The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Haym Salomon, meanwhile, who may or may not have “financed” the Revolution, was a member in good standing of two Sephardic congregations—Shearith Israel in New York and, later on, when his activities were centered there, Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia. He had, however, been born in Poland—around 1740—and this fact, of course, made him Sephardic second class. In America, after his arrival in 1772, he made an auspicious marriage, to Rachel Franks, daughter of Moses Franks of Philadelphia. Frankses—the name had been Franco in Spain—were a prominent mercantile family in both Philadelphia and New York, and families such as the Gomezes, Lopezes, and “old” Levys considered the Franks family “one of us.” At the time of his marriage to Miss Franks, Haym Salomon was thirty-seven. His bride was fifteen. Still, this alliance considerably elevated his social position in the Jewish community.

  He also had acquired, before leaving Europe, a university education, which was unusual for a young Polish Jew in the late eighteenth century. He spoke a number of languages, including, as he once mentioned offhandedly in a letter, “French, Polish, Russian, Italian, etc. Languages.” He also spoke Hebrew, and Yiddish—a tongue the old Sephardic families had only vaguely heard of.

  Despite his educated tastes, he first set himself up in New York as a dry goods merchant and, in 1776, Leonard Gansevoort, himself a prominent store owner, recommended young Salomon to Philip Schuyler, who commanded the troops of the Northern Department in upper New York State, and asked that Salomon be allowed “to go suttling to Lake George,” that is, to accompany the troops and provide them with clothing, provisions, whiskey, and such. Gansevoort wrote to Schuyler: “I can inform the General that Mr. Salomon has hitherto sustained the Character of being warmly attached to America.” He followed the troops through most of that summer, returned to New York in September, and when, on September 15, 1776, the British captured New York, Haym Salomon was one of a group of men who formed a dangerous plan to send fire ships into the Narrows of New York harbor to destroy the British fleet. The plan was discovered, and Haym Salomon was arrested as a spy.

  Whether or not he was sentenced to be shot by a firing squad is another point widely disputed within and without the now extensive Salomon family, and among historians of the Revolution. Salomon’s son, who may have had reasons to exaggerate certain aspects of his father’s career, always insisted that the threat of death was there. In the only existing description of the event by Haym Salomon himself, he makes no mention of this. He became, however, a valuable prisoner. With his knowledge of languages he was able to communicate with a motley assortment of other prisoners, which included mercenary soldiers Britain had hired from all over Europe to fight its war, and Salomon was assigned the job of prison interpreter.

  He must have done his job well, for he was eventually released. In 1778, threatened with arrest again, he fled to Philadelphia, where he decided to remain since he possessed “principles repugnant to British hostilities,” as he put it in his somewhat flowery style.

  In Philadelphia, he wasted no time before appealing to the Continental Congress for a job, citing in his letter his past services to the Revolution, and informing the Congress that he had left behind him all his “Effects and credits to the amount of five or six thousand pounds sterling and [a] distressed Wife and Child of a month old at New York, waiting that they may soon have an opportunity to come out from thence with empty hands.” Robert Morris, the Philadelphia financier who had founded the Bank of North America—and whose personal credit at one point during the war was better than the government’s—took Salomon on and assigned him to negotiate war loans. What this amounted to was going out into the market and selling the infant government’s bonds. He was so good at this that soon he was being called “the most successful of the war brokers,” and, though he charged only a modest ¼ of 1 percent for his services, his account at the Bank of North America grew until it was nearly as large as Robert Morris’. With hands no longer empty, he sent for his wife and child, and the family settled comfortably on Philadelphia’s Front Street.

  He dealt in other goods than government securities, as is apparent in a letter that survives, written to a merchant in Virginia and advising that “The hats are so much higher than you judged that I shall defer sending them till I hear from you. They cannot be got for less than 10½ dollars. Silk stockings are also high and scarce, and am afraid shall not be able to send the quantity you want. Goods are grown scarce, and from the number of vessels we have lost, and our capes now swarming with enemy cruisers, we expect they [the goods] will rise considerably.” Wartime inflation was on, but still the amounts Salomon dealt in were not impossibly large. In this same letter he adds: “The forty dollars in favor of Robert B. Chew I have paid.”

  In 1781, he was prosperous enough to send off a draft in the amount of a thousand pounds to his family in Poland. This turned out to have been an unwise move. The minute his relatives in Europe discovered that they had an affluent kinsman on the other side of the Atlantic, they descended upon him in droves, hat in hand. Haym Salomon found to his dismay that he had more aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, and cousins in more corners of the Continent than he had ever imagined, and that they all expected to be put on allowances. Furthermore, as Jewish relatives have always tended to do, they did not simply ask for their share of their cousin’s wealth. They demanded it as their right, and were highly indignant when they were turned down. By 1783, Haym Salomon had clearly begun to weary of their petitions, and we see him writing to an itinerant uncle in England: “I have ordered fifty guilders to be paid you by Mr. Gumple Samson in Amsterdam, which letter giving that order you must already have rec’d, and I now send you an order for six guineas.” As patiently as possible he tries to outline his financial situation to his uncle:

  Your bias of my riches are too extensive. Rich I am not, but the little I have, think it my duty to share with my poor father and mother. They are the first that are to be provided for by me, and must and shall have the preference. Whatever little more I can squeeze out I will give my relations, but I tell you plainly and truly that it is not in my power to give you or any relations yearly allowances. Don’t you nor any of them expect it. Don’t fill your mind with vain and idle expectations and golden dreams that never will nor can be accomplished. Besides my father and mother, my wife and children must be provided for. I have three young children, and as my wife is very young may have more, and if you and the rest of my relatives will consider things with reason, they will be sensible of this I now write. But notwithstanding this I mean to assist my relations as far as lays in my power.

  His uncle had mentioned coming to America, where, without doubt, he expected to be put on the payroll. Haym wrote him indignantly:

  I am much surprised at your intention of coming here. Your yikes [family background and education] is worth very little here, nor can I imagine what you mean to do here. I think your duty calls for your going to your family, and besides these six guineas you will receive in Amsterdam fifty guineas from Mr. Gumple Samson.… I desire no relation may be sent. Have I not children, are they not relations? When I shall be fully informed of all the young people of our family and their qualifications explained, I may then perhaps advise sending one or two to this country. I will explain to you the nature of this country: vinig yidishkayt [“little Jewishness”].

  He had a sense of humor, and was capable of writing gossipy letters, too, as he did to a friend whom he accused of not keeping him posted, twitting him that doubtless “your whole time is devoted to the ladies, and can’t spare time to inform a friend of your welfare.… I doubt if the ladies here have the same reason to complain of your neglect. Am certain you would not make it long before your return, was you to know how desirous the ladies are of your presence. And one in particular who wishes that no pecuniary views may get the better of the partiality you always entertained for her.…”

  He was proud of his position as the Revolution’s leading—and best—banker, and he guarded this position jealously
. Other Jewish brokers were doing what Haym Salomon was doing, buying and selling government notes. These included Isaac Franks, Benjamin Nones, and Lion Moses, but Salomon did the biggest amount of business and, in 1782, he asked Robert Morris for permission to advertise himself as “Broker to the Office of Finance.” Morris gave him permission to use this prestigious title, noting in his diary: “This broker has been usefull to the public interest, and requests leave to publish himself as broker to the office which I have consented, as I do not see that any disadvantage can possibly arise to the public service but the reverse, and he expects individual benefits therefrom”—benefits, of course, in respect to his competition. In his advertisements, Haym Salomon frequently made such statements as one which announced that the advertiser “flatters himself that his assiduity, punctuality, and extensive connections in business, as a broker, is well established in various parts of Europe, and in the United States in particular.” He continued to buy and sell on commission tobacco, sugar, tea, silk stockings, and ladies’ bonnets. But he summed himself up in a letter to a London merchant when he said: “My business is a broker, and chiefly in bills of exchange, and so very extensive that I am generally known to the mercantile part of North America.” All this is most certainly true.

  On Yom Kippur eve, 1779—it is said—Washington’s armies were in desperate straits. His soldiers had not been paid for several months, they were at the point of mutiny, and battle was at hand. Washington pleaded with his men, then threatened, but they were adamant; they would fight no more without their wages. At last a desperate Washington sent a messenger on horseback through the night to Philadelphia with instructions to obtain, from Haym Salomon, a loan of $400,000, an enormous sum in those days, to pay and provision his troops. The messenger found Salomon in the synagogue, and a hasty whispered conference took place. Salomon rose and quickly moved about the synagogue, collecting certain friends. A small group left together, and that night the money was raised. Did Haym Salomon himself contribute $240,000 of the money? So the legend, perpetuated in many accounts, insists.

  It is at this point, alas, that the story of Haym Salomon dissolves into speculation and controversy. Did he, as his son later claimed, loan “vast sums” to the government, personally pay soldiers’ salaries, and pay for the Revolution? There is no proof of it. He did, however, extend personal loans to many prominent individuals of the Revolution and members of the Continental Congress, including James Wilson, General St. Clair, Edmund Randolph, and many Philadelphians, and often charged them no interest. Presidents Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were all aided by him at one time or another when short of ready cash. Poor Madison was perennially in financial difficulties and in 1782 wrote to his friend Edmund Randolph: “I cannot in any way make you more sensible of the importance of your kind attention to pecuniary remittances for me than by informing you that I have for some time past been a pensioner on the favor of Haym Salomon, a Jew broker.” A few weeks later, Madison was in as bad shape as ever, and Salomon had come to be something more to him than “a Jew broker.” He wrote, again to Randolph:

  I am almost ashamed to reiterate my wants so incessantly to you, but they begin to be so urgent that it is impossible to suppress them. The kindness of our little friend in Front Street, near the coffee house, is a fund which will preserve me from extremities, but I never resort to it without great mortification, as he so obstinately rejects all recompense. The price of money is so usurious that he thinks it ought to be extorted from none but those who aim at profitable speculations. To a necessitous delegate he gratuitously spares a supply out of his private stock.

  Salomon’s son claimed that his father also aided the Polish patriots Pulaski and Kosciusko with enormous loans, but there is no proof of this either. He did, however, when the British fleet cut off all communication with Europe, maintain the Spanish ambassador to the Revolutionary government, Don Francesco Randon, out of his own funds. And it can be argued, from this, that a vital service was performed, since, had Salomon not done so, Spain might have damaged American prestige—such as it was—abroad. And it is known that he did sell hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of American bonds, which found their way to the bourses of Paris, London, and Frankfurt, and which certainly did much to establish American credit in the world market.

  Does the United States government still owe Haym Salomon a huge amount of money? His son, Haym Moses Salomon, always said so, and his many descendants—he had four children, and a multitude of grandchildren—who are scattered about the country in such places as New Orleans; Galveston; Houston; Saint Louis; Ardmore, Oklahoma; and Canton, Kansas, would like to think so, and grow wistful dreaming of the fortune they might split if only they could prove that it existed.

  His son’s story is this: Between the years 1778 and 1782, Haym Salomon loaned the United States government money in the neighborhood of $700,000, more than half of which was never repaid. On January 5, 1785, the government sent Haym Salomon a full and complete accounting of all the money it owed him. But it was a Sabbath day and, pious Jew that he was, Salomon refused—though a few years earlier he had supposedly been willing to interrupt high holy day services to help George Washington—to sign the papers until the day of rest and prayer was over. On the next day, Sunday, January 6, before he had a chance to examine the government’s statement, he died—a victim of the heart disease he had contracted while a prisoner of the British in New York.

  The figure of $700,000, his son claimed, represented money that had gone through Haym Salomon’s bank account, payable to the government of the United States, and this same figure has been given authority in such publications as the Dictionary of American Biography, in its sketch on Salomon, as the amount he “loaned” the government. It would have been an extraordinarily large sum in 1782. Salomon can’t have been that rich. If he had—and, on top of that, supported his family and all his European relatives—he would have been by far the richest man in America. In 1778, he had escaped from New York and arrived in Philadelphia without a penny to his name. How, in four short years’ time, would he have possibly amassed so staggering a fortune? It is hard to credit, too, that, just a year after his escape, he could personally have come up with $240,000 to loan George Washington. His wife’s family, the Frankses, was rich, but Rachel Franks Salomon descended from the poor branch.

  How reliable was his son? It was from him, too, that biographers learned that Haym Salomon’s parents in Poland were “wealthy.” But still Salomon thought it needful to send them a thousand pounds when at last he became successful, and in his letter he spoke of his “poor father and mother.” In his will, he provided that his mother be bequeathed a gold chain, and his aged father enough money to purchase a burial plot.

  Several years ago, the Federation of Polish Jews of America attempted to have a statue erected in Haym Salomon’s memory, citing, among other sources, the Dictionary of American Biography account of his services to the Revolution, and saying: “America failed to repay the money he advanced, and now men seek to rob him of his posthumous fame.” What the Federation wanted to demonstrate, of course, with their statue, was that there had been Polish Jews in America long before the Czarist pogroms of 1881, and that they had contributed mightily. The chief “robber” of Salomon’s posthumous fame was the late historian Max J. Kohler. Kohler called the Poles’ project ridiculous, and there was a great deal of angry talk. Kohler was a German Jew, and the mutual antipathy that has existed between the earlier-arrived Germans and the later-arriving Poles and Russians was at the heart of most of it. The project sputtered, with much acrimony, to no conclusion.

  Haym Salomon was, in his own words, a broker, a trader of government bonds, an agent. The $700,000 that may have gone through his account over the four years in question was not his money; it was the government’s and represented funds from securities he had sold, deposited, and then turned over to Robert Morris. On these moneys Morris now paid him a tidy commission—½ of 1 percent. Haym Salomon was also a genero
us man. Even the remote uncles got their guineas. He was generous, too, to his friends in Philadelphia, offering unsecured loans, loans without interest—generous to a fault. After his death, merchants to whom he had loaned money could not pay. His estate was found to be insolvent. His chief creditor was the Bank of North America, Robert Morris’ bank.

  His son claimed that the United States government owed Haym Salomon $354,000—which today, with interest, would be worth in the tens of millions of dollars. His son said the government had come with a detailed statement to that effect. True, his son waited decades after his father’s death to make this claim, and after all records had inconveniently been destroyed when the British captured Washington during the War of 1812. Mysteriously, the government never came around with that statement again. The money has never been paid. The papers are gone.

  But the Polish Americans did get their statue—not in New York, where they wanted it, but in Chicago. And it is a memorial not to one but to three men. Haym Salomon shares the marble pedestal—and perfectly properly, it would seem—with George Washington and Robert Morris. At the time of the statue’s dedication, President Franklin D. Roosevelt turned to an aide and, in full innocence, asked: “I know who the other two are, but who …?”

  To those of the Old Guard Sephardim who had questioned the importance of Haym Salomon’s Revolutionary role, there was always the point that he was “not really Sephardic,” something of an interloper and stealer of Sephardic thunder. Now, however, that his statue stands proudly in Chicago, and in such illustrious company, for all the world to see, most Sephardim prefer to claim him—it seems too bad to give him to the Poles—and Sephardic parents tell their children, “And he was one of us!”