The most important Founding Father (you probably never heard of)

Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Adams, Paine — familiar names in the incredibly talented constellation of Founding Fathers who managed to pull off the creation of the United States of America, the first modern republic.

How about Robert Morris?

Without him, it’s highly doubtful the American Revolution would have succeeded as it did, or that the nation could have endured through its chaotic early years under the Articles of Confederation that followed the defeat of Britain.

Yet his name is unknown to most Americans.

Morris was nicknamed the “Financier of the Revolution.” The Continental Congress had created the United States of America with the Declaration of Independence in July of 1776. But even the term “Continental Congress” was pretty much a joke.

Power in those early days lay with the governments and militias of the 13 states. The Articles of Confederation, approved by the Congress in 1778, was powerless to force the states to provide either manpower or money for the war effort.

Consequently, Gen. George Washington was chronically forced to beg Congress for men, supplies and money to keep the effort alive throughout the war. State militias were relatively well funded and supplied. But the Continental Army, had it relied solely on the Continental Congress, was doomed.

Enter Robert Morris.

A Philadelphia merchant and financier, owning 250 ships and later millions of acres of frontier land, he was the wealthiest man in America. And after his initial reluctance to acquiesce in independence from the British crown, he nearly single-handedly funded the Army, much of the Navy and indeed the government itself.

Since U.S. currency had no value during those tenuous years, Morris personally paid the Continental troops under Washington in what would amount today to enormously huge sums. His payments were in “Morris notes,” since U.S. money was worthless.

Morris personally supplied the funding for 80 percent of all the American bullets fired during the Revolutionary War, and almost 75 percent of all other U.S. government expenses during the war years.

His vast fortune included 250 ships, most of which he turned into privateers to prey on British ships and their cargoes. But he gave his best ship, “The Black Prince,” to the Continental Congress.

When Washington learned that British commander Lord Cornwallis’ troops were gathered on the Yorktown peninsula in Virginia in 1781, he was able to notify French naval forces in the West Indies, and they blockaded the port to prevent evacuation of the British army by sea. Morris coordinated the French fleet’s arrival.

But Washington’s army was in New York state, and he had no funds to get them to Virginia. So Morris served as quartermaster for the journey and supplied some $14 million ($195 million in today’s dollars) of his own credit to fund the trip. Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown effectively ended the Revolutionary War.

Morris was one of only two men, along with Roger Sherman of Connecticut, to sign the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution.

He served as an influential senator from Pennsylvania in the earliest years, as well as the first U.S. Superintendent of Finance, the precursor office to Secretary of the Treasury. He also controlled the U.S. Navy as Agent of Marine.

In the early 1780s, next to George Washington, he was the most powerful man in America.

But in one of the great reverses in American history, Morris speculated heavily in western lands in the 1790s, after the Constitution took effect. He owned more land than anyone else in America, but it was highly leveraged, and the Panic of 1797 left him bankrupt.

He was imprisoned for debt in Philadelphia for over three years.

Congress adopted its first bankruptcy legislation, the Bankruptcy Act of 1800, partly as a way to release Morris from prison.

He died in 1806 at the age of 72 in Philadelphia.