Anonymous ID: e9bf96 Feb. 2, 2019, 3:49 p.m. No.5006490   🗄️.is đź”—kun

Bank of North America

 

First private bank in USA, 1781.

 

Using a gift/loan from France, Robert Morris purchased 63.3% of the original shares for the government. Robert Morris deposited large quantities of gold and silver coin and bills of exchange obtained through loans from the Netherlands and France. He then issued new paper currency backed by this supply.

 

So it started like this

Anonymous ID: e9bf96 Feb. 2, 2019, 3:56 p.m. No.5006576   🗄️.is đź”—kun   >>6694

The man who financed the American Revolution

 

During desperate desperate years,

merchant Robert Morris answered the call

for money and munitions

so that George Washington could win

 

Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington are the most famous heroes of the American Revolution, but it wouldn’t have turned out successfully without Robert Morris.

 

A signor of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, Morris was a Philadelphia merchant who raised money, often from his own pocket, so that George Washington could feed, clothe and pay his restless soldiers. Morris made it possible for Washington to take his troops to Yorktown, Virginia where he defeated British General Charles Cornwallis, winning the Revolutionary War.

 

The Continental Congress was broke, there was runaway inflation, and Morris dealt with anxious creditors. “He had made more enemies than any other single man in public life up to that time,” wrote biographer Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer. “His rugged force, his sound sense, and his inflexible determination constituted him a friend to be sought and a foe to be feared.”

 

Morris faced mounting demands for cash. After Washington had surprised and routed the Hessians, mercenary soldiers recruited by the British and camped in Trenton, New Jersey, he appealed to Morris for funds with which to buy information about British troop movements. American soldiers were returning from Canada, and they hadn’t been paid. In these and other situations, Morris generally made secured, short-term loans to the Continental Congress.

 

Foreign lenders seemed tapped out. The French government had loaned the Americans 3 million livres in 1778, 4 million in 1780, 10 million in 1781, and King Louis XVI gave an additional 6 million livres to the cause (which didn’t have to be paid back). American representative Benjamin Franklin wasn’t able to get any more loans from the French government. John Jay, the American representative in Madrid, couldn’t borrow more money from the Spanish government, and John Adams didn’t have any luck with the Dutch government. But Adams was able to raise money from Dutch bankers.

 

The American government was loaded with some $25 million of war debts and close to bankruptcy. The French government wouldn’t extend any more credit and was concerned to have existing loans repaid. Those loans were renegotiated at a higher rate of interest.

 

Morris had to deal with all kinds of creditors who wanted to be paid. “The greatest part of my time,” he wrote, “has been consumed in hearing the tales of woe, which many of the public creditors relate, and which I cannot prevent in any other way than by declining personal interviews, and substituting this mode of hearing them in writing.” When about 80 armed Continental soldiers came to his office for their back pay, and he didn’t have anything to offer them, he fled to the home of a friend. He renegotiated one loan after another, since repudiation would have meant bankruptcy.

 

http://www.libertystory.net/LSACTIONROBERTMORRIS.htm