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L IKE THEIR G ENTILE counterparts, Jewish businessmen of the latter eighteenth century chafed at Britain's restrictive fiscal and mercantile policies. They, too, joined in the nonimportation and nonconsumption agreements, boycotting British goods and services. But they also shared the widespread ambivalence about rebellion. After the battles of Lexington and Concord, some Jews remained Loyalists, others became Whigs, and many others equivocated. Families divided in the Revolution. There were Gomezes, Lopezes, and Hayses in both the colonial and the British camp. Members of the renowned Franks clan of New York and Philadelphia, who had made their greatest fortunes as suppliers to the British armed forces, were endlessly grateful for the Empire's protection and benevolence. In Philadelphia, the beauteous Rebecca Franks reigned as queen of a society ball attended by General Sir Henry Clinton, the new British commander. Rodrigo Pacheco, Philip Moses, and Abraham Wag, among other leading citizens of New York, remained behind British lines. And once the British evacuated the city, not a few Jews fled to British protection on Long Island or in Philadelphia. Not a few also paid for their loyalty. After the war, several were driven into exile, losing their estates and even their lives. David Franks left for England, never to return. Isaac Hart, a cultured Newport merchant shipper who had joined the flight to British sanctuary on Long Island, was bayoneted to death by vindictive Whigs.
By far the majority of Jews chose the side of the colonists. Some left businesses and homes in New York, Newport, Savannah, and Charleston specifically to be free of British rule. Approximately one hundred Jews performed military service in the Revolution, most in local and state militias. A few died, some were wounded or captured. Almost the entire young adult Jewish male population of Charleston served in Captain William Lushington's company, which accordingly became known as the “Jew Company.” One of the first Charlestonians killed in action was the beloved Francis Salvador, ambushed and scalped by Indians in the pay of the British. Several Jews rose to high rank. Mordecai Sheftal of Savannah was deputy commissary general of issue for Georgia. Colonel Solomon Bush became adjutant general of the Pennsylvania militia. Lieutenant Colonel David S. Franks—a cousin of the Loyalist David Franks—served as adjutant to General Benedict Arnold. Dr. Philip Moses Russell, George Washington's surgeon, endured the hardships of Valley Forge.
Of more noteworthy service yet to the Revolution were Jewish blockade-runners, civilian contractors, financiers. A particularly successful blockade-runner was Isaac Moses & Co., whose Amsterdam branch shipped goods to the Dutch Caribbean island of Saint Eustatius, whence Jewish shippers carried them to American ports. Other Jewish shippers were less fortunate. Aaron Lopez of Newport lost the bulk of his merchant fleet to British naval interception. By war's end, this legend of New England merchant shipping was financially ruined. He would never recover his fortune. The role of civilian contractors was even more vital to the colonial effort. In their European tradition, numerous Jewish wholesale merchants provided the army with clothing, gunpowder, lead, and other needed equipment. Bernard and Michael Gratz manufactured uniforms, employing the manpower of local poorhouses. Joseph Simon manufactured rifles in Lancaster. More commonly, suppliers subcontracted. It was a financial risk. The Continental Congress took its time settling accounts, and some contractors never were recompensed.
Of the Revolutionary financiers, Haym Salomon was by far the most eminent. Born in Poland, Salomon immigrated to New York in 1772, at the age of thirty-two. There he resumed his European vocation of bill-brokering—in this case, the purchase and sale at a discount of the innumerable currencies circulating along the Atlantic seaboard. With the outbreak of the Revolution, Salomon moved to Philadelphia and promptly set about negotiating the sale of Continental bills of exchange for hard Dutch and French currencies. In a shrewd gesture, he asked only a negligible one-quarter of 1 percent for himself on the transactions. A grateful Continental Congress thereupon appointed Salomon official “Broker to the Office of Finance of the United States.” The French consulate similarly appointed him “Treasurer of the French Army in America.” From then on, throughout the war, endlessly advertising in the New York and Philadelphia press, the enterprising Salomon trumpeted his accomplishments as “ye official bill-broker.” His private business did not suffer. Neither is there doubt that his efforts to negotiate Continental currency and bonds were a godsend to the Revolutionary government, as were his personal interest-free loans to government officials, among them Madison, Jefferson, James Wilson, Edmond Randolph, and Generals von Steuben, St. Clair, and Mifflin of the Continental Army. The diaries of Robert Morris, superintendent of finances, contain several appreciative references to the “little Jew broker.”
Salomon's aggressiveness in negotiating government loans, however, ultimately did him in. When he died in 1785 at the age of fortyfive, leaving a widow and four young children, he was rumored to be owed $638,000 by defaulting public and private debtors. He was insolvent. For that matter, from Aaron Lopez to Mordecai Sheftal to Salomon, nearly every Jewish contractor, privateer, and financier of note came out of the Revolution with his fortune either gone or painfully diminished. Yet in Salomon's case, the magnitude of the government's debt was never documented. Later, the debt even was questioned by some historians. It is significant that Salomon himself did not present a claim for repayment. That step was taken, rather, years afterward by his posthumous son, Haym B. Salomon, who maintained an extensive correspondence on the subject with Presidents Madison and Tyler and who finally pressed his case with Congress in 1846, when he was sixty-one and poor. After Haym B.'s death, Salomon's heirs continued to petition Congress. Their appeals no longer were for money, however, but for a commemorative medal to honor their ancestor. Ethnic pride was at stake. By the early twentieth century, exposed to an upsurge of nativist racism, Jews of East European ancestry were determined that Salomon, one of their own, should achieve his belated niche in American history as “Financier of the Revolution.” Throughout the 1920s they appealed for a congressional resolution, a statue, a medal. All proposals died in committee. Finally, the Jews of Chicago simply raised the funds on their own. In a public ceremony of December 1941, a park statue was unveiled of George Washington flanked by Robert Morris and Haym Salomon. In later years, other statues of Salomon would be financed privately and erected on public plots in New York and Los Angeles. The Jewish role in the American Revolution presumably was canonized.