Robert Morris, War Finance, and Early Bankruptcy Law in the U.S.

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. I don't know how
I came across this one. I found it on a
scrap of paper shoved into a book and went I

(00:22):
should follow up on I love it when that happened.
It happens a shocking amount of time with me. My
life is just post its. I don't know what to
tell you mineor often the notes app on my phone
and I, oh, yeah, weird stuff in there and think,
what is that? Oh yeah, And sometimes I'll abbreviate it
in a way I never can recover what it meant

(00:42):
in the first place, such as life. But this one
I found so. Robert Morris is who we're talking about today,
and he's one of the lesser mentioned founding fathers of
the United States, and when he is mentioned, he's called
the financier of the Revolutionary War. He did wield a
great deal of power in the money dealings that enabled

(01:04):
the Continental Army to take on Britain. But his story
is a lot more complicated than that, and it also
offers us a chance to examine the way that early
US history, which we often get talked about in a
very grandiose kind of way, and you know, idealistically, is
really mired in a lot of messy dealings and questionable judgment.

(01:26):
So Robert Morris was born in January of seventeen thirty
four in Liverpool, England. What date in January is almost
hilariously different from source to source. His father was Robert
Morris Senior, and his mother was Elizabeth Murfitt Morris. Yes,
I literally saw everything from January first to January thirty first,

(01:48):
and pick a number in between. I saw at least
six different ones. I'm not even joking. In seventeen thirty seven,
when Morris was either thirteen or fourteen, he traveled to
the North American Colony. At that point, his father was
already living in Oxford, Maryland and making a living as
a tobacco agent. Efforts to get Robert enrolled in school

(02:09):
did not go particularly well. It seems that the teenage Morris,
who was by all accounts really quite smart, was not
a great student and he found school tedious. So at
the age of sixteen, his father decided to send him
to Philadelphia to become an apprentice at the mercantile house
of Charles Willing. Not long after Robert's moved to Philadelphia,

(02:30):
his father died and Morris inherited his estate. He stayed
with Charles Willing, though, and he continued to work. Several
years later, Charles Willing also died, and at that point
Robert and willing son Thomas Willing, who had become good friends,
formed their own partnership. In seventeen fifty seven, the shipping

(02:51):
firm of Willing Morrison Company was founded, and this company
imported and exported, and because this was the mid eighteenth
century in North America, that meant that they were involved
in the triangle of trade and thus slavery. So keep
that in mind. We're not going to talk about it more,
but it is a cornerstone of the wealth that he

(03:12):
eventually builds. By the seventeen sixties, Morris had made a
very nice fortune for himself, but he, like all other
businessmen in the colonies, was about to see a loss
of revenues as a result of a historically significant tax
And this was a significant moment that was a major
catalyst for unrest in the colonies, and ultimately was one

(03:33):
of the things that led to the revolution, So we're
going to give it a little bit of time here.
On March twenty second, seventeen sixty five, the British government
passed the Stamp Act. This act was described as quote
an Act for granting and applying certain stamp duties and
other duties in the British Colonies and plantations in America,
towards further defraying the expenses of defending, protecting, and securing

(03:57):
the same, and for amending such parts of the several
Acts of Parliament relating to the trade and revenues of
the said colonies implantations, as direct the manner of determining
and recovering the penalties and forfeitures therein mentioned. The Stamp
Act was the first time Parliament decided that business and

(04:17):
legal interests in the colonies were to be directly taxed
in the interest of funding a standing army on the
North American continent. In addition to business and legal papers, almanacs, newspapers, cards,
and even dice or taxed. From the point of view
of Britain, the seven years were with France, which ended

(04:38):
in seventeen sixty three, had depleted the military. Both financially
and in terms of landholdings and power, and as Britain
saw it, there was a need for an army to
occupy North America and to defend against any other attacks
that might incur further losses and weakening of Britain's North
American position. But from the color colonial point of view,

(05:01):
this was an instance where Britain was taxing them without
any agreement to such a law on their part, a
case of no taxation without representation in terms of the
colonies being frustrated because the colonies didn't have anyone representing
them in Parliament. There were colonial assemblies that the colonists
viewed as their governing bodies, whereas the British government claimed

(05:24):
that British citizens living in North America had virtual representation.
This disagreement about governance and the limits that the colonists
felt should be in place for Parliament's actions led to
massive protests, which is kind of an understatement. In some cases,
British officials were hanged in effigy in the colonies, and
in one instance the home of a British governor was ransacked.

(05:47):
Robert Morris protested the Stamp Act along with other merchants
who were very heavily hit by this act. These protests
did result in a repeal of the Stamp Act a
year after it had been passed, but it wasn't really
a victory. In its place, Parliament passed the Declaratory Act,
which stated that British Parliament had jurisdiction over the colonies

(06:10):
and could pass legislation and governance of them. Yeah, okay,
you got us this time, but now we're putting things
in place that make it okay for us to do
it again. Later at the end of the seventeen sixties,
Robert got married to a woman named Mary White. She
was the daughter of a prominent Philadelphia couple, Colonel Thomas
and Esther White. Mary was twenty and she had grown

(06:32):
up in high society, and it really made all the
sense in the world that she would marry the successful,
thirty five year old Morris. The couple eventually had seven
children together. In seventeen seventy five, Morris served in the
Pennsylvania State Assembly. One of the other representatives during that
time was Ben Franklin. Morris was vice president of the

(06:54):
Pennsylvania Committee of Safety. That committee was tasked with ensuring
the state's litia was supplied and fortified. That included acquiring
arms and building forts along the Delaware River. Then, in
late seventeen seventy five, Morris was selected by the Pennsylvania
legislature to serve in the Continental Congress, So just in

(07:16):
case you do not know that it was the governing
body established to govern the colonies as a whole and
give a galvanized organization structure under which the various colonies
could negotiate with Britain, and once the war began, it
was also there to coordinate their efforts. The seventeen seventy
five Continental Congress that Morris joined was the second one,

(07:37):
the first had been in seventeen seventy four. Morris was
a member of the Congress's Secret Committee, which got weapons
and ammunition for the Continental Army from sources abroad, and
estimated two million dollars was spent by the Secret Committee
from the years seventeen seventy five to seventeen seventy seven,

(07:58):
and Morris's firm, Recis sived about half a million dollars
of it as contractors in overseas trade. He was also
part of the Secret Correspondence Committee, which, as its name suggests,
involved reaching out to other countries on the download to
make alliances. At this point, the Revolutionary War had been
under way for about eight months, beginning in the spring

(08:20):
of seventeen seventy five at Lexington and conquered in Massachusetts.
Coming up, we'll talk about Morris's beliefs regarding independence for
the Colonies, but first we will pause for a sponsor break.

(08:42):
From the time the Revolutionary War had become a likely
outcome of the conflict between Britain and the Colonies, Robert
Morris was kind of in a unique position in terms
of his ideology. He didn't actually want the colonies to
form a new nation. He did, however, want them to
have a lot more autonomy to govern themselves as they

(09:03):
saw fit, rather than being subject to laws enacted from
across the Atlantic, and of course, the big sticking point
for him was taxes. When the Second Continental Congress was
to vote on the issue of independence, Morris sat out
the vote and stayed home that day. He knew that
he was in a very tiny minority, but he was

(09:24):
also entirely willing to abide by the results of the vote.
For a while, Morris thought a reconciliation between the Colonies
and Britain might be possible, but he eventually saw that
it would just never happen. He signed the Declaration of Independence,
but his name doesn't exactly jump out, in part because
it sits to the right of John Hancock's famously very

(09:48):
large signature. Morris is quoted as saying, of this shift
to supporting independence, quote, I am not one of those
politicians that run testy when my own plans are not adopted.
I think it is the duty of a good citizen
to follow when he cannot lead. He also stated that
it is quote the duty of every individual to act

(10:09):
his part in whatever station his country may call him
to in hours of difficulty, danger and distress, and Morris
was all in when it came to supporting the Continental
Army and the independence fight. He helped the militia in
the colonies by leveraging his business success to aid in
the cause. Through his company, he was able to import

(10:30):
weapons and gunpowder to give to the revolutionary forces. Morris
also sold the ships from his company's fleet to the
Continental Navy. As the war played out, his own business
interests became progressively more entangled with that of the colonial government.
That raised some eyebrows, though Given that Morris was making

(10:52):
money by selling assets to the revolutionaries, people started to
accuse him of profiteering, most prominently Thomas Paine. Those accusations
were bolstered by Morris's contracts that he had taken out
with privateers who went after British ships in the Atlantic.
That seems like he's doing a great thing for the colonies.
But as part of those deals Morris was also getting

(11:15):
to keep a lot of what was seized. Writing for
the William and Mary Quarterly in nineteen thirty four, E.
James Ferguson wrote of Morris quote, another advantage of his
office was the use of government money to float his
private enterprises. How much he converted to his own use
is impossible to know, for if private ventures were successful,

(11:38):
money could be replaced, and a misapplication of funds would
very likely leave no trace. It should be said also
that in the normal course of events, there were occasions
when a public officer would owe the government money and
for a time have the benefit of government funds to
finance his private trade. At other times, perhaps the government

(11:59):
might own him money. However, it is clear that Morris
took an improper advantage of his position. He diverted at
least eighty thousand dollars to his own purposes and did
not replace it. Yeah, and a lot of that happens
in a role that we're about to talk about. But
from the beginning there were people going like, what is

(12:22):
Robert Morris doing exactly? What? How is this working? But
Morris's work in politics continued to be related almost entirely
to finances even after the profiteering accusations had begun. During
his involvement in the Revolutionary government, Morris was deeply involved
and influential in how the Continental Congress raised money and

(12:44):
how that money was spent, specifically when it came to
military action. He is often described, with some level of debate,
as having almost single handedly managed the finances of the
revolutionaries from seventeen eighty one to seventeen eighty before he
was Superintendent of Finance, a job created under the Articles

(13:04):
of Confederation. This was a new role created to see
to the ongoing needs of funding for the war effort
and to fix some serious problems. Morris was very good
friends with George Washington, and Washington offered Morris the role
of Secretary of Treasury, but Morris turned it down. This
new job as superintendent didn't have a lot of oversight.

(13:28):
Morris had a great deal of freedom to do whatever
he deemed necessary to write the finances of the fledgling nation,
and that lack of oversight was something Morris had negotiated
as part of agreeing to take the job. He had
initially been asked to become the superintendent in seventeen eighty,
but he didn't accept right away. He had two specific

(13:50):
conditions that had to be agreed to before he would
assume the role. For one, he wanted to be able
to fire anyone he wished within the Treasury, with no
approvals needed from anyone else. And two, he wanted to
be able to maintain all of the various business connections
he had in his private business. After accepting the position,

(14:13):
Morris wrote a letter to George Washington in which he
assured him that it was his goal to ensure that
the General had provisions for his army. We have a
few quotes coming up from Robert Morris, and I will
say as a writer, he's a little convoluted, so just
know that going in. But he wrote to Washington in
this instance quote be assured that it shall be my

(14:35):
study to guard you as much as possible against the
distress and perplexity that arise from want of provisions, etc.
And if the several legislatures will only do their part
with vigor, I shall have the strongest hopes of putting
a much better face on our money to affairs in
a short time. But without their aid, the wheels will
go heavily round. I shall therefore apply them closely in

(14:59):
order to bring about changes gradually. I have advertised for
contracts to supply rations to the troops, artificers, and prisoners
that are now in this city, or which may happen
to be here from time to time between this and
the first January next. And he also outlines in this
letter his plan for sort of juggling the obligations of

(15:20):
these various contracts, which offers a glimpse into the way
that Morris thought about money, and specifically about transactions. So
be warned this is an especially wild and run on
sentence quote. I believe it may not answer so well
to contract for rations to be delivered at the main
army as to make one contract for bread, another for

(15:41):
fresh beef, another for salted meat, another for rum, vinegar
and salt, etc. Because by dividing these contracts, I can
oblige each contractor to allow convenience in time of payment
for certain part of the supplies. And it is most
consistent with demonstrated ideas to divide things of this kind
amongst a number of freemen rather than permit anyone to

(16:05):
grasp all the advantages that may arise from the contract.
And there is no danger of prices rising so as
to create artificial scarcity under the management of several contractors,
because they will all be actuated by one principle that
operates effectually against that kind of competition which raises prices.
Whereas a number of purchasers who have no other rule

(16:26):
for their government than a desire to obtain what they want,
never fail to raise prices by the measure they pursue,
even though they mean to serve the public. Ever, so well,
basically like we're going to have an easier time juggling
a bunch of people and moving our money around that
way than actually having one contract. Morris did work diligently

(16:48):
to deliver on his promise of getting Washington the resources
he needed. The movement of the Continental Army from New
York to Yorktown led by George Washington was made possible
by Morris's fundraising. That fundraising came in several forms, one
borrowing from France, two requisitioning from the States. In the

(17:09):
Articles of Confederation adopted in seventeen seventy seven, there was
a provision for Congress to request money from the States,
but the states didn't have to kick in any money.
It was strictly a request and not a command. So
the first thing Morris did in his new role was
to try to establish a war debt tax. That didn't
make it through Congress. All the states but Rhode Island

(17:30):
agreed to it, but they needed a unanimous vote for
the tax to be levied. Still, though, he did reach
out to the states to get them to pony up
as much as possible, and then three Morris himself when
funding came up shorts. That was when he reached into
his own pocket to make up the gap. So this
may sound like kind of a wild concept, right, a

(17:50):
public official paying from his personal coffers to finance military action.
But for Morris, the fight for independence had become very
much about money and commerce. In that letter to Washington
that we quoted a moment ago, he also relays some
information like really detailed information about specific market values of items,

(18:12):
and the ways in which Morris watched such things. And
then he told Washington, quote, I would not take up
your time with this detail, only for the sake of
this one observation, which I think should be impressed on
the minds of all persons in power, and which I
believe exactly coincides with your sentiments. It is that commerce
should be perfectly free, and property soundly secured to the owner.

(18:35):
The only exception that should be admitted our legal restraints,
on the first founded on such evident public utility as
convinces the community at large of their propriety, and such
restraints should continue no longer than the propriety is evident.
And on the last, the only exception should be as
to that part of property which is taken from all
with an equal hand by taxation. Kind of like, hey,

(18:57):
when we set up our government, keep your hands out
of a business. In seventeen eighty one, Morris established the
Bank of North America. This was an effort to stabilize
the economy, which was in the middle of what looked
like an endless inflation cycle, and to regulate the printing
of banknotes. As the war played out, Congress had issued

(19:19):
a lot of paper money as part of their fundraising,
and it meant that the new country they were trying
to establish was starting out with a really shaky financial picture.
But this bank plan of Morris's also got some side eye.
It was yet another instance where Morris, clearly a person
with a bias for action, kind of forged ahead while
other statesmen were standing around asking if this was actually

(19:42):
legal to do. But bigger than any questions posed about
the legality was the reality that there really did need
to be a bank, so the plan went ahead. This
was a privately owned bank run by the subscriber investors
who bought into it. So the idea was that in
lieu of tax income, which had been voted down, the

(20:03):
Bank of North America would provide money through the subscribers
to pay off the national debt. The bank also issued
its own national notes. The banknote situation in the seventeen
seventies had gotten really messy. Massachusetts had been the first
to start issuing banknotes, starting right after the Battle of
Lexington and conquered. These banknotes were bills issued against money

(20:26):
the colony would have in the future through a variety
of income streams, including taxes and levies. After Massachusetts started
doing it, so did the other colonies, and things rapidly
got out of hand as bills were issued at a
rate that just couldn't ever be backed up. But there
was ongoing need for war funding, so these bills continued

(20:48):
to be printed, though the glut in the market devalued
them and led to inflation. To compound the issue, Britain
started printing counterfeit notes and dropping them into circulation. In
North America. In seventeen seventy seven, the Continental Congress called
for the then states to stop issuing currencies. There was

(21:08):
a new system initiated in seventeen eighty, with the states
issuing their own notes, but as part of a larger
regulated system overseen by Congress, but that system wasn't embraced
because no one trusted notes at that point, even if
Congress backed the state issued currency. Estimates put the value
of currency in seventeen eighty at a fortieth of its

(21:31):
face value. So all of this was what Morris inherited
as a problem to solve, and it is why his
Bank of North America introduced notes that were intended for
nationwide circulation. Morris also called for the creation of a
National Mints, but Congress didn't prioritize that. It wasn't until

(21:52):
seventeen ninety two, eight years after Morris left the Superintendent
of Finance role, for the National Mint to be established
through the Coinage Act. Morris also reorganized the Treasury and
established much more robust reporting structures and schedules. Morris's team
gave regular monthly reports that were widely circulated to the

(22:13):
public via newspapers, so that there was both transparency and,
when needed, the opportunity for the public to see issues
and call them out. This was also a way to
ensure that states didn't renege on their agreements and that
they were paying enough money to help the war effort,
and so that the Treasury could rebuild the lost trust
in national finances. Robert Morris had plenty of critics, and

(22:38):
some of them believed he had done some shady things
while serving as Superintendent of Finance. We will talk about
that and some other trouble he got into after we
hear from the sponsors that keep stuffiness in history class going.

(23:02):
After Morris left the Superintendent of Finance job in seventeen
eighty four, there were ongoing concerns about the ways he
had handled things and whether or not he had maneuvered
aspects of the job to ensure his own wealth. On
June twentieth, seventeen eighty five, there was a resolution in
Congress to investigate Morris's conduct as Superintendent of Finances. At

(23:24):
the time, the resolution kind of sputtered because it would
have taken time and resources that were in short supply.
But Morris himself continued to push for the investigation for
several years because with that one he was going to
be forever under suspicion, and he felt that he had
done nothing wrong. He wrote once again to George Washington

(23:45):
in seventeen ninety asking him to please get an investigation underway, writing, quote,
your memorialist, desirous of rescuing his reputation from the aspersions
thrown upon it, came in the month of October seventeen
eighty eight to the City of New York as well,
for the purpose of urging the appointment of commissions to
inspect his official transactions, as for that of procuring an

(24:07):
adjustment of the accounts which existed previous to his administration.
He was basically saying like, please check the receipts. Let's
have it all out in the open. In February of
seventeen ninety, a House committee made up of James Madison,
Theodore Sedgwick, and Roger Sherman got the referral for an investigation.

(24:28):
Because of this, Morris is sometimes said to be the
first subject of a Congressional committee investigation, but the extent
of that investigation is a little unclear. A statement made
by Madison in March of seventeen ninety indicated that quote
regular official examination has been already made into the transactions

(24:48):
of mister Morris as Superintendent of the Finances of the
United States, and that it is inexpedient to incur the
expense of a re examination by commissioners, as proposed by
the resolution of the Senate on that subject. The resolution
went on to a second committee, which looked at the
various receipts and accounts and determined that Morris hadn't done

(25:10):
anything wrong to his supporters. Yes, Morris did have money
coming in through some of his war deals, but he
was also losing money by personally financing things like arms purchases.
But though he was cleared of the profiteering charges. He
continued to have detractors who believed that he was a profiteer. Yeah,

(25:33):
his declaration of innocence by the Senate Committee didn't really
do much. The people that distrusted him continued to do so.
After the war ended, and during that period of time
when the accusations against him as a public official had intensified,
Morris initially actually kind of tried to go back to
his pre war life. He wanted to just get back

(25:55):
to his business affairs, but he was pulled back into
civic work as a Progressional delegate. In seventeen eighty seven,
Morris was part of the Constitutional Convention, where he worked
alongside other Founding Fathers in drafting the first US Constitution.
After the Constitution was created, Morris did not go back
to his business. He served as a Senator from seventeen

(26:18):
eighty nine to seventeen ninety five, and his focus as
a senator was actually keeping an eye on national finance,
lobbying for reform during the late seventeen hundreds, Morris made
a number of financial decisions that would come back to
bite him. For one, he sank a lot of money
into building his dream home. It was a mansion designed

(26:39):
by Pierre L'Enfant, who also designed the district of Columbia.
The lot he had for the home was near the
center of the city, and there was a degree to
which he was kind of hoping that he could flip
this as a location for the presidential residence when that
was still undecided. Once it became apparent that that was

(27:00):
not going to happen, he envisioned his own home and
he saw it as a structure that would become iconic
to the city. We will come back to the planned
mansion in just a moment. Morris also during this time,
shifted his business interests away from banking in trade and
put everything he had into real estate, specifically speculative real estate,

(27:22):
and he went big, purchasing a reported millions of acres
with no immediate plans for their use. There wasn't a
development plan and there were no buyers in place for
all of this property, and he went into debt to
make those purchases. While he had been in business with
a number of other speculators at various points in these acquisitions,

(27:44):
a lot of those other partners bowed out after a
certain point, so then Morris was on the hook for
ever greater amounts of debt. Meanwhile, his Philadelphia lot sat undeveloped.
He had managed to put a fence around it before
getting off involved, and then as things ramped up, he
started really hemorrhaging money. According to historian Ryan K. Smith,

(28:07):
who wrote the book Robert Morris's Folly, it was costing
Morris two one hundred and forty four dollars each month
to keep the workers going. There were rumors that the
project was plagued by issues and that Morris wasn't happy
with the design. Lamfont was paid nearly ten thousand dollars
over the course of several years for this project, but

(28:29):
the house made slow progress. The seventeen ninety three yellow
fever epidemic that swept through Philadelphia led Morris and Lamfont
to both leave the city, and that dragged the progress
farther and farther behind. Then, in seventeen ninety seven, a
serious financial crisis erupted. Morris and his business partners were

(28:51):
not the only people buying up land with the intention
of quickly flipping it or working with other investors to
develop it. A lot of people of means, recognizing that
a country in its infancy would only grow wanted to
get in on the potential for a huge financial payout
that such a moment might offer. As with any financial

(29:12):
panic or crisis, there were many factors involved, but the
two major ones in seventeen ninety seven were these. One,
the US credit system was still inflated, and there were
more loans out than could be backed up with real money.
A lot of loans were backed up with property in
areas that weren't yet developed, like farther out to the west,

(29:33):
and their potential value turned out to not be real. Two.
A lot of the speculation going on was carried out
with the assumption that foreign investors would come in and
buy land or develop it, thus boosting both the finance
of the speculators and the overall US economy, but that
didn't happen. The French Revolution took place in a Europe

(29:55):
that had already been depleted in many countries by loans
and expenses related to the revolutionary war that had just
played out in North America, and banks in Europe were
having their own problems. When the Bank of England put
a halt to any exchange of paper currency for coinage
in seventeen ninety seven, everything kind of crashed and the

(30:16):
speculation bubble in North America popped. Morris found himself deeply
in debt, with no money coming in to pay back
the various loans he had taken out. And when we
say deeply in debt, he had with business partner John Nicholson,
amassed ten million dollars in debt in their real estate
speculation that is not adjusted to today's currency value. There

(30:38):
was no way he would ever be able to repay this,
although he was constantly dancing and hustling to try to
come up with any money he could. By the end
of seventeen ninety seven, Robert and his wife Mary had
stopped appearing in public. Morris's personal crisis went from bad
to worse as his creditors took legal action, desperately hoping

(30:59):
to save themselves from collapse. Unable to pay his many loans,
in early seventeen ninety eight, Morris was sentenced to debtor's prison.
He was confined in the Prune Street Debtors Prison, which
sat next to the Walnut Street Prison. His mansion project ended,
and the unfinished home was nicknamed Morris's Bolly by the

(31:21):
citizens of Philadelphia. In prison, Morris was visited by a
range of prestigious friends, including George Washington, fellow founding father
Governor Morris stopped bi frequently and made arrangements so that
Robert's wife Mary would at least have a small pension
to live on. Throughout his confinement, Morris continued to negotiate

(31:43):
with his creditors, hoping that he could strike a deal
that would get him released. Then the Bankruptcy Act of
eighteen hundred, known more formally as a Bill to Establish
and Uniform System of Bankruptcy throughout the United States, was
passed that offered the possibility of a release. This Act,
which was applied to merchant debtors, only allowed those debtors

(32:07):
to be discharged from prison if two thirds of their
creditors agreed to it. The Act enabled Morris to declare
bankruptcy and get out of debtors prison. He was released
in eighteen oh one. Morris was one of the most,
if not the most high profile speculators to land in prison,
so it looks on first glance as though this law

(32:27):
was created just to spring him, and while benefiting Morris
might have been a motivator, he was one of a
lot of prominent men who had gotten into similar trouble.
There had actually been discussion of a Bankruptcy Act as
early as seventeen ninety two, but it did not get
prioritized until after the seventeen ninety seven crisis, and the

(32:48):
act didn't exactly sail through Congress. It passed by a
single vote. The eighteen hundred Act was intended to be
a piece of stopgap legislation to get the country through
the immediate problem of a lot of formerly wealthy and
powerful people being in debtors prison, and it had a
five year limit on it, but it did not even

(33:09):
last for five years. It was repealed after three. As
for Morris, he never returned to his former lifestyle, having
once been one of the wealthiest men on the continent. Instead,
he lived in a modest house on the outer edge
of Philadelphia with his wife Mary. He did actually try
to get back into business as a merchant and trader,

(33:30):
but he was already out of pace with those industries
and where they had progressed to while he was busy
doing politics and then being in prison, and he also
just had a shadow of distrust hanging over him. Morris
died on May eighth, eighteen oh six. Despite having been
really instrumental in the success of the revolutionaries and the

(33:50):
formation of the United States, and the end he was
relatively poor and largely forgotten. Although there is a good
bit of scholarship regarding his life today, he's generally not
one of the founding fathers who comes up a lot
when people invoke that phrase. And in wondering why, I
found this really wonderful quote by Ryan Smith, who we

(34:11):
quoted earlier, and who is a Virginia Commonwealth University history professor,
who talks about how Morris was supposed to be, you know,
this apex version of what it was to be a
moneyman in the New Country. But then he wrote quote instead,
he had this horrible crash that threatened to bring down
his peers. For a variety of reasons, people wanted to

(34:35):
forget Robert Morris and his role in the Revolution, which
is just a good example of how the stories we
tell ourselves about things like history and particularly like civic
pride get tweaked to leave out the uglier stuff and
the messier stuff. Right. But that is Robert Morris, who

(34:56):
I find ceaselessly fascinating and also so just kind of wild.
I have thoughts I have thoughts. Do you also have
listener mail? I do this listener mail came with some
of the cutest cat pictures of all time. That's all
you need to do, and it's about Ada Coleman, who
I love this from our listener page, who writes, Hello,

(35:17):
Holly and Tracy. Longtime fan of the show and loved
your most recent episode on Ada Coleman in the Savoy
American Bar. I have to share that we have our
own Gilbert and Sullivan tradition here in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, called
the Savoy Company. I also picked this because it related
to today's episode. Location wise, we are the oldest amateur
theater company in the world solely dedicated to the works

(35:38):
of Gilbert and Sullivan since Douley Kart's dissolution in nineteen
eighty two. We have been performing in Philly and the
surrounding area since nineteen oh one and often use the
Savoy Cocktail Book during our happy hours. Absolutely loved learning
more about Ada Coleman and of course some GNS history.
They have shows coming up. They're doing the Mikado this spring.

(35:59):
You can look for more information if you want it
on their website, which is Savoyd dot org. For pet
tax I'm sending pictures of my great Tabby Carlow, including
his studying of the Rudi Gore score and other genius work.
Thank you for the podcast. I always look forward to
a new episode. This cat is so cute I borderline

(36:20):
can't deal with it. One of them. He has on
an adorable outfit which is like one of those fabulous
pet costumes. That isn't really the cat wearing an outfit.
It's kind of draped over his shoulders, so in front
it looks like arms and a little cowboy person. Yeah,
it's so stinking cute, and he's so very cute. He
looks a lot like one of my best friend's babies.
So thank you, Paige, because I always need more kiddies

(36:42):
and kitties that can read or keep that one for sure.
If you would like to write to us, share your
pet pictures or your love of anybody we've talked about,
or you're dislike of them, that's also fine. You can
do that at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. If
you would like to describe to the show that is
as easy as pie, you can do it on the
iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.

(37:11):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
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Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

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