In July 1776, when America’s Founding Fathers voted to sign the Declaration of Independence, they pledged to risk “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.” Their lives and their honor were indeed at stake, but what was their fortune? And how much did the Founders gain or lose in the American Revolutionary War?
Below is a look at how five of the nation’s founders made a living, how they invested in the revolutionary cause, and what they gained and lost.
benjamin franklin
Portrait of Benjamin Franklin
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Editor. Statesman. Contractor. Inventor. Land speculator. Benjamin Franklin, the 10thand son of a soap maker, developed his wealth – and his reputation – in multiple ways. Along with a thriving business printing everything from books to sermons to currency, he published his journal, The Pennsylvania Gazetteand his bestseller Poor Richard’s Almanac. He invested his profits in 89 rental properties in his hometown of Philadelphia and in land speculation further west. During two wars of the colonial era, he organized the defense of the pacifist Quaker city, designing and building forts, helping to buy weapons and selling them in his bookstore. In his early 40s he was one of the wealthiest Americans, with a total income of £2,000 a year, or $300,000 today.
Franklin was on a diplomatic mission to France in 1777, negotiating military and financial support for the war, when the British captured Philadelphia. Troops ransacked his rental properties and looted his house, which they had used as their secret service headquarters. When he finally returned home, Franklin, a favorite of French King Louis XVI, received a special parting gift: a snuffbox encrusted with 401 diamonds. Franklin’s revelation of the gift (which would be valued at around $270,000 today) caused an uproar at the Constitutional Convention, leading to a stricter emoluments clause. But because Franklin had been so honest and gave the diamonds as a gift to the nation, Congress said he could keep the gems to pass on to his daughter.
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george washington
Portrait of George Washington
Metropolitan Museum of Art
George Washington, orphaned at age 11, amassed vast acreages – over 50,000 acres at his death – by shrewd speculation in the frontier lands he surveyed. Marrying one of the richest widows in Virginia, he develops a taste for beautiful things. At their Mount Vernon estate, he diversified their income, switching the main cash crop from tobacco to wheat and starting a profitable whiskey distillery.
When Washington became the colony’s unrivaled choice to lead the revolutionary forces against the British, he refused a salary, asking only to be reimbursed for his expenses. Over the eight years of the war, the meticulous archivist shelled out $160,074 (about $5 million in today’s dollars), including paying a network of 500 spies and feeding his staff officers. Congress would argue only about $8 of its expense accounting, but pay it in heavily depreciated Continental currency.
The war wreaked havoc on Washington’s finances in other ways. In 1781, British raiders carried off much of Mount Vernon’s cattle and 17 enslaved workers. As Washington struggled — and neglected his farming ventures — for so long, he lost 50% of his net worth. And a postwar depression made it impossible for Washington to collect rents for its frontier land holdings.
In 1787, when elected to the Constitutional Convention to help formulate “a more perfect union,” the land-rich, money-poor war hero had to borrow money from a neighbor to spend four months in the dear capital of Philadelphia. And when he was unanimously elected the first American president, he wrote to a relative that he needed this salary: Without a pension, he could no longer afford his retirement at Mount Vernon.
READ MORE: 11 little-known facts about George Washington
John Hancock
Born to a battered country clergyman, John Hancock was adopted by his childless uncle, a wealthy Boston merchant. After attending Harvard College, Hancock mastered the family import-export business, expanding it to include building ships that carried whale oil to Britain and returned stuffed with consumer goods for his retail store chain.
Hancock, which employed hundreds of people, gained popularity by supporting the town’s poor, funding the nascent independence movement and spending at least £100,000 to equip an artillery company. Winning a series of elections, as city councilor and provincial legislator, he distinguished himself as the city’s most popular radical leader. Hancock led protests against British taxation and organized boycotts of British goods. After the Boston Tea Party, he shipped all the tea from his warehouses in England, at his own expense.
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Ordered to be arrested for treason, he takes refuge in a church basement with Samuel Adams while British troops search for them in Lexington and Concord. In a car stuffed full of gold, silver, and negotiable bills to fund the revolution, New England’s wealthiest merchant fled to Philadelphia for the Second Continental Congress. Elected its president unanimously, he was the first to sign the Declaration of Independence.
Robert Morris
Financier of the Revolution: Colorized engraving of English-born American merchant and politician Robert Morris (1734-1806), 1782. Morris was a member of the Continental Congress, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and founder of the Bank of America in North.
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Robert Morris, America’s first billionaire, was known as the main financier of the American Revolution. The illegitimate son of a Liverpool tobacco trader grew up in Maryland before becoming a young partner in an international trading house in Philadelphia. He got rich by building ships, stuffing them with Chesapeake tobacco, and trading it at enormous profit for goods from Europe and elsewhere.
As a delegate from Pennsylvania to the Continental Congress, he was authorized to create a naval committee and commission a squadron of ships to plunder British commerce. Congress paid him to build two of his first four ships, including what his captain, John Barry, called “the finest ship in America”. Morris invested heavily in privateer ships that disrupted British military and commercial shipping, and he used his worldwide contacts to help import munitions for the war effort, earning millions in commissions.
With no banks in the British colonies, the continental currency had no backing and had become virtually worthless. After Congress asked Morris to become Superintendent of Finance, he immediately created the first bank in the United States. Selling stocks and granting short-term loans, Morris made private credit the basis of public credit.
When the war ended, Washington refused to send the troops home without pay, but the treasury was empty. Morris said the only solution was to issue notes backed by his own credit. He personally signed 6,000 notes stamped “Public Debt” in denominations of $5 to $100.
In the post-war depression, he unsuccessfully speculated in frontier lands and went bankrupt. He spent three years in a debtor’s prison a few blocks from Independence Hall.
READ MORE: The Financial Patriot Who Funded the Revolutionary War
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
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Thomas Jefferson, orphaned at 11, received a classical education at William and Mary College before studying law for seven years. His border practice brought in little money. He abandoned it when he married the daughter of a wealthy slave trader who left plenty of money but even more debt. A compulsive shopper, Jefferson exceeded his income from tobacco farming by building his mountaintop retreat in Virginia, Monticello, and wrote a summary of the struggle with Britain.
Elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses, the first democratically elected legislature in the colonies, Jefferson earned a place in Virginia’s congressional delegation thanks to his brilliant writing. Appointed to the committee responsible for drafting the Declaration of Independence, he worked alone for three weeks on the project, then endured three days of verification that removed his conviction of the slave trade. Refusing another term, he returned to Virginia to revise his code of law.
When the British invaded Virginia, they destroyed one of its plantations and stole or killed its horses. Pursued for two days by cavalry, he came away with a lifelong hatred of England and used the episode to justify his refusal to pay his mounting debts to British merchants.
Succeeding Franklin as minister to France, he spent his diplomat’s modest salary far and wide, buying so many books and works of art that it cost him $80,000 to ship them home to join the cabinet. of Washington as Secretary of State. Jefferson’s spending spree lasted 50 years after he wrote the nation’s founding document.
The reward for so many founding fathers was not cash. Their reward was a new independent nation.
Willard Sterne Randall, author of The Fortunes of the Founders: How Money Shaped the Birth of America, won the National Magazine Award during a 17-year journalism career before graduating from Princeton. Author of six biographies of the founding fathers, he is professor emeritus of history at Champlain College.
