It would appear, in synthesis and to borrow a pleasing opposition of human types from John Milton, that Morris was the active Allegro principle of the firm, while Willing was the more withdrawn but vigilant Penseroso. Morris evidently took the lead during the war in supplying Washington’s troops; Willing remained the presiding presence and, not surprisingly, emerged financially intact, even as Morris ended up in bankruptcy.
What exactly did they do? The answer seems to be that they took advantage of their reputation as solid conservative men of business to finance a radical cause. Scaling up the established practice of issuing lines of credit for ships out on the water, they took bills of exchange, payable in the ports of France and Amsterdam, and sold them, or borrowed against them, in the colonies, to pay for uniforms, guns, and horses. They basically took the credit they held abroad—Amsterdam being the Hong Kong of the period—and redeployed it locally to support Washington’s army.
“Where do you see yourself in five, four, three, two . . . ?”
Cartoon by Kaamran Hafeez and Van Scott
The paradox was that their credit as merchants was sounder than the new country’s credit as a state. Morris later began issuing what amounted to a private currency: personal notes, denominated in sums of twenty, fifty, and eighty dollars. “My personal credit,” he explained, “has been substituted for that the country has lost.” And in the back of the minds of all wide-awake merchants was the shared understanding that the King of France, England’s great enemy, would ultimately stand behind the bills of exchange, even if the ships were sunk or the bills themselves went unpaid. Under the combined pressure of Benjamin Franklin’s diplomacy and the sympathies of Enlightenment-minded French courtiers, he did.
Yet one need not imagine Willing and Morris as proto–Bruce Wayne figures, secret radicals in conservative clothing. It seems more likely that they were making a complicated, coolheaded hedge on the outcome of the war. Even if the conflict appeared to favor British arms and the Royal Navy, it must have been clear that this David, though armed only with a slingshot, stood a real chance of felling Goliath, however large he loomed.
What gave weight to the slingshot, in this case, were two realities. First was the simple fact, common to all Colonial conflicts, that the colonized were in the colonies, while the colonizer was not, or at least not in sufficient numbers. The war, financed by the Americans on hope and a shoestring, was even more unaffordable for the British. Franklin made the grisly point in his correspondence with the London radical Joseph Priestley that the cost of killing an American soldier ran to some twenty thousand pounds per Yankee. Even if the British had prevailed in the immediate fighting, some form of national independence was bound to follow: there was no army large enough to pacify the rebels permanently.
And Willing and Morris must have known that, if the rebels lost, it was extremely unlikely that the British—whatever they did to military or political leaders—could, or would, hang or banish the merchants who had backed the rebels. Life, and business, would go on. And if the rebels won? Then the rewards would be immense for those who had financed the victory. When Philadelphia’s merchants finally banded together to form the Pennsylvania Bank, consolidating their credit, as Morris had earlier done on behalf of the new country, it was because they had come to see this as a sound wager. James Madison wrote that “our greatest hopes are founded on a patriotic scheme of the opulent merchants of this city.” Patriotic it was, but, by 1780, with Washington still in the field, having weathered even the loss of Charleston, the war’s worst defeat, it was also shrewd. This was the greatest consolidated special-purpose vehicle in American history: “opulent merchants” pooling their credit to take a chance on a high-risk new startup, the United States.