000. Men- 
 tion was also made in the father's will of some 
 real estate. 
 
I 2 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 In 1754 Robert Morris and Thomas Willing 
 formed the firm of Willing & Morris, which took 
 the place of the older house. The reconstruction 
 of the firm indicates an infusion of youth and 
 enterprise. Morris was especially characterized 
 during his whole life by a spirit of sanguine enter- 
 prise quite beyond the fashion of his day. 
 
 As a young man he made several voyages as 
 supercargo. There is a story that he was once 
 captured by the French during the Seven Years' 
 War, and being destitute of money, earned enough 
 to return home by repairing a watch. 
 
 He was married on the 27th of February, 1769, 
 to Mary White, daughter of Col. Thomas White, 
 and sister of the first bishop of Pennsylvania of the 
 Protestant Episcopal Church. She was then less 
 than twenty years old. She was considered one 
 of the belles of Philadelphia, and is always men- 
 tioned with high honour whenever we meet with 
 any reference to her. 
 
 Morris signed the non-importation agreement 
 of 1765, and was on a committee of citizens who 
 forced the stamp distributer of Pennsylvania to 
 desist from the administration of his office. 
 
 He does not seem to have been one of the 
 early and prominent whigs. In June, 1775, he 
 
ENTRANCE INTO PUBLIC LIFE. 13 
 
 was appointed on the Committee of Safety of 
 Pennsylvania. The most important function of 
 this body at that time was to import arms and 
 ammunition, which it was necessary to do in 
 - secret. He was on the sub-committee which 
 was especially charged with this duty, because 
 he, as a merchant, had the best opportunities 
 for executing it. 
 
 In October he was elected a member of the 
 Assembly of the Province, and in November 
 was appointed by them one of the delegates in 
 the Continental Congress. Being a member of 
 these three bodies at the same time, we are not 
 surprised to find him declaring that his time 
 was occupied with public affairs to the injury of 
 his private business. 
 
 The Assembly of that winter was the last one 
 that ever sat under the old Penn charter. Morris 
 was not a very active member of it. During the 
 autumn and early winter he devoted himself chiefly 
 to the work of the Committee of Safety. After he 
 became a member of Congress, he was absorbed 
 \\n the work of that body. He was appointed a 
 member of the Secret Committee, and also of 
 the Committee of Secret Correspondence. The 
 former of these was a committee for importing 
 
14 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 arms and ammunition on behalf of Congress; 
 the latter was a committee for maintaining cor- 
 respondence with any persons or powers who 
 might be willing to assist the revolt, as well as 
 with the agents of Congress abroad. 
 
 The advertisement in the newspapers by the 
 firm of Willing, Morris & Co., even as late as 
 1784, shows that they carried on a business of 
 a very diverse and comprehensive character. 
 They offer for sale all the heterogeneous com- 
 modities of a country store. Their business was 
 that of general importers and dealers, and they 
 brought to the market of Philadelphia any prod- 
 ucts of the wide world which were there in de- 
 mand.' They therefore bought and sold bills of 
 exchange, and in the absence of banks, did all 
 that branch of banking and exchange business. 
 
 It was as a merchant and banker that Robert 
 Morris was useful at the beginning of the Revo- 
 lution. Contracts were made with him, as with 
 many other merchants at the time, to make voy- 
 ages, the object of which was to exchange Ameri- 
 can products for arms and munitions of war. 
 These contracts were of different form, but in 
 
 1 Mr. Paul Ford informs me that he has found such ad- 
 vertisements in which slaves also are offered for sale. 
 
ENTRANCE INTO PUBLIC LIFE. 1$ 
 
 general they carried a guarantee or insurance by 
 Congress against the loss of the ship and cargo, 
 or a merchant who imported a cargo of muni- 
 tions of war received a license to export American 
 commodities of equivalent value, at a time when 
 the exportation was otherwise forbidden. Morris 
 was also employed as a banker, to buy bills of 
 exchange when the same were needed by 
 Congress, or to buy hard money when it was 
 necessary to have such. 
 
 Morris was one of those who hesitated about 
 the Declaration of Independence. During the 
 winter of 1775-1776 he expected that some plan 
 of reconciliation would be presented, which would 
 be satisfactory, although he believed that any such 
 scheme must contain a substantial redress of the 
 grievances of which the colonists complained. 
 When the Howes came out, in the summer of 
 1776, with a commission to treat for a recon- 
 ciliation, he was one of those who insisted that 
 they should be heard. He voted against the reso- 
 lution in favor of independence on the 2d of 
 July, and absented himself on the 4th. He signed 
 the Declaration, however, on the 2d of August, 
 with the other members of Congress, after it had 
 been engrossed. Probably he had made up his 
 
1 6 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 mind in the interval that the Howes had no offer 
 to make which could be entertained. Moreover, 
 Pennsylvania underwent a revolution in July. A 
 convention was called, under a resolution of 
 Congress of May lo, that the States should re- 
 organize their governments to fit the circum- 
 stances of the time, and a new constitution was 
 made. 
 
 In November, 1776, Morris was elected a mem- 
 ber of the first Pennsylvania Assembly under the 
 new constitution. This constitution was no sooner 
 adopted than it produced a great dissension in 
 Pennsylvania. A very large portion of the popu- 
 lation were very much attached to the old Penn 
 charter, and there were novelties in the new 
 constitution which were regarded with great dis- 
 satisfaction. Two parties were at once formed, 
 one of the friends, and the other of the enemies 
 of the constitution. The former were called 
 Constitutionalists, and the latter Republicans. 
 The strife and animosity of these two parties 
 for the next fifteen years has scarcely been 
 equalled in our history. It had important effects 
 on the history of the Union, and upon the per- 
 sonal career of some of the most important 
 public men of the country. The dissatisfaction 
 
ENTRANCE INTO PUBLIC LIFE. l^ 
 
 with the constitution was so great that the As- 
 sembly elected under it could hardly organize, 
 and did not in fact set about its work with 
 energy until Congress threatened to assume the 
 direction of affairs in Pennsylvania, in December, 
 when it was expected that the EngUsh might 
 enter Philadelphia. 
 
 Morris seems to have taken scarcely any part 
 in the proceedings of the Assembly. He was in 
 fact fully absorbed in the work which had been 
 put upon him as a member of Congress. In 
 December, Howe had marched across New Jer- 
 sey without meeting with any important opposi- 
 tion. It was expected that he would cross the 
 Delaware and advance to Philadelphia. Wash- 
 ington's army had dwindled to about three thou- 
 sand men. Under these circumstances Congress 
 somewhat over-hastily fled to Baltimore. There 
 was great terror in Philadelphia. The people 
 were moving away, and the city appeared de- 
 serted. A committee of Congress was left behind 
 to attend to affairs at Philadelphia. Of this com- 
 mittee Morris was chairman, and the really active 
 and responsible member. During December and 
 January he may be said to have carried on all the 
 work of the Continent. He prepared the ships 
 
1 8 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 which belonged to the public for sea, in order 
 to save them from capture. He managed the 
 accounts of the committees ; he provided Wash- 
 ington with sums of hard money which were 
 imperatively needed for secret service, and as 
 bounty, to persuade the soldiers to stay beyond 
 the time of their enlistment ; he received letters 
 from Silas Deane in Paris, in regard to supplies 
 which had been sent from France, and in regard 
 to supplies which had not been sent to Deane for 
 his support. He took charge of cargoes which 
 arrived, and informed Washington what goods 
 were thus placed at his disposal. He wrote long 
 and full reports to Congress of his proceedings, 
 and long letters of information to Washington and 
 to Deane. 
 
 Of the three great crises of the Revolution, — 
 the attack on Trenton, Burgoyne's surrender, and 
 Comwallis's surrender, — the first, and perhaps 
 most important, occurred at this time. We can 
 clearly see that Washington, for the manoeuvre 
 which he executed at Trenton, really had no sup- 
 port from anybody but Morris. 
 
 When Howe took Philadelphia in September 
 1777, Congress adjourned to York, where it con- 
 tinued its session during the winter of 17 77-1 7 78. 
 
ENTRANCE INTO PUBLIC LIFE. ig 
 
 The only very important effect of the occupation 
 of Philadelphia was that Congress, being thus dis- 
 lodged from its seat, lost prestige. Its number 
 dwindled to eighteen or twenty. Its existence 
 was easily forgotten. The union of which its 
 members were the representatives declined in 
 strength, and lost definiteness in the public mind. 
 The administration lost in efficiency, although it 
 had no efficiency to spare. The work of getting 
 out cargoes of American products to be sold in 
 Europe as a means of buying powder and arms — 
 the work in which, as we have seen, Morris was 
 particularly active — was suspended and at length 
 given up. Morris withdrew to an estate which he 
 owned, called Manheim, about ten miles north 
 of the city of Lancaster. We have letters of his 
 which show that he was very much dissatisfied 
 with the course of public affairs. He had begun 
 to urge, from the first year of the war, that Con- 
 gress should employ competent executive officers 
 upon proper salaries. He urged this as a measure 
 of economy and efficiency in administration. We 
 do not know of any one who at that time seconded 
 his efforts in this direction. Congress was under 
 the influence of a number of prejudices in respect 
 to civil liberty, human rights, etc., — prejudices 
 
20 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 which had been developed by the colonists in 
 their strife with Great Britain. It was also 
 accustomed to the methods of administration 
 which were customary in the towns and in the 
 colonies. The fashion of doing business by com- 
 mittees had grown up in the colonial administra- 
 tion as a device for limiting the power of the 
 executive government. Congress therefore pur- 
 sued this method of administration, and discharged 
 the executive function by means of committees. 
 The effects were most unfortunate ; worst of all, 
 however, in the Department of Finance. 
 
 During the winter of Valley Forge Congress 
 sent a committee to visit the army and urge 
 Washington to make an attack upon Howe in 
 Philadelphia. Morris was a member of this com- 
 mittee. Washington, however, was in no position 
 to take the offensive. He could only wait and 
 wonder, while he rejoiced that Howe should 
 spend his time in the city in frivolity and idleness. 
 A grand attempt was made, however, to reform the 
 administration of the American army, and to put 
 a stop to the waste, extravagance, and negligence 
 which reigned there. All this, together with the 
 party divisions in Congress, which now began 
 to be very intense, seemed to Morris to be so 
 
ENTRANCE INTO PUBLIC LIFE. 21 
 
 much neglect or hindrance where he thought 
 that all else should be laid aside in order to 
 devote all available strength to an energetic 
 prosecution of the war. It seemed to him that 
 the quarrels about liberty and rights could be 
 settled after peace and independence had been 
 won. 
 
 This winter was also marked for him by the 
 unhappy consequences of the misbehaviour of his 
 half-brother Thomas. This brother was seventeen 
 years younger. Robert had taken the position of 
 a father to him, and had sent him to Europe in 
 order to remove him from bad associates and 
 break up habits of dissipation into which he had 
 fallen. When the war broke out, Thomas was 
 made agent of Willing & Morris for the sale of 
 the cargoes shipped to France, and was also made 
 commercial agent of the United States at Nantes. 
 His habits of dissipation, however, had not been 
 broken, and in 1777 they became a public scan- 
 dal. Robert Morris made the great mistake of 
 trying at first to support this young man against 
 Deane and Franklin when they tried to displace 
 him from his public office. Robert committed 
 himself to an insulting reference to Franklin, 
 whom he in effect charged with trying to displace 
 
22 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 Thomas in order to put his own nephew, Williams, 
 in the position. No doubt it was a great advan- 
 tage commercially to Robert Morris to have his 
 brother in that position. The fact cannot be 
 doubted that all the men of the period, with very 
 few exceptions, were taking advantage of aU the 
 opportunities of private gain which the current of 
 affairs offered them, and the jealousies and rival- 
 ries of merchants enter in no small degree Into 
 the struggles of policy. Robert Morris had a 
 more commanding and powerful position in pub- 
 lic affairs than any other merchant. He incurred 
 a great deal of suspicion and animosity on this 
 account. He had the reputation, in his day, 
 of pursuing gain as a merchant with very great 
 ardour. The public position which he occupied 
 gave him great opportunities. A confidential 
 agent at Nantes, who was a relative of his 
 o^vn, made his position entirely different from 
 what it was after Williams was made commercial 
 agent. 
 
 When he recognized his error he made a very 
 ample apology for it to the President of Congress. 
 Thomas Morris died in February, 1778. His 
 papers were sent home, and were delivered by 
 order of Congress to Robert Morris, who prom- 
 
ENTRANCE INTO PUBLIC LIFE. 23 
 
 ised to adjust the account and pay any indebted- 
 ness of Thomas ; but we hear of these papers and 
 of the operations of the Secret Committee of Con- 
 gress connected with them, as a fruitful source of 
 trouble until the end of Robert Morris's life. 
 
PARTY STRIFE IN WHICH MORRIS 
 WAS INVOLVED. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 Party Strife in which Morris was involved. 
 — Silas Deane. — Agency of the Committee 
 OF Commerce. — The Ship "Farmer." — At- 
 tempts TO enforce Legal Tender and Em- 
 bargo. — Morris's Wealth. — His Position 
 on Paper Money, Embargoes, and Confisca- 
 tion. — The Situation in 1780. — Appeals to 
 France. — Mission of John Laurens and its 
 Results. 
 
 Robert Morris's term of service in Congress 
 ended November i, 1778. The constitution of 
 Pennsylvania provided that no delegate should sit 
 for more than two years without interruption. He 
 had been a member for two years since that 
 constitution was adopted. He was immediately 
 elected a member of the State Assembly, where 
 he took a very active part during the winter of 
 1 7 78-1 7 79. 
 
 During that winter the party divisions in Con- 
 gress became much more intense, and they cen- 
 tred about the rights and wrongs of Silas Deane. 
 After the system of obtaining supplies from Europe 
 by way of commerce was abandoned, the depen- 
 
28 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 dence of the United States for supplies was on 
 loans or gratuities from France, for Congress had 
 no domestic revenue. It was printing and issuing 
 continental notes, which were depreciatuig in 
 value as their amount increased. Deane had 
 been sent to France in the summer of 1776 
 under the guise of a merchant, and had exerted 
 himself there, as he thought, with great success, to 
 obtain and ship supplies, and he had made prom- 
 ises on behalf of Congress that products of the 
 United States, especially tobacco, should be shipped 
 to France in payment for them. He had also sent 
 a great number of officers to the United States, 
 who were supposed to possess all the secrets of 
 the art of war, but who did not possess a knowl- 
 edge of the English language. The contracts 
 under which they were sent with respect to rank 
 and pay were very onerous. Congress was unable 
 to fulfil them. Deane was betrayed into these 
 contracts by an excess of zeal. He not only 
 thought that these persons were capable of ren- 
 dering very valuable assistance, but he also was 
 led to believe that they, through connections at 
 court, etc., could bring very great influence to 
 bear in favour of the United States. He also 
 thought that he had contributed very efficiently to 
 the formation of the alliance. 
 
AFFAIRS IN 1779-1780. 29 
 
 He was summoned home in December, 1777, 
 and came out with the French fleet in the follow- 
 ing spring. An account of the expenditures in 
 Europe was demanded of him. Congress had 
 been given to understand, chiefly through private 
 letters of Arthur Lee to his brother, that there was 
 a great deal of fraud and peculation in Europe, 
 and that while France was advancing money, the 
 agents of the United States, in collusion with 
 French speculators, were stealing and wasting it. 
 Deane had not brought with him books and papers 
 with which to explain the expenditures. He 
 always claimed that the summons home which he 
 received contained no reference to any wish on 
 the part of Congress that he should bring anything 
 of the kind, but that he understood that he was to 
 explain the political situation. A year was spent 
 in fruitless strife and pretended investigation of 
 this matter. There never was any investigation 
 leading to a reasonable decision, but the matter 
 was treated as a party contest. 
 
 ;g^bertJVIoms, although he was not in Congress 
 at the time, wa5jinderstood_tj3^be_one pfJDe^iie's 
 friends, and the party division over this matter 
 affected his relations with men and affairs for 
 many years afterward. He had been one of the 
 
30 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 committee which sent Deane to France, and there- 
 fore no doubt felt a friendly interest in him. He 
 had also been engaged in commercial enterprises 
 with Deane. It was on account of these last that 
 he was drawn into the controversy about Deane. 
 In December, 1778, Deane's patience was ex- 
 hausted. He published in a newspaper an ap- 
 peal to the people. This step was considered in 
 those days in the highest degree reprehensible. 
 Congress considered itself insulted ; for whatever 
 its weakness and inefficiency, it never lacked 
 a disposition to exact respect and deference. 
 Deane, however, succeeded in winning attention 
 to his case, and a newspaper war arose over it. 
 One of the leaders in this war was Thomas 
 Paine. He was secretary of the Cominift^e~^f 
 Foreign Relations, which had superseded the 
 Secret Committee and the Committee of Secret 
 Correspondence, since the necessity of secrecy had 
 been removed after an open state of war came to 
 exist. In this office Paine had read the de- 
 spatches of Arthur Lee. In his newspaper letters 
 he used the facts which had come to his knowledge 
 through his office, about the subsidies granted by 
 France, and he construed all the facts according 
 to the colour which had been given to them by Lee. 
 
AFFAIRS IN 1779-1780. 31 
 
 In Deane's reply he evinced the greatest astonish- 
 ment, which was no doubt sincere, at this con- 
 struction of the facts, and he was bound by his 
 duty as an ambassador, not to enter upon a public 
 discussion of acts of the French government which 
 had been confidential and secret. The French 
 ambassador, in fact, compelled Congress to repu- 
 diate Paine, and to deny his statements about aid 
 given by France before the treaty of alliance was 
 formed. Paine was compelled to resign. This, v. 
 however, set him free, and he returned to the news- 
 paper war with greater vigour than ever. He de- 
 nounced Deane and all who had been connected 
 with him, charging them all with corruption and 
 abuse of public trust. Next to Deane, he directed 
 his attack against Morris, whom he charged with 
 having received public funds to be used in the 
 commercial operations which have been described, 
 for which he had never accounted. To this Morris 
 replied that the transactions were not yet closed ; 
 that he had made temporary settlements, and had 
 set matters in train for a final settlement so soon . 
 as it should be possible. 
 
 It will be seen that this matter pursued Robert 
 Morris all his life, and that it ended in a way which 
 cannot be considered satisfactory to him or his 
 
32 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 friends. It is therefore important to apprehend 
 correctly the case as it stood. Congress pro- 
 vided selected individuals with funds, that is, con- 
 tinental paper money, with which they bought 
 commodities for export ; and they were to account 
 for the money, either by the proceeds which were 
 to be paid over to the agents of Congress in France 
 or in the West Indies, which proceeds would be 
 subject to the order of Congress, or by the return 
 cargoes of supplies needed by Congress. Besides 
 all the risk that the ships might be captured by 
 the enemy, there was the difficulty of adjusting the 
 expenses of the voyage, the commission of the mer- 
 chants, and the value of the goods obtained. The 
 returns were necessarily made in a roundabout way, 
 in order to avoid the enemy's cruisers, involving 
 sometimes two or three transshipments. There was 
 no system for regulating and expediting the trans- 
 shipments. Invoices were neglected or lost ; often, 
 by the very nature of the case, none could be 
 made, because secrecy must be observed. The 
 goods were often put in warehouse, and their 
 existence forgotten at some port in France or in 
 the West Indies. When the ships approached the 
 American coasts, they were forced to run in at any 
 port where they found a chance. Receipts for 
 
AFFAIRS TN 1779-1780. 33 
 
 the cargoes could not be obtained, because there 
 was no responsible agent at the port, and no other 
 person would incur responsibility. The mails were 
 very slow and uncertain, causing reports and orders 
 to be long delayed. If any goods were landed, 
 they were eagerly seized, delivered out, and put 
 to use without any accounting. All this took 
 very long time, and made the transactions spread 
 over years. During that time the currency was 
 depreciating, the administration of the treasury 
 was changing, and throughout the whole there 
 was a lack of business method and a neglect of 
 proper guarantees which to a modem business 
 man would seem incredible. Two things re- 
 sulted : \ there was great opportunity for fraud on 
 the part of those who were intrusted with public 
 money, and any one who accepted this trust risked 
 his interest and reputation in an undertaking which 
 it was not possible for him to control, so as to 
 bring it to a conclusion which would be demon- 
 strably true and just to himself and the public. 
 
 In January, 1779, a charge was made against 
 Morris in Congress that he had put goods belong- 
 ing to Willing & Morris on board the ship " Far- 
 mer," which was despatched from Baltimore on 
 public account. Upon Morris's demand, an in- 
 3 
 
34 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 vestigation was held. He was exculpated, and 
 Jay, as President of Congress, wrote him a formal 
 letter of thanks. It was held that the Committee 
 of Congress had employed him in order to give 
 to the enterprise the colour of a private transaction. 
 The evidence, however, showed that there were 
 goods of Willing & Morris on board the ship. 
 
 The depreciation of the continental currency in 
 the year 1779 was very rapid. This meant, of 
 course, that prices advanced to enormous figures. 
 This produced great popular rage against people 
 who were alleged to depreciate the currency by 
 raising the prices. Then, too, as the currency 
 depreciated, everybody was eager to part with it 
 for goods which were held for the advance in 
 price, that is to say, in order to guarantee one's 
 self against the decline in the currency. This 
 buying and holding for a rise was called engross- 
 ing or forestalling, and advancing the prices was 
 called monopolizing. These proceedings were 
 speedily declared criminal by the different legis- 
 latures, under the recommendation of Congress ; 
 and various acts were passed to prevent them, such 
 as compelling a person who had a stock on hand 
 to part with it at a price fixed by law. 
 
 The popular temper showed a great deal of 
 
AFFAIRS IN 1779-1780. 35 
 
 bitterness in connection with the rise in prices and 
 its attendant phenomena. Perhaps this bitterness 
 was greater at Philadelphia than anywhere else. 
 On the 25th of May, i779j_aj)iiblic_m_e£tiag_was 
 held' at that city, at which inflammatory speeches 
 were made, and extravagant resolutions were 
 passed. It was perhaps one of the inevitable 
 consequences of the Revolution that the popular 
 notions about the supremacy of law and due 
 respect for constituted authority should have be- 
 come incorrect. A committee was appointed at 
 this meeting which was endowed with such au- 
 thority by a mass meeting as to threaten property 
 and personal rights, and no notice whatever was 
 taken of the authority of the State or of Congress. 
 The committee was to proceed under direction of 
 the mass meeting and to report to it. It was 
 charged with two important duties. The first was 
 to establish a tariff of prices on the first day of 
 each month, taking as a standard those of some 
 months previous. The second duty was to inves- 
 tigate alleged cases of monopoliziiig by certain 
 persons, of whom Robert Morris was named as the 
 chief. This monopolizing consisted in buying the 
 whole cargo of a ship and selling it at retail. In 
 the course of the summer, as this popular attack 
 
36 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 on Morris was prosecuted, all the bitterness of 
 Paine's charges of the previous winter about the 
 accounts of the old Commercial Committee was 
 infused into this inquiry. While Morris treated 
 the committee with courtesy and respect, he en- 
 tirely evaded their purpose. He stated that the 
 flour which had been bought by him, in connec- 
 tion with which they charged him with engrossing 
 and buying above the legal tariff, had been bought 
 for the French fleet; and when they addressed 
 their inquiry to Holker, the French agent, he de- 
 clined to be responsible to anybody but Congress. 
 
 The culmination of all this popular agitation, 
 which seems to have been embittered still further 
 by a sense of failure and defeat, was the Fort 
 Wilson riot of October 4. A mob made an at- 
 tack on the house of James Wilson, and a formal 
 battle took place. Morris is said to have been 
 one of the defending party. Two bodies of mili- 
 tia, one at Germantown and the other at Phila- 
 delphia, found themselves ready to come to blows. 
 At this point, however, the entire popular agitation 
 passed away. 
 
 Thus the year 1779 was a very stormy one for 
 Morris, and the effect of these charges against him 
 was to represent him as a pubhc enemy. On one 
 
AFFAIRS IN mO-llSO. 37 
 
 occasion women came to him to demand flour, 
 saying that they had been told by the committee 
 that he had it all locked up in his warehouse. 
 
 At the election in October of this year he was 
 not returned to the Assembly. The year 1780 is 
 the only one between 1775 and 1784 in which he 
 was not in the public service. He was at this 
 time engaged in privateering, in which it was said 
 that he made great gains. An Englishman who 
 was here at the time wrote : " Very large fortunes 
 were made from nothing during this period, but 
 this state of prosperity was not of long duration. 
 In 1 781 and 1782, so numerous were the king's 
 cruisers and privateers that frequently not one 
 vessel out of seven that left the Delaware escaped 
 their vigilance. The profits on successful voyages 
 were enormous, but it was no uncommon thing 
 to see a man one day worth ^^40,000 or ^^5 0,000, 
 and the next day reduced to nothing. Indeed, 
 these rapid transitions were so frequent that they 
 almost ceased to affect either the comfort or the 
 credit of the individual. Flour shipped on board 
 at Philadelphia cost $5, and produced from ^28 to 
 ^34 a barrel in specie at the Havana, which is 
 generally but a short run, and the arrival of one 
 European cargo out of three amply repaid the 
 
38 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 merchant ; so that, notwithstanding the numerous 
 captures, the stocks were continually full of new 
 vessels to supply such as were lost or taken. In 
 short, without having been upon the spot at that 
 period, it is impossible to conceive the activity 
 and perseverance of the Americans. There was 
 scarcely a captain, or even common sailor, who 
 had not been taken six or seven times during the 
 war, nor a merchant who had not been more than 
 once rich and ruined." 
 
 A French traveller wrote : " It is scarcely to 
 be credited that amidst the disasters of America, 
 Mr. Morris, the inhabitant of a town just eman- 
 cipated from the hands of the English, should 
 possess a fortune of a million and a half or two 
 million dollars. It is, however, in the most criti- 
 cal times that great fortunes are acquired. The 
 fortunate return of several ships, the still more 
 successful cruises of his privateers, have increased 
 his riches beyond his expectation, if not beyond 
 his wishes. He is, in fact, so accustomed to the 
 success of his privateers, that when he is observed 
 on a Sunday to be more serious than usual, the 
 conclusion is that no prize has arrived in the pre- 
 ceding week. This flourishing state of commerce 
 at Philadelphia, as well as in Massachusetts Bay, 
 
AFFAIRS IN 1770-17S0. 39 
 
 is entirely owing to the arrival of the French 
 squadron." 
 
 The first-mentioned writer adds : " Mr. Morris 
 has certainly enriched himself greatly by the war, 
 but the house of Willing & Morris did a great 
 deal of business and was well known in all the 
 considerable trading towns of Europe previous to 
 that period. Mr. Morris had various other means 
 of acquiring wealth besides privateering. Amongst 
 others, by his own interest and his connections 
 with Mr, Holker, then consul-general of France at 
 Philadelphia, he frequently obtained exclusive per- 
 mission to shfp cargoes of flour, etc., in the time 
 of general embargo, by which he gained immense 
 profit. His situation gave him many similar op- 
 portunities, of which his capital, his credit, and 
 abilities always enabled him to take advantage. 
 On the strength of his office as Financier-General, 
 he circulated his own notes of Robert Morris as 
 cash throughout the Continent, and even had the 
 address to get some Assembhes, that of Virginia in 
 particular, to pass acts to make them current in 
 payment of taxes. What purchases of tobacco, 
 what profits of every kind, might not a man of 
 Mr. Morris's ability make with such powerful 
 advantages 1 " 
 
40 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 In October, 1780, Morris was again elected to 
 the Pennsylvania Assembly. He took a very ac- 
 tive part in its work during the winter of 1 780- 
 1781. The ideas upon which the people had 
 acted since the beginning of the war had now 
 been severely tested, and the devices which had 
 been employed had produced bitter results. The 
 attempts to give a forced circulation to paper 
 money by terrorism and violence had had their 
 natural result, to produce scarcity. The effect of 
 the price tariff had been to drive goods out of the 
 market. No one was willing to be a merchant if 
 he might be compelled to sell at a price fixed by 
 a committee of irresponsible persons, or under a 
 law interpreted by such a committee. A man 
 wrote to the newspapers to say that he bought a 
 hogshead of sugar and sold it at a handsome ad- 
 vance, that is to say, in number of dollars ; but 
 when he went to buy more, the currency which he 
 had obtained for the hogshead would buy only a 
 tierce. He sold the tierce at a handsome profit 
 in number of dollars, but the currency which he 
 received for it would buy only a barrel. The 
 business of a merchant was therefore very precari- 
 ous, if he could be limited in the prices at which 
 he might sell. If anybody carried it on, he 
 
AFFAIRS IN mo-nso. 41 
 
 needed a large insurance rate to cover the risks 
 which came from the law, as well as those which 
 were in the business. 
 
 Another device of the times was embargoes. 
 People reasoned with great simplicity that if 
 things were scarce in Pennsylvania, it would be 
 a good plan to forbid them to be exported; but 
 the effect of this was to prevent them from being 
 produced, and thus through scarcity to enhance 
 prices still more. 
 
 Another most mischievous device was to obtain 
 the supplies needed for the public service by a 
 system of impressment, giving the owner a remu- 
 neration in paper money or certificates of indebt- 
 edness, at a price arbitrarily fixed by law. This 
 caused people to hide their property or to dispose 
 of it in such a way as not to be found with any 
 in their possession which the impressing officer 
 could even think that they might spare. 
 
 In 1780 it was no longer possible for Congress 
 to issue paper money. At the end of 1779 the 
 continental currency was worth, according to the 
 admitted scale of depreciation, two and a half 
 cents on the dollar, but was really current at a 
 very much lower rate. In that year Congress had 
 recourse to a system of specific supplies ; that is. 
 
42 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 the supplies which were needed for the army were 
 apportioned between the different States, and were 
 to be collected and delivered by them without the 
 intervention of money. This system proved ex- 
 ceedingly cumbersome and wasteful. It imposed 
 on the public officers the duties of transportation 
 and exchange. The expenses of transportation 
 were very great, and while a large supply of goods 
 was spoiling at one place, a detachment of soldiers 
 was naked or starving at another, perhaps not 
 very far away. 
 
 The culmination of these difficulties and failures 
 in the year 1 780 threw upon all men who were 
 capable of influencing public opinion the duty of 
 endeavouring at last to persuade Congress and the 
 State legislatures to abandon the notions which 
 they had pursued so obstinately, to recogniEC their 
 mistakes, and to adopt a system of efficient ad- 
 ministration. The net result of the system which 
 had been pursued had been to inflict very heavy 
 burdens on the people, to destroy their enthusi- 
 asm, and to arouse their opposition, while scarcely 
 anything was accomplished for the effective real- 
 ization of pubhc purposes. Morris, Washington, 
 Hamilton, and others agreed that the faults and 
 errors arose from inexperience ; but this inexperi- 
 
AFFAIRS IN 1770-1780. 43 
 
 ence was very obstinate, and had been very confi- 
 dent in its own judgment. The pubhc men of the 
 time truckled to public opinion, and feared unpop- 
 ularity to a degree which modem men hardly 
 understand. There were very few public men 
 who could take a stand in favour of a view of 
 public questions and defend it with courage and 
 persistency in the face of the popular drift. This 
 was especially noticeable in regard to taxation. 
 All the American public men, without exception, 
 made excuses for the indisposition of the people 
 to pay taxes. They all seemed to think that it 
 was good reasoning to say that the war was carried 
 on to resist taxation, and therefore that it was not 
 politic to tax the people to carry on the war. 
 They thus in effect admitted what indeed was the 
 truth, that the motive of the war was to resist 
 taxation as such, and not simply to resist unjust or 
 improper taxation. As a matter of fact, the colo- 
 nies escaped taxation when they began to make 
 war. If the whole thirteen were taken into ac- 
 count, it would be true to say that they paid less 
 taxes between 1775 and 1789 than they did be- 
 fore 1775. The administration of the State gov- 
 ernments, while they were revolutionary, was 
 exceedingly weak, and the people took advantage 
 
44 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 of this to avoid paying taxes. The collection of 
 taxes was also very uhequal, as between States 
 and between counties and between individuals. 
 If a man pays taxes, however, once, and knows 
 that his neighbours have not paid, he will certainly 
 try to escape the second time, so that inequality 
 or favouritism in the collection acts with the 
 greatest force to prevent collection as time goes 
 on. 
 
 We must also not forget the proscription and 
 persecution of the tories, and the confiscation of 
 their property. This was generally carried out 
 with rigour and cruelty. It introduced into the 
 contest the features of a civil war, and of a civil 
 war in which the opponents were neighbours. In 
 the histories of this period the rights and wrongs 
 of the tories are generally passed over either with 
 neglect or with shame ; but the truth is that the war 
 was attended with a social convulsion and a dis- 
 placement of classes in the American States which 
 was extremely important. The social changes 
 were of course connected with a very important 
 redistribution of property. It was a very easy 
 thing to persecute tories ; they were very rarely 
 active, and very rarely had recourse to violent 
 measures. The English were extremely disap- 
 
AFFAIRS IN 1779-17S0. 45 
 
 pointed in the number of tones whom they could 
 recruit. They found the tories utterly dependent 
 and waiting to be taken care of, but not at all dis- 
 posed to meet their whig neighbours with arms in 
 their hands. It was easy, therefore, to display pa- 
 triotic zeal by persecuting them by mob methods. 
 Then, too, in the general failure of financial re- 
 sources, confiscation presented itself as an easy 
 and productive resource. The malversation and 
 peculation which went on in connection with it 
 were enormous. 
 
 Morris was an opponent of paper money, of 
 embargoes, of legal tender laws, and of the rigour 
 against the tories. We have no speeches or writ- 
 ings of his on these subjects ; but the record of his 
 votes, and of his activity in the public assemblies 
 of which he was a member, shows that he was con- 
 servative and moderate in all his views, and re- 
 sisted the ebullitions of popular temper in his day. 
 Many of the burning questions of the time, under 
 the heads which have just been enumerated, came 
 to a crisis in the Pennsylvania Assembly in the 
 winter of 1780^1781. He exerted himself espe- 
 cially to secure the repeal of the embargo and the 
 legal tender laws. 
 
 At the end of 1780 the leading public men 
 
46 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 almost despaired of the struggle. The resources of 
 the country were ample, and had scarcely been 
 touched by the war. We have traditions of great 
 suffering during the Revolution, and in the dis- 
 trict which was for the time being the seat of 
 military operations, the people were undoubtedly 
 harassed and distressed to a considerable degree ; 
 but no district suffered in this way for any length 
 of time. The burden was very fairly distributed, 
 and the actual suffering which was endured by the 
 people of the United States in the total struggle 
 for their independence was very slight. The 
 trouble was that the resources which existed could 
 not be applied to the task. At the beginning of the 
 war enthusiasm and good-will had done much to 
 overcome the difficulties, but the people were now 
 tired of the war, they regarded independence as 
 assured, they wanted to devote themselves to 
 their private interests, and could not be stimulated 
 to zeal or energy. To the public men in positions 
 of responsibility, it seemed that everything might 
 be lost. 
 
 France was also very tired of the war. The ex- 
 pense of it was enormous, and her finances were 
 hastening toward bankruptcy. She had entered 
 upon the contest supposing that nothing more 
 
AFFAIRS IN 1779-1786. 47 
 
 would be necessary than to give a little encourage- 
 ment to the colonies, or to distract the attention of 
 Great Britain by attacking her elsewhere. She 
 found herself, however, engaged in the enterprise 
 as the principal, with the United States in the 
 auxiliary or subordinate position. At the end of 
 1780 Vergennes was eager for peace on the basis 
 that the parties should hold what they possessed. 
 This would have given to England North and 
 South Carolina and Georgia. That prospect 
 created great alarm in America, but the project 
 failed. England would not agree to the mediation 
 by which it was hoped to bring it about. France 
 therefore saw herself compelled to take up the 
 task with new energ}', and to carry the United 
 States through to their independence by a more 
 determined effort. 
 
 In November, 1780, Congress prepared a me- 
 morial to the King of France, in which they 
 described their distressed condition, and begged 
 for more assistance than they had hitherto re- 
 ceived. Franklin, understanding the situation, 
 had already opened negotiations of the same kind 
 and with the same purpose, and by his efforts the 
 French government was brought to a determina- 
 tion to grant larger subsidies and larger forces. 
 
48 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 Two hundred thousand dollars were loaned, one 
 milHon two hundred thousand dollars were given, 
 and a guarantee of a loan of two million dollars 
 to be raised in Holland, was promised. 
 
 In January Congress determined to send a 
 special ambassador to France, to state the case 
 and advocate the application of the United States. 
 This determination was reached because they did 
 not know or appreciate the efforts of Franklin. 
 Col. John Laurens, one of Washington's aides-de- 
 camp, a young man of about twenty-six years, was 
 selected for this mission. He was an enthusiastic 
 patriot, one of the most sincere and determined to 
 be met with in the history of the war. He was 
 also eager for military distinction. His name 
 never occurred in the history of the war except 
 under circumstances which called for admiration. 
 He was not, however, at all fitted for an ambas- 
 sador. He reached Paris in April. He bore an 
 elaborate letter of instructions from Washington, 
 in which the facts of the case were carefully stated 
 and the gloomy apprehensions were explained and 
 their causes stated. 
 
 He also bore a list of things in the way of sup- 
 plies which Congress thought that they needed ; 
 among the rest, some silver-mounted dr€ss-swords. 
 
AFFAIRS IN 1770-17S0. 49 
 
 The line of argument which Laurens used to 
 Vergennes was, that it was France which was to 
 profit by the destruction of her rival England, — 
 that America was helping to do this, and that 
 therefore France, in her own interest, ought to 
 grant to America the aid which she required. 
 Vergennes repelled these arguments without enter- 
 ing into a discussion of them. He declared that 
 Franklin's system of diplomacy was much more 
 acceptable, and would be found much more effec- 
 tive. He protested against the demands which 
 were presented in the list of articles, and Laurens 
 was compelled to throw out a great many of the 
 things asked for. The ship " Lafayette " had been 
 fitted out with a cargo just before, and had been 
 captured. It was now promised that she should 
 be replaced, but a million dollars out of the sub- 
 sidy of the year was retained for this purpose. 
 
 There was a ship at Amsterdam which the 
 American commissioners in France had under- 
 taken to fit out as a public vessel, but the expense 
 was too great for them, and they sold the vessel to 
 the King of France. It was rented to Commodore 
 i Gillon of South Carolina, who had purchased part 
 ot a cargo and placed it on board the vessel, which 
 was now named the " South Carolina," for transpor- 
 4 
 
so ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 tation to that State. Laurens probably thought 
 that he was making a grand stroke when he en- 
 gaged to pay the debt on this cargo in order to 
 release it, and to buy other goods in Holland in 
 order to fill the " South Carolina " and two other 
 vessels which were to sail under her convoy. He 
 obtained $470,000 in silver, which was placed on 
 board a French frigate, and he returned with it to 
 Boston in August. From there he hastened to 
 Yorktown, where he was just in time to take part 
 in the battle. 
 
MORRIS BECOMES "SUPERINTEND- 
 ENT OF FINANCE." 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 Morris becomes " Superintendent of Finance." 
 
 — His Plan of Action and his Exertions. — 
 Reasons why his Exertions were fruitless. 
 
 — Faults of Administration at Home and 
 Abroad. — Waste of Resources in Holland. 
 
 At the beginning of the year 1781 Congress 
 was driven by the circumstances which have been 
 described in the last chapter to the determination 
 to supersede the board which had had the man- 
 agement of the treasury by a single competent 
 officer. Robert^ Morris was regarded as the one 
 man in the country for this office. He was elected 
 to it on the 20th of February. The title given to 
 the office was Superintendent of Fmance, but for 
 brevity he was generally called the Financier. 
 When we realize the serious crisis to which all 
 affairs, but chiefly those of finance, had come, we 
 are very much surprised to find that he did not 
 assume the duties of the office until the following 
 June. This fact, however, may serve to give an 
 
54 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 idea of the slowness or lack of promptitude with 
 which all things were done. It would be the de- 
 spair of a modem business man to have to con- 
 duct aifairs with such lack of punctuality or of 
 direct and prompt response as then prevailed. 
 
 Morris was in command of the situation. It no 
 doubt flattered his vanity that all should turn to 
 him in a moment of supreme crisis as the one man 
 who was indispensable to the country. He had 
 clear ideas of what was wanted and of what ought 
 to be done. He also had very definite convictions 
 about what was necessary to enable him to accom- 
 plish what he was about to undertake. He there- 
 fore set his conditions, and it was the negotiation 
 over-thesei" in part^which caused the delay. He 
 was regarded as a very rich man, and he claimed 
 to be such. He spoke of himself as entitled by 
 his age and circumstances to ease and comfort. 
 First of all, he refused to abandon his commercial 
 connections, and demanded that if he took the 
 ofiice, it should be with a distinct imderstanding 
 that he might continue his capital in the invest- 
 ments in which it was engaged, and he refers to 
 these as if he had established partnerships for the 
 use of his capital in commerce at different places 
 and with diiferent persons. He next demanded 
 
SUPERINTENDENT OF FINANCE. SS 
 
 that he should have the power of removing his 
 subordinates, which he said he considered a prime 
 condition of efficient administration. 
 
 Congress did not consent to these conditions 
 without considerable opposition, especially to the 
 second one. They were very tenacious of their 
 power and authority, especially in the form of 
 Tjatronage. He insisted, however, and carried his 
 point. 
 
 Another thing which caused delay was his desire 
 to remain a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly 
 until the legal tender laws should be repealed. In 
 April the Assembly passed a law for another emis- 
 sion of paper money, and the attempt to repeal 
 the tender law failed. Perhaps Morris despaired 
 of carrying it. It was carried, and the embargo 
 was repealed after he resigned his seat in the 
 Assembly and entered upon the duties of his office 
 as Financier. 
 
 At the same time he was charged by the State 
 of Pennsylvania to purchase the specific supplies 
 which that State was bound to furnish under the 
 requisitions of Congress. The State paper money 
 was put in his hands, but he undertook to restrict 
 the issue of it as much as possible, and to buy the 
 paper of other States with which to pay the quota 
 
56 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 of Pennsylvania. He was therefore acting in a 
 double capacity at the same time, — as the agent 
 of the State and Financier of the United States, 
 and he entered upon an operation in which he 
 endeavoured to serve the interests of both by what 
 were really book-keeping transactions, so as to 
 keep down the paper money issues of the State. 
 
 There were two things which were favourable in 
 the situation when Robert Morris took office as 
 Financier : (i) The Articles of Confederation were 
 finally adopted in March, 1781. This gave to the 
 Union of the States a constitutional form and regu- 
 lation. Congress ceased to be a revolutionary 
 body, dependent for its authority entirely upon 
 the assent which its individual measures and rec- 
 ommendations could obtain, and was endowed 
 instead with authority under the due forms of con- 
 stitutional order. (2) In February, 1781, Congress 
 proposed to the States to amend the Articles of 
 Confederation by giving to Congress power to levy 
 uniform rates of import duty for the Union. 
 
 Morris was one of the first to recognize the 
 immense importance of union between the States. 
 For the financial reforms which he had in view, 
 union was of the first importance. He was to be 
 Financier 0/ the United States. He was not satis- 
 
SUPERINTENDENT OF FINANCE. 57 
 
 fied to think of the United States simply as an 
 alliance of independent States, which contributed 
 at their good-will to a common treasury. He de- 
 sired to be at the head of the treasury of a great 
 confederated State, because it was evident that 
 under no other circumstances could revenues be 
 obtained in a manner to serve the necessities of 
 the States in respect to their common interests. It 
 also belonged to the same view of the case to con- 
 sider it necessary that there should be federal 
 taxes, providing a federal revenue by the indepen- 
 dent play of federal institutions. There was only 
 one kind of taxes which could give this revenue, 
 and that was duties on imports. Great Britain 
 had tried to levy such taxes, because they were 
 the only ones which promised revenue cheaply 
 and directly without bringing the tax-gatherer and 
 the tax-payer face to face. 
 
 The lines upon which Morris planned to organ- 
 ize his administration of the treasury were, first of 
 all, taxation under this form ; then he proposed 
 retrenchment ; and thirdly, he relied upon loans 
 and subsidies from France. These last he re- 
 garded as necessary to meet the strain of the 
 moment, so far as it was excessive for the strength 
 of the United States, before his other measures 
 could be made effective. 
 
58 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 When he entered upon his office in June, the 
 only real resource which was put at his disposal 
 consisted of bills of exchange drawn on the en- 
 voys of the United States in France, Spain, and 
 Holland. It was not known, when these bills were 
 drawn, that the envoys had succeeded in begging 
 or borrowing anything, but the plan pursued by 
 Congress was to draw these bills and sell them in 
 the United States. The buyers forwarded them to 
 Europe, where they were presented in due time 
 to the American envoy, with a demand for pay- 
 ment. He had no means of payment at his dis- 
 posal, unless he had succeeded in borrowing or 
 begging from the government to which he was 
 accredited. In the year 1781 John Jay succeeded 
 in borrowing of Spain ^150,000, but bills had 
 been drawn on him for three times that amount. 
 Adams, in Holland, tried to contract a loan in the 
 open market, but did not succeed. All the bills 
 drawn on these envoys were thrown back on 
 Franklin in Paris, who was forced, by importuning 
 the French government, to obtain means to meet 
 them all, and even to pay the salaries of the 
 ministers besides. 
 
 These bills Franklin described as drawn on the 
 town pump ; and he complained with some bitter- 
 
SUPERINTENDENT OF FINANCE. S9 
 
 ness of his Gibeonite office, to draw water for the 
 whole congregation of Israel. 
 
 It was bills of this character which were handed 
 over to Morris with which to carry on the treasury. 
 Part of them were lost, because the ship on which 
 they were sent was captured, and they were thrown 
 overboard. The rest he refrained from using as 
 far as he possibly could do so. 
 
 No sooner had he entered upon his office than 
 he was called upon to provide the resources neces- 
 sary for the most important campaign in the his- 
 tory of the war. Washington had long cherished 
 a desire with the help of the French to dislodge 
 the English from New York. The French re- 
 garded the enterprise as too difficult and expen- 
 sive. Morris, of course, shrank from the enormous 
 expense of that undertaking. It was then deter- 
 mined to march against Cornwallis in Virginia. 
 Morris made a visit to the camp, in order to dis- 
 cuss this plan. He carried a few guineas with 
 him ; but when he found that the demands upon 
 him for money far exceeded the amount which he 
 possessed, he gave none to anybody, but brought 
 it back. However, the movement was determined 
 upon, Washington and Rochambeau joined their 
 forces, and Morris undertook his share of the en- 
 
6o ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 teqjrise. The troops who came from the Northern 
 colonies were exceedingly unwilling to go to Vir- 
 ginia ; for it must be understood that the sentiment 
 of common interest or common nationality was 
 extremely weak. Their pay was in arrears. Mor- 
 ris was called upon by Washington to advance 
 them at least one month's pay, in order to recon- 
 cile them to the demands made upon them. He 
 was also called upon to furnish some driblets of 
 hard money for secret service. He had taken the 
 office of Agent of the Marine of the United States, 
 in order to save expense, and it was to him that 
 Washington wrote to provide the transportation for 
 the army on the Chesapeake Bay. It also en- 
 tered into the range of his duties at the time to 
 provide for the transportation and delivery of the 
 specific supplies at convenient points for the use 
 of the army. Transportation was exceedingly ex- 
 pensive and slow upon land, and very uncertain 
 upon water. He was therefore compelled to 
 make transactions of exchange, giving flour and 
 supplies in one place for the same things in an- 
 other. Indeed, it would be difficult to describe 
 the range of finance at the time, except by saying 
 that what did not distinctly fall in the department 
 of war or foreign correspondence was included in 
 finance. 
 
SUPERINTENDENT OF FINANCE. 6 1 
 
 When the troops passed through Philadelphia, 
 Washington had his quarters at Morris's house, 
 and anxious consultations were held between them 
 and the French officers and supply-agents as to 
 ways and means. Morris asked the Frenchmen 
 to lend him twenty thousand dollars. At first they 
 hesitated ; but when it was heard that the fleet of 
 De Grasse had reached the Chesapeake, and it 
 was known that there was money on board that 
 fleet, this advance was made, under a promise that 
 it should be repaid in three months. This promise 
 was not punctually kept ; but John Laurens arrived 
 from France at Boston in August, with ^470,000 
 in specie, as already stated ; and from this money 
 the loan was repaid. 
 
 There are many legends and anecdotes pertain- 
 ing to this period in regard to the efibrts which 
 Morris made to beg or borrow a few hundred dol- 
 lars, especially in the all-powerful hard money, 
 from his friends and neighbours for the purposes 
 of the United States. Many of them are no doubt 
 apocryphal, but they may be taken to indicate that 
 he did something of the kind. Iji the account 
 which he rendered after the surrender of Corh- 
 wSllii7~he presented an item of twelve thousand 
 dollars due to himself for money advanced. This 
 
02 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 is the only item of the sort which appears in any 
 of his accounts ; and the legends that he advanced 
 frequently large amounts of his own wealth for the 
 public necessities may be rejected as unfounded. 
 It would have been foolish and uncalled for, for him 
 to do so. He gave his own credit, as we shall 
 see, to bolster up that of the United States in great 
 exigencies upon one or two occasions, but he 
 never paid the bills of the United States out of his 
 own pocket. He had such security for sums ad- 
 vanced by him as the United States gave at the 
 time to any of its creditors. He no doubt ob- 
 tained interest on his advances, and he had a 
 salary of six thousand dollars a year, which was al- 
 together the largest salary paid by the United States 
 to anybody, the heads of the other departments 
 having only five thousand dollars. The honour 
 and merit of Robert Morris are sufficient, upon the 
 basis of truth and fact, because he rendered effi- 
 cient and faithful service and displayed zeal and 
 devotion to duty. If he had played the pa- 
 tron of the United States, his position would have 
 been unbecoming to himself and humiliating to 
 the United States. Indeed, that role was never in 
 his character. He was ambitious to win wealth, 
 and his views of wealth were strictly matter of fact 
 
SUPERTNTENDENT OF FINANCE. 63 
 
 and mercantile, not at all sentimental, or after the 
 fashion of the Arabian Nights. There is especially 
 a story which has often been repeated, that he ad- 
 vanced ^r,4oo,ooo for the expenses of the York- 
 town campaign, 'or^iSsued iiotes to that amount in 
 some -form or other involving his personal credit, 
 for which story we have not been able to find any 
 foundation whatever ; and the largest issue of notes 
 which he ever made for the United States, under 
 the stress of a very great necessity, was only little 
 more than half that amount. 
 
 The expedition of Laurens to France resulted, 
 as has been stated, in the transportation of nearly 
 half a million dollars in silver from France to 
 the United States. This event was regarded with 
 very great satisfaction by the public, by Congress, 
 and also by Morris. Inasmuch as it provided that 
 amount of cash in hand, and in Morris's hand, it 
 was of course extremely useful ; but specie was 
 then far more plentiful in the United States than 
 it ever had been before. Both the French and 
 English armies were spending large sums in , 
 specie in the United States. On the downfall 
 of the continental paper, this specie came into 
 circulation. It did not, however, come into the 
 treasury of the United States, and that difference 
 
64 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 was just the important one which the importation 
 of the French specie overcame. Beyond this, 
 however, Laurens's expedition to Europe only did 
 mischief. We have seen that the French had 
 granted the subsidy and the loans before Laurens 
 arrived, upon the solicitation of Franklin. It was 
 part of this money which Laurens brought back. 
 He also sent his subordinate. Major Jackson, to 
 Holland, with another million and a half of French 
 livres, which were to be put on board the " South 
 Carolina " frigate, and instructed him to buy other 
 supplies in Holland, to fill out the cargo. These 
 supplies were to be paid for by Franklin, and the 
 latter amount of specie was also to be taken from 
 the loan which he had obtained. Franklin had 
 supposed that the specie and the goods from 
 Holland were to be paid for out of the loan 
 which was to be raised in Holland, under the 
 guarantee of the King of France. When he 
 learned that that loan had failed, and that all 
 this expenditure was to come out of the fund 
 on which he relied to pay all the bills of ex- 
 change which had been drawn, he ordered the 
 specie brought back from Holland, and refused 
 to pay for the goods, although he was at last 
 forced to do it. At length, after great delays 
 
SUPERINTENDENT OF FINANCE. 65 
 
 and an amount of mismanagement which it is 
 difficult to understand, the " South Carolina" frigate 
 ^ departed, leaving the goods behind. She arrived 
 . in South Carolina in the following spring, and 
 these goods did not reach America until Sep- 
 tember, 1782, nearly a year after Yorktown, and 
 within a few weeks of the signing of the pre- 
 liminary treaty of peace. Then the goods were 
 found to be of extremely poor quality, and 
 Morris was obliged to sell a large part of them 
 for what they would bring, in order to meet 
 the desperate necessities of the moment for 
 money. 
 
 To return to the year 1781. In this first year 
 of his administration Morris displayed an ener- 
 getic and eager spirit of enterprise, reaching out 
 in every direction with plans and projects which 
 he thought would answer his purposes. He found 
 that the bills sold by the French army agents com- 
 peted with those sold by himself, and he succeeded 
 in bringing about an arrangement by which he was 
 able to sell both together, and so to prevent undue 
 depression of the rates in dollars at which he could 
 ^sell drafts payable in France in livres. He also 
 undertook the purchase of supplies for both armies, 
 the French and the American, as a measure of 
 S 
 
66 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 economy. Another plan upon which he built 
 great hopes was the importation of specie from 
 Havana, or directly from Mexico. This specie 
 belonged in the first instance to the government 
 of Spain. He had sanguine expectations, such as 
 were entertained by Congress at the time, that 
 Spain could be persuaded to make large loans 
 of money to the United States, and he desired 
 that these loans should come in the form of 
 specie, which the Spanish government might or- 
 der sent directly to the United States. If this 
 plan did not succeed, he had another one. He 
 hoped that Spain, being fearful of the risks of 
 capture, in transporting the silver to Europe, 
 might deliver it to the United States and receive 
 pay for it in Europe, out of the subsidies granted 
 by France. He prosecuted this enterprise with 
 great zeal during the summer of 1781. He wrote 
 long despatches to Jay to stimulate his zeal, and 
 to provide him with facts and arguments which 
 might have effect upon the court of Spain. He 
 also fitted out a vessel to go to Cuba and execute 
 this errand; the vessel, however, was captured. 
 Spain refused the loans, and refused the proposed 
 negotiation, and the whole enterprise resulted in 
 a loss. 
 
SUPERINTENDENT OF FINANCE. 6^ 
 
 The last resource to which he must always 
 return, and the only one which could rationally 
 be depended upon to pay the public expenses 
 of the United States, was taxation. If the people 
 of the United States wanted to be independent, 
 they must pay for it, and fight for it. When 
 appeal after appeal was addressed to France, 
 the French minister replied, sometimes in terms 
 of the most direct remonstrance and humiliating 
 rebuke, that the people of the United States were 
 forcing France to do the fighting and the paying. 
 The French people were under very heavy taxa- 
 tion, and the people of the United States were 
 under very light taxation, or none at all. The 
 French had seven thousand regular troops at 
 Yorktown, and the Americans had only fifty-five 
 hundred Continental troops. They had besides, 
 it is true, thirty-five hundred militia, but, accord- 
 ing to the estimate which the military men of the 
 time put upon the militia, they were valuable for 
 little more than to make the grand total exceed 
 the number of the French. The French also had 
 two fleets, while the Americans had not a ship, 
 and the result was produced by the fleet, which 
 prevented the English from reinforcing Comwallis 
 or taking him away. 
 
68 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 From the beginning of his administration, 
 Morris began a series of circular letters, con- 
 taining appeals to the States to comply with the 
 requisitions of Congress, and provide him with 
 funds. In these circulars he used every form 
 of remonstrance, argument, and appeal. He 
 seems long to have maintained his faith that 
 such appeals could produce results, in spite of 
 reiterated disappointments. To realize the case, 
 we must understand that these letters could only 
 be intrusted to the mails, which were very slow 
 and uncertain. There was not a single governor, 
 unless possibly Governor Trumbull of Connecticut 
 should be excepted, who distinguished himself as 
 a war governor, by organizing the resources of 
 his State, and powerfully supporting the measures 
 of the central government. If a governor had 
 done this, he would have become very unpopular 
 in his State. To be popular in his State, he 
 needed to protect the State against the demands 
 of the central government. The governors there- 
 fore either passed by with neglect these appeals 
 which were addressed to thern, orJbrmally trans- 
 mitted them to the legislature. -The legislatures 
 did not seem to feel any very heavy responsibility. 
 They did little or nothing, and seemed to believe 
 
SUPERINTENDENT OF FINANCE. 69 
 
 that if nothing was done, no- very serious conse- 
 quences would follow. In their defence, it must 
 also be stated that they were at least partly in the 
 right. If a grand system of defence had been 
 organized, and much more, such a grand system 
 of offence as was projected at the beginning of 
 the war, it would have been enormously expen- 
 sive ; and if they had provided generously the 
 means of executing such plans as Congress and 
 its officers were disposed to make, it is impossible 
 to guess what the expenditure would have been. 
 As it was, the lack of organization and adminis- 
 trative system made the expenditure very waste- 
 ful, extravagant, and irresponsible. No one ever 
 knew what it was or where the money went. 
 Such investigations as were made from time to 
 time revealed a great consumption of resources 
 with very slight results. If the system had not 
 been amended, the people who undertook to 
 provide revenues sufficiently great to make the 
 system effective, in spite of the waste, would have 
 undertaken an indefinite burden. Then, too, the 
 individual citizen could not be made to feel that 
 there was any great danger that the British army 
 would reach him, or he knew that if it did reach 
 him for a short time, it would pass on, and could 
 
70 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 not do him any great harm. Every district which 
 was invaded called loudly for help, and com- 
 plained that it did not receive it. This produced 
 suUenness and anger, and a determination to pay 
 no heed when others cried for help. We must 
 also notice that the very same lack of organiza- 
 tion which was the weakness of the Americans 
 in respect to efficient war-making and finance 
 was also their great strength in the widest and 
 most philosophical view of the enterprise on 
 which they had entered. The English com- 
 manders never knew where or how to strike, in 
 order that the blow might be felt. It was because 
 there was no chord of intense sympathy between 
 the different parts of the Union, that there was 
 also no bond of connection through which the 
 suffering of one part could be transmitted through- 
 out the whole body. It was because there was 
 no strong national feeling that the pressure which 
 was brought to bear on one part did not exert 
 coercion on the whole. It was because the 
 social organization was low that there was very 
 little social apparatus which could be destroyed, 
 so as to cripple the national life, and force 
 submission. 
 
 Morris's circular letters were therefore almost 
 
SUPERINTENDENT OF FINANCE. 71 
 
 as vain as if he had torn them in pieces and 
 scattered them on the winds, in the hope of 
 obtaining replies. 
 
 The modern reader is also astonished that the 
 members of Congress did not return to their 
 constituents, and explain the facts in such a way 
 as to obtain a response and produce results. 
 The one controlling sentiment of the time was 
 a fear of unpopularity. Morris, in rather odd 
 language, called it " our enderaial disease." All 
 the civil and political forces of the time were 
 disintegrating. The State legislatures, instead of 
 acting as sovereign legislative bodies, having 
 power to make enactments which would dispose 
 of all the civil power of the commonwealth, 
 acted by calls or recommendations addressed to 
 the county or to the town, according to the sys- 
 tem of local government which existed in each 
 State. The Continental Congress when it pro- 
 ceeded by its recommendations, requisitions, and 
 appeals to the States, really proceeded upon the 
 methods to which its members had been habitu- 
 ated by their experience in their separate States. 
 When the Continental Congress proceeded in 
 that way in its dealings with the States, and the 
 States adopted the same method with the towns 
 
72 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 and counties, all civil efficiency depended on the 
 promptitude and force of the response which was 
 obtained from the petty local bodies. Was that 
 response either prompt or powerful? It certainly 
 was not. It was, on the contrary, slow and weak, 
 negligent and drawling. For the same reason, 
 however, every man felt more his position in the 
 town or county of his residence than in any of 
 the larger political bodies, so that the ideas of 
 the time were narrow, local, and provincial to 
 an intense degree. Nothing better deserves the 
 attention of the student of American history than 
 this fact, for in the light of it he can understand 
 the prodigious efforts which have been necessary 
 for a hundred years to overcome the local preju- 
 dices and the narrow methods of thought of that 
 time, and to put in the place of them wider, more 
 generous, and more rational views of the civil 
 body, of the sense and meaning of the State, of 
 the value of the Union, and of the worth of be- 
 longing to a great nationality. The men who 
 have laboured to influence public opinion in this 
 direction, however, have always been unpopular. 
 They have always had to contend with and over- 
 come the traditional prejudices and the inertia 
 of the popular bodies, while those who have 
 
SUPERINTENDENT OF FINANCE. 73 
 
 floated with the popular tide have enjoyed 
 popularity and ease both together. 
 
 The love of popularity and the terror of unpop- 
 ularity were produced by a social order in which 
 the petty township was of predominant importance. 
 It was because a man lived in a very small social 
 group that he felt his happiness and prosperity 
 conditioned in the most essential manner on the 
 good-will of his neighbours, and realized how far- 
 reaching was the peril of injury and unhappiness if 
 he should become detested by his neighbours. 
 Under such a social order the boycott has terrific 
 power. This is why we find that the enforcement 
 of the association and of the currency of the conti- 
 nental paper money by the threat to " hold a man 
 up as the enemy of his country " was so effective, 
 and we may also realize what sufferings were in- 
 flicted on the tories by the methods which were 
 employed against them. In a few cases, where 
 Congress undertook by sending out committees to 
 inform and persuade the States, they did not send 
 members to their own States, but selected members 
 from one section to go to another. 
 
 Another thing which the modem reader misses 
 in the record of the difficulties and troubles of the 
 Revolutionary period is the newspaper. The edi- 
 torial was almost unknown, and the conception of 
 
74 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 " news " strikes the modem reader as extremely 
 singular. In searching the files of a Philadelphia 
 newspaper for notice of something which occurred 
 at Philadelphia, he will find letters and news items 
 from all over the world, culled at second hand 
 from other papers, and perhaps not a word about 
 the thing for which he is searching, and which, 
 according to our ideas, was the most important 
 thing going on at the time. Indeed, it is quite 
 possible that he will find mention of it in a letter 
 to some Boston or New York paper of the time 
 rather than in the newspaper of the place where it 
 occurred. The discussions which were carried on 
 chiefly took the form of letters from volunteer 
 contributors. Congress sat with closed doors. 
 Although a journal of its proceedings was pub- 
 lished, it was very imperfect, and was sometimes 
 two or three years in arrears. The men of the 
 Revolution were under a most unfortunate convic- 
 tion of the power of a pretence well maintained, 
 although in fact false and unfounded. Their no- 
 tion of credit was that it consisted in an impression 
 which could be made on the mind by devices, 
 assertions, and suggestions, whether true or false. 
 There was not one of them who had mastered the 
 radical difference between commercial credit and 
 the deception of a confidence operation. They 
 
SUPERINTENDENT OF FINANCE. 75 
 
 had also accepted with impUcit faith the eighteenth- 
 century notion of diplomacy by secrecy and finesse. 
 They thought it the sum of military and diplomatic 
 wisdom not to inform one's enemy, and we have 
 never found a proof that any one of them had 
 accepted the doctrine of policy that you should by 
 all means inform and inspire your friends to sup- 
 port and co-operate with you, even at the risk of 
 informing your enemy. There were some, it is 
 true, foremost among whom stood Alexander 
 Hamilton, who advocated publicity of the pro- 
 ceedings of Congress. The only thing in the way 
 of the work which a modem party newspaper 
 would do was Paine's " Crisis," a series of pam- 
 phlets which he published from time to time, in 
 order to act on public opinion at particular exi- 
 gencies. His first pamphlet, " Common Sense," 
 had extraordinary influence, because it performed 
 this function very well at a very critical moment. 
 The later numbers were far inferior, and never 
 would have had any importance but for the prestige 
 established by the first one. 
 
 Now the modem reader, accustomed to the 
 methods and devices of modem political life, con- 
 stantly feels, in reading Morris's circulars, that 
 they should have been published in the news- 
 
76 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 papers instead of being read by a governor or 
 read in a legislature and then filed away, never to 
 be read again until some student of history should 
 bring them forth. They should have been in the 
 hands of every citizen. Their warm enthusiasm, 
 their passionate appeals, their argument and exhor- 
 tation would then have won gradually some influ- 
 ence on public opinion. If it was with the towns- 
 men at last that the political initiative and civil 
 force rested, these papers might, by reaching the 
 townsmen, have led to the exercise of the initiative 
 and the application of the force. According to the 
 ideas of the time, however, it would have been 
 disastrous to publish these admissions of weakness 
 and failure, and these confessions of humiliating 
 dependence on France, because Rivington would 
 have republished them and the tories would all 
 have rejoiced. The only real effect of them that 
 can be ascertained is that they produced some 
 exasperation against Morris personally ; and it can- 
 not be denied that as he went on but was con- 
 stantly disappointed, he used stronger and stronger 
 language in the effort to sting the States into 
 a response, and that this was impolitic and 
 unsuccessful. 
 
THE BANKS OF PENNSYLVANIA 
 AND NORTH AMERICA. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 The Banks of Pennsylvania and North Amer- 
 ica. — Army Contracts. — Sectional Preju- 
 dices AND Jealousies. — The Attempts to 
 GET a Revenue. — Discontent in the Army 
 AND Over-drafts on the Bankers in Eu- 
 rope. — Morris resigns, but is persuaded 
 to continue. — He issues Notes to pay 
 OFF THE Army. — The Pledges to him are 
 BROKEN. — Loans in Holland. — Morris's 
 Drafts are protested. — He redeems his 
 Notes, and escapes from Office. 
 
 In June, 1780, it was proposed to make a sub- 
 scription at Philadelphia, in order to provide the 
 army with needed supplies. Thomas Paine claims 
 that he first proposed this. The plan was taken 
 up, and a subscription of ^^300,000 in Pennsyl- 
 vania currency, but to be paid in hard money, ' 
 was made. The project of this subscription did • 
 not differ much from the operations of the loan 
 
8o ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 Offices, which were already in existence. The 
 chief difference was that this so-called " bank " 
 was a syndicate of persons who united to make the 
 loan to the United States, and that they obtained 
 special security for it. Bills of exchange were 
 lodged with them by Congress as security, but 
 they were the same sort of bills of exchange 
 drawn on the envoys which have already been 
 described. The subscriptions were paid in conti- 
 nental or State paper, and the supplies were 
 bought with this paper. Congress promised to 
 pay within six months, which, however, it did 
 not do. If Congress had promptly paid, the sub- 
 scriptions could have been renewed, and the bank 
 would have had a certain continuity of operation. 
 In fact, it came to an end of its operations in 
 about a year. Alexander Hamilton, criticising it, 
 said that it was not an institution ; which was very 
 just. 
 
 Morris had long entertained a project of estab- 
 lishing a bank. When the French specie was 
 brought over, in August, 1781, he saw his way to 
 put this plan in operation. He had already sub- 
 mitted it to Congress, and obtained their approval. 
 He determined to put the specie in the bank ; and 
 his idea about it was that he could multiply the 
 
ATORRIS'S CONTINUED EFFORTS. 8 1 
 
 capital of the bank many times in paper notes, 
 and so make the specie do many times as much 
 work as its actual amount. 
 
 The stock of the bank was very slowly sub- 
 scribed. The project was new; there were few 
 people who understood it ; " confidence " had been 
 so abused that it was difficult to draw it out, even 
 for a sound and reasonable plan. Before the ist 
 of November, when the bank was organized, only 
 seventy thousand dollars had been subscribed 
 to the capital. The intention was to make it 
 ^400,000, and, in the enthusiasm of the time, 
 Morris declared that he would ultimately make 
 it ten times that. When the bank went into 
 operation, at the beginning of the year 1782, 
 he put into it ^250,000 on account of the United 
 States, taking stock to that amount. The gentle- 
 men who had subscribed to the former bank, 
 which was popularly known as the Bank of Penn- 
 sylvania, could not subscribe to the new bank, 
 which was called the Bank of North America, be- 
 cause Congress had not yet repaid them the funds 
 which they had loaned to the first one, and they 
 still held the bills of exchange as security. Under 
 these circumstances Morris obtained the consent 
 of Congress to a plan by which these gentlemen 
 6 
 
82 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 converted their shares in the old bank into shares 
 in the new one, and Morris undertook to pay the 
 old debt as a subscription to the new bank and 
 release the bills of exchange. 
 
 Morris was a stockholder in the Bank of North 
 America, but he never was an officer of it, and he 
 never used its notes unless he obtained them by 
 discount, as any one else might do. As Superin- 
 tendent of Finance, he had the right to receive 
 regular statements from the bank of its condition. 
 In his public capacity he had no other control of 
 the bank than what was given him by this pro- 
 vision, and the custody and control of the govern- 
 ment stock. As a private individual, he had no 
 other control of the bank than what belonged to 
 him as a stockholder. 
 
 In February, 1782, France made another loan 
 of gi, 200,000. In that same month the House 
 of Commons voted that the war in America should 
 be continued as a defensive war only. All the 
 American public men were influenced by an un- 
 conquerable suspicion of the sincerity of Great 
 Britain, and especially of the character of Lord 
 Shelburne. John Wilkes, in a silly political squib 
 many years before, had declared that Shelburne 
 had the same physiognomy as a celebrated Jesuit, 
 
MORRIS'S CONTINUED EFFORTS. 83 
 
 Malagrida. The name seemed to stick, and the 
 reputation which was suggested by it became 
 fastened upon Shelburne. We find it repeated 
 by a great many of the leading American public 
 men. No ground can be ascertained for it, and 
 it seems to have been utterly unjust. 
 
 This suspicion was very expensive to the United 
 States. All agreed on account of it that the army 
 must be kept up, and that preparation must be 
 made for another campaign. If the Americans had 
 correctly judged the state and tendency of things, 
 they might have disbanded their army immedi- 
 ately after Comwallis's surrender, and might have 
 saved themselves all the trouble and expense of 
 the next two years. 
 
 In 1782 some income from taxes began to 
 be received. At least in the Northern States, 
 attempts were made to levy continental taxes, as 
 distinguished from State taxes, which latter also 
 began to be employed systematically. This in- 
 come, however, was very inadequate for the ex- 
 penditures. In February, Morris made payments 
 to the officers of the army, in order to enable 
 them to buy clothing, of which they were greatly 
 in need. When he did this, he expected that the 
 French loan would be twelve million instead of 
 
84 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 six million livres, and he was still sanguine that 
 the States would grant to Congress power to levy 
 import duties. As he was disappointed on both 
 those points, the engagements which he under- 
 took at this time produced a great deal of trouble 
 afterward. 
 
 At the beginning of this year he also introduced 
 the system of contracts for supplying the Northern 
 army. There had been great prejudice against 
 this system. The colonists knew that there had 
 been a great deal of jobbery in supplying the 
 English army by contracts. Everything which 
 came to them with that sort of reputation they 
 treated with abhorrence ; but probably there never 
 was anywhere more waste and peculation than in 
 the American army, so that at last Congress con- 
 sented to make use of contracts, when the other 
 system had produced such results that they could 
 no longer adhere to it. 
 
 The system of contracts was not extended to 
 the Southern army. Morris refused to apply con- 
 tracts there, because the three Southern States 
 raised nothing by taxes. The Southern army con- 
 tinued until the end of the war in a state of misery 
 and nakedness. The descriptions which are given 
 of it make one think that it must have resembled 
 
MORRIS'S CONTINUED EFFORTS. 85 
 
 a horde of savages. It was forced to subsist from 
 the country by impressment and violence. 
 
 This state of things produced great bitterness in 
 the Southern States against Morris. The bitter- 
 ness was intensified also by some other facts. 
 The continental paper finally disappeared at 
 Philadelphia in May, i78r. The final catastrophe 
 was brought about by a singular misstep. It was 
 the duty of the Council of Pennsylvania, accord- 
 ing to law, to state on the first of every month the 
 quotation of the continental paper in the State 
 paper. The latter was at a customary rating 
 against specie of three to one. The quotation 
 for continental against State paper during the 
 spring had been 75 to one. On the ist of May 
 the Council, without explaining the change, quoted 
 the continental against specie, and rated it at 1 75 
 for one. The public immediately interpreted this 
 in the old way, as a quotation in State paper, and 
 multiplied it by three, so that continental fell to 
 525 for one in specie. This never could have 
 happened unless the previous quotations had been 
 false. Thereupon the continental disappeared, 
 and specie came in to take its place. The con- 
 tinental paper, however, continued to circulate 
 south of the Potomac for a year longer ; and as 
 
86 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 it was shipped thither from all the other parts of 
 the country where it had ceased to circulate, its 
 depreciation was very rapid, and reached an ex- 
 travagant limit. The people of the Southern 
 ■States supposed that the French subsidies and 
 loans, which had been obtained for all, and must 
 be repaid by all, had been brought to Philadel- 
 phia, and had been kept there by the Financier. 
 Whenever paper money is used it always leads 
 to the fetichism of gold ; that is to say, to an ex- 
 travagant and irrational esteem for gold. Con- 
 sequently, a degree of advantage was attributed 
 to the possession of specie far beyond what it 
 really rendered. 
 
 Another ground of complaint against Morris 
 was connected with the exportation of tobacco 
 from Yorktown to New York after the surrender 
 of Comwallis. These exportations were made in 
 the interest of Congress, and under license from 
 Congress ; but they were viewed with great suspi- 
 cion, because it was thought that under cover of 
 these exportations for government account others 
 might be made for private advantage. Investi- 
 gations were made by the Assembly of Virginia 
 and Congress, without developing any justification 
 for these suspicions. 
 
MOJiKIS'S CONTINUED EFFORTS. 87 
 
 The State of Virginia had promptly given con- 
 sent to the impost proposed by Congress, but 
 later she revoked this consent. It vi-as said that 
 the Assembly were induced to do this by Arthur 
 Lee, out of spite against Morris. Massachusetts 
 opposed this grant of power to Congress. Rhode 
 Island took the strongest ground of State rights 
 and limited powers in Congress against it. 
 Hamilton went into Congress from New York 
 in November of 1782, in order to help in a 
 new and energetic attempt to carry a specific 
 proposition for import duties, to which the States 
 should be asked to consent. A protest from 
 Rhode Island against the whole scheme was pre- 
 sented. That State apprehended dangers from 
 the introduction of federal officers, empowered 
 to collect revenue. Hamilton drew up a paper 
 in response to these objections, in which he laid 
 down very strong federal doctrine about the duty 
 of the States to provide any revenue which Con- 
 gress might call for, about the power of Congress 
 to dispose of the revenue as it judged best, and 
 also about the necessity in any effective federal 
 system that the federal government should collect 
 its own revenue by its own agent. Such were the 
 political notions of the time that these doctrines, 
 
88 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 which belong to the simplest elements of constitu- 
 tional law under a federal system, were regarded 
 as very dangerous and extravagant, by many peo- 
 ple, even of the moderate State-rights party. 
 
 Hamilton refused to discuss soberly the objec- 
 tions put forward by Rhode Island, because he 
 said that they were not the real motives of her 
 opposition. Under the existing state of things, 
 she was taxing Connecticut, and she wished to 
 continue to do so, which would be prevented if 
 the federal impost was adopted. The commer- 
 cial States, in fact, opposed the impost, because 
 they were at the time able to levy import duties 
 at their ports on all the goods which passed 
 through them, and to put the proceeds in the 
 State treasury. 
 
 In January, 1783, a committee came from the 
 army to present to Congress a memorial of the 
 officers, who complained that the promises which 
 had been made to them had not been kept. 
 They feared that the army would be disbanded, 
 after which there would be no chance whatever 
 to obtain attention for their complaints or de- 
 mands. Congress turned to Morris to ask him 
 what could be done. He replied that he was 
 just about to ask them for a confidential com- 
 
MOKJilS'S CONTINUED EFFORTS. 89 
 
 mittee, to whom he could state the alarming 
 crisis in which the treasury stood. When such 
 a committee was appointed, he informed them 
 that he had largely overdrawn on the bankers in 
 Europe and must draw more, which he did not 
 dare to do without the express approval of Con- 
 gress. This he desired them to obtain without 
 revealing the facts in detail. They were extremely 
 alarmed, but the only thing which they could pro- 
 pose or which Congress could propose was to 
 make another appeal to France. Morris did not 
 see how this could be avoided, for he must meet 
 his obligations ; but he also thought it wrong, as 
 things then stood, to ask anything more of France. 
 A very large party in Congress, however, thought 
 it perfectly right to make demands upon France. 
 They even wanted to take a higher tone of de- 
 mand than had ever been used, and they were 
 dissatisfied with Franklin because they thought 
 that his attitude toward France was altogether 
 too much that of a suppliant. These were those 
 who thought that the aid which the United States 
 gave France to humble her rival was more impor- 
 tant than that which France gave the United States 
 to win their independence. 
 
 The situation with the officers of the army on 
 
go ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 the one side, demanding either pay or security, 
 and Congress on the other, proposing more sup- 
 plications to France instead of passing the impost, 
 became for Morris unendurable, and he resigned 
 his office. The first effect of this on Congress 
 was stunning. They placed a strict injunction 
 of secrecy on the fact and on his letter of resig- 
 nation. This was on the 24th of January, 1783. 
 In the letter he said : " To increase our debts 
 (that is, by more borrowing from France), while 
 the prospect of paying them diminishes, does not 
 consist with my ideas of integrity. I must there- 
 fore quit a situation which becomes utterly unsup- 
 portable." Madison wrote: "This letter made a 
 deep and solemn impression on Congress. It was 
 considered as the effect of despondence in Mr. 
 Morris of seeing justice done to the public credi- 
 tors, or the public finances placed on an honour- 
 able establishment ; as a source of fresh hope to 
 the enemy, when known ; as ruinous both to 
 domestic and foreign credit; and as producing 
 a vacancy which none knew how to fill, and which 
 no fit man would venture to accept." February 
 26, Morris asked that the injunction of secrecy 
 should be raised from his resignation, because 
 he must inform certain persons whose interests 
 
MOKR/S'S CONTINUED EFFORTS. 91 
 
 would be affected by it. They complied with his 
 request. The next day he wrote to Washington 
 that Congress wished to do justice, but that they 
 would not adopt the necessary measures, because 
 they were afraid of offending their States. 
 
 He was very generally blamed for this resigna- 
 tion, and unless we misconstrue his behaviour in 
 many other cases, it was the effect of a petulance 
 and impatience of temper which was in his charac- 
 ter. He seems to have taken hold of new enter- 
 prises with great zeal and enthusiasm, but to have 
 tired of them soon. He certainly lacked that 
 fortitude which Washington possessed to such 
 an amazing degree in the midst of disappoint- 
 ment, and of the neglect and inefficiency of 
 those on whom he was forced to rely. 
 
 On the 1 8 th of April Congress adopted a 
 scheme of federal taxes. They needed to raise 
 two and a half million dollars, in order to pay 
 the interest on the debt, and the current ex- 
 penses. They proposed to lay a tax of five per 
 cent on all imports, with a few exceptions, and 
 to levy specific taxes on some selected articles. 
 The revenue which they expected from these 
 taxes was less than a million dollars. The other 
 million and a half the States were to raise under 
 
92 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 quotas, in such way as each saw fit. Hamilton 
 would not vote for this act. He considered it 
 as falling far short of what ought to be done, 
 and he believed that a better act would have 
 had equal chances of success with the States. 
 Especially he objected to the part of it which 
 left a larger part of the revenue still to be ob- 
 tained by the same old system. Morris agreed 
 with him. 
 
 In April it was evident that the army could 
 not be disbanded without some payment, and 
 that there was no way to pay them anything 
 unless Robert Morris would undertake to carry 
 through an issue of paper for that purjDose. It 
 was on account of this commanding position 
 which he held that his enemies and political 
 opponents detested him. It is they who have 
 borne the fullest testimony to the fact that he 
 held a commanding position at Philadelphia, 
 higher, in fact, than that of any one else there. 
 He was a man of aristocratic temper, and be- 
 longed to the party in Pennsylvania politics which 
 was called aristocratic, the virulence of party 
 feeling being very intense. It only embittered 
 the feeling still more to know that he was indis- 
 pensable. It was feared that the army woiild 
 
MORRIS'S CONTINUED EFFORTS. 93 
 
 mutiny if it was not paid, and there was no 
 means whatever to satisfy it except through him. 
 
 The two Morrises, Robert and Gouverneur, the 
 latter being assistant to the former, with Hamil- 
 ton, had a plan to unite the army interest with 
 that of the certificate holders, in order to bring 
 pressure on Congress to make them provide for 
 both at the same time. They believed that the 
 friends of either interest would defeat taxation, 
 unless provision was made to do justice to that 
 interest. The project, however, was no sooner 
 known or suspected, than it produced suspicion 
 on all sides. It was construed as an effort to 
 overawe Congress by means of the army, or to 
 defer the claims of the soldiers until those of the 
 certificate holders were satisfied. The project 
 was abandoned. 
 
 A committee called upon Morris to ask upon 
 what terms he would consent to continue in office. 
 It appears that he and they did not understand 
 each other perfectly ; but the essential conditions 
 on which he insisted were, that he should be 
 asked to continue in such explicit terms that it 
 might be fully understood that he remained in 
 office only out of deference to their request. 
 Then he demanded that Congress should pledge 
 
94 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 to him their support for the measures which it 
 would be necessary to take. They accepted 
 these conditions. 
 
 He then proceeded to cause notes to be printed, 
 payable six months from date, which were to be 
 distributed to the soldiers as payment ; the amoimt 
 to be issued was expected to reach ^750,000. 
 During May and June these notes were distrib- 
 uted. As they were only payable six months from 
 date, they must be discounted. As the United 
 States already had an enormous amount of certifi- 
 cates afloat, nobody then knew exactly how many, on 
 which it had defaulted, these notes were certain to 
 be worth only a fraction of their face value. The 
 soldiers, therefore, were scattered over the coun- 
 try, with these bits of paper in their hands, which 
 they were obliged to sell for fifteen or twenty 
 cents on the dollar, in order to obtain food from 
 day to day. The certificates were to be redeemed 
 by the receivers of continental taxes in the several 
 States ; but the notes were large in amount, and 
 the taxes received were very small in amount. 
 Morris, of course, was anxious that the notes 
 should not be precipitated upon the receivers too 
 rapidly. He therefore did not advertise the fact 
 that they would be redeemed in this way. The 
 
MORRIS'S CONTINUED EFFORTS. 95 
 
 only assistance that Congress gave was by order- 
 ing him to advertise this fact, lest the soldiers 
 might sell their certificates for less than they were 
 worth. At the same time, both in Congress and 
 elsewhere, anybody who speculated in the cer- 
 tificates, that is, bought them up to await a mar- 
 ket for them, was denounced as a public enemy. 
 In July Congress asked him how he expected to 
 redeem the notes ; to which he replied, that he 
 expected to redeem them by the resources which 
 Congress would give him in virtue of their promise 
 when he agreed to continue in office. 
 
 He already saw, however, that these promises 
 were a thing of the past, which would never have 
 any effect. Nothing was being done to provide 
 for those notes when they should fall due. He 
 complained of the arguments which were made, 
 that as the notes had six months to run, 
 there was plenty of time, and nothing need be 
 done. 
 
 Now that the army was disbanded, however, it 
 was possible to put in execution a vigorous system 
 of retrenchment and reduction of expenses. On 
 the ist of July Morris had over ^800,000 of his 
 notes afloat. He must see to it how he should 
 provide for them. He could not be quit of his 
 
96 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 office until he had done so. In some degree, 
 which it seems impossible to determine at present, 
 his name and personal credit were engaged in 
 these notes. Retrenchment was the first means 
 within his own reach by which to extricate 
 himself. 
 
 In midsummer of 1 783, American independence 
 being assured, and a permanent treaty of peace 
 not far off, it was found possible to contract a 
 loan for the United States in the money market of 
 Holland. The news of this reached Morris in 
 September, and held out a hope that a loan might 
 be contracted there sufficient to answer all his 
 purposes. In September, however, the news 
 reached Holland that a part of the army, in June, 
 had mutinied and besieged Congress in their hall 
 at Philadelphia. This gave rise to fears that the 
 United States would fall into anarchy, as their ill- 
 wishers had always predicted. The sale of the 
 American bonds fell off, and during the autumn 
 remained very small. Morris, however, had pro- 
 ceeded to draw largely on the bankers in Holland. 
 In December he was aware that the resources in 
 Holland were not nearly large enough to satisfy 
 the drafts which he had made. In January, 1 784, 
 this became certain, and he must expect that his 
 
AfORRIS'S CONTINUED EFFORTS. 97 
 
 drafts would be protested. This was a catastrophe 
 which he had had in mind ever since he took 
 office. He had dreaded it, and had declared over 
 and over again that if drafts signed by him should 
 go to protest, he could serve the United States no 
 longer, for it would taint the credit of his name, 
 which was the most powerful resource which he 
 had brought to the public assistance. We there- 
 fore find him writing to all his agents and corre- 
 spondents in Europe, summoning them to co- 
 operate to support his credit and win delay. He 
 had been long since forced to have recourse to 
 devices of drawing one bill of exchange to pay 
 another, in order to win time, and this was now 
 the best device he could think of. John Adams, 
 who had gone over from Holland to Lx)ndon, was 
 summoned to go back again in midwinter, which 
 he did very unwillingly, and imder a strong sense 
 of his sacrifices for the public good, in order to 
 contract a loan there which would provide for an 
 overdraft. This he succeeded in doing, although 
 upon somewhat onerous terms ; and as the spring 
 came on, bonds were sold in sufficient numbers to 
 tide over the emergency. 
 
 Morris also engaged in commercial operations, 
 especially in shipments of tobacco to Holland, in 
 7 
 
gS ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 order to provide for interest there, and thus sus- 
 tain the public credit. 
 
 During the year 1784 he succeeded, month by 
 month, in reducing the amount of his notes out- 
 standing ; and November i st he was able to quit 
 the office, having, according to his accounts, dis- 
 charged all the debt which had been incurred in 
 paying off the army. He published a notice to 
 the public that although he should be out of 
 office, his notes would all be paid at maturity. 
 
MORRIS'S PUBLIC LIFE CON- 
 TINUED. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 Morris's Public Life Continued. — The Bank 
 War. — The Union. — The Commercial Con- 
 vention. — The Constitutional Convention. 
 — Morris in the Senate. 
 
 The War of the Revolution produced some very 
 great social changes in the United States. These 
 changes were on the whole extremely advanta- 
 geous. They set free social energies which had be- 
 fore been restrained ; but any social convulsion of 
 that character must produce very mixed and con- 
 tradictory effects, some of which are evil. Some 
 people had been raised from poverty to wealth, 
 and others had been cast down from wealth to 
 poverty. There had been a great deal of " specu- 
 lation." Many were very much dissatisfied with 
 the results of the change. They found that they 
 had not reahzed any definite gain, while they saw 
 others who had apparently gained very much. 
 The declamation about liberty which had been 
 
I02 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 in fashion for ten or fifteen years had stimu- 
 lated vague expectations which were disappointed. 
 Many people were in debt, and wanted more pa- 
 per money in order to escape from debt. Specie 
 was being exported from the country, which was 
 generally regarded as a sign of calamity, and as 
 proving that somebody was committing a social 
 crime. 
 
 Insurrections and social disturbances, demands 
 for paper money, attempts to close the courts, took 
 place in many parts of the country. 
 
 The Bank of North America, in the first two or 
 three years of its existence, made thirteen or four- 
 teen per cent dividend. This led to propositions 
 to found other banks. In order to prevent an- 
 other bank from being founded, the Bank of 
 North America was obliged to absorb its pro- 
 posed rival. Then arose a popular clamour against 
 the bank as an organ of the money-power, un- 
 democratic, dangerous to the State, and oppres- 
 sive as a capitalistic machine. A petition was 
 presented to the Pennsylvania Legislature to re- 
 voke the charter. This was done. The bank 
 then applied to the State of Delaware for a char- 
 ter, and obtained one. There was a project to 
 move to some town in Delaware, but of course 
 
PUBLIC LIFE CONTINUED. 103 
 
 the bank was loath to carry it out. In October, 
 1785, Morris secured his own election to the 
 Assembly, in order to be able to exert influence 
 on a plan which was made to apply for a new 
 charter. 
 
 A report of the debate which took place in the 
 Assembly on the proposal to renew the charter of 
 the bank was published. It contains a report in 
 full of Morris's speech ; indeed, the pamphlet is 
 said to have been published at his expense. It 
 shows that he was a good debater. He entered 
 at considerable length into the history of the bank 
 from its foundation, and showed what aid it had 
 rendered to himself in his office as Financier. 
 Within a period of less than eighteen months 
 he borrowed from it six times the amount which 
 the United States invested in it. This appeal to 
 gratitude, however, had very little power. The 
 opponents of the bank were influenced by a 
 dogged adherence to certain formulas which they 
 supposed to contain the sum of political wisdom. 
 Although there is no direct evidence in the record 
 to reveal such a fact, nevertheless the ease with 
 which the re-charter was passed at last suggests 
 that it was accompUshed by legislative devices and 
 manipulation. 
 
I04 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 Our information about this bank war is unfor- 
 tunately very meagre j but in its essential features 
 it was a very clear anticipation of the bank war of 
 Jackson's time. 
 
 Morris was re-elected to the Assembly in 1786, 
 for the session of 1 786-1 787. 
 
 As soon as the stress of the war was past, the 
 Union began to fall to pieces. It had been ce- 
 mented only by the necessity of common defence. 
 It never had rested on good-will, true sympathy, 
 and hearty consent. As soon as the danger was 
 past, the motive of union was past also. After the 
 mutiny at Philadelphia, in June, 1783, Congress 
 moved to Trenton, then to Princeton, afterward 
 to Annapolis, and alternated for a time between 
 Trenton and Annapolis. This was very unfortu- 
 nate for its prestige, because people lost sight of 
 it. They did not know where it was. There was , 
 no capital or visible centre of the Union, nor any 
 known seat of its government. The eifect of 
 such facts as these upon the minds of men is 
 by no means to be despised when dealing with 
 politics. 
 
 As soon as the bonds of union were loosened, 
 and each State began to feel itself an independent 
 Commonwealth, such as it never had been either 
 
PUBLIC LIFE CONTINUED. 105 
 
 in the colonial days or during the war, the local 
 interests and jealousies began to make themselves 
 felt. This was especially the case with regard 
 to trade and the regulation of navigation. The 
 ideas of men about trade and navigation had been 
 thrown into chaos. The old notions on which the 
 colonial and navigation system were based had 
 been shaken somewhat, but they had not been 
 replaced by others. Consequently we find the 
 most contradictory notions side by side, and we 
 find the conclusions of one system connected with 
 the premises of another. 
 
 The geography of the Atlantic coast has had in 
 several important respects controlling influence on 
 the settlement, growth, and development of the 
 United States, and it exerted an influence at this 
 time. The fact that the coast is intersected by 
 great gulfs, bays, and sounds, and that large and 
 navigable rivers flow down from the range of the 
 Alleghanies into these gulfs and bays, made it easy 
 to settle the continent at a time when land trans- 
 portation was slow, difficult, and expensive. 
 
 As soon as the States began to regard them- 
 selves as independent, — that is to say, as rivals 
 and possible enemies to each other, — the fact 
 that they abutted upon the same sheets of water 
 
Io6 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 was a fact of controlling importance. Virginia and 
 Maryland tried to form a convention with each 
 other by which they could agree in the police and 
 tax regulations to be applied to the water which 
 they owned in common. They never were able to 
 accomplish this. They never acted together, and 
 never made concurrent regulations, although they 
 seem to have been animated by a disposition of 
 concord. The real difficulty, however, was still 
 greater. Any arrangement which Maryland made 
 with Virginia must be shared in by Delaware and 
 Pennsylvania, otherwise their systems of navigation 
 and revenue would be interfered with, because the 
 Chesapeake approached so nearly to them that 
 evasion of their laws would have been possible. 
 If Delaware and Pennsylvania came into an ar- 
 rangement with Maryland and Virginia, New Jer- 
 sey would be affected on account of the common 
 occupation of the Delaware ; and if New Jersey 
 joined them. New York would be affected through 
 New York Bay. The same connection extended 
 through the Sound and Narragansett Bay, and 
 brought the Eastern States within the same bonds 
 of influence. On the south, also, the great sounds 
 of North and South Carolina linked those States 
 with Virginia. The importance of these physical 
 
PUBLIC LIFE CONTINUED. 107 
 
 facts in forming or making necessary the union of 
 the thirteen States was very great. As Maryland 
 and Virginia went on year by year in their at- 
 tempts to agree, they experienced the necessity of 
 making the combination wider in order to make it 
 effective, and they invited the other States to join 
 in a convention to adopt uniform measures. Such 
 a convention met in the spring of 1787. Robert 
 Morris was a delegate to it from Peimsylvania, and 
 Alexander Hamilton from New York. 
 
 Morris and Hamilton acted together in many of 
 theif-enTerprises for the public service. They 
 were both earnest advocates for a closer union of 
 the States. At this commercial convention the 
 conversation and discussions soon showed that the 
 attempt to deal with the subject of navigation and 
 revenue outside of the Articles of Confederation 
 would be unwise, and that if the task was to be 
 performed satisfactorily, it must be by a revision of 
 the articles. Experience had shown that the 
 attempt to revise the articles by asking for the 
 consent of thirteen independent legislatures was 
 hopeless. The Eastern States and New York 
 were already very jealous of any movement by the 
 Union to tax commerce ; but they had reached the 
 point of desiring something in the way of a naviga- 
 
lo8 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 tion law, in order to give favours to American ships, 
 and also to retaliate on England, because the re- 
 strictions of the English navigation law were now 
 enforced against them. The determination was 
 therefore reached by this commercial convention 
 to recommend a general convention of the States 
 to amend the Articles of Confederation. Out of 
 this proposition grew the constitutional convention 
 of May, 1787, and the federal Constitution of the 
 United States. 
 
 Robert Morris was a member of the Constitu- 
 tional Convention. It fell to his duty, as leader 
 of the Pennsylvania delegation, after FrankUn, to 
 nominate Washington for president of the conven- 
 tion, because the only rival for the position was 
 Franklin. Morris, however, did not take a prom- 
 inent part in the debates or on the committees of 
 the convention. He was called into conference 
 on at least one important occasion, when the con- 
 test between the large and small State interests 
 came to a crisis ; but he left to Gouvemeur Morris 
 the active work, they two being in close sym- 
 pathy with each other. 
 
 Morris wrote to his son that Washington made 
 his home at the Morris house during the con- 
 vention. 
 
PUBLIC LIFE CONTINUED. 109 
 
 On the organization of the federal government, 
 Washington offered to Morris the position of Sec- 
 retary of the Treasury. He declined it, and rec- 
 ommended Hamilton. 
 
 Morris was one of the first Senators from Penn- 
 sylvania. He drew the long term, from 1789 to 
 1 795 ; but the record does not show that he took 
 any share in the proceedings after the first two 
 years. His colleague, Maclay, kept a diary, in 
 which there is constant mention of Morris. Maclay 
 was a rigid democrat and republican. He was 
 dissatisfied with all his colleagues, and especially 
 with Morris. His comments, therefore, on his 
 colleague are in general unfriendly. Morris was 
 strongly in favour of funding the public debt and of 
 the assumption of the State debts. Maclay thinks 
 that he speculated in the debt of the United 
 States, which is more than probable. Maclay 
 thought that that was all corrupt and abominable. 
 Wherever he went, he met with traces of it ; which 
 is not strange, since the simple fact was that any- 
 body who thought that the certificates would be 
 funded under the new government, and who had 
 any means, tried to buy them. The amount of 
 declamation which was wasted on this so-called 
 "speculation" is very remarkable, and some of 
 
no ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 the leading public men exhausted their ingenuity 
 in efforts to discriminate between the original or 
 innocent holder and the " speculator." 
 
 Morris was also willing to blot out the State 
 boundaries, at least for revenue purposes, and to 
 favour a federal system rather than a State system, 
 which gave great alarm to his colleague. The two 
 might indeed have been taken as first-rate repre- 
 sentatives of the parties to which they respectively 
 belonged. Maclay detested New York. " These 
 Yorkers," he writes, " are the vilest of people ; 
 their vices have not the palliation of being manly." 
 He mentions their caricatures in ridicule of the 
 Pennsylvanians, no doubt referring to those against 
 Morris. One of these represented " Bobby " 
 marching off with the federal ark on his shoulders, 
 referring to his desire to remove the federal capital 
 from New York. The Devil was represented on 
 the Jersey City ferry-house, calling to him, " This 
 way, Bobby." 
 
MORRIS'S ACCOUNTS AS AGENT 
 OF PENNSYLVANIA. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Morris's Accounts as Agent of Pennsylvania. 
 — Superintendent of Finance, and Agent 
 OF THE Committee of Commerce. 
 
 Every man during the Revolutionary period who 
 exerted himself zealously and with self-forgetful- 
 ness for the cause suffered for it. He exposed 
 himself to suspicion and misinterpretation. He 
 was obliged to act often where he could not obtain 
 vouchers, and when a strict accounting was re- 
 quired of him, he could not give it. In justice 
 also it must be remembered that there were cases 
 of grave misdoing which, if they did not justify 
 suspicion, at least enforced caution. We have 
 seen already, in some of the passages which have 
 been quoted, that innuendoes were thrown out 
 against Morris with respect to his public service. 
 There were three sets of accounts with regard to 
 which question was raised. 
 
 We have seen that he was appointed agent for 
 the State of Pennsylvania at the time that he took 
 8 
 
114 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 office as Superintendent of Finance. The paper 
 money of Pennsylvania was put in his hands, and 
 he was to buy the specific supphes which that 
 State was bound to furnish. Instead of going 
 through this operation, he used the paper money 
 directly for the purposes of the United States. 
 This left the State still debtor to the United 
 States for the supplies, and left Robert Morris 
 debtor to the State for the currency which he had 
 not expended according to orders. In 1785 the 
 State ordered suit commenced against him for 
 this debt ; but after considerable trouble, he suc- 
 ceeded in having commissioners appointed, who 
 should convert the currency which he had used 
 into the specific supplies due from the State, and 
 so cancel the account. 
 
 Immediately after he left office in 1784, he 
 caused to be printed the accounts of his office as 
 Superintendent of Finance. He adopted the de- 
 termination at the outset to pubhsh the report of 
 the treasury, in order that people might see and 
 know what the transactions of the treasury were. 
 His experience had taught him the necessity of 
 publicity, in order to put a stop to the injurious 
 gossip and rumours which were the fashion of the 
 time. Unfortunately, he was not sufficiently con- 
 
MORRIS'S ACCOUNTS. 115 
 
 vinced of the paramount importance of publicity 
 to carry it out in spite of inconveniences. There- 
 fore, when his treasury accounts would have re- 
 vealed the desperate condition of the treasury, he 
 flinched from the policy which he had adopted, 
 and thought it better and safer that the truth 
 should not be known. We may venture the 
 opinion that that was just the time when the truth 
 should have been known. His report of 1785 
 was a publication of the quarterly reports which 
 had been made up, but had not been published 
 during his period of office. They are as clear and 
 complete, according to the defective system of 
 book-keeping which was employed, as could be 
 desired, but his enemies cavilled at them. We 
 do not know what the system of auditing was. It 
 was proper, of course, to examine the vouchers 
 and verify the entries. It was not, however, until 
 1792 or 1793 that he was able to have these 
 accounts settled and closed. 
 
 There was, however, a third set of accounts 
 which were made a ground of attack upon him, 
 and, as_ it appears, with more justice. 
 
 We have seen that at the beginning of the 
 Revolution he was charged with large and im- 
 portant commercial transactions on behalf of the 
 
1 1 6 ROBER T MORRIS. 
 
 United States. As a member of the Committee 
 of Commerce, he made contracts with that com- 
 mittee, or rather undertook enterprises on its be- 
 half. The nature of these enterprises or contracts 
 is not stated anywhere. He was always charged 
 with having taken good care of his own interests, 
 and with having conducted these enterprises in 
 such a way as to win the profits without taking the 
 risks. The charges of this character were of every 
 grade, from that of driving a sharp bargain to that 
 of embezzling the pubhc money, the last being the 
 wild and utterly irresponsible calumnies of political 
 and personal enemies. Many persons engaged in 
 these transactions ; and nobody used stronger lan- 
 guage than was used by Morris himself in some of 
 his reports to Congress, about the unsatisfactory 
 nature of the book-keeping of the old Commercial 
 Committee, and about the delinquencies of the 
 persons who had not accounted for the public 
 money intrusted to them for the operations of 
 that committee. 
 
 Arthur Lee and William Lee were the first who 
 commenced to spread charges and insinuations 
 against Morris in connection with that business. 
 Through them these charges came to Thomas 
 Paine. He published them in January, 1779, in 
 
MORJilS'S ACCOUNTS. 117 
 
 the midst of the bitter fight over Deane's affairs. 
 He charged Morris with having been in trade 
 relations with Deane improperly, since both were 
 in the public service. In the winter of 1 777-1 778 
 Morris had attempted to straighten out the ac- 
 counts of the old Commercial Committee ; but he 
 found the task too difficult, and gave it up. This 
 he stated in answer to Paine, and declared that 
 the accounts of Willing & Morris with the com- 
 mittee had been partially settled, but were still 
 partially open, because the transactions could not 
 be closed up. 
 
 After Morris resigned in 1784, the treasury 
 was put under a board of three, of whom Arthur 
 Lee was one. He was one of the best haters 
 that ever lived, and he had a special animosity 
 to Robert Morris. He appears to have under- 
 taken to unravel the accounts of the old com- 
 mittee, and to enforce a settlement of them, 
 which, of course, it was perfectly right and proper 
 for him to do, although he may have had a per- 
 sonal and mahgnant motive. It appears, how- 
 ever, that he must have furnished information 
 to the political and partisan writers of the pe- 
 riod, who used it for general vituperation and 
 deaunciation. 
 
1 1 8 ROBER T MORRIS. 
 
 This abuse fell in the year 1788, in the midst 
 of the fight in Pennsylvania over the adoption and 
 ratification of the new federal Constitution. The 
 contest over this issue in Pennsylvania was ex- 
 tremely bitter. We have already said that the 
 virulence of parties in Pennsylvania during this 
 period was intense. The friends of the Penn- 
 sylvania Constitution of 1776 were known as 
 constitutionalists. They were the popular and 
 democratic party, and became anti-federalists in 
 the formation of federal parties which took place 
 soon afterward. They therefore were the oppo- 
 nents of the federal Constitution. Their chief 
 writer was " Centinel." His articles were a sin- 
 gular combination of good writing and personal 
 abuse. Passages from them would do as well to 
 represent the anti-federal side as the " Federal- 
 ist" does to represent the federal side. Robert 
 Morris, or, as " Centinel " called him, " Bobby the 
 Cofferer," was one of "Centinel's" pet aversions. 
 We have no direct evidence that the writer was 
 furnished with his material by Arthur Lee, but 
 the internal evidence of it seems to us conclu- 
 sive. He may possibly have received it at second 
 hand, through Paine. 
 
 Morris made some replies in the newspapers 
 
MORRIS'S ACCOUNTS. 119 
 
 to "Centinel," but not such as to repel the 
 charge. 
 
 Maclay, who was Morris's colleague in the 
 Senate in 1789 and 1790, when Morris demanded 
 that Congress should appoint commissioners on 
 his accounts as Financier, thought that Morris 
 was trying to cloak over his accounts with the 
 Committee of Commerce by making a parade of 
 eagerness for a settlement of his accounts as 
 Financier. 
 
 Some time in the year 1794 or 1795, for we 
 have not been able to find any trace of the pro- 
 ceeding, these old accounts of the Committee of 
 Commerce were brought to a settlement. The 
 only record of them which we have been able 
 to find is the entry on the books of the Treasury 
 of the United States, in June, 1796. Morris there 
 stands debtor for the sum of ^93,312.63. There 
 is no entry on the credit side. 
 
 In an account of his property and review of his 
 affairs which Morris wrote when in prison, in 1800, 
 he wrote with regard to this : " Mr. Ross and 
 Willing, Morris & Co. made certain contracts, and 
 the latter transacted much business for the old 
 Congress, and upon the settlement of the account 
 by officers who meant fairness, but who, I ever 
 
I20 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 thought, did not truly understand mercantile 
 method and principle, and who, by charging 
 depreciations which I objected to upon princi- 
 ples that I thought right, although overruled by 
 them, brought a balance in favour of the United 
 States, to which at last I submitted, and gave secu- 
 rity on land ; which proving deficient, I have now 
 assigned all my claims on Mr. Ross to the Comp- 
 troller of the Treasury and his successors in office, 
 in additional security for the debt that may be 
 ultimately found due, for the former balance will 
 be considerably reduced by objects of credit I 
 have discovered that were not at the former set- 
 tlement brought into view. As this debt to the 
 United States, whatever it may prove to be, is in 
 fact due in part by John Ross, and after that part 
 shall be ascertained, the remainder is equally due 
 by Thomas Willing, Esquire, and myself, that is, 
 each one half, I have therefore assigned also all 
 my claim on the said Thomas Willing to the 
 Comptroller of the Treasury and his successors 
 in office, in additional security for the balance 
 that ultimately may be due to the United States, 
 reserving in both cases any surplus that may 
 arise in my favour to my heirs and assigns. From 
 the examinations I have lately made into the 
 
MORRIS'S ACCOUNTS. 121 
 
 State of matters between Mr. Willing and me, 
 and with Mr. Ross, I expect there will, from 
 these two sources, be sufficient to extinguish that 
 debt to the United States, my part as well as 
 theirs." 
 
MORRIS'S SOCIAL POSITION AND 
 RELATIONS. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Morris's Social Position and Relations. — 
 His Residences. 
 
 We have a great deal of evidence that Morris's 
 social position and relations during all the active 
 period of his life were very high and conspicuous. 
 In 1781 he sent his two sons, Robert and Thomas, 
 then twelve and ten years of age, to Europe for 
 their education, because education here was broken 
 up by the war. They were at Geneva five years 
 and at Leipsic two years, and returned in 1788. 
 Morris wrote to Jay upon this occasion as follows : 
 '■ Many considerations which it is needless to enu- 
 merate induce me to this measure, which my 
 judgment approves, but which, now that it is to 
 be carried into execution, awakens all the tender 
 feelings of a father. Your and Mrs. Jay's sensi- 
 bilities will disclose the situation of Mrs. Morris 
 and myself, when I tell you that these two good 
 and well-beloved boys leave us to-morrow. They 
 
126 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 are tractable, good boys. I hope they will make 
 good men, for that is essential. Perhaps they 
 may become useful to their country, which is 
 very desirable ; and if they have genius and 
 judgment, the education they will receive may 
 be the foundation for them to become learned 
 or great men, but this is of most consequence 
 to themselves. Should it fall in your way to 
 notice them, I am sure you will do it. I expect 
 they will be fixed at the schools in Geneva. This 
 parting reminds me, my good friend, that we are 
 but too much the slaves of ambition and vanity, 
 to permit the enjoyment of that happiness which 
 is in our power. I need not part with my chil- 
 dren ; but . . ." 
 
 The Morrises and Jays were very intimate with 
 each other. Miss Catharine Livingston, daughter 
 of the Governor of New Jersey, and sister of Mrs. 
 Jay, had taken refuge with the Morrises in the pre- 
 vious year, on account of the British raids in New 
 Jersey. She aftenvard became the wife of Mr. 
 Ridley, who took the Morris boys to Europe, 
 whither he was going as the commercial agent 
 of Maryland. 
 
 Jay disapproved of educating the boys of a free 
 country in Europe. 
 
MORRIS'S SOCIAL POSITION. 127 
 
 Mi-s. Jay, writing to Mrs. Morris after these 
 boys arrived in Europe, said that when things 
 went wrong with them, she asked the elder one 
 what his father would say upon such an occasion, 
 telling him that that would be sure to be right. 
 
 The Marquis de Chastellux visited Philadelphia 
 probably in 1 781. Speaking of a ball at the house 
 of the French Ambassador, he says : " On passing 
 into the dining-room, the Chevalier de la Luzerne 
 presented his hand to Mrs. Morris and gave her 
 the precedence, — an honour pretty generally be- 
 stowed upon her, as she is the richest woman in 
 the city, and, all ranks here being equal, men fol- 
 low their natural bent by giving the preference 
 to riches." The following is his description of 
 Morris : " Mr. Morris is a large man, very simple 
 in his manners ; but his mind is subtle and acute, 
 his head perfectly well organized, and he is as well 
 versed in public affairs as in his own. He was a 
 member of Congress in 1776, and ought to be 
 reckoned among those personages who have had 
 the greatest influence in the Revolution of Amer- 
 ica. He is the friend of Dr. Franklin and the 
 decided enemy of Mr. Reed. His house is hand- 
 some, resembling perfectly the houses of London. 
 He lives there without ostentation, but not without 
 
128 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 expense, for he spares nothing which can contrib- 
 ute to his happiness and that of Mrs. Morris, to 
 whom he is much attached. A zealous republi- 
 can and an epicurean philosopher, he has always 
 played a distinguished part at table and in busi- 
 ness." On this the translator, who was an Eng- 
 lishman, remarks : " The house the Marquis 
 speaks of, in which Mr. Morris lived, belonged 
 formerly to Mr. Richard Penn. The Financier 
 has made great additions to it, and is the first 
 who has introduced the luxury of hot-houses and 
 ice-houses on the continent. He has likewise 
 purchased the elegant country-house formerly 
 occupied by the traitor Arnold ; nor is his luxury 
 to be outdone by any commercial voluptuar)' of 
 London. ... In private life he is much esteemed 
 by a very numerous acquaintance." 
 
 The house in which Morris lived was not that 
 which had belonged to Richard Penn. That 
 house was burned down in January, 1780. Morris 
 bought the ground and built a new house upon it. 
 In this he resided until 1791, when the city of 
 Philadelphia hired it, in order that Washington 
 might reside in it as President of the United 
 States, when the seat of government was estab- 
 lished at Philadelphia. 
 
MORRIS'S SOCIAL POSITION. 1 29 
 
 We have also a description of a visit to tlie 
 house of Morris by the young Prince de Broglie 
 in 1782. A party of young nobles came over, 
 apparently on an excursion of pleasure rather than 
 of war. In his diary the Prince says : " M. de 
 la Luzerne conducted me to the house of Mrs. 
 Morris to take tea. She is the wife of the Finan- 
 cier of the United States. The house is simple, 
 but neat and proper. The doors and tables are 
 of superb mahogany, carefully treated. The locks 
 and trimmings are of copper, charmingly neat. 
 The cups were arranged symmetrically. The mis- 
 tress of the house appeared well ; her costume 
 was largely of white. I got some excellent tea ; 
 and I think that I should still have taken more if 
 the Ambassador had not charitably warned me, 
 when I had taken the twelfth cup, that I must put 
 my spoon across my cup whenever I wanted this 
 species of torture by hot water to stop, ' since,' 
 said he to me, ' it is almost as bad manners to 
 refuse a cup of tea when it is offered to you as it 
 would be indiscreet for the master of the house to 
 offer you some more, when the ceremony of the 
 spoon has shown what your intentions are in re- 
 spect to this matter.' Mr. Morris is a large man, 
 who has a reputation for honourableness and intel- 
 9 
 
130 KOBERT MORRIS. 
 
 ligence. It is certain that he has great credit at 
 least ; and that he has been clever enough, while 
 appearing often to make advances of his own 
 funds for the service of the republic, to accumu- 
 late a great fortune and to gain several millions 
 since the Revolution began. He appears to have 
 much good sense. He talks well, so far as I can 
 judge, and his large head seems as well adapted 
 for governing a great empire as that of most 
 men." 
 
 We have also a description of a visit to Morris 
 in 1783 by Mr. Lowell and Mr. Otis of Boston. 
 They dined with thirty persons at Morris's, " in 
 a style of sumptuous magnificence which I have 
 never seen equalled." Mr. Otis said that Morris 
 was esteemed next to Washington. 
 
 In 1784, when the Chevalier de la Luzerne, who 
 seems to have been intimate at Morris's house, 
 returned home, the latter wrote : " Mr. and Mrs. 
 Morris have more sincere good wishes for the 
 Chevalier de la Luzerne's health, happiness, and 
 safe arrival than can be expressed on this paper." 
 Luzerne carried with him a shoe of Mrs. Morris, 
 in order that he might send from Paris " six pairs 
 of fashionable shoes to the size of the old pair." 
 
 In the same year the Morrises extended hos- 
 
MORRIS'S SOCIAL POSIT/ON. 131 
 
 pitality and kindness to Jefferson's daughter, for 
 which Jefferson made hearty acknowledgments. 
 
 The King of France sent portraits of himself 
 and the Queen to Congress ; but as it had no 
 permanent seat, the French Minister, Marbois, was 
 not able to deliver the pictures. As he was about 
 to leave America, he asked Morris, in 1785, to 
 take charge of them until a proper place for them 
 at the meeting-place of Congress could be pro- 
 vided. Morris consented, but preparations were 
 made to unpack the pictures. To this Marbois 
 objected in writing. Morris wrote back with some 
 irritation, as if he resented the suspicion that he 
 was making an idle display of vanity by putting up 
 the portraits in his o\vn house. He said that he 
 meant to lock them up. Marbois, however, re- 
 plied courteously, repudiating the suspicion which 
 had been ascribed to him, and proposing to de- 
 liver the pictures to Congress himself. 
 
 Among Morris's prot^g(5s was Paul Jones, with 
 whom he was brought in contact by the work of 
 the Marine Committee. When Jones was on his 
 death-bed at Paris, in July, 1792, he sent for 
 Gouverneur Morris, who made his will for him. 
 Jones wanted the two Morrises to be his execu- 
 tors. Gouverneur excused himself, but Robert 
 
132 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 was named. Jones bequeathed to Robert Morris 
 the sword which had been given to him by Louis 
 XVI. Morris gave it to the oldest commander 
 in the navy in succession. 
 
 In 1770 Morris bought a part of the manor of 
 Springetsbury, which touched upon the Schuylkill 
 River. He appears to have had some sort of a 
 country-house there in 1776, to which he sent his 
 family when the English were expected in Phila- 
 delphia. His family were also at this place in 
 I 781, when the American army marched through 
 Philadelphia on its way to Yorktown. Manasseh 
 Cutler mentions Morris's country-seat on the 
 Schuylkill, which he calls "The Hills," in 1787. 
 He says that the house was then unfinished, but 
 would be very grand. This spot is now in the 
 Fairmount Park, just above the old waterworks. 
 When it was in the country it must have been 
 an extremely beautiful spot. Morris's house at 
 Manheim has already been mentioned. Other 
 places belonging to him are mentioned at Morris- 
 ville and at Merion in Montgomery County. 
 
 After Morris gave up his house to President 
 Washington, he took a house which formerly be- 
 longed to Galloway, a tory refugee, but before the 
 war one of the most prominent men in Pennsyl- 
 
MORJi/S'S SOCIAL POSIT/ON. 133 
 
 vania. In 1795 Morris bought the square of land 
 bounded by Chestnut, Walnut, Seventh, and Eighth 
 Streets. He employed Major L'Enfant to build 
 him a grand house on this piece of ground. It 
 never was finished, although work was continued 
 on it for four or five years. The roof was closed 
 in, and the windows boarded up. It became 
 known as "Morris's Folly." After his failure it 
 was torn down and the materials were sold. It 
 was of brick, with window and door trimmings of 
 pale blue marble. According to the best account, it 
 was between eighty and one hundred feet long and 
 between forty and sixty feet wide. The total amount 
 expended upon it was 116,369. In the account 
 of his property which Morris wrote in 1800, he 
 says that L'Enfant was erecting a much more mag- 
 nificent house than he ever intended to build, and 
 he makes references to the architect which show 
 that he was very much dissatisfied with him. 
 
 Mrs. Morris went from Philadelphia to New 
 York with Mrs. Washington when the new federal 
 government was organized. Maclay mentions a 
 dinner at Morris's house : " Mrs. Morris talked a 
 great deal after dinner, but gracefully enough. She 
 is considered the second lady at court ; as to 
 taste, etiquette, etc., she is certainly the first." 
 
MORRIS'S BUSINESS ENTER- 
 PRISES. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 Morris's Business Enterprises. — The Tobacco 
 Contract. — The China Trade. — His Share 
 IN THE Political Intrigues about the Fed- 
 eral Capital. — His Speculation at Wash- 
 ington. — His Speculations in Wild Land. — 
 The Fallacy of those Enterprises. 
 
 In 1 783 a proposition was made to Morris by 
 the Farmers-General of France, that he should 
 make a contract to provide them with tobacco. 
 However, the firm of Williams & Alexander had 
 made propositions for such a contract, and Morris 
 entered into partnership with them. By the con- 
 tract which he made with the Farmers-General, 
 he was to provide sixty thousand hogsheads of 
 tobacco in 1785, 1786, and 1788. This contract 
 was not profitable. Morris had an advance of 
 g 2 00,000 from the French farmers, and he issued 
 notes for the purchase of tobacco in Virginia. 
 Although the price of tobacco declined, it appears 
 that the notes, one kind of which was redeemable 
 
138 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 in bills of exchange on France, involved him in 
 speculations on the exchange. There was also a 
 great monetary stringency in 1785. The enter- 
 prise ended with a lawsuit between the partners, 
 in which Morris was successful ; but the time spent 
 in litigation was so long that he realized nothing 
 from his victory. 
 
 As soon as he was out of office, he sent a ship 
 to China as an experiment. He is credited with 
 having made a voyage out of season, by sending 
 the ship around Australia, but we do not find that 
 he prosecuted this line of enterprise. 
 
 In 1784 Congress resolved that buildings should 
 be erected at the falls of the Delaware for a federal 
 capital, and in the following year Morris was 
 appointed on the committee to lay out the city 
 and plan the buildings. It is perhaps in this con- 
 nection that he was led to buy a large tract of 
 land opposite Trenton on the Delaware, where the 
 town of Morrisville was built, at which he had ten 
 years later a large number of small manufacturing 
 establishments of different kinds, and where he 
 tried, as it appears, unsuccessfully, to set up a 
 steam-engine. 
 
 The plans for building a federal city called out 
 every local prejudice and jealousy which existed 
 
MORRIS'S BUSIA^ESS VENTURES. 139 
 
 in the Union, and also stirred up political specula- 
 tions and intrigues without number, some of which 
 were so recondite and far-fetched as to be almost 
 incomprehensible to the modern reader. The 
 different interests were only able to combine 
 against any one proposition which was put forward 
 and defeat it. When the federal government was 
 organized under the new Constitution, its seat was 
 at New York, because that was the last place at 
 which the old Congress in its wanderings had 
 settled. The question of a permanent federal 
 capital was one of the first which came up. Rob- 
 ert Morris was greatly interested in it. We have 
 suggested above the probable conjecture that he 
 bought the Morrisville tract in the expectation that 
 the federal city would be built near there. During 
 the session of 1789 different propositions were 
 made, but all were defeated by legislative tactics 
 or hostile combinations. In 1790 it was found 
 that, according to the strength of parties and the 
 division of interests in Congress, neither the as- 
 sumption of the State debts nor the settlement of 
 the permanent capital could be carried, unless 
 they were united. A great deal of vituperation 
 was afterward expended upon the " bargain " 
 which was finally adopted at this time; but the 
 
I40 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 bargain which was adopted was only the final one 
 which succeeded out of a great number which 
 were projected and attempted. The Northern 
 States had far more capital than the Southern 
 States, because the Southerners could always em- 
 ploy any capital which they accumulated in the 
 improvement of land or the purchase of negroes. 
 The Northern States, therefore, invested free capi- 
 tal in the public debt. The denunciations of the 
 Virginia statesmen against what they called specu- 
 lation was only an exhibition of provincialism. As 
 the Northern and Eastern people were the public 
 creditors, they wanted the credit established and 
 the bonds paid. As the Southern people did not 
 own the bonds, they were indifferent to this, but 
 they wanted the capital on the Potomac. Hamil- 
 ton was afterward called a great wire-puller and 
 lobbyist, but in this case he simply took account 
 of the forces with which he had to deal, if he 
 wanted to carry his purpose, and combined them. 
 Morris told Maclay in June, 1 790, that there 
 was a proposition to build a federal city near 
 Harrisburg if the requisite number of votes could 
 be assured to carry the assumption of the State 
 debt. Morris said that he preferred to deal with 
 principals ; therefore he had written to Hamilton 
 
MORIilS'S BUSINESS VENTURES. 141 
 
 that he would walk in the morning on the Battery, 
 and if Hamilton had anything to propose to him, 
 Morris, he might meet him there as if by accident. 
 
 They met, and Hamilton said that he wanted 
 one vote in the Senate and five in the House for 
 assumption. If he could get them, he would 
 agree to put the residence at Germantown or at 
 the falls of the Delaware. Morris agreed to con- 
 sult the Pennsylvania delegation, but proposed 
 that the temporary residence of Congress at Phila- 
 delphia should be the price. The next day, how- 
 ever, Hamilton sent him word that he could not 
 negotiate about the temporary residence. 
 
 June 15 Maclay writes : "Mr. Morris called me 
 aside, and told me that he had a communication 
 from Mr. Jefferson of a disposition of having the 
 temporary residence fifteen years in Philadelphia, 
 and the permanent residence at Georgetown on 
 the Potomac, and that he, Mr. Morris, had called 
 a meeting of the delegation at six o'clock this 
 evening at our lodging on the business. . . . The 
 delegation met at six. I was called out. How- 
 ever, when I came in, what passed was repeated 
 to me." It was only the proposition of the day 
 before. " Never," he writes again, " had a man a 
 greater propensity for bargaining [than Morris]. 
 
142 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 Hamilton knows this, and is labouring to make a 
 tool of him." 
 
 Finally, July i6, a law was passed fixing the 
 temporary residence for ten years at Philadelphia, 
 and then the permanent residence at the falls of 
 the Potomac. 
 / Maclay was convinced that residence, assump- 
 tion, and six per cent rate on the public debt were 
 ' all bargained and contracted for on the principle 
 \ of mutual accommodation for priva te^ interest. 
 "The President of the United States has, in my 
 opinion, had a great influence in this business. 
 The game was played by him and his adherents of 
 Virginia and Maryland between New York and 
 Philadelphia, to give one of those places the tem- 
 porary residence, but the permanent residence on 
 the Potomac. I found a demonstration that this 
 was the case, and that New York would have ac- 
 cepted the temporary residence if we did not, but 
 I did not then see so clearly that the abominations 
 of the funding system and the assumption were so 
 intimately connected with it. Alas ! that the 
 affection, nay, almost adoration of the people, 
 should meet so unworthy a return [as from Wash- 
 ington]. Here are their best interests sacrificed 
 to the vain whim of fixing Congress and a great 
 
MORRIS'S BUS/ArESS VENTURES. 143 
 
 commercial town so opposite to the genius of 
 the Southern planter, on the Potomac, and the 
 President has become, in the hands of Hamil- 
 ton, the dish-clout of every dirty speculation, as 
 his name goes to wipe away blame and silence 
 all murmuring." 
 
 It is undoubtedly true that in the even balance 
 of the legislative forces, the personal influence of 
 Washington and the desire to honour him by found- 
 ing a city which should bear his name, were the 
 deciding elements which caused the federal capital 
 to be placed where it is. It might be an inter- 
 esting subject of speculation, what would have 
 been the effect on our history if it had been 
 placed at Harrisburg or opposite Trenton, instead 
 of where it is. 
 
 It belongs to the humour of the discussion on 
 this question that the Philadelphians were very 
 fearful that Washington would be built into a great 
 commercial city, to rival their own ; also that 
 they refused to consent to the improvement of the 
 navigation of the Susquehanna, preferring rather 
 to let the capital go away from Pennsylvania, lest 
 they should favour the commercial rivalry of Balti- 
 more ; and again, on the other hand, that Maclay, 
 who owned land at Harrisburg and wanted the 
 
144 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 capital there, should talk about the chances that 
 the Western commerce might come down the 
 Juniata and the western branch of the Susque- 
 hanna. Talk about the foresight of statesmen ! 
 
 The city of Washington was laid out in 1792, 
 under the general supervision of President Wash- 
 ington. He laid the comer-stone of the Capitol 
 September 18, 1792. The original holders of 
 the land deeded it to trustees, who were to lay- 
 out the streets and squares, and lay off what was 
 wanted for the use of the government. Another 
 part also was assigned to the government, which 
 part was to be sold in order to pay the origi- 
 nal proprietors for what had been assigned to 
 the United States, and to provide for the 
 improvements. 
 
 Not many lots were sold until 1793, when 
 Robert Morris and James Greenleaf bought six 
 thousand lots at eighty dollars each, for which 
 they were to pay in seven annual instalments, 
 without interest, commencing May i, 1794. 
 They agreed to build annually twenty brick 
 houses, two stories high, and covering twelve 
 hundred square feet each. In 1794 John Nichol- 
 son took a share in this contract. 
 
 The object of the commissioners who were 
 
MOIiRIS'S BUS J NESS VENTURES. 145 
 
 charged with the lay-out and construction of the 
 federal city in the large sales to Morris and his 
 partners, was to interest men of large means. 
 Morris and his partners sold half their lots to 
 other rich speculators. One of these was Blod- 
 gett of Philadelphia. He got up two lotteries ; 
 the first prize in the first was a tavern, valued at 
 fifty thousand dollars. In the second lottery the 
 first three prizes were three houses, to be built 
 near the Capitol, valued at twenty-five thousand, 
 fifteen thousand, and ten thousand dollars. He 
 made profits by these lotteries. 
 
 In 1795 and 1796 Morris, Nicholson, and 
 Greenleaf became embarrassed ; and the first 
 two, who held together, quarrelled with the last. 
 Greenleaf was bankrupt, and was obliged to make 
 an assignment, in which was included, or at least 
 involved, the property and obligations of Nichol- 
 son and Morris. This assignment was made in 
 1797. Morris always attributed his ruin to Green- 
 leaf, but that certainly was not just to the extent 
 to which he claimed it. These embarrassments of 
 the capitalists who have been mentioned threw 
 titles into doubt. There had always been great 
 opposition to the building of the city. All the 
 other cities which were anxious to be the federal 
 10 
 
146 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 capital were opposed to it ; and the ultra demo- 
 crats opposed it, on account of the exclusive juris- 
 diction which the federal government was to have 
 over the district. For these reasons the construc- 
 tion of the city was not zealously prosecuted by 
 Congress, and the embarrassments of the capital- 
 ists being added placed the existence of the city 
 for a number of years in extreme jeopardy. In 
 order to understand Morris's disaster at Wash- 
 ington, however, we must turn back to notice 
 another enterprise, or set of enterprises, which 
 he had been prosecuting at the same time, and 
 which also resulted in failure. 
 
 The State of Massachusetts had a claim under 
 its old colonial charter to extend to the South 
 Sea. This claim was interrupted by the State of 
 New York ; but Massachusetts demanded that 
 whenever the western boundary of New York was 
 determined, the claim of Massachusetts beyond it 
 should be recognized. In 1784 Massachusetts peti- 
 tioned Congress to appoint commissioners to settle 
 the conflicting claims of Massachusetts and New 
 York, and Congress appointed a court for this 
 purpose ; but the court never could be con- 
 vened. The two States finally proceeded on their 
 own initiative to appoint commissioners, who in 
 
MORRIS'S BUSINESS VENTURES. 147 
 
 1786 made an amicable agreement which was 
 ratified by Congress. The north and south hne 
 which would very nearly pass through the present 
 city of Geneva was taken as the starting-point, 
 and New York yielded to Massachusetts the pre- 
 emption of the land west of that line as far as the 
 western boundary of New York, which was set at 
 the meridian running through the westernmost 
 point of Lake Ontario, with the exception of a 
 strip one mile wide along the Niagara River, on 
 its eastern side; while Massachusetts yielded the 
 sovereignty and jurisdiction over all the land in 
 dispute to New York. By other acts, the States 
 ceded all their claim west of the westernmost 
 boundary of New York, as just described, to the 
 United States. 
 
 In April, i 788, Massachusetts sold all this land, 
 being that part of the present State of New York 
 west of a line drawn through the town of Geneva, 
 to Nathaniel Gorham and Oliver Phelps for a mil- 
 lion dollars, to be paid in three annual instalments 
 in the scrip of Massachusetts, which was then worth 
 about twenty cents on the dollar. 
 
 In July, 1788, after much difficulty and con- 
 siderable negotiation, Phelps and Gorham extin- 
 guished the Indian titles to the eastern part of 
 
14a ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 their purchase, bounded westerly by a north and 
 south Hne from the Pennsylvania boundary to the 
 junction of the Canaseraga Creek with the Gene- 
 see River, then along the Genesee to a point two 
 miles north of the present village of Avon, then 
 due west twelve miles, then northeasterly so as 
 to be twelve miles distant from the Genesee 
 River to Lake Ontario. 
 
 The assumption of the State debts by the 
 United States raised the Massachusetts notes to 
 par. This caused Phelps and Gorham to surren- 
 der their contract for all except the part just 
 described on which they had extinguished the 
 Indian title, and the State agreed that they should 
 pay for that at the specie value of the paper at the 
 time of their original contract. 
 
 From this time on, the Phelps and Gorham 
 purchase meant the district between the line 
 through Geneva and the line through the 
 Genesee River. 
 
 In I 790 Robert Morris purchased all this tract 
 of Phelps and Gorham for seventy-five thousand 
 dollars. The next year he sold it to a company 
 of Englishmen, afterward known as the Pultney 
 Association, for ^133, 333. 
 
 This was a piece of fatal good fortune. It led 
 
MOJfK/S'S BUS/NESS VENTURES. 149 
 
 Morris to believe that he had found a mine of 
 wealth in the wild land of the United States. 
 
 In March, 1791, he made a contract with Mas- 
 sachusetts to buy the remainder of the land in 
 western New York which had been in the first 
 contract with Phelps and Gorham. It was esti- 
 mated to contain four million acres, and turned 
 out to be rather more. Looking back upon this, 
 in 1800, he wrote: "I shall begin with the lands 
 purchased in the Genesee country, acknowledging 
 that if I had contented myself with those pur- 
 chases and employed my time and attention in 
 disposing of the lands to the best advantage, I 
 have every reason to believe that at this day I 
 should have been the wealthiest citizen of the 
 United States. That things have gone otherwise 
 I lament, more on account of others than on my 
 own account, for God has blessed me with a dis- 
 position of mind that enables me to submit with 
 patient resignation to his dispensations as they 
 regard myself." With regard to his first transac- 
 tion, he wrote : " In the year 1 790 I purchased 
 of Messrs. Gorham and Phelps a tract of country 
 in the Genesee district, warranted to contain not 
 less than a million acres, and sold the whole of 
 that purchase in the year 1791 in England at a 
 
15° ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 handsome profit, but which was reduced by dis- 
 count and other circumstances so as to close with 
 less than I had first expected." 
 
 In 1792 and 1793 Morris sold to the Holland 
 Company, an association of Dutch capitalists, 
 among whom the most prominent were the 
 bankers who had negotiated the loans of the 
 United States in Holland, all the land owned by 
 him in western New York west of a line running 
 between the present towns of Bolivar and Alma, 
 Elba and Byron, Bethany and Pavilion, Carleton 
 and Kendall. This left him about half a million 
 acres between the line through the Genesee River 
 and the line last described, which district was 
 called Morris's Reserve. He was bound by his 
 contract to extinguish the Indian title, which he 
 was not able to do until 1796. 
 
 In the years 1795 and 1796 Morris bought 
 enormous quantities of land in half a dozen dif- 
 ferent States. In February, 1795, he, Nicholson, 
 and Greenleaf formed the North American Land 
 Company, to which they deeded land in Pennsyl- 
 vania, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, 
 Georgia, and Kentucky, six million acres in all. 
 There were thirty thousand shares in the com- 
 pany, making a capital of three million dollars. 
 
MORRIS'S BUSINESS VENTURES. 151 
 
 the land being put in at fifty cents an acre. The 
 title was vested in trustees, and Morris was named 
 President of the board of managers. 
 
 A sort of prospectus and advertisement of this 
 company was published, in which its prospects 
 were described in the most sanguine terms. It 
 was argued that the land was worth ;^ioo per 
 acre. "The proprietor of back lands gives 
 himself no other trouble about them than to 
 pay the taxes, which are inconsiderable. As Na- 
 ture left them, so they lie till circumstances give 
 them value. The proprietor is then sought out by 
 the settler who has chanced to pitch upon them, 
 or who has made any improvement thereon, and 
 receives from him a price which fully repays his 
 original advance with great interest." 
 
 This was a woful mistake. Wild land has no 
 money value whatever, except what it may be 
 worth to have it defined by a survey, and to 
 have the possession of it guaranteed by a civil- 
 ized government. Nobody knows this better than 
 the actual settler. He knows better than to be- 
 Heve that wild land is " a boon of Nature." He 
 knows that when he went upon it he found no 
 gift there, but that if he did not want to starve 
 to death upon it, he had an overwhelming task 
 
152 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 before him. He had to clear off the trees, break 
 up the soil, exterminate the vermin, drain the 
 swamps, contend with the wild animals or the 
 savage men, and endure the fever and ague. 
 When he had made his improvements, he never 
 sought the man who held the paper title, in 
 order to pay him for it, " the land." He waited 
 for the man with the paper title to seek him, and 
 when that man came, he resisted him as long as 
 he could, because he saw no consideration for 
 what he was called upon to pay to that person. 
 The legislation and the litigation of our frontier 
 States are full of proof of this. 
 
 It did, it is true, enter into the scheme of the 
 North American Land Company to expend capital 
 in developing the land. Agents were to explore 
 it, make the first improvement, prepare it for the 
 settlers, and facilitate their entrance upon it ; but 
 very little of this was ever done by the company. 
 
MORRIS'S EMBARRASSMENTS. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Morris's Embarrassments. — Bankruptcy. — His 
 Imprisonment. — His Death. — His Family. — 
 His Estate. 
 
 In 1796 the affairs of Robert Morris became 
 entangled and embarrassed. His account books 
 which are now within reach show that his trans- 
 actions were suspended, and there were scarcely 
 any accounts to be kept. At the end of his life 
 there were those who said that he never had been 
 rich. There is a story which is often repeated, 
 that he was bankrupt when the Revolution broke 
 out- John Adams says that that is why he joined 
 the whigs. But against that is the fact that he 
 opposed the Declaration of Independence, and 
 occupied a conservative position at the beginning 
 of the war, so that he was by no means that sort 
 of whig who had an interest in promoting social 
 disorder. During the Revolutionary War every- 
 body supposed that he had become very rich by 
 
156 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 privateering, by speculating in paper money, by 
 trade, and by dealing in exchange. The profits 
 on all those transactions were very great, and the 
 risks were very great. The man who could operate 
 with success was the one who was in a position to 
 obtain the information which would lessen the risk. 
 Morris undoubtedly occupied such a position. 
 
 He spoke of himself, in 1781, when he was 
 asked to become Superintendent of Finance, as 
 a rich man. 
 
 Whether his China enterprises were profitable or 
 not we do not know; but as he did not continue 
 them, we must infer that they were not. His 
 tobacco contract was not profitable. His estab- 
 lishment at Morrisville is not spoken of as having 
 produced profits, although the Due de Liancourt 
 thought that Morris might have made good profits 
 from it, if he had devoted his attention to it, 
 abandoning his speculations in land. 
 
 We find references to Morris's affairs in 1785, 
 in 1788, and 1789, in which he is said to be 
 embarrassed. It is said that he was " in a whirl- 
 pool of trouble from 1787 to 1798." 
 
 In his review of his affairs in 1800, he refers 
 back to 1792 as a time when he was rich. There 
 is great reason to believe, although we have found 
 
MORRIS'S EMBARRASSMENTS. 157 
 
 no recorded evidences of it, except Maclay's de- 
 nunciations of him for speculating in the pubUc 
 debt, that he made great profits out of the rise 
 in certificates in 1790 and 1791. 
 
 In his petition in bankruptcy, he dated his 
 misfortunes from the failure of two houses in 
 London and Dublin, in 1793. One writer ex- 
 presses the opinion that he was carried away by 
 the eclat of his own reputation; and another, 
 that he became mad with speculation and ambi- 
 tion. We find ourselves driven to the same opin- 
 ion. The habit of dealing with large sums on 
 paper when he was public financier, the glory 
 of giving credit to the United States by his per- 
 sonal indorsement, the discovery that he could 
 wth facility circulate his personal notes as cur- 
 rency, and the prestige which he had enjoyed 
 were enough to turn the head of any man. Sad 
 as it is to believe it, we cannot resist the convic- 
 tion that he was ruined by the moral reaction 
 which he undervvent from his experience in the 
 public service. We cannot overlook the fact that 
 he was forced to use devices on behalf of a bank- 
 rupt treasury of which he expressed detestation 
 as an honourable merchant. Having stooped to 
 these things, like other men in similar cases, he 
 
158 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 speedily became habituated and reconciled to 
 them. 
 
 When we arrive at such an understanding of 
 Morris's proceedings as the existing record enables 
 us to obtain, we find that he engaged in wild and 
 extravagant purchases of land, that he gave his 
 notes in a strangely reckless fashion, entered into 
 engagements, created mortgages and trusts and 
 other liens right and left, the effect of which 
 was in two or three years to plunge his affairs 
 into inextricable confusion, so that after his 
 bankruptcy his creditors abandoned the whole 
 estate, and did not consider it worth the trouble 
 and expense of liquidation. In his prison days 
 he undertook a sad and pathetic task of posting 
 up his books and writing memoranda of his affairs, 
 in order to save trouble to his creditors and em- 
 barrassment to his children. He still believed in 
 the value of his investments, and he tried to make 
 a liquidation by distributing the surpluses, wher- 
 ever he thought that there were any, among his 
 different creditors. 
 
 From the years 1795 to 1798, we possess a 
 great many letters of his, which show the anxiety 
 and distress of mind through which he passed. 
 He had always been sanguine, bold, and enter- 
 
MORRIS'S EMBARRASSMENTS. 159 
 
 prising. When Washington remonstrated with 
 him for going into these extensive speculations 
 when he was over sixty years of age, he answered 
 that he could not deal with small things. He 
 "must either be a man or a mouse." 
 
 In 1796 there was a very severe commercial 
 crisis in the United States, contemporaneous with 
 the crisis in England. It was very difficult to bor- 
 row capital, and the rates for it were very high. 
 Morris's account books show that he was in the 
 habit of obtaining discounts from the bank, almost 
 day by day. We therefore find him complaining 
 bitterly of the difficulty of borrowing money in 
 order to carry on the work at Washington. 
 
 In May, 1796, he and Nicholson bought out 
 Greenleaf s share in the North American Land 
 Company for ^1,150,000. They allowed Green- 
 leaf to keep the shares until the stipulated pur- 
 chase money should be paid, and they gave him 
 their notes with cross-indorsements. 
 
 Morris paid one half the price in notes indorsed 
 by Nicholson, and Nicholson paid the other half 
 in notes indorsed by Morris. The notes had one, 
 two, three, and four years to run. This extraor- 
 dinary transaction, as we should consider it, was 
 not very exceptional in their proceedings, for we 
 
l6o ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 find that they did the same thing in other cases. 
 These notes were treated as if they had been 
 collateral security for the contract; and the only 
 explanation we can see of the device is that by 
 making an immense number of small notes of this 
 kind with cross-indorsements, it was supposed that 
 they could be negotiated more easily, and thus 
 gave the creditor better security than he would 
 have had on a single note or contract. Many 
 of these notes — in fact, enormous quantities of 
 them, which were created in the different trans- 
 actions — were negotiated, and are now in exist- 
 ence. Must we not suppose that the manufacture 
 and use of them was the last grade of abuse of 
 that power to issue notes which Morris had won 
 and used during his period of service as Finan- 
 cier? In one case a court had occasion to animad- 
 vert upon the proceeding of making these notes, 
 and said : "It is impossible to justify Morris, 
 whether his conduct proceeded from his distress 
 or an insatiable thirst for riches, in coining these 
 millions of notes to circulate under a promise to 
 redeem them at full specie value, which he must 
 have known he would not be able to do, and that 
 the world would be thereby deceived." We have 
 found these notes quoted as low as 3.6 cents on 
 
MO/iR/S'S EMBARRASSMENTS. l6i 
 
 the dollar ; and the court somewhat grimly said, 
 when it ruled that they could be offered in pay- 
 ment only at this rate : " It is believed that the 
 widow and orphans spoken of, and all others hold- 
 ing Morris's notes, would be glad to be so paid 
 for them." 
 
 Morris was very much ashamed of the notes 
 himself in the retrospect. In 1800 he wrote: 
 " It is well known that Mr. Nicholson and myself 
 owe a very large debt by notes drawn and in- 
 dorsed by each other. The issuing of these notes 
 is the blamable part of our conduct, which we have 
 both felt and acknowledged; but as no use can 
 arise to the holders of such paper from any reflec- 
 tion I can now make, I will forbear any attempts 
 to justify that business, although circumstances 
 might be adduced that would at least soften the 
 disposition to censure." In 1797 we find in the 
 letters frequent outbursts of pain and distress on 
 the part of Morris at the ruin which he saw scat- 
 tered about him upon the people who had trusted 
 him. "I am daily undergoing the most morti- 
 fying and tormenting scenes you can imagine." 
 His property began to be advertised for sale. He 
 could not raise five hundred dollars to pay his 
 petty creditors. His soul is wrung with anguish 
 
i62 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 for his family : " I am, to be sure, disagreeably 
 situated ; but my affairs are retrievable if I could 
 get the common aid of common times, and I will 
 struggle hard." " I am not in a situation to an- 
 swer off-hand, as was formerly the case, every 
 claim on my justice." " By heaven, there is no 
 bearing with these things ! I believe I shall go 
 mad ! Every day brings forward scenes and 
 troubles almost insupportable, and they seem to 
 be accumulating, so that at last they will, like a 
 torrent, carry everything before them." His cred- 
 itors besieged him in his hotise at The Hills, and 
 lit bonfires on the lawn on the winter nights. The 
 writ of arrest against him was issued on the last 
 day but one of 1797. January 11 he wrote to 
 Nicholson : " Confidence has furled her banners, 
 which no longer wave over the heads of M. and 
 N." To Hamilton he wrote : " I am sensible that 
 I have lost the confidence of the world as to my 
 pecuniary ability, but I believe not as to my honour 
 or integrity." 
 
 He expressed great dread of going to prison, but 
 was finally forced to go on the 1 6 th of February, 
 1798. Immediately afterward he wrote : " Starva- 
 tion stares me in the face." "I have not money 
 enough to buy bread for my family." According 
 
MORRIS'S EMBARRASSMENTS. 163 
 
 to the custom of the time, he was bound to sup- 
 port himself and to pay the hire of his room in 
 the prison. A young man who was in prison with 
 him speaks of his custom of walking about the 
 prison yard with a handful of pebbles, one of 
 which he dropped at each round. We have a 
 letter in which Morris says that he set himself 
 the task of going about the yard fifty times every 
 day. 
 
 After he had been in prison a few weeks, he 
 fell into a tone of grim pleasantry and desperate 
 reconciliation to facts. He even wrote a verse of 
 poetry. He wrote to Nicholson that if he would 
 visit the prison often he would soon become fa- 
 miliar with it, and invited Nicholson to dine with 
 him at the " hotel with grated doors." In the 
 summer of 1 798 the yellow fever was epidemic at 
 Philadelphia. Very many people in the prison 
 were ill and died of it. Morris said that he did 
 not mind it, but his wife and daughter visited him 
 daily, and their distress affected him. His son 
 William was attacked by a bilious fever, and died 
 in September. 
 
 In 1798 Washington went to PhDadelphia in 
 connection with his duties as General of the army. 
 He visited Morris in prison, and in the following 
 
l64 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 year invited Mrs. Morris to Mount Vernon, assur- 
 ing her of the " affectionate regard of General and 
 Mrs. Washington for Robert Morris." Custis says 
 that Morris was the one man to whom Washington 
 unbent. Probably Washington felt that Morris had 
 always done his utmost to support- him in the 
 worst of times. 
 
 In April, 1 799, Gouvemeur Morris visited Rob- 
 ert Morris in the prison, and dined with him and 
 Mrs. Morris there. The latter two kept up high 
 spirits, and the visitor was distressed to see that 
 Morris had made up his mind to his situation 
 more than could have been believed possible. 
 
 Morris was in jail from February 16, 1798, 
 until August 26, 1 80 1, — three years six months 
 and ten days. 
 
 Among the memoranda which he made on his 
 affairs, the following may be selected as furnishing 
 some details of interest about himself and his 
 family : — 
 
 The furniture which Mrs. Morris was using had 
 been lent to her. He had sold some land in- 
 herited by her from her father, worth ^15,860. 
 He had regarded this as a sacred debt, but had 
 made no provision for it, therefore it depended 
 on his creditors whether any should be made or 
 not. 
 
MORRIS'S EMBARRASSMENTS. 165 
 
 Of his daughter Esther he says : " In this ac- 
 • count will be found the credit for a legacy of a 
 hundred pounds left to her by her grandmother 
 and received by me. As I gave her nothing on 
 her marriage except clothes and some old wine, I 
 thought it a duty to pay this legacy, and for that 
 purpose I have assigned to her two quarter chests 
 of tea which I sent to Alexandria for sale. I fear, 
 however, that this will not amount to principal and 
 interest." 
 
 We must fear that Esther never received her 
 grandmother's legacy ; but as her husband, James 
 M. Marshall, was a creditor for more than ;^20,ooo 
 sterling, this loss, except for the element of senti- 
 ment in it, fell into insignificance. Bishop White, 
 Morris's brother-in-law, was a creditor for some 
 amount exceeding three thousand dollars. 
 
 Among other items, Morris complained of the 
 tailor's and shoemaker's bills of one of his sons, 
 who appears to have contracted expensive habits. 
 At the end he says : " I have an old, worn-out 
 gold watch that was my father's. He died in 
 1 75 1. I have had it ever since, and do not want 
 to part with it even now if I can avoid it. I be- 
 lieve it will sell for very little." At his death he 
 gave this watch to Robert, Jr. 
 
1 66 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 Those who have written about the career of 
 Robert Morris have almost always contrasted the 
 end of his life with his services to the United 
 States, and have expressed or implied blame on 
 the country for neglect or ingratitude. A little 
 reflection will show that there is no ground what- 
 ever for any imputation of the kind. Morris's 
 enterprises were undertaken entirely on his own 
 judgment and responsibility. He engaged in the 
 one which immediately caused his ruin ten years 
 after he left office. He had a large salary and 
 good opportunities, which he used while in office. 
 He never gave anything to the public, nor lost 
 anything by the public service ; on the contrary, 
 he died a debtor for nearly one hundred thousand 
 dollars. It cannot be said that the United States 
 were bound to guarantee him against his own 
 speculation for the rest of his life. 
 
 There was one transaction with the Holland 
 Company which consisted of a loan with the op- 
 tion that it might be converted into a purchase by 
 them. Morris never supposed that he had any 
 option ; but the lawyers who examined the con- 
 tract said that he also had an option in it. He 
 was reluctant to claim it, but felt bound to do so 
 on behalf of his creditors. Gouvemeur Morris, 
 
MORRIS'S EMBARRASSMENTS. 1 67 
 
 on his behalf, made a negotiation by which all the 
 titles of persons who had bought of the Holland 
 Company under this contract were confirmed. It 
 is also stated elsewhere that Mrs. Morris's dower 
 rights had not been cancelled in some of the con- 
 tracts with the Holland Company ; and Morris 
 mentioned that a stipulation which he had put in, 
 with the intention of securing her dower, had 
 proved invalid. We have not been able to ascer- 
 tain with certainty from which of these cases it 
 was that Gouverneur Morris won for her from the 
 Holland Company a grant of a life annuity of 
 fifteen hundred dollars. Such an annuity, how- 
 ever, he did obtain. When Morris came out of 
 prison, he went to live in the lodgings which his 
 wife had taken, and in the home which she had 
 prepared by means of this income. 
 
 In January, 1803, Gouverneur Morris wrote in 
 his diary that Robert Morris in the last summer 
 " came to me lean, low-spirited, and as poor as a 
 commission of bankruptcy can make a man whose 
 effects will, it is said, not pay a shilling in the 
 pound. Indeed, the assignees will not take the 
 trouble of looking after them. I sent him home 
 fat, sleek, in good spirits, and possessed of the 
 means of living comfortably the rest of his days." 
 
l68 ROBERT MORRIS. 
 
 Robert Morris died May 8, 1806. He was 
 buried behind Christ Church, on Second Street, 
 Philadelphia. The entrance to the vault is en- 
 closed in an old-fashioned rectangular brick en- 
 closure, with a slab lying horizontally upon it. 
 The inscription on it reads : " The family vault of 
 William White and Robert Morris. The latter, 
 who was Financier of the United States during the 
 Revolution, died the 8th of May, 1806, aged 73 
 years." Probably when he was buried there the 
 vault was in the grass of the churchyard, with the 
 blue sky and the bright sun above, even though 
 there was a city about. Now the whole church- 
 yard is covered with a brick pavement, and a 
 school-room addition to the church has been built 
 at the height of the second story, above the grave. 
 His resting-place is now, therefore, a damp and 
 dark comer. 
 
 He had seven children, — five boys and two 
 girls. Three boys and two girls survived him. 
 
 When Lafayette visited Philadelphia in 1824, 
 the first private call which he made in that city 
 was on Mrs. Morris. She died January 16, 1827. 
 
 In 1856 the trustees of the North American 
 Land Company held ^92,071.87. Litigation, of 
 course, began immediately about the distribution 
 of this sum. 
 
MORRIS'S EMBARRASSMENTS. 169 
 
 An auditor's report of 1880 on the administra- 
 tion of this estate says that the litigation has been 
 phenomenal. The counsel for the Morris and 
 Nicholson interest pursued the fund for twenty- 
 five years, seeking to obtain it from the trustees 
 of the North American Company and the trusts 
 which had been created upon it, and also defend- 
 ing the money against an attempt of the State to 
 sequestrate it. After all counsel fees and expenses, 
 the amount available for division to the Morris in- 
 terest was $<)fi<)2.\(). 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Adams, John, 155. 
 
 Bank of North America, 
 
 79-9S, 102, 
 Bank of Pennsylvania, 79-98. 
 Bank War, the, 102-104. 
 Broglie, le Prince de, quoted, 129. 
 
 Capital, the Federal, 138-144. 
 
 Centinel, the, 118. 
 
 Chastellux, le Marquis de, 
 
 quoted, 127. 
 Continental Currency, ■?4, 41, 42, 
 
 45> 55» 73. 79-98. 
 
 Deane, Silas, 18, 27, 28, 29, 30, 
 3i)"7- 
 
 Embargoes, 41. 
 
 Finances of the United States, 
 
 57-65, 68, 73, 79-98. 
 Fort Wilson Riot, the, 36, 
 France and the United States, 
 
 46, 47, 61, 63, 64,67, 82, 89. 
 Franklin, Benjamin, 21, 47, 58. 
 
 Hamilton, Alexander, 75, 80, 
 
 87, 8S, 93, 107, 109, 141. 
 Holland, loans made in, 96, 97; 
 
 Morris's commercial transac- 
 tions with, 97. 
 Howe, Lord, 17, 18. 
 
 Independence, Declaration 
 of, .5. 
 
 Jay, John, 34, 126. 
 Jefferson, Thomas, 131. 
 Junes, Paul, 131, 132. 
 
 Lafayette, le Marquis de, 168. 
 Land speculations, 150-152. 
 Laurens, John, 61, 63, 64. 
 Lee, Arthur, 116, 117. 
 Lee, William, 116. 
 Livingstone, Catherine (Mrs. 
 
 Ridley), 126. 
 Lotteries, 145. 
 Luzerne, Chevalier de la, 127, 
 
 129, 130. 
 
 Maclay, William, 109, no, 119, 
 
 140, 141, 143. 
 Madison, James, 90. 
 Morris, Esther, 165. 
 Morris, Gouvemeur, 93, 164, 
 
 166, 167. 
 Morris, Mrs. Robert, 121, 127, 
 
 128, 129, 130, 133, 164, 168, 
 Morris, Robert. See Table of 
 
 Contents. 
 Morris, Thomas, 21,22- 
 
172 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Newspapers, 73-76. 
 
 Paine, Thomas, 7^5, 116. 
 Pennsylvania, political parties in, 
 
 16; finances of, 113-121. 
 Philadelphia, taken and occupied 
 
 by Howe, 18-20. 
 
 Social changes in the colonies, 
 101. 
 
 Taxation, 43, 57,67,71, 83,91. 
 Tories, persecution of, 44, 45. 
 TnimbuU, jonatlian, 68. 
 
 Washington City, 144. 
 Washington, George, 20, 42, 128, 
 
 132, 159, 163, 164. 
 Willing, Thomas, 12. 
 White, Mary. See Morris, Mrs. 
 
 Robert. 
 
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