Mr. President by Ray Raphael Read Free Book Online Page B

power. Most prominent was a merchant-prince from Philadelphia, Robert Morris, who had amassed a fortune during the French and Indian War by supplying military wares to the army, profiting from wartime shortages of consumer goods, and privateering. As chairman of the Secret Committee of Commerce, he issued contracts for the procurement of supplies, often to his own firm. Other contracts went to his trading partners. If this sounds corrupt, it was not universally treated that way at the time. Morris chaired the Secret Committee of Commerce precisely because he possessed the contacts, credit, ships, and merchandise to keep the Continental Army in the field. He could access the goods, and that’s what counted.
    With Benjamin Franklin, Morris also anchored the Committee of Secret Correspondence, which communicated, sometimes using invisible ink, with foreign merchants and diplomats. He served too on the Marine Committee, charged with creating an American navy and distributing the goods obtained by American privateers. This committee dovetailed with both secret committees, for all three had as their primary goal the procurement of necessary goods from abroad. The entire matrix centered on Robert Morris. In October 1776, when members of Congress wondered why they were not better informed about certain business of the Committee of Secret Correspondence, the committee, in the persons of Franklin and Morris, replied: “We are … of opinion that it is
unnecessary
to inform Congress of this intelligence at present because Mr. Morris belongs to all the committees that can properly be employed in receiving & importing the expected supplys.” 9
    When Congress fled to Baltimore on December 12, 1776, fearing that advancing British forces might soon invade the city, three membersstayed behind to carry on critical transactions: George Clymer, George Walton, and Robert Morris. When Clymer and Walton vanished into their private lives, Morris was left on his own to perform all the tasks required to keep an army in the field and the nation solvent: requisitioning supplies and paying bills, keeping the books, dispatching vessels, arranging deliveries, and so on. To Silas Deane he wrote: “It is well I staid as I am obliged to set many things right that would otherways be in the greatest confusion. Indeed I find my presence so very necessary that I shall remain here untill the enemy drive me away.” Morris kept wagons loaded with his valuable possessions, ready for an emergency escape in the event of a surprise attack. 10
    Morris’s work did not go unappreciated by Congress, which on December 21 formally approved the “care of the public business as signified in Mr. Morris’s letters.” On one day alone, Congress read on the floor twenty-three of his letters. More significantly, it transformed the team of Morris, Clymer, and Walton into an emergency committee with the broad and unprecedented power “to execute such continental business as may be proper and necessary to be done at Philadelphia,” and it gave this committee immediate access to $200,000, along with the authority to borrow as much “as the continental use there may demand.” Since Clymer and Walton disappeared from public service during this time, one man, Robert Morris, now possessed the power to run the fledgling nation by himself. He could (and did) order salt to be removed into the country, purchase clothes for soldiers, rig boats with guns, commandeer wagons to evacuate the city, and make myriad on-the-ground decisions with no oversight, no check on his deeds. 11
    Previously, Congress had guarded its powers jealously, fearing that a grant of executive authority to one or a few individuals might start the new nation on the road to tyranny. With the new nation struggling for survival, however, delegates relented by forming an ad hoc executive branch that was empowered to take independent action. If the exigencies of war demanded a distinct executive, so be it,