Robert Morris is an interesting figure, a very important person during the Revolutionary War and in the Confederation that followed it. He emigrated with his father to Maryland as a teenager in 1747, and when his father died was apprenticed to a merchant in Philadelphia, Charles Willing. He did well, and set up his own company with Willing's son when he was still quite young, and as the French and Indian War was breaking out. Morris quickly figured out how to make money from supplying that war, and afterwards kept making money, expanding business into the Caribbean and overseas, investing in projects like mines and mills. His firm would also invest in other merchants' projects: the colonial financial world was rather small, and there was a lot of pooling of resources, working connections- marriages and bloodlines mixed up many if not most of the eastern merchants, and therefore some historians have referred to the Robert Morris group...there was Robert Morris, and there were the relatives, friends, associates he could call for help.

Unlike Jefferson or John Adams, Morris had little idealism, and it is a bit of a mystery whether his support for the revolt might have been based on his financial interests. He thought the new taxes imposed by Britain were an abomination, but he also allied himself initially with Dickinson in opposing separation. He abstained from voting for independence, but signed the Declaration of it. He also talked in glowing terms of how much money could be made from the War. Being in the Congress, and on the Secret Committee, gave him plenty of opportunities for doing that, and he did. That attracted plenty of negative comments from the idealists- Tom Paine denounced him as a profiteer. But the hard truth was that the colonies needed an enormous amount of stuff to fight their war- not only guns, gun powder etc but food, wagons, clothes, blankets.... That stuff had to be found, purchased with borrowed money or on credit, and gotten into the armies. That was hard, but Morris was able to work his connections to achieve it better than anyone else could; certainly not the idealists. That it was still not quite enough, that the army was still pretty ragged, ill-fed and badly equipped is true, as is the charge Morris and his group took a fee from all those transactions that seemed more than patriotism would allow. But alone among the Continental Congress delegates, Morris seemed to know how to do it.

It's for that reason they made him Superintendant of Finance in 1781, and Morris was able to set conditions for accepting; he got broad powers to hire and fire and agreement to be able to continue to run his own business as well as the Congress'. He took away logistics of supply from the states; his plan was also to create a Bank of America that would assume at least some of the states' war debts in return. He also stopped paying soldiers- feeding them was going to be enough, and the Bank would pay them back after the War.

Now, all this was a Good Thing, and because of his getting that job your tour guide and others have sometimes tried to make Morris the Man who Saved the Revolution. That's not really true- he became Superintendent close to the end of the conflict, only a couple of months before the seige of Yorktown. And after the British surrender at Yorktown, Morris's plans to strengthen the credit of the US with a national mint and national bank ran into trouble because the states didn't want devote money to fund it. He resigned in 1784, and would be a Pennsylvania delegate at the Constitutional Convention, siding with the other Federalists for a stronger national government. Alexander Hamilton would take his idea of the federal government assuming states' war debts and manage to implement it. He would also become a Pennsylvania Senator in the new federal government.

His mixing up of Congressional business and his own unfortunately became a problem when Congress got around to asking him for his accounts during the War. Morris does not seem to have ever been admired or well-liked, and when he could not separate his group's private transactions from the public ones, there was no sympathy. In 1795 he was billed $93,312, an enormous sum. Morris would join a number of other merchants who would get little gratitude, once the war was done and the critics could come forward. Silas Deane, who'd put together the first shipment of goods from France that really saved the colonists' revolt, would end up ruined for his efforts when he could not justify his accounts ( and justify them to the same Delegate who went after Morris, Arthur Lee).

One of the problems with the group projects common to the businesses of the time was that the failure of one investor could sink the entire venture, as that investor's creditors would usually swoop in immediately to grab whatever project assets they could. Morris unfortunately had a number of these mis-ventures. Along with being presented a massive bill by Congress, Morris had overextended himself, mostly in land speculation, and he simply did not have the funds to necessary to extricate himself. As a result, he lost everything and went to debtor's prison in 1799, and was there for three years. He could have been there longer, but partly because of embarrassment over the spectacle of such an important figure being in jail, Congress passed the Bankruptcy Act of 1800 that did away with debtors' prisons.

For a detailed look at the web of businesses supplying the War, Robert A. East's Business Enterprise in the American Revolutionary Era is old but still interesting- you'll see more of the individual trees rather than a big view of the forest, but the trees are worth looking at. For a narrative of the Congress and the Revolutionary War and the aftermath of the Confederation, John Ferling's A Leap in the Dark is also quite good.