in the historical narrative of the nation’s early years. As I learned more about Willing’s extraordinary life, I found myself mortified on his behalf when I learned of his votes against independence – in retrospect, a seeming act of heresy at America’s most sacred moment. Was he disloyal? Obstinate? A defender of his narrow commercial interests? My curiosity pulled at the thread of that no vote until the story familiar to me about the vote for independence gradually unraveled into a new one. This vote came in the throes of an internal political class war in America that unfolded alongside its war with Britain and helps us understand Willing’s perspective. Thomas Willing’s life and times – and his vote against independence – opens up a much larger story of these two wars, which together profoundly set the course for the new United States.

Willing is a paradoxical figure, and we cannot truly understand this moment or its implications for American history without understanding this paradox, because even as Willing cast his votes, he and his business partner Morris were supporting the Revolution in a more tangible and imperative way: they were financing it. And often on nothing more than their personal wealth, credit, and reputations. They were taking the lead and the risk in supplying much-needed arms, gunpowder, and funds to the Revolution, likely saving it in its earliest and most perilous months.

Stated simply, Willing was the most powerful figure in early American history that you’ve likely never heard of. He was America’s dominant merchant and banker through the Revolution and the earliest days of the Republic and stood at the very heart of America’s founding financial elite. This elite’s political and economic conflicts with an emerging class of the so-called “middling and lower sorts,” and its creation of a new financial system for the young nation, profoundly shaped American history.

Pugnacious President John Adams would complain that “[George] Washington and [Alexander] Hamilton, with all their Understrappers, Tools, Satilites and Puffers, were in the Way: all governed by Willings and Chews and Bingham and Yard” – an extended and powerful group that Thomas Willing dominated. Adams had often protested that Washington was unduly swayed by Hamilton, but here he made a more startling claim: that for all their influence and power, both men were under the sway of – nay, governed by – Thomas Willing and his associates. Adams viewed their wealth and influence – embodied in the two banks Willing helped create – as the epitome of a threat to democracy, fretting that Willing and his son-in-law William Bingham would “get possession of all Pennsylvania” through their extraordinary riches. This, after the country had just won its freedom from the king. “A banking Aristocracy,” Adams lamented, “is not better than any other Aristocracy.”

US history has followed the country’s ideas, politicians, soldiers, revolutionaries, social movements, settlers, rebels, and immigrants. Money and debt – and who controls them – are Archimedes levers that move the fate of nations, and yet this is

a story that has largely been overlooked. Colonists’ orientation toward Britain, independence, and even the US Constitution was in no small part influenced by whether they owed or lent; whether they wanted debts enforced or expunged; and whether debt acted in their lives to leverage a fortune or provoke ruin. This influence runs like an invisible but unbreakable thread through the nation’s founding.

As America’s dominant financier, Willing wielded enormous power. He was the man at the pinnacle of the burgeoning American banking industry, president of the nation’s first bank and then its first central bank, the Bank of the United States. As such, he directly oversaw over a third of all the bank loans made in the country during his almost thirty- year career – and whether perceived or real, political and legislative votes were influenced by the “dread of being refused [loans] at the Bank.”

In the Revolution, prevailing against Britain came down to whether America could obtain sufficient supplies and funding, and Willing was central to both. Robert Morris, deemed “the financier of the Revolution,” was Willing’s employee whom he later elevated to partner. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton was his client. William Bingham, Willing’s wealthy son-in-law, was selected as a young man by Congress as its agent to raise funds for the Revolution through trading and feats of privateering in the West Indies, where he oversaw the capture of more than 200 British merchant ships. After the war, Willing’s London banking relatives, the father and son Francis and Alexander Baring – leaders of a firm so formidable that it would later be called the world’s “sixth great power” – would help finance America’s banks and government, including the massive 1803 Louisiana Purchase. Part of that financing would be a loan from Willing’s bank.

Three of these men – the dealmaker Morris, the brilliant and obsessive Hamilton, and the opportunist Bingham – would end up as tragic figures. The Barings would be winners, globally triumphant after the Revolutionary War helped vault their success forward. All of their stories – or, more accurately, parts of all of their stories – help explain Thomas Willing and what he meant to the young nation.

Willing’s vote against independence was the embodiment of the preference of Philadelphia’s elite merchant class. In fact, in 1775, the wealthy Quakers and Anglicans who dominated Pennsylvania’s government had expressly prohibited its delegates from voting for independence. Though Willing had been Pennsylvania’s leader in protesting the Stamp and Townshend Acts, he, along with many of his associates, were deeply entangled with British wealth and did not see the need for revolution. At the same time, they found themselves in the crucible of an internal political war in Pennsylvania that pitted the conservative elite merchant traders in the colony’s port city against the middling and lower sorts – the largely rural Scots-Irish Presbyterian farmers and artisans who had been flooding into that colony, who coveted independence, and who were becoming a radical force for political change. The fate of the country

hung in the balance as these factions fought a virulent class war within America that has raged episodically and in different guises ever since.

These characters can neither be reduced to caricatures of greed and self-interest nor exempted from aspects of those criticisms. They resisted American independence, and then they bankrolled it. They were crucial to financing a revolution of democratic and egalitarian ideals, and then they inscribed their financial self-interests into the new nation’s founding documents, moments, and creeds. They built their own wealth, and then they built the nation’s, because they accomplished one vital thing: they brought a finance and banking revolution to America that bridged the political revolution of 1776 and the industrial revolution of the 1800s.

Along the way, Willing and his ensemble gained, expanded, expended, and occasionally lost their fortunes; speculated on land; built the new republic’s largest homes; intermarried to consolidate power and riches; and forged America’s first culture of wealth with all its riveting scandals and celebrity.

Over the decades, Willing grew the modest trading business he inherited from his father into the dominant merchant firm in Philadelphia and likely all of North America. During the 1740s, his father’s firm had conducted trading voyages averaging 15 tons (a rough measure of a ship’s capacity) per year. Under Willing’s leadership, along with that of his partner Morris, this increased to about 86 tons per year during the 1750s, then to over 260 tons annually just before the Revolutionary War, and then to a remarkable 1,043 annually by the end of the 1780s. This was a time when merchant trading was the preeminent business of the elite, and the firm’s ships carried wheat and timber to the West Indies and Europe and brought wine, sugar, cloth, and other manufactured goods back to Philadelphia. Over the course of his career, Willing would parlay a $26,000 inheritance from his father into a fortune estimated at roughly $1 million.

In the crucial period leading to Yorktown – a point by which the continental currency had turned worthless – Willing, Bingham, Morris, and others pooled their own personal resources to help supply the army. This led to the creation of America’s first bank for the express purpose of funding the war. As its president, Willing would lend money to the fragile US government. Hamilton rejoiced: he had carefully analyzed the financial capacity of both Britain and America for continued fighting, then calculated the added funding that loans from a new bank could bring. “Without being an enthusiast,” he concluded, “I will venture to assert, that with such a resource as is here proposed (the bank), the loss of our Independence is impossible.”

In Thomas Willing, we find a conjunction of obscurity and power – the contradiction of a titan who’s been forgotten by history. In our world bankers aren’t revolutionaries and revolutionaries aren’t bankers. Progressives and financiers seem to hold opposite things sacred – the former, liberty; the latter, power in the form of fully unbridled capitalism. But in the evolution of Willing’s

life, we see a capacity to adapt and a consequential and improbable amalgam of these traits. True, as he strolled with stately calm down the streets of Philadelphia, he was sometimes mistaken for George Washington, but Willing made no boasts to that kind of stature. He had a long-standing reputation for modesty, steadfastness, and honesty in his conduct, and “a civil and respectful deportment to all my fellow citizens.” Even Adams, upon first meeting him in 1774, had deemed Willing “the most agreeable man.” Willing was devoted to family, paying great attention throughout his life to his many siblings and children. He was similarly committed to the firm passed on to him from his father. He was Mayor, Assemblyman, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice, and a creature of habit who claimed as his own talents nothing more grandiose than persistence and hard work. He was so predictable and punctilious, the banker’s temperament, that he was nicknamed “the old regulator.”

Perhaps the most telling character in Willing’s story was America itself: bursting, explosive, unbounded – from the outset a stage for turmoil, conflict, and relentless advancement. It was a country one astonished immigrant decried as “a Hercules in the cradle.” Far from a small and wanting country resisting the depredations of an impregnable Britain, Willing’s America was in the midst of the greatest economic expansion in world history. The Willings had not come to America because of religious persecution, but to build more wealth. The country, and in particular fertile Pennsylvania, was the Silicon Valley of its day – a beacon for ambitious British entrepreneurs. This was a century in which the colonies’ population would skyrocket from 200,000 to 5 million while their collective economies grew from nothing to one-third the size of mighty Britain’s, making it inevitable that America would not long subordinate itself to its mother country. In that span, against that backdrop, Willing and his associates would become America’s first financial elite.

So many roads of history seemed to intersect with Willing, and then I discovered that this was literally true as well, after I (a Philadelphian) took a walk to visit the location of Willing’s home. For a time, Willing and most of the men that surrounded him lived within a few doors of each other on a two-block stretch of Philadelphia – Third Street, from Spruce to Walnut to Chestnut – to form one of the densest concentrations of wealth and power the nation has ever known. Willing had his house on Third Street at Willing’s Alley, just south of Walnut. Hamilton lived across the street from Willing and conducted his notorious affair with the prostitute Maria Reynolds there. Bingham, married to Willing’s luminous daughter Anne, would build the largest mansion in Philadelphia just down the block at Spruce where the two would entertain regally. George Washington lived next door to Willing for a time after the Battle of Yorktown. The brilliant lawyer James Wilson, viewed by some as “the Father of our Constitution,” lived just north of

Willing at Walnut. Benjamin Chew, who served as both Pennsylvania’s Attorney General and Chief Justice of the state’s Supreme Court – and who was one of the targets in John Adams’s angry missive – lived between Willing and Bingham.

Future Treasury Secretary Oliver Wolcott lived briefly on that street, too. Even young Alexander Baring, destined to become Europe’s most powerful banker, would live next to Willing for a time in what we now know as the Powel House, once owned by Willing’s sister, Elizabeth Willing Powel, and later given as a wedding gift to Baring when he married Willing’s granddaughter. Just across Walnut sat the financial institutions that Willing and Hamilton dominated, the Bank of the United States and the US Treasury, respectively. Hamilton would often visit with Willing, the country’s loan officer, and discuss the government’s loans.

Even very highly regarded histories of this period that touch on finance often speak solely of the Bank of the United States, a looming and impersonal presence, with little or no mention of Willing, its president. So one of the most influential figures in early American history is also one of the least remembered today, though this lack of recognition comports neither with Adams’s assessment of Willing nor with the fact that he was powerful enough to not only decline loan requests from America’s government, but to require early loan repayment at a critical moment – something no one has had the power to do since.

Willing was a pivotal leader in Philadelphia’s rise to become the North American colonies’ leading city in the eighteenth century, boldly building his business and with it the economy of that city. He led Philadelphia’s protests against the Currency, Stamp, and Townshend Acts, and would live so long that he would be of at least some influence in everything of major consequence to Philadelphia and America from the Albany Conference of 1754 to the chartering of the Second Bank of the United States in 1816.

Though he initially opposed independence, he and his partner Robert Morris played a crucial role in supplying and funding the Revolutionary War. Once the colonies committed to that path, Willing extended his personal credit and his firm’s overseas connections to quickly secure financing, gunpowder, and other vital war needs. He later became president of America’s first bank, an institution chartered to provide desperately needed funds for the war at a point when continental currency had turned virtually worthless. This was a “war of finance,” as Morris himself later noted – a financial war of attrition that would cost (distant) Britain far more than the colonies. This broad collaboration between radical political impulses for independence and the support of the conservative merchant elite was the only feasible path to victory. During the war, Willing was seemingly everywhere, serving on countless war committees while his ships served as navy vessels, his warehouses as a munitions depot, and his wharves as a gathering point for navy seamen.

Willing and Morris launched that bank in a country that had

no banks or banking system – a venture he described as a “pathless wilderness.” Indeed, the colonies had been prohibited from establishing such banks. He then played a vital part in shaping the young nation’s new world of banking as a generous resource to advise other new banks in other cities.

His banks financed the robust growth of the new nation’s private sector. As president of the Bank of the United States, he was the dominant economic force in the country, extending “public and private credit,” as Hamilton would put it, to the US government, the merchant elite, and the broader business community. In any economy, growth is dependent on loans, and he was responsible for making the largest portion of the loans made in the country for more than a quarter of a century. Hamilton, in his less than seven years as Treasurer, primarily financed the government (in part with Willing’s help). Willing, in his twenty-six years as a bank president, financed both the government and the emerging business class, so much so that the country’s economy more than tripled in size during his banking tenure.

From his seat of power and with his fundamentally conservative temperament, he would, through time, implement curbs and guardrails against the banking industry’s tendency toward boom and bust. This included establishing internal guidelines, governed by a balance of risk and caution, that his bank branches should not make loans of more than five times the “specie capital apportioned to them.” He skillfully navigated his own business and banks through one of the most turbulent eras in economic history – a sixty-year span that saw almost continual wars and near wars; the postwar depressions of the 1760s, 1780s, and the latter half of the 1810s; the financial crises of 1772, 1791–2, 1797, and 1819; the economic boycotts and embargoes of 1765, 1767, 1773, and 1807–9; and one of the most far-reaching political revolutions in history. Willing kept his perspective and his fortune – and kept his banks in strong condition – when many others did not. It is arguable that a different Bank president with a different temperament could not have provided the steady helmsmanship that allowed this experiment to succeed so mightily. In stark contrast, when William Jones – a former Secretary of the Navy with no banking experience – took the helm of the newly chartered Second Bank of the United States in 1816, his catastrophic mismanagement led not only to his own dismissal but to one of the worst financial crises in US history.

Remarkably, Willing’s combination of power and conservatism was such that he was the only lender to ever call the US government’s loans. For all his commitment to advancement, he had the indispensable ability to say no; to resist the siren song of million-acre land speculations when his peers succumbed; to turn down friends, family, and even the government for loans he deemed ill-advised, and to circumscribe the activities of his life when those were overextended.

Willing has been overshadowed by

Hamilton in most historical scholarship and writing, but at the helm of the Bank of the United States, he helped Hamilton shape the national financial and economic system. He crafted policies that governed the interactions between the Treasury and the Bank of the United States (the same kind of policies that govern the relationship between the Treasury and Federal Reserve today), coordinated with Hamilton and his successors to stabilize and sometimes save troubled banks, and even showed Hamilton how to create secret, anti-counterfeiting marks on bank notes. Willing helped to unify, streamline, and rationalize the government’s finances in its first decades as his bank and branch network served as a principal depository for federal monies and tax payments; a transfer mechanism from city to city; a clearing agent for payments on the national debt; and a facilitator for the payment of government salaries.

Because of their banking power, Willing and his peers had a profound political influence, and the specter of Willing’s approval or disapproval hung over most major legislative actions of that period, including the fierce legislative battle for ratification of the Constitution, the protracted battle to get the new government to honor its war debt, and the political battles regarding the Jay Treaty and the Quasi-War. Willing’s power in these moments came in part from his financial control: Whether real or perceived, many were loath to vote against Willing’s wishes for “dread of being refused [loans] at the Bank.” This was the very power that John Adams decried when he wrote that Washington, Hamilton, and their staffs were all “governed by [the] Willings.” Significantly, the new monetary system launched by the 1787 Constitution was the very one that Willing, Morris, and Bingham had so coveted. It precluded states from ever again issuing currency and left banks as the all-but-exclusive creators of money in the new country.

In short, Willing was a colossus presiding over the financial landscape of the new republic. Meanwhile, over his own lifetime, he built a substantial fortune, and for a time was likely the wealthiest man in America.

His values and character anchored him. Surely part of his success and durability can be credited to his steadfastly modest profile. One of the most remarkable lessons of Willing’s life was his own acceptance of the corrective of moderation. In decades roiled by extremes – forces of revolution and counterrevolution that pulled toward division and potential dissolution – Willing, however reluctantly, acquiesced to a moderating center. And he exemplified the importance of family, tasked as he was at an early age with the care of his many siblings and then as a widower with the care of his own children.

His life and deeds are not beyond criticism, either in his moment or retrospectively. The story of Willing and his peers illustrates how the financial elite of the day often pulled tight a knot of privilege in finance, society, marriage, and politics – operating with conflicts of interest, conducting personal business in conjunction with government interests, and using close

connections and intimate knowledge of the government’s workings for financial gain. Given this, it is all the more remarkable that liberty and democratic values sometimes prevailed, and that the elites’ self-interest could be harnessed to create as extraordinary a country and democracy as the United States.

Thomas Willing’s era spurred two revolutions – one against Britain, and one within America, centered in the vital linchpin state of Pennsylvania. The world Willing lived in reached heights of political vitriol rarely matched in our country since, and he set a tone of steadfastness and graciousness that was needed in that moment – as it still is today. Even Adams had called him “the most agreeable man.” The story of Thomas Willing and his peers is the story of contention and compromise between two factions, where in rare but crucial moments, and with great difficulty, differences were bridged and self-interest braided with civic responsibility.

Willing and the banking aristocracy’s contributions suggest that to truly understand the brand of democracy enacted in the US Constitution, we need to understand Willing, Morris, and Bingham as much as Hamilton and Madison. The story of Willing and the banking aristocracy reveals that the struggle between liberty and power, between democracy and oligarchy, is as old as the story of America itself. This is a fundamental paradox that has recurred in different guises ever since.

The banking aristocracy that Adams so feared in 1813 bears resemblance to America’s financial elite in every other era. They all used influence, politics, and power to serve their interests and advantage. Business was often conducted on the very margins of ethics, if not beyond them, and the elite of Willing’s day were likewise infused by ambition, hubris, self-interest, and even recklessness. So, perhaps Adams was right after all – perhaps this banking aristocracy was “not better than any other Aristocracy.”

Except that this was not Willing’s story. In him, we see a more complex legacy: personal ambition and self-interest entwined inseparably with the conviction – even the cultural assumption – that private interest had to somehow support the greater good. With Willing, wealth brought duty. Perhaps the most elegant evidence for this is his lengthy resume of public service roles. In addition to funding the Revolutionary War and creating American banking, he served as a mayor, a justice on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, a Common Council member, president of the Provincial Congress, a delegate to the Continental Congress, a Commissioner of Indian Affairs, a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania, and much more. Civic interest and self-interest were often entangled for Willing and his compatriots. Yet it is better to have civic interest entangled with self-interest than to have no civic interest at all. Willing’s story invites us to think beyond cynicism.

Above all, Thomas Willing embodied a new nation’s capacity for evolution and adaptation, and as this book shows throughout, this is one of our most vital democratic skills. Thomas Willing adapted and thus made manifest the nation’s capacity to adapt. Though known for his

habitual nature, the world changed cataclysmically around Willing, and he changed with it even as he helped to change it. He started in a world where the wealthy were appointed to key offices and ended ina world where commoners were elected to office, with power increasingly shared with artisans and mechanics who held very different views on government, religion, and society. He started in a world in which he was financially tethered to the lucrative heart of the British Empire, profoundly uncomfortable with the very idea of independence, and ended as an exemplar of the power of that economic independence, boldly trading as far away as China. He went from a dependence on British financiers to becoming a key architect of what became the world’s greatest financial system in the United States, with rudimentary financial tools evolving into complex systems of money, banking, and insurance that he helped create.

Willing would succeed far more than almost any other in his era largely because he was the embodiment of what became cherished American values: dependability coupled with innovation; steadfastness with graciousness; boldness with prudence; and conviction with compromise. As Willing himself would reflect: “My success in life has not been derived from superior abilities, or extensive knowledge, a very small and scanty share of either having fallen to my lot; therefore, it can only be ascribed to a steady application to whatever I have undertaken, a civil and respectful deportment to all my fellow citizens, and to an honest and upright conduct in every transaction of life.”

So why has Willing been lost to history?

One answer to that question is his vote against independence, which denies him claim to status as a Founding Father. Another likely falls with historians’ tendency to neglect the history of banking and finance.

But Willing is also unknown because he did not write much that survives beyond ordinary business correspondence – and thus left historians comparatively little by which to directly know him or his world. We know every nuance of John Adams’s thoughts and feelings through his diaries and copious correspondence. It seems Hamilton could not put pen to paper without pouring forth a thousand words. Willing’s surviving correspondence consists almost entirely of business transactions, with few observations on politics or the broader world, much less anything salacious. (“I never write but on mere business,” he once wrote to Morris, and then later to Bingham: “I am not fond of writing on political subjects.”) But that’s in keeping with his great success – a truly great lender must be the height of discretion and confidentiality, and Willing was nothing if not discreet, even in his most personal correspondence.

It was also not in his nature to seek the spotlight. Willing sought duty, inarguably – as a member of Pennsylvania’s Assembly he served on thirty- three committees, four times more than most – but not the acclaim that might accompany it. Born to wealth and power, he never had that need. In marked contrast, Hamilton, who grew up in

heartbreaking circumstances – abandoned by his father, witness to his mother’s death, labeled a bastard child, and separated from his half-brother – spent his life trying to prove himself, reaching in every moment for the spotlight.

The omissions of history seem forever compounded. There are many key moments in which Willing was as or more prominent than anyone else, but at some point, a historian left him out as they streamlined their account, and so the next historian did the same, and over time Willing disappeared altogether – and only a handful of well-polished characters remained in the telling.

But we mustn’t mistake anonymity for powerlessness. Quite the opposite. Willing’s life gives credence to the adage that the loudest one in the room is often the weakest. Thomas Willing and the financial aristocracy of his day were more influential in their time than their counterparts of today, given that Willing and Bingham had Presidents and Treasury Secretaries at their dinner tables far more often and more intimately than the power brokers of the twenty-first century.

Any understanding of the American Revolution or early Republic that does not encompass its costs, its resulting debts, and its complex financial underpinnings misses the mark, since these factors were central to the very causes of the Revolution, to America’s power, to its stark internal divisions, and to its unparalleled ascendance as a new country. Any such omissions rob us of this history’s value in helping to understand today’s world.

There is no more direct path to the heart of this story than through Willing. By recounting his life, we follow the vitriolic class war that polarized the nation and helped bring about the Revolution; the unbridled democracy unleashed by the Revolution and the fear of that democracy; and the conservative counterrevolution meant to tame it. It also tells of the tumultuous explosion of growth that followed and set the pattern for America’s next two hundred years.

Thomas Willing lived a long time, from 1731 to 1821, and was, given his stature, engaged to at least some degree in almost all the key developments in the emergence of the new nation, from the Albany Conference to the Stamp Act, from the Declaration of Independence to the US Constitution, from the Louisiana Purchase to Jefferson’s embargo, and much in between.

To study his life is to have a more profound understanding of America.