The Founders' Fortunes

“Randall’s dry wit drives the true stories of French police searching Ben Franklin's underwear and Sam Adams’ beer career… Randall’s clear, engaging account reveals the effects of money on the founding of the U.S. and offers a useful look at colonial history.”
—Booklist, starred review

“The narrative is well written and packed with human interest, providing a valuable update to the Revolutionary-era history many readers may not have studied since high school…A vivid history of how America paid for its Revolution and why the Founding Fathers made the decisions they did.”
—Kirkus, starred review

“The adage ‘follow the money’ was as true in the Revolutionary era as in our own. By examining the dollars-and-cents (or pounds-and-pence) side of events, Willard Sterne Randall offers a refreshing perspective on the nation’s founding. Translating values into our own currency gives us an appreciation of, for example, Ben Franklin’s $110,000 salary (in today’s dollars) as postmaster general; or Martha Custis’ nearly $4 million fortune when she married George Washington; to say nothing of the staggering British national debt of $20 trillion. The Founders’ Fortunes is an eminently readable book with the sharp vignettes and incisive character portraits that bring history to life.”
—Jack Kelly, author of Valcour: The 1776 Campaign That Saved the Cause of Liberty
 
“It is common knowledge that the finances of the United States at its founding were extremely shaky. Less well known is that the personal finances of many key Founders were also shaky. Willard Sterne Randall's study reveals the Founders’ fluid personal financial circumstances, and how those circumstances worked to shape the decisions they made as public servants. Randall extends and amplifies Charles Beard’s influential economic interpretation of the Constitution that launched ‘Progressive’ history-writing more than a century ago.”
—Richard Sylla, Professor Emeritus of Economics, New York University and Chairman of the Museum of American Finance (2010–2020)
 
“Historians have attributed the American Revolution to ideology, nationalism, and restless ambition, but in this thoughtful book Willard Sterne Randall reminds readers that the pursuit of economic gain was also a decisive motivating factor. Some merchants, land speculators, penniless lawyers, and debt-ridden office holders glimpsed a better material future through American independence, and some found that their dreams came true under the new national government in the 1790s. The Founders’ Fortunes is a rewarding reconsideration of the birth of the American nation, all the more so in this time of an enhanced awareness of our frayed social fabric and economic inequities.”
—John Ferling, author of Winning Independence: The Decisive Years of the Revolutionary War, 1778-1781

Auteur

Willard Sterne Randall

Texte du rabat

An illuminating financial history of the Founding Fathers, revealing how their personal finances shaped the Constitution and the new nation.

In 1776, upon the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers concluded America's most consequential document with a curious note, pledging "our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor." Lives and honor did indeed hang in the balance; yet just what were their fortunes? How much did the Founders stand to gain or lose through independence? And what lingering consequences did their respective financial stakes have on liberty, justice, and the fate of the fledgling United States of America?

In this landmark account, historian Willard Sterne Randall investigates the private financial affairs of the Founders, illuminating like never before how and why the Revolution came about. The Founders' Fortunes uncovers how these leaders waged war, crafted a constitution, and forged a new nation influenced in part by their own financial interests. In an era where these very issues have become daily national questions, the result is a remarkable and insightful new understanding of our nation's bedrock values.

Story Locale: Early America

Échantillon de lecture

Chapter One

 

"A Penny Saved"

 

Dirty, cold, and hungry, seventeen-year-old runaway apprentice Benjamin Franklin arrived in Philadelphia on a sunny Sunday morning in 1723 after sleeping all night in an open boat he had helped row across the Delaware River. From the foot of Market Street, he could see, beyond a waterfront crowded with ships and piles of cargo, solid rows of brick houses, a three-block-long covered market, and families dressed in clean clothes heading to the Friends Meeting House. Following them inside, he fell asleep; awakened by a smiling Quaker, he got directions to a nearby bakery, where he spent his last Dutch dollar.

 

Already a master printer, the tall, barrel-chested Ben Franklin came to the largest town in America, as George Washington would half a century later, with the promise of a job, something he felt he could never find in Boston, where he had antagonized Puritans and politicians with his satirical writings. Selling half his library, Franklin had found a berth on a Dutch ship that took him to even smaller New York City. There, he also failed to find work, but he had learned of an opening in a Philadelphia printshop, a ninety-mile trudge across New Jersey.

 

Born in Boston, the eighth of seventeen children of an immigrant candle and soap maker, Franklin was editing and publishing his own newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, within five years of his arrival in Philadelphia, by age twenty-two.

 

In its premiere issue, in October 1729, Franklin advertised his first book publication, Isaac Watts's metrical Psalms of David, a perennial bestseller. Yet Franklin's greatest success as a publisher was to come from his own pen. In 1732, he launched Poor Richard's Almanack. Written in a witty, rural vernacular, it combined Puritan moralizing, weather forecasts, household hints, and memorable proverbs that counseled industry and thrift. It would go on to sell, on average, ten thousand copies a year-one copy a year for every one hundred colonists-making it, after the Bible, colonial America's most popular reading matter.

 

To sell such a large number of books, Franklin found that he had to operate on an ambitious, intercolonial scale. Setting type and printing pages in his own Philadelphia printshop, he then shipped the pages off to be bound and sold by printer partners, often his relatives and former apprentices, in Boston, Newport, New York, Williamsburg, and Charleston.

 

 

Franklin practiced what Poor Richard preached. ÒKeep thy shop and thy shop will keep thee,Ó Poor Richard counseled in June 1735. In ÒAdvice of a young Tradesman, written by an old one,Ó Franklin admonished:

 

Remember that TIME is money. . . . Remember that CREDIT is money. . . . The Way to Wealth is as plain as the Way to market. It depends chiefly on two words, INDUSTRY and FRUGALITY.

 

Posing as a "wise old man" delivering a "harangue" to "the People attending an Auction," Franklin filled "the little spaces" at the margins of his calendar with proverbs. "Clergy and the Gentry" purchased Poor Richard, he later explained in his autobiography, "to distribute gratis among their poor Parishioners and Tenants." Franklin's proverbs linked "the Means of procuring Wealth" with "securing Virtue, it being more difficult for a Man in Want to always act honestly. . . . It is hard for an empty Sack to stand upright."1

 

Opening a stationery shop in the front of his house on Market Stree…