The Banker Who Made America

The Museum of the American Revolution’s location across from the First Bank of the United States is an accidental parallel to the notion that American independence was more about compounding wealth than woes, and obtained through bankrolling as much as it was through bayonets and bloodshed, more than the average American might understand today. In other words, in July 1776, the American Revolution sure wasn’t exactly a sound investment, which is why Pennsylvania delegate Thomas Willing voted against independence in both the July 1 and July 2 sessions of the Continental Congress. “With his fateful vote, Willing had consigned himself to an undeserved obscurity in early American history,” writes businessman, banker, and economic commentator Richard Vague in his new book, The Banker Who Made America: Thomas Willing and the Rise of the American Financial Aristocracy, 1731-1821. 

Vague lifts Willing’s story out of obscurity and outlines how he not only helped bankroll and save the new nation he had voted against, but went on to shape the financial and political architecture of the United States in ways that still echo nearly 250 years later. 

Excerpt: 

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 way, Willing’s London banking relatives, the father and son Francis and Alexander Baring – leaders of the 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 coted independence, and who were becoming a radical force for political chance. 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.  

Richard Vague, The Banker Who Made America: Thomas Willing and the Rise of the American Financial Aristocracy, 1731-1821 (Polity, 2025). p. 4-5.