From Lissa to New York
Haym Salomon was born in 1740 in Lissa, today Leszno in western Poland, a town with a large and long-established Jewish community. Very little is known about his family or upbringing. What is clear is that as a young man he travelled widely in Western and Central Europe, picking up a working knowledge of several languages and of the business of money: currencies, credit, and the bills of exchange that merchants used to move funds across borders without shipping coin.
He seems to have left Poland around the time of its first partition in 1772, and by about 1775 he was in New York, setting up as a broker and merchant for traders in the Atlantic commerce. He arrived just as the quarrel between Britain and its American colonies was turning into war. Salomon chose the side of independence.
Prisoner and spy in occupied New York
When the British captured New York in September 1776, Salomon was arrested as a suspected spy and imprisoned. Because he spoke German, he was released into the service of the Hessian commander, General von Heister, working in the army’s commissary. He used the position to help American prisoners and, by later accounts, to encourage Hessian soldiers to desert. In 1777 he married Rachel Franks, daughter of Moses B. Franks, at New York’s Shearith Israel congregation.
In 1778 he was arrested again. On 11 August 1778 he escaped from New York, leaving behind his wife, a one-month-old child, and property he valued at five or six thousand pounds sterling. He reached Philadelphia, then the seat of the Continental Congress, and on 25 August petitioned Congress, describing his services and asking for employment. The petition went nowhere. He had to rebuild his life from nothing.
A broker in Philadelphia
In Philadelphia Salomon set up again as a broker and commission merchant, and his languages and his grasp of European credit made him valuable. He acted for the French, whose army and fleet in America needed local currency, and became known as an agent and paymaster for French funds. Early in 1781 he advertised himself as a dealer in bills of exchange.
Within days, Congress appointed the Philadelphia merchant Robert Morris as Superintendent of Finance, effectively the first head of an American treasury. Morris inherited a bankrupt war effort. Continental paper money had collapsed, the states paid little of what they owed, and the army was close to mutiny for lack of pay and supplies. The main real resource was foreign: loans and subsidies from France and later the Netherlands, which reached Philadelphia in the form of bills drawn on European bankers. Those bills were only useful if someone could sell them to American merchants for cash, at a decent price, without flooding the market.
Financing the Revolution: what the records show
That was Salomon’s work. Morris kept a detailed diary of his office, and Salomon’s name appears in it about seventy-five times between August 1781 and April 1784. Morris relied on him to sell government bills of exchange, to raise money in emergencies and to place the public’s paper. “This broker has been useful to the public interests,” Morris wrote on 12 July 1782. On 26 August 1782, in a crisis, he noted: “I sent for Salomon and desired him to try every way he could devise to raise money.” Salomon advertised himself, with Morris’s approval, as broker to the Office of Finance, and he became the largest individual depositor at the new Bank of North America, founded by Morris in 1781. His accounts there fill fifteen ledger pages, with balances that ran from about $15,000 to $50,000, and over these years he paid some $200,000 into Morris’s hands for the public service.
The historian Morris U. Schappes, who compiled the diary entries, concluded that Salomon sold about $200,000 worth of bills for the government in 1781 and 1782, earning a modest broker’s commission. That is a large sum for the time, and the steady, reliable conversion of foreign credit into usable money was a genuine service at the most fragile point of the war. Salomon also put his own funds into government securities and backed them with his credit when few others would.
He was generous to individuals as well. James Madison, then a delegate in Congress whose salary from Virginia rarely arrived, wrote to Edmund Randolph on 27 August 1782 that he had “for some time past been a pensioner on the favor of Haym Salomon, a Jew broker.” A month later he described the kindness of “our little friend in Front street,” who “obstinately rejects all recompense.” Other delegates, including James Wilson, were helped in the same way.
Separating fact from legend
Salomon’s real story was later wrapped in legend. From the 1840s his son, Haym M. Salomon, pressed Congress to repay sums he said his father had lent the nation, with claims eventually running into the millions. Several congressional committees reported favourably between 1848 and 1864, but no money was ever paid. In the twentieth century popular books, films and speeches turned Salomon into the man who personally “financed the Revolution.”
Some of the most repeated stories have no support in the documents. There is no contemporary record of George Washington saying “Send for Haym Salomon” before the Yorktown campaign, or of Salomon single-handedly raising the money for it. Claims that he lent the government hundreds of thousands of dollars from his own fortune confuse the large value of government paper that passed through his hands with personal loans. Schappes put it plainly: Salomon did not himself lend money to the government and never claimed that he did. The story that the thirteen stars above the eagle on the Great Seal were arranged as a Star of David in his honour is a modern invention.
Stripped of the myths, the record remains impressive. Salomon was a refugee who risked his life for the American cause, the most trusted broker of the Revolution’s finance office during its hardest years, and a patriot who invested heavily in the young republic’s debt and lost almost everything when it went unpaid.
A Jew in the new republic
Salomon was an observant and active member of Congregation Mikveh Israel, Philadelphia’s Jewish congregation, which had grown during the war as Jewish patriots fled British-occupied New York and Charleston. When the congregation built its first synagogue building in 1782, he was one of its largest contributors, and by 1783 he sat on its mahamad, the governing board. It was a community of patriot refugees, and Salomon was among the men who held it together.
He also fought for civic equality. Pennsylvania’s constitution of 1776 required members of the state assembly to acknowledge the Old and New Testaments as divinely inspired, an oath no observant Jew could take. On 23 December 1783 the leaders of Mikveh Israel, Salomon among them alongside the congregation’s minister Gershom Mendes Seixas, petitioned the state’s Council of Censors to remove the test. The council set the petition aside, but the restriction was dropped in Pennsylvania’s new constitution of 1790. In 1784, when a Philadelphia lawyer attacked Jewish brokers in the press, Salomon published a spirited public reply defending himself and his people. These efforts were part of the early struggle that made religious liberty, not mere tolerance, an American principle.
An early death
After the war Salomon tried to expand his business, opening a brokerage and auction house in New York in 1784. But his health was failing, and his fortune was locked up in government certificates and Continental paper that had lost most of their value. He died in Philadelphia on 6 January 1785, aged about forty-four, after a long illness. The inventory of his estate listed more than $350,000 in loan-office, treasury and state certificates, nearly worthless at the time, and debts that left his widow Rachel and their young children in hardship.
A Philadelphia newspaper recorded his death in a short notice. It described him as “an eminent broker of this city,” a native of Poland “and of the Hebrew nation,” remarkable for his skill and integrity and his “generous and humane deportment.” He was buried in the Mikveh Israel cemetery on Spruce Street, where his grave is unmarked but commemorated by memorial tablets.
Remembering Haym Salomon
Salomon has been remembered more than almost any other figure of early American Jewish history. In 1893 a House committee backed a gold medal in his honour, though the bill never passed. In 1941 the Heald Square Monument in Chicago, begun by the sculptor Lorado Taft and completed by Leonard Crunelle, was unveiled, showing George Washington flanked by Robert Morris and Haym Salomon. A Liberty ship, the SS Haym Salomon, was launched in 1943, and in 1975 the United States Postal Service honoured him with a stamp in its “Contributors to the Cause” series for the Bicentennial.
His lasting importance lies partly in what his story came to mean. For generations of Jewish immigrants, Salomon offered proof that Jews had been present and patriotic at the founding of the United States, not latecomers to it. That message mattered especially in the 1930s and 1940s, when antisemitism was strong in America and Jewish loyalty was being questioned. The legends exaggerated his wealth, but the core of his story is true and more human: a refugee broker who used his skills and his credit for a cause he believed in, helped poorer patriots without asking for repayment, and worked for a country in which a Jew could be a full citizen.
Sources & further reading
Haym Salomon, Wikipedia · Salomon, Haym, Jewish Encyclopedia (1906) · Haym Salomon, Jewish Virtual Library · Financial Hero?, Journal of the American Revolution · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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