re: the question about the wealthiest man at time of revolution:
The war itself upset a lot of fortunes, but according to Ferdinand Lundberg's Cracks in the Constitution, the richest American at the time of the Constitutional Convention was probably Robert Morris, a political boss from Pennsylvania and the founder of the country's first commercial bank, the Bank of North America, in 1781. Lundberg quotes the historian Forrest McDonald on Morris: "[He] was known as the 'great man', both to his friends and enemies. The real financial giant of the period--his brain would have made two of Hamilton's--Morris has rarely been rivaled in economic and political power in the United States. The power he held in the 1780s may be compared to that of the House of Morgan in the early twentieth century, which means that no one knows exactly how great it was. Probably J.P. Morgan would have had to add the secretaryship of the treasury and the control of Tammany Hall to match Morris's power."
Regarding Washington, whom he characterizes as being near Morris's league for sheer wealth, and the rest of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, Lundberg writes: "Owners predominantly of personal property-- merchants and their attorneys and holders of state and continental securities and specie--and owners of land and realty were approximately evenly divided [among delegates]. There were 31 in the first group, 24 in the second, including Washington. Many of the second group were short of cash in a cash-short society but long on land and slaves--far from indigent."