The Banker Who Made America: Thomas Willing and the Rise of the American Financial Aristocracy, 1731–1821 by Richard Vague. Polity. 448 pages

Thomas Willing is a name that few people, even those well-versed in the history of the American Revolution, will probably recognize. Those who do will likely associate Willing with only two achievements: voting against American independence as a Pennsylvania delegate to the Continental Congress of 1776, and serving as the head of the first Bank of the United States, established in Washington’s presidency under the aegis of Alexander Hamilton and his ascendant Federalist allies. Richard Vague’s new book, The Banker Who Made America: Thomas Willing and the Rise of the American Financial Aristocracy, 1731–1821, makes the case that, despite his vote against independence that fateful July, Willing should be recognized for playing a vital role in financing the American Revolution and fostering the nascent nation’s economic power in its early years.

Willing, the eldest son of a well-to-do Philadelphia merchant, was thrust into his responsibilities early. His father died when he was just 22, leaving Thomas with the family business and the heavy responsibility of caring for his widowed mother and 10 younger siblings. The young man proved a more than adept hand at his trade, and soon became one of the most active merchants in the city. He also formed a partnership with the young (and today considerably better-known) Robert Morris, who in his later years served as the Superintendent of Finance for the Confederation Congress and was one of only two men to sign the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution of the United States.

Morris was a socialite and a speculator with an appetite for risky ventures, a characteristic that made him rich in his youth and served him well in his political maneuvering. In contrast, Willing—as Vague reminds us at every possible chance—was more temperamentally conservative. His prudence and attention to detail served him well in a tumultuous era when fortunes could be won and lost with great rapidity as a result of war, weather, or the constant cycle of boom and bust that characterized the early American economy. 

Willing cut his teeth early in American politics. He served in the state assembly as a young man, and then on the series of committees for boycotting British imports in response to taxation levied by Parliament on the colonies after the French and Indian War. British restrictions on commerce were galling for merchants like Willing and Morris, and their firm regularly smuggled goods from the French Indies in violation of British law. But when things came to a head after the passage of the Intolerable Acts, Willing hesitated. A Pennsylvania moderate, Willing was generally opposed to a definitive split with Britain, which he felt the colonies could not win. He was elected as a delegate to the Continental Congress by the conservative state assembly with orders to vote against independence. Under severe pressure at home by local Patriots, the assembly rescinded the order at the last minute, but did not replace it with instructions to vote in favor of independence.

When the Continental Congress voted on July 1, 1776 to advance the resolution to declare independence from Britain to the floor for a final vote, the Pennsylvania delegation, including Willing and his friend and partner Morris, voted against the motion four to three. Nevertheless, the motion advanced to the floor—only the South Carolina delegation had joined that of Pennsylvania in the negative, although New York abstained and the Delaware delegation voted a tie.

The following day was to be the decisive one. If the colonies were to declare independence, they needed to demonstrate unity and resolve. Any state voting against independence would severely weaken the revolution and provide the British with a ready wedge to divide and conquer their rebellious subjects. The taverns of Philadelphia hummed the night of July 1 with politicking, as delegates desperately made their appeals to state delegations to get the votes in order. When the role was called and the votes taken on July 2, Robert Morris and his fellow moderate Pennsylvania delegate John Dickinson were nowhere to be found, depriving Pennsylvania of two “no” votes. Benjamin Franklin, who was in town but not serving as a delegate for the state, is widely supposed to have convinced the two to absent themselves from the Congress that day. But Willing was there, and for the second time set his name down against declaring the United States of America independent from the Kingdom of Great Britain.

Willing’s actions at the Continental Congress cast a certain pall over his reputation during the revolution, as did his decision to stay in Philadelphia when it was occupied by the British in 1777 and 1778. But his trading firm, Willing, Morris & Co., was a vital link for the Continental Army, and imported many of the supplies desperately needed by Washington and his ragged soldiers—though always at a neat profit. Willing may have voted against the Revolution, but he also made a tidy sum by its prosecution: The war raised prices, made merchant imports even more important than before, and opened up new opportunities for ventures such as privateering (a business he participated in extensively). Which is not to say that his support was purely mercenary. Willing also assisted with the creation and running of a Philadelphia corporation (it was called a bank, but made no loans) charged with collecting capital and deploying it to purchase funds and supplies for the Army, an endeavor to which Willing donated £5,000, a massive sum at the time and the largest individual contribution of any funder.

After the Revolution, Willing continued to expand his business. One of the richest men in America, he was widely recognized for his talent as a financier, and was put in charge of an early attempt to make something approximating a national bank modeled on the Bank of England, widely recognized as one of the keystones of Britain’s national power. He was appointed the first president of the Bank of North America, an enterprise which prospered under his leadership. Subsequently he was elevated to preside over the country’s first true national bank, the Bank of the United States, where he collaborated closely with Hamilton in his capacity as secretary of the Treasury to secure the fledgling republic’s credit and stabilize the American debt market, which was plagued by perilous speculative booms and busts. His management of the national bank was again as good as his reputation, and when he retired after suffering a stroke, he left the finances of the bank and the nation in good order to his successor.

Vague’s book provides a good overview of Willing’s life, as sketched here, but it is not really Thomas Willing the man that the author is interested in. Instead, Vague—a banker and businessman by trade—is most interested in providing an economic history of the American Revolution and its immediate aftermath. Willing is just one character among many in the foreground, and serves more as the lens by which the period is examined than as the center of the work. Unfortunately, this often leaves the book unfocused, and the quality varies widely over the course of the narrative. 

The first few chapters of The Banker Who Made America principally consist of a somewhat awkward class history of prerevolutionary Pennsylvania, intended to help the reader situate Willing in his social and economic context and explain the state’s initial hesitation to throw in with the Revolution. Although unfortunately burdened at times by infelicitous prose, these early chapters contain the most interesting historical material, detailing the contest between the established Quaker aristocracy, the wealthy Anglican merchant elites in Philadelphia, and the farmers and artisans of the rural towns and villages, who were mainly Scots-Irish Presbyterians and the most powerful source of Patriot sentiment in the colony.

The narrative here includes a number of delightful details that illustrate the tumultuous politics of the time, such as Benjamin Franklin advocating for the Townshend Acts in London—the result of his commission from the colonial assembly to petition Parliament and the Crown to convert Pennsylvania’s colonial charter, held by the heirs of William Penn (who thus avoided paying any taxes to support the colony despite their vast holdings there), to a royal charter. Another charming detail is the Patriot radicals requiring the new colonial legislature to swear an oath attesting their belief on God and Jesus Christ, ostensibly to exclude atheists (who were rare and politically powerless) but really to do down the Quakers (who were common, powerful, largely opposed to the Revolution, and religiously prohibited from swearing oaths).

The central chapters expand outwards from Pennsylvania to a more general economic overview of the American Revolution. The history here is largely well-trodden, and the author seemed unable to decide how to divide the narrative’s attention between Willing’s affairs and those of the United Colonies. The result is that neither is so detailed as one would expect or hope; the reader is left with only a vague idea of Willing, Morris & Co.’s business endeavors, and given a broad account of the difficulties the Continental Congress and state governments had with the issuing of currency, inflation, and debt—all of which have been covered in more detail in other works.

Vague provides a much more satisfying look at Willing’s activities as a banker, first as president of the Bank of North America and then of the Bank of the United States. The frenzies of debt  and land speculation in post-independence America have been well documented, but Vague ties them up nicely with the establishment of the American national banking and credit system and a sharp and sometimes critical look at Hamilton’s interactions with both, a useful corrective to contemporary tendencies to idealize the talented treasury secretary.

Unfortunately, by the end of the book the reader is still left to ask, “Who is Thomas Willing?” Vague describes his business dealings and approach to banking, but leaves little room for Willing to speak for himself. The few excerpts from letters written by Willing are, with only one exception, unremarkable, and provide little insight into the man himself. Was Willing a reluctant revolutionary who embraced the cause only because his country had committed itself to a course he did not agree with? Did he change his mind about the capacity of the colonies to win their independence from Britain during the war? Was he simply following the course that seemed to him to lead to the most profitable outcomes? These questions are largely left unanswered by Willing or anyone else.

Subscribe Today

Get daily emails in your inbox

Email Address:

This may be because of a dearth of records, or simply because Willing was a consummate professional whose only passion in life was his trade, but Vague does not elaborate. He mentions that Willing wrote an autobiography, but no more than a sentence or two appears in the book. Nor are there many descriptions or accounts of Willing from his contemporaries. Even the accounts of Willing’s business are often obscure; Vague provides little context for the scale of his trading operations other than the number of his ships.

Vague’s book presents itself as an attempt to put Willing in his rightful place among his revolutionary contemporaries, but the subject becomes lost amid the history of Vague’s home state of Pennsylvania and the details of the economic confusion of the Revolution, no part of which is delivered with the completeness the subject merits. These topics were, perhaps, what Vague was really interested in writing about. Willing may have provided a convenient excuse for the exploration, but that history would have been better served on its own merits, rather than being written about through the context of Willing’s life.

Thomas Willing may be a “forgotten Founder” who deserves more credit than he is popularly given. But he remains, alas, even in his own biography, largely a mystery.