The Founding Fortunes

The Founding Fortunes is a complex read that takes time to read. Tom Shachtman has done a thorough research and it shows. This a interesting and informative book.

With skill and thorough research, this is an excellent (and complicated) telling of some of our revolutionary history. You'll want to take your time with this one. I learned some really interesting facts and met a lot of historical figures I've never heard of that had an impact on our nation. Very engaging and memorable. Recommended.

I really appreciate the comp copy for an honest review!!

This is a well documented social history of the American revolution. I will be recommending my library purchase this title.

In times of war, the rich usually do get richer and the poor are still poor, yet free. Somewhat.  This well-researched telling of the well known and not so well known who put their money into biting the very hand that was feeding them. In order to have control over what they grew and who they sold to this young country and its leaders were far from perfect and often put their own interests above the country. 

The British wanted total control and the John Hancocks and George Washingtons of the time wanted the opposite. To control their own taxes, representations, to settle their own disputes and have free trade. We also meet a lot of people who were less well-known but never the less played significant roles in this time period. 

Several things struck me reading this book. One, these guys did not have, as a rule, long lives. So what they accomplished as very young men was astounding. They were determined to define their own destiny in this new world. They had left England for a reason and that was the freedom to determine their own fate.

Excellent research and a much-needed history lesson for the times!

NetGalley/ January 21st, 2020 by St. Martin's Press

Historian Tom Shachtman has furnished a rock-solid, impeccably researched investigation into a side of the Revolutionary War that tends to get scamped by both the patriotic rah rah histories and the Let’s Trash The Scum diatribes: just how a colony of thirteen very different entities managed to go to war against the most powerful empire in the western Europe.

There were definitely those who profited off war, as in every war, and they get their due, but there were also those who took a risk in uniting with people they didn’t necessarily agree with in order to fund what was actually a very long war, in the hope of winning independence for all.

The structure follows the lives and fortunes of twelve men, whose economic soldiering were crucial to the emerging finances of the baby republic. A lot of these names rarely show up except in footnotes of Revolutionary War histories: Henry Laurens; William Bingham, Jeremiah Wadsworth, and Stephen Girard; Elias Hasket Derby; and of course famous figures such as Alexander Hamilton, Robert Morris, and John Hancock, as well as Hamilton’s successors at the Treasury, Oliver Wolcott, Jr. and Albert Gallatin.

This is not an easy read, as each page is packed with information, but it’s an involving one. As I read about these financial privateers and pirates (in a couple cases, literally!) I couldn’t help but see some parallels to today. Only I don’t see any of these modern pirates doing anything for anyone but their own greed.

Anyway, a thoroughly worthwhile book for anyone interested in Revolutionary War history—and even if you think you aren’t.

This book was well researched.  I never thought much about how the American Revolution was funded.  I just thought that France loaned the money and that did it all.  Not the case at all.  A number of well-to-do men in the colonies loaned the money to make sure that the army had the supplies it needed.  Shachtman makes sure to cover all of those.  

The one problem I had with the book is that there are so many people to keep track of.   It isn't a book for an easy afternoon of reading.  But it is definitely a book for filling in your knowledge of the foundations of the American revolution.