How Haym Salomon Kept the Flame of American Liberty Burning

New York was burning again.

On a hot August night in 1778, as strong winds blew inland from the harbor, a massive fire tore through lower Manhattan near Cruger’s Wharf. The flames destroyed roughly 50 houses in a city already scarred by war, occupation, and suspicion. A later history would say the damage was made worse when British officers tried to direct the city’s firefighters themselves — a blunder that only deepened the sense that the occupiers were losing command of the city beneath their feet.

The British were primed to see fire in occupied New York as the work of American agents. They had done so two years earlier, after the Great Fire of 1776 ripped through the city just days after the British occupation began. Now, in August 1778, another great fire had broken out in lower Manhattan. And shortly afterward, British General Sir Henry Clinton had a man taken in New York on charges that he had received orders from General Washington to burn British fleets and destroy their storehouses — orders the British alleged he had tried to execute “to their great injury and damage.”

The accused was Haym Salomon.

Whether Salomon had anything to do with the Cruger’s Wharf fire cannot be proven at this distance. But the timing is hard to ignore. The fire broke out on August 3. Salomon escaped New York on August 11. His alleged offense involved incendiary warfare against British ships and storehouses. The surviving record does not allow us to close the case. It does allow us to see what British headquarters thought it had found: not merely a merchant, not merely a broker, but a dangerous Patriot agent inside occupied New York.

It was not the first time the British had come for him. Two years earlier, in September 1776, Salomon had been arrested as a spy and thrown into the notorious Provost prison. That too was a month of fire in New York. The Great Fire of 1776 — which broke out just days after British troops entered the city — raced through lower Manhattan, destroying hundreds of buildings. The British blamed Patriot saboteurs then as well.

Twice arrested by the British. Twice in the vicinity of catastrophic wartime fires. And the second time, the charge itself involved fire: an alleged Washington-backed plot to burn British fleets and destroy British storehouses.

Salomon was imprisoned, treated brutally, and condemned to death. He escaped by means of what a later account described as “a considerable bribe in gold,” corroborated by a letter he wrote shortly afterward to his brother-in-law, Major Franks. Then he fled to Philadelphia and changed the course of the American Revolution with a ledger book.

Haym Salomon had come a long way to risk his neck for a country that did not yet exist. He was born around 1740 in Leszno, in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, into a Jewish family of modest means. He arrived in the American colonies sometime in the early 1770s, first appearing in the documentary record in 1776, when a “Hyam Solomon, the distiller” served as an interpreter before the New York Provincial Congress. He joined the Sons of Liberty. He set up in business. He made himself useful to the Patriot cause in ways the British found sufficiently alarming to justify two arrests.

After his escape from the death sentence in August 1778, Salomon reached Philadelphia with his New York property confiscated and his wife and infant child left behind.

He rebuilt with remarkable speed. By 1781, when the Continental Congress appointed Robert Morris as superintendent of finance and charged him with keeping the Revolutionary government from collapsing under its debts, Salomon became one of Morris’s most useful brokers. By July 1782, he was publicly advertising himself as “Broker to the Office of Finance” — the man who helped turn French subsidies, Dutch loans, public paper, and bills of exchange into the hard money needed to pay troops, buy supplies, and keep the machinery of a revolution running.

The mechanism was less romantic than the legend but more impressive. Salomon bought and sold bills of exchange, advanced funds against government notes, extended his own credit, and deposited proceeds into the Bank of North America. He did it, at Morris’s insistence, for a commission of half of one percent — at a time when other brokers commonly charged two to five percent. He understood he was not engaged in ordinary commerce. He was helping keep alive a government whose credit had nearly died.

He also reached into his own pocket.

James Madison, writing to Edmund Randolph from Philadelphia in 1782, described his situation with some embarrassment. He had been, he wrote, “a pensioner for some time on the favor of Haym Salomon.” The kindness of “our little friend in Front Street, near the coffee house,” Madison later wrote, was “a fund that will preserve me from extremities.” Salomon, Madison added, “obstinately rejects all recompense,” because he believed the price of money ought to be “extorted from none but those who aim at profitable speculations.” To a delegate in need, he simply gave what was required.

Madison was not alone. Congressional investigations later assembled to examine Salomon’s estate found that he had supported, from his private means, delegates and officers including Thomas Jefferson, James Wilson, Baron von Steuben, Arthur St. Clair, Thomas Mifflin, James Monroe, and others who testified that without his assistance they could not have remained in public service. He also maintained Don Francisco Rendón, the secret Spanish representative to the Revolutionary government, whose supplies had been cut off by British cruisers — support that helped keep Spain’s covert backing of the American cause alive.

Salomon’s financial role has sometimes been embroidered into legend. He was not a one-man Treasury. Robert Morris remained the indispensable superintendent of finance. French aid, Dutch loans, domestic taxation, public credit, private merchants, and military sacrifice all mattered. But Salomon occupied a crucial place in the Revolutionary financial machine. He was a broker of trust when trust itself had become scarce.

And that mattered. The Revolution did not merely need money. It needed someone who could move money through channels broken by the war: foreign grants, depreciated paper, private credit, personal advances, and desperate appeals from public men who could no longer pay their own expenses. Salomon sat at that junction. He spoke several languages and had the commercial skill, abundant courage, and access to networks that crossed the Atlantic world. He had also proved, in British-occupied New York, that he was willing to risk his life.

Haym Salomon died in Philadelphia on January 6, 1785, at about 45 years old, after a lingering illness his family attributed to the privations of his British imprisonment. Philadelphia’s newspapers remembered him as “an eminent broker” of remarkable “skill and integrity,” a man of “generous and humane deportment.” He was buried the next day in the cemetery of Congregation Mikveh Israel.

He left behind a young wife who did not speak English, four infant children, and an estate that told the story of a man who had put his country before his family’s security. The inventory filed in Philadelphia’s probate court showed public securities — loan office certificates, treasury certificates, continental liquidated dollars, commissioners’ certificates — totaling $353,729.43. Beyond that, congressional investigations later documented specie advances to Robert Morris of roughly $211,000, plus six promissory notes worth approximately $92,000 in federal currency. The Treasury’s own first auditor subsequently confirmed that not a cent of any of it had ever been redeemed or funded — not under the old Confederation government, not under the new constitutional one formed in 1789.

His heirs petitioned Congress for decades. Committees repeatedly found merit in the claim. Unfortunately, this never translated into actually paying the Salomon family the debt they were owed.

It fell to Calvin Coolidge, speaking in Washington in 1925, to give Salomon the title history had too often denied him. “There is a romance in the story of Haym Salomon,” Coolidge said, “Polish Jew, financier of the Revolution.” Salomon, the president continued, had negotiated loans for Robert Morris, pledged his personal faith and fortune for enormous amounts, and personally advanced large sums to Madison, Jefferson, Steuben, St. Clair, and other patriot leaders, “who testified that without his aid they could not have carried on in the cause.”

A Polish-born Jewish immigrant, twice arrested by the British, once condemned to death, had kept the flame of American liberty burning when it had nearly gone out.

As America turns 250 this year, we should hold the memory of Salomon as a blessing to our young nation.