 Hello to my viewers, my name is Melinda Moulton and welcome to Moments with Melinda. Today my guest is Willard Randall. Hi Willard, how are you? Very good, thank you, how are you? I am fine and I am really just honored and thrilled to have you on my show today. I heard you speak at Phoenix Books when they brought you in to speak and I am just blown away by your new novel. And let me tell my viewers a little bit about Willard Randall. Willard is a distinguished scholar in history and professor emeritus at Champlain College where he is finishing up his 25th year of teaching there. Prior to academia, Willard worked for 17 years as an investigative reporter during which he garnered the National Magazine Award, the Hillman Prize, the Loeb Award and the John Hancock Award. Eventually pursuing advanced studies in history at Princeton University as a biographer and lecturer who specializes in the history of the founding era. And this is your new book, The Founder's Fortunes, How Money Shaped the Birth of America. Glad to see it. Well, I gotta tell you when I saw the title, I thought it was gonna talk about their fortunes and in a few minutes we're gonna get into this but it wasn't always about fortunes, was it? No, it was not. It was not. So first of all, though, Willard, I would love you to share with my viewers a little bit about who you are, where you hail from, a little bit about your growing up and who inspired you to pursue this work, to study this era in our country's history and I'm gonna mean it myself. That's about four questions. So let me say first, I'm from Philadelphia, which is really considered the heartland of history of the Revolutionary Era. So I grew up surrounded with Franco and everything and with the different institutions that he founded. So I was always interested in the history of Philadelphia. My father, who was an executive with a manufacturing company, loved history and he edited a magazine for the company for 25 years in which he wrote historical articles. He always was getting the latest history book and I was always grabbing it the minute he got finished with it. So from about the age of nine or 10, I was reading American history. Who inspired me? Well, I don't know if anybody inspired me because I've never felt really inspired. I've worked at this since I graduated from high school. I finished high school and went to work immediately on a daily newspaper in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, which at the time was the leading daily paper, small paper in the country. It doesn't exist anymore, unfortunately. I had a very tough editor who sent me out on all sorts of assignments and that gave me sort of the courage to write about just about anything. I started writing a history column for the Mercury. I think at the time I was 19. So I've been writing history in one form or another since then, which is getting to be a very long time. In Philadelphia, I went to work for Philadelphia evening in Sunday bulletin, which was the largest evening paper in the country, that a very fine paper. And there more and more, they steered me to their magazine and writing longer history pieces. Doing one of those, I met Catherine Drinker Bowen, who was a famous biographer in her time. And for some odd reason, she thought that I had the right stuff to pursue the history of the revolution because I had ideas that other people weren't doing. At the time, nobody was writing about the Americans who didn't want a revolution, the loyalist Americans, the ones who left. And I was working on that on my own and she heard about it and she said, that's the last great story of American history. So out of that conversation came my first full length biography on Benjamin Franklin and the Sun called A Little Revenge. So I would say if there was any individual who inspired me, it was Kitty Bowen herself, a single mother who basically lived and wrote in her brother's attic. Well, he ran one of the biggest law firms in Philadelphia. So she pretty much, she didn't take me under her wing, but she introduced me. And because of her, I was able to get my first research grant, a small one, $750 from the American Philosophical Society, but that gave me sort of the cachet to go on and speak and write about American history. When she died, the day after she died, I gave her eulogy at the first international conference on the American loyalists. And at that meeting, a leading British historian said to me, you can't write about the revolution, there aren't enough documents. How can you write about the revolution? Well, I've been working very hard to prove to him that I can and that I could. But it was a chance of meeting some wonderful people very early along in a journalism career. So I finally decided that I would take the plunge after 17 years of reporting and start writing history full-time, writing books. Which brought me here. After my journalist years came to an end, I saw that I had to get more education. I had never gotten a college degree in all those years as a journalist, but I actually challenged Princeton University a program they had to let me take one graduate course. And if I passed that, they would admit me to graduate school. They did. And I got my master's degree in the next year or so. And then my wife, Nancy Nara, and it was my co-author in my works, came to teach at UVM. And I decided this is a good time to come to UVM. And I started teaching at UVM in 1983. And I taught there for 10 years. I taught American history for 10 years. But during that time, I began to write books. So after the Franklin book, I turned to Benedict Arnold, who never had, I think, a decent biography about him. There's a line from Shakespeare that I had in mind from the very beginning. The evil that men do lives on after them. The good is oft interred with their bones. So we know Benedict Arnold is the great trader, but we don't know that we could not have won the revolution if he had also been our best fighting soldier. And for a lot of reasons, which you can read in my book, Benedict Arnold, Patriot and Trader, he wound up on the wrong side. And because for one thing, he tangled with Congress. And Congress, after the Founding Fathers, wrote the Declaration of Independence, et cetera. Really, the founders went off to run their individual states. But the people who crowded in after that are not the most admirable politicians. So Arnold locked horns with them. But after I wrote Benedict Arnold, my wife basically said, you can't go on writing about generals. So I began writing about presidents. Well, didn't Benedict Arnold, didn't he also not get paid? And he was also had to do that. Well, that was exactly one of the big causes. He not only didn't get paid, but as a general in Philadelphia, he had to pick up the tab for all the other generals and officers. And Congress just came and fed at his table as he went deeper and deeper into debt. So look, I have to tell you, I could spend a day talking to you. Your wealth of information and how you get that across to the public is phenomenal in this book, which we're talking with Will or Will about the founder's fortunes, how money shaped the birth of America. Let's jump into this. Talk a little bit about this book and give us an overview of the book. And then I have some questions I wanna ask you. Okay. I can start really where the Founding Fathers started. And that was at the Declaration of Independence. After they agreed on what was going to be in it at the very end, they all signed their pledge, which was to they pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. Well, I wanted to look at those words individually. They pledged their lives. That's right. They were revolutionaries. And if they had been caught, they would have been hanged by the British. The British commanders wrote around with copies of the Declaration of Independence and their pockets with the names of all the signers. So if they had been caught, they would have been sent to England and brutally executed. Their fortunes was another question. What were their fortunes? This was harder to dig out. This is what took most of the last five years. A little over a century ago, a professor at Columbia University named Charles Beard came up with a theory that the founding fathers were corrupt, that they were in it for the money, that they wanted a new form of government in which they could make a lot more money. And that had bothered me quite a lot. So I decided to dig in and look at each one. And that's what I've done from Franklin and Washington down to Hamilton. Hamilton had so little money after creating our financial system that he didn't have enough money for a funeral when he was killed in the famous duel with Aaron Burr. George Washington was the richest man in America in land, but nobody had the money to buy it and nobody had the money to rent it. And the first thing I discovered as I went along is most of the founding fathers were land rich and cash poor because the economy was unstable. And after the revolution, the British clamped down restrictions on our trade with Canada, the Caribbean, Europe, et cetera. So the people who were beginning to make money, the merchants, all of a sudden had no business and they all had a great deal at stake in real estate but nobody could pay for it. So right away I knew was on the right track with them. And then I decided to work through them individually. So before resorting to arms, the colonies tried various embargo tactics. How important to England was the American market? Can you just describe the effectiveness of these early tactics, Willard? Well, the Stamp Act, the first riot with the Stamp Act, when Americans refused to buy the stamped paper, which you had to have a stamp on every piece of paper coming from England. When Americans rejected that, it was because until then, they had been allowed to make up their own laws, their own taxes. So the big issue was where did Parliament get the authority? But when Americans boycotted the stamps, it meant that 30% of the workers in England went out of work because they had no jobs, because they had nothing they could ship to America. Americans were not allowed to manufacture anything. They sent raw materials and crops to England and then they had to buy the manufactured goods back and pay custom studios on them. So adding a stamp tax to that. And it wasn't just on newspaper, every newspaper, every page had to be tax paper. George Washington, when he came in from the fields, wanted to play cards at Mount Vernon with his friends. When he opened a pack of cards, there was a tax on the cards that was enough to pay for a farm manager. When he got out of his dice to roll them with his friends, the tax on the dice was enough to buy two horses. So he began to see how outrageously overtaxed they were. And Washington did not want war. He did not want to be a soldier. Washington had fought against the French for five years, but he wanted to be a country gentleman with his plantation. But everything he did, he ran into taxes, fees and commissions from the British. His answer was sanctions. The word we use for sanctions now. At that time, man, economic boycott. Americans systematically shut down their trade with the English and the English had massive unemployment. So that was effective. So let's talk about the privateer licenses. Now, Congress was issuing privateer licenses a year before the creation and passing and the declaration of independence. Can you give a sense of scale of these American privateers activities and how important they were to the revolution? Well, we didn't have a Navy and the British had 600 and some ships. We didn't have a Navy. And so merchants who had ships, several of them gave their ships to Washington to form what became known as Washington's Navy, just 20 ships all in all. Those merchants then built new ships and got licenses from the Continental Congress called Letters of Mark where they could go out and they weren't pirates. They were commissioned by Congress to go and capture British merchant ships. And if they got those ships intact back to port, they were auctioned off. And the captain, the crew and George Washington got a cut of the auction price. Washington was for the army. And there was some people who made phenomenal fortunes raiding British commerce. And it got to the point where British merchants couldn't get insurance from Lloyds of London, their insurance company. The British had to build a big fleet to escort their ships. So the privateers, as we recall, were decisive in the American revolution. So interesting words. So in the era leading up to the revolution then throughout the revolution and even as aftermath, you trace the undercurrent of condemning slavery and indenture, attempts to polish it. Can you give us some examples of such efforts and who was making them? Well, exactly in the Thomas Jefferson in writing the Declaration of Independence wrote a list of 24 grievances, complaints about why the Americans thought the British were acting unfairly and why they had to break away and have a country of their own. And on that list was a strong condemnation of the slave tree written by Jefferson himself. I'm blaming it on the king of England who profited from it. And Jefferson was right that most of the slaves were sold by the Royal African Company, which is owned by the British crown. So he tried to abolish slavery in the Declaration of Independence, but several delegates from southern states threatened to not sign the Declaration of Independence and leave the Continental Congress if that paragraph remained. So Jefferson's an attempt at the abolition of the slave trade hit the cutting room floor in Independence Hall. And he had, he was a slave owner. Yes, he was, but he thought that the government should take the responsibility for freeing the slaves and compensate their owners. And it shouldn't be an individual thing, it should be done by the government. And that's where they differed. So Willard, what were the confiscation laws and how did they play out in this new nation? Well, actually, a good example is Vermont. Ethan Allen was put in charge of confiscations after he came back from being a prisoner of war with the British for nearly three years. And so Ira Allen had the brilliant idea instead of taxing the Americans who were fighting against the king, instead of taxing them for the war to confiscate the property of the loyalists, those Vermonters who had left and gone to Canada to join the king side. And there were quite a few. So Ethan Allen, for example, went around and confiscated loyalist estates. They were turned over to American leaders. So General Von Steuben, who trained our army at Valley Forge, for example, was given a handsome estate in New York because nobody had any money to give him money. So the confiscations were like a direct transfer of wealth from those against the revolution to those who were for it. So what did the overall economy, especially right after the war, how did the common soldiers fare? Well, that's a wonderful question because they weren't faring very well and the war was over. We had signed a peace treaty and Washington had several thousand armed men on his hands and they were rebellious. They threatened to march on Congress in Philadelphia. So Congress pulled up stakes and went to Princeton and the soldiers followed over and that they started to a mutiny and Washington broke it up. And when they persisted one sergeant, especially kept the mutiny going, Washington had him shot. Washington was an opusy cat. As far as I can tell, he ordered 34 executions in the course of the war for insubordination, especially if you threatened Congress or one of the officers. So what Washington had to come up with the money to pay the troops or it wasn't safe to send them home, armed men, disgruntled, unpaid for years. So he turned to Robert Morris, who's one of the figures in the book that I'm fascinated by. Robert Morris became briefly the richest man in America. And Robert Morris himself sat down on a weekend with reams of parchment and scissors and cut it up into small pieces. And each one became a banknote backed by him, his entire fortune. He signed 6,000 of those notes, which Washington then used to pay off his men. So they went home with some dignity, a little money and I think slightly inebriated thanks to Robert Morris. So interesting. And he ended up in debtor's prison, am I correct? Exactly right. And that's one of the sad notes. These men, if they were in it for money, we're not very good at that because quite a few of them lost everything. Three signers, the Declaration of Independence went bankrupt and went to debtor's prison. I wasn't even aware of debtor's prisons. I thought they were all in England with Charles Dickens writing about them. But no, they were here. If you couldn't pay your debts, you had to surrender to the sheriff. You were put in a debtor's prison. It has the lovely name of the Prune Street Jail in Philadelphia, right near Independence Hall. And he was there for three years while his wife lived in a small rented house, too humiliated to have tea with Abigail Adams when she wanted to come visit. But Washington, to show how much Robert Morris had done actually visited Robert Morris in jail. The man who had paid his soldiers, George Washington sat and had lunch with him. And then went off to Mount Vernon and Robert Morris eventually was one of the first bank rubs before the first U.S. bankruptcy court and then ended up penniless and free. So I want you to just touch a little bit on Shay's rebellion and the economic forces that led to it. And do you think that it influenced the constitutional convention? Definitely, I can give a short absolute answer on that. Shay's was one of the Massachusetts continental soldiers who spent seven years in the war. And how the recruiting was done after the initial volunteers was states offered land. The individual states gave bounties of land. Shay's was one of those who got 100 acres of backwoods country in the Berkshires, unbroken land. So he came and settled it as others did, broke it up. He became the town leader in Pelham, Massachusetts. The government of Massachusetts became very conservative after the revolution. Adams was gone, Hancock was out of office and you got a very conservative government led by merchants who shifted the tax burden to the land owner. These poor veterans were supposed to pay property taxes and they didn't have any money either. So there were massive sheriff sales on the frontier and that led to Shay's rebellion. And so many joined, 4,000 men joined Shay's, not all at once, unfortunately, but 4,000 men. And when Washington heard about this, he shuddered. He said, here we go again. The revolution's gonna start all over. The merchants hired their own private army that got there before Shay's did to the artillery in the arsenal at Springfield and killed a few Americans. Thousands ran to Vermont and so you have towns all up and down the Connecticut River and Lake Champlain that are named after the towns in Massachusetts that they left behind. It was so important that Washington said we can't have this left of the states to do what they want, especially with these veterans. So he got behind the movement for a new constitution in the federal government. So fascinating. So in 1790, Jefferson to Madison did travel to Vermont. You wanna talk a little bit about the politics around their visit? That's one of my pet. I think I'm the one that came up with that story in American heritage is called Thomas Jefferson Takes a Vacation. When I was doing my research for my Jefferson book, I used microfilm in the New York public library. And most of it was real estate deals. So I got bored one day and I didn't finish the whole real microfilm. When the book came out, I had 30 days for any revisions. I thought, you know how to look at the rest of that role of microfilm. And on it was a day-by-day diary that Jefferson made of all the people he stopped with what he had to eat. It was like a first travel guide. And so he and Madison took a vacation together. They used Jefferson's huge carriage. He was so tall. He had designed one that was like a phone booth on wheels. And he took off on the road with Madison. And they came by way of Saratoga. They stopped at the battlefield of Saratoga. They stopped at every good in and then raided it. How good, bad, or indifferent. They crossed over to Bennington. They arrived on a Sunday and found out that Bennington was closed on Sunday. And then Bennington insisted on taking Madison and Jefferson back across the border to where the real battle of Bennington had taken place, which is not in Vermont. But he had four days. He was sort of excoriated by the minister of the congregational church there because some people thought he was an atheist. Jefferson, how about it? Was he an atheist? No, he was not an atheist. Today he would be called a Unitarian. Very much a Unitarian. He didn't believe in the Trinity. He didn't believe in clergy. He didn't believe in sacraments. He got the Bible down to 48 pages called Jesus a Good Man. So no, he was not. But the clergy didn't like him very much. But they left Bennington and crossed over through New England and actually wrote the first glossary of native languages, writing a list of what words meant. So it was a wonderful trip. And when it was all over, Vermont pretty much had to make up its mind whether it was gonna be for Jefferson or Hamilton because that trip started the two-party system. Jefferson started a newspaper that attacked Hamilton's policies as Secretary of Treasury. So he had a newspaper war going on and Washington hated it. Washington hated partisanship. He only took a second term because these two men were in each other's throats. But he hated it, he hated it. He was sick of the media by the time he left. He called the journalist pack of infamous scribblers. And he was so happy to go back to Mount Vernon. Well, listen, we're coming down close to the end of this interview. And I want to talk to you, first of all, to my viewers, what a fabulous time to spend with Willard Randall to talk about his new book, The Founder's Fortunes, How Money Shaped the Birth of America. And there's so many wonderful tales in this book and things that you would not expect to find and it's available at your local bookstore. I believe it's been released, right, Willard? And you can get it. It's released last Tuesday, yes, at Phoenix Books. So I honor that I get one of the first interviews with you and you can certainly pick it up at any of your local bookstores of Phoenix Books. And I always want to promote that you shop at your local bookstores. Now, Willard, I'm gonna move into something a little bit more present day. Okay. As we see these attacks on our constitution and our voting rights and the insurrection on January 6th who these folks consider themselves revolutionaries, the challenge to the outcome of the election, the propaganda and the mistruths, one of the things that crossed my mind is what would it take if someone was elected as our president who really did have fascist motives to abolish the constitution and just write their own doctrine and move this country into a place away from where we are as a democracy? Does that, does any of that boil up in you as you, cause history does guide us in how we move to the future? Does any of that percolate in your mind? It also repeats itself. Thank you. So for that, I need your wisdom. One of the lessons of history, you are doomed to repeat them. So I need your wisdom today. Yes. I think there's, I think there's a danger that too many people will become disgusted with politics and lose interest in it. When I listen to the news at night, it's hard to hear anything encouraging. There's so much divisiveness, so much partisanship, only my research gives me encouragement because we have been through this many times. We've had one awful civil war, but I don't think it will come to that. I think there are enough people in this country smart enough that if they have to create a new political party to end some of this, we'll do it. I think the fight is over money. Too much authority has been given to money in our electoral system. But I do think there are a lot of people who won't sit on the sidelines. And the important thing is to keep encouraging, show the things that we have accomplished and what we can do in a very rough time. Inspire our young people. I'm still teaching history to teachers, future teachers of high school because I think we undervalue our high schools. If our students learn their history in high school, then they will become good citizens. If they don't, they're gonna drift into college and probably have a wonderful time, but not come out of it good citizens. If I had my way, every American student would take the citizenship test that every new American takes. And they would know enough history to understand and appreciate what we already have. And civics classes. Yes, civics classes. You need to start this in grade school. Absolutely. It shouldn't come down to sticking something in an envelope once a year or every four years. It should become an integral part of everyday life. But how do you feel about the efforts by state's legislatures to override elections? I mean, if we lose the ability to have honest and fair elections, then our democracy is really at risk. Do you see us moving in a direction with these legislatures changing the laws and with gerrymandering? I think it's a terrible thing that they're doing, frankly. But I also think they risk the ire of an awful lot of people who just see, who have very little except their right to vote. And what I've seen historically before, you get something like an uprising of good people. Throw the scoundrels out. Like the McCarthy era. I mean, I'm like the McCarthy era, right? Yes, that's right. But California is great for recall elections. We just saw another one. It can happen. If people care enough and they think there are scoundrels misrepresenting them, then they can be voted out of office. How do you feel about media, major media outlets propagating falsehoods and propaganda? Well, I don't wanna get down to particulars, but it's very easy. It's almost impossible not to. It's scandalous. And they're doing it for ratings and for advertising dollars. But I don't wanna paint with a broad brush. There's still the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, the Wall Street Journal. It goes on and on. But a rogue elephant can do a lot of damage in a China shop. And it just takes one of these big media companies. And they're not apolitical. They're very much a part of the insurrection. So I think people have to refuse. It's very easy to cancel a subscription. It's even easier to change a channel so these people don't have so much power. Right. Well, Willard Randall, I have had a delightful time with you on my TV show. And to my viewers again, the Founders Fortunes, How Money Shaped the Birth of America? It's a page turner. It's a fabulous book. Read it, read it to your children. And Willard, I wish you all the best. And I can't wait for your next novel, your next piece of work. And thank you for your time today. And thank you. This has been a very good interview. Thank you, Willard. Thank you, sir.