In this book, Richard Vague shows how Thomas Willing bankrolled and in the process helped save, the Revolution and then fundamentally shaped the financial architecture of the young Republic. So powerful was Willing that President John Adams complained that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton were governed by him. Yet at a decisive moment in Willing’s life he voted against independence, as conflict between Pennsylvania’s moneyed elite and the emergent lower and middle classes embroiled the politics of 1776 in bitter class conflict. This dynamic would continue after independence, as Willing and his associates attempted to tame the democratic forces unleashed by revolution and thereby set up a tension that has never stopped shaping US politics. This dramatic untold story sheds genuinely new light on the genesis of the American Republic, as well as the enduring economic and political conflicts that still shape US society today.
