Robert Morris and John Hancock have been mentioned. And I'm sure someone on the list could come up with the names of those who owned over let's say 1500 slaves at the time of the Revolution.
Marta mentions an olde legend. There is one in my Dad's family dealing with how Washington came up with some cold hard cash after the Revolution in 1784. Many years ago I approached a published Washington expert who was the head of at the time a university history department about this legend. The good doctor had written about the incident that led up to the speculation(?) that the legend was based on---his opinion was that there might be something to it. I can assure Mike Perelman that Marvin Kitman would have a field day with this one if he ever finds out about it! That is if Kitman is still alive?
Tom Lehman
Steve Perry wrote:
> 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."