Robert Morris

Robert Morris was born in 1734 in Liverpool, England, and came to Pennsylvania as a boy. He became one of Philadelphia's greatest merchants and, during the Revolution, the leading financier of the American cause, using his credit to find money, supplies, and ships when the Congress had little of its own. He abstained from the July 1776 vote on independence, thinking the moment premature, but he signed the Declaration and later signed both the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. As superintendent of finance under the Articles he tried to put the government's accounts in order. In the 1790s he speculated heavily in western land, the venture collapsed, and in 1798 he was confined in the Prune Street debtors' prison in Philadelphia. He was released after Congress passed a bankruptcy law in 1800 and died in reduced circumstances in 1806. His life shows both the value of courage in a public emergency and the damage of overreaching after the emergency has passed.

See also: Signers of the Declaration · Benjamin Rush · Benjamin Franklin · John Morton · James Wilson