 Robert
Morris was born at or near Liverpool, England, in 1734. When he
reached 13 years of age, he emigrated to Maryland to join his
father, a tobacco exporter at Oxford, Md. After brief schooling at
Philadelphia, the youth obtained employment with Thomas and Charles
Willing's well-known shipping-banking firm. In 1754 he became a
partner and for almost four decades was one of the company's
directors as well as an influential Philadelphia citizen. Wedding
Mary White at the age of 35, he fathered five sons and two
daughters.During the Stamp Act
turmoil in 1765, Morris joined other merchants in protest, but not
until the outbreak of hostilities a decade later did he fully commit
himself to the Revolution. In 1775 the Continental Congress
contracted with his firm to import arms and ammunition, and he was
elected to the Pennsylvania council of safety (1775-76), the
committee of correspondence, the provincial assembly (1775-76), the
legislature (1776-78), and the Continental Congress (1775-78). In
the last body, on July 1, 1776, he voted against independence, which
he personally considered premature, but the next day he purposely
absented himself to facilitate an affirmative ballot by his
delegation.
Morris, a key congressman, specialized in
financial affairs and military procurement. Although he and his firm
profited handsomely, had it not been for his assiduous labors the
Continental Army would probably have been forced to demobilize. He
worked closely with General Washington, wheedled money and supplies
from the states, borrowed money in the face of overwhelming
difficulties, and on occasion even obtained personal loans to
further the war cause.
Immediately following his congressional
service, Morris sat for two more terms in the Pennsylvania
legislature (1778-81). During this time, Thomas Paine and others
attacked him for profiteering in Congress, which investigated his
accounts and vindicated him. Nevertheless, his reputation suffered.
Morris embarked on the most dramatic phase of
his career by accepting the office of Superintendent of Finance
(1781-84) under the Articles of Confederation. Congress, recognizing
the perilous state of the nation's finances and its impotence to
provide remedies, granted him dictatorial powers and acquiesced to
his condition that he be allowed to continue his private commercial
enterprises. He slashed all governmental and military expenditures,
personally purchased army and navy supplies, tightened accounting
procedures, prodded the states to fulfill quotas of money and
supplies, and when necessary strained his personal credit by issuing
notes over his own signature or borrowing from friends.
To finance Washington's Yorktown campaign in
1781, in addition to the above techniques, Morris obtained a sizable
loan from France. He used part of it, along with some of his own
fortune, to organize the Bank of North America, chartered that
December. The first government-incorporated bank in the United
States, it aided war financing.
Although Morris was reelected to the
Pennsylvania legislature for 1785-86, his private ventures consumed
most of his time. In the latter year, he attended the Annapolis
Convention, and the following year the Constitutional Convention,
where he sympathized with the Federalists but was, for a man of his
eminence, strangely silent. Although in attendance at practically
every meeting, he spoke only twice in debates and did not serve on
any committees. In 1789, declining Washington's offer of appointment
as the first Secretary of the Treasury, he took instead a U.S.
Senate seat (1789-95).
During the later years of his public life,
Morris speculated wildly, often on overextended credit, in lands in
the West and at the site of Washington, DC. To compound his
difficulties, in 1794 he began constructing on Philadelphia's
Chestnut Street a mansion designed by Maj. Pierre Charles L'Enfant.
Not long thereafter, Morris attempted to escape creditors by
retreating to The Hills, the country estate along the Schuylkill
River on the edge of Philadelphia that he had acquired in 1770.
Arrested at the behest of creditors in 1798 and
forced to abandon completion of the mansion, thereafter known in its
unfinished state as "Morris' Folly," Morris was thrown into the
Philadelphia debtor's prison, where he was nevertheless well
treated. By the time he was released in 1801, under a federal
bankruptcy law, however, his property and fortune had vanished, his
health had deteriorated, and his spirit had been broken. He lingered
on in poverty and obscurity, living in a simple Philadelphia home on
an annuity obtained for his wife by fellow-signer Gouverneur Morris.
Robert Morris died in 1806 in his 73d year and
was buried in the yard of Christ Church. |
