Patriot Pirates by Robert H. Patton

meant public finance. On a personal level he thrived, ascending from “a leading young merchant from Philadelphia” in 1775 to the so-called “financier of the Revolution” by war’s end. Early on he helped equip Washington’s army through his business contacts in Europe. Later as Superintendent of Finances he would keep the American economy afloat by stabilizing its worthless currency through a juggling act of monetary austerity, foreign trade, hat-in-hand international borrowing, and cash infusions from his own holdings.
    In an era of widespread belief that all procurement officials speculated with government money and manipulated prices to increase commissions, Morris’s critics took little regard of his contributions. John Adams weighed his “vast designs in the mercantile way” against a “masterly understanding, an open temper, and an honest heart.” But others placed him among a supposed cabal of merchant-dignitaries whose public service disguised, in the ominous insinuation of Virginia-born diplomat Arthur Lee, “some deep design against our independence at the bottom. Many of the faction are, I know, actuated by the desire of getting or retaining the public plunder.” Such suspicions were fostered by the fiscal contrivances of men like Morris and Deane no matter the benefit they often rendered the cause.
    Deane sailed for Europe in March. Three months later, Morris sent a second protégé abroad, this time to Martinique in the West Indies. The island was France’s gateway to New World trade and a booming hub of international commerce. Its inhabitants’ eagerness to sell weapons to the rebels under the protection of French neutrality was a magnet to the Secret Committee and a thorn to Great Britain.
    Morris’s appointee, William Bingham, presented himself on Martinique as a private businessman. Born to wealth, Bingham was well educated and worldly, possessed a composed efficiency belying his twenty-four years, and displayed none of Deane’s compulsive personal and financial turmoil. He quickly secured military wares for shipment home on Congress’s account, disseminated American propaganda and upbeat war reports to French officials, and began monitoring activities of the French fleet in the West Indies “and whether they mean to act for or against America.” On Congress’s recommendation, he partnered with local merchants to promote his entrepreneurial cover and solicited “private adventurers” of any nationality to raid British shipping for profit.
    The triangle formed by Bingham and Deane on each side of the Atlantic and Morris in Philadelphia became a busy backchannel of financial opportunism and patriotic zeal, elements never more entwined than in the men’s involvement in privateering. But Congress’s embrace of privateering’s quintessential “private adventurers” would sour when rumors arose late in the war that Morris, Deane, and Bingham had invested in warships with public money and skimmed the profits for themselves.
    By then their circumstances had drastically diverged. Morris was still a financial colossus, though overambition was poised to undo him. Deane was ruined—scorned by his nation and friends. Only Bingham withstood the storm of indignation, for which he thanked the obscurity of Martinique. “If my services had been more conspicuous I might perhaps have had much to fear.” He didn’t mean fear from the British. It was an American “voice of calumny” that assailed him and his colleagues, “the pursuits,” Bingham said, “of the envious.”
    Yet in Deane’s case at least, a cautionary note written before the war suggests he might have blamed himself as well. “I have known very honest men, when unfortunate, to suffer in their character and never retrieve their affairs only because of their being careless.” It was a prescient observation, for though Deane’s honesty remains debatable, his carelessness and misfortune are certain.
             
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