Most of us think that if, by some magic, we could go back in time that our superior knowledge would soon make us rich and famous. When we consider the complexity of fiscal dealings in the 1790s by Gouvernour Morris and his friend, Robert Morris, we may say, “Hmmmm. They were pretty smart.”
From a letter from Gouvernour Morris to an agent concerning European business dealings involving the famous Financier, Robert Morris:
“Suppose (that) Constable will draw on you for five thousand pounds sterling payable at six months sight, and he will obtain from our friend Robert Morris in Philadelphia a credit on you in Paris to the amount. You will draw on Amsterdam and assign a credit to Paris to redraw. This double usance from London to Paris through Amsterdam gives four months–and we pay here to Robert Morris the value of the livres payable in Paris on the day when the bills are payable by you in London respectively, this gives at least seven months. The operation will be chargeable with the commissions (one of which you pocket) and the exchanges–whatever all this may exceed legal interest will be a loss and whatever it may fall short will be a gain. But the eventual payment always being certain renders it a desirable business to our friends and when occasion offers may be useful to us.”
Very few of us could make sense, much less money, out of that. Robert Morris and his associates could, and did. Using these sorts of arrangement, when communication was dependent on the vagaries of sail and wars on land and sea, he was instrumental in financing the American Revolution. He was so important in obtaining America’s victory that when peace came, and his own fiscal empire collapsed, he spent nearly three and a half years in debtor’s prison. There, he was visited by a grateful George Washington. He knew and appreciated what Morris had sacrificed to the cause of freedom. Unlike Morris’s many fair-weather friends, Washington visited his old comrade, America’s financier, in the fetid hellhole of a post-Revolutionary jail.
