The conclusive evidence of Dayton’s extensive operations in public securities during the period of the establishment of the new government and his term of service as Speaker is afforded by the records of the Treasury Department. Here he appears so frequently on the books of the loan offices of several states that some pages of this volume would be required to present the bare data of his transactions. However, a few examples of his dealings may be given by way of illustration. He appears on the loan office books of New York in February and March, 1791, for the following amounts: $17,060.82, $8530.40, $11,332.93, $7401.31, $3700.73, and $5100.61, totalling more than $50,000.[[170]] At another point he is recorded for more than $15,000;[[171]] and at another point for $6000.[[172]] Although Woods is not celebrated for the painstaking impartiality of his famous History of Adams’ Administration, he is singularly accurate in one of his characterizations: “Jonathan Dayton, of New Jersey, the late speaker of Congress, is notorious from Boston to Georgia. The deeds of other members of Congress were scarcely known beyond the circle of their respective states, but the speculations of this man have rung throughout the western world.”[[173]]
John Dickinson, of Delaware, was a member of one of the established landed families of the south. He was born in 1732, on a plantation in Talbot County, on the eastern shores of Maryland; and eight years after his birth, his father, Samuel Dickinson moved from Maryland to Delaware “where he purchased a large estate in Kent County, near Dover.”[[174]] Dickinson was a student of law in the Middle Temple and took up the practice of his profession in Philadelphia in 1757.[[175]] Within five years he had acquired an extensive practice and won a respectable standing at the bar.
If his personal fortunes, however, had not been sufficient to assure him a satisfactory position in the business and professional world at Philadelphia, his marriage into one of the first and wealthiest commercial families would have more than made up for his deficiencies.
In 1770 he married Mary Norris, and for a time lived at the family estate, Fairhill, one of the show places of the day: “This house,” says Simpson,[[176]] “was in its day a very grand mansion and a place of great celebrity, with a large front of sixty feet. It was surrounded by forest and evergreen trees of majestic growth and well-arranged shrubbery. It commanded a beautiful prospect of the city, with a distant view of the Delaware.... The mansion was two stories high and most substantially built, with a very wide hall running through its centre. The library was papered, but the parlors and hall were wainscotted with oak and red cedar unpainted, but polished with wax and kept in bright and handsome order by constant rubbing. The carriage way was finely graduated and wound through an extensive lawn, from its approach on the Germantown road which was bordered with shrubbery. The pleasure grounds, lawn, green house, and gardens, fish-ponds, and walks, embraced a large area of several acres in extent.” It is true the vast estates bequeathed to Miss Norris by her father were transferred to collateral male heirs in order to preserve the family holding and name, but she retained the “considerable personal property” which her father left to her.[[177]] Dickinson was able to make a large gift to Dickinson College, named in his honor; and he and his wife were widely celebrated for their extensive benefactions.[[178]]
The meagreness of the Treasury records for Delaware make it impossible to determine whether Dickinson was engaged in fiscal operations along with his intimate friends, Robert Morris, Thomas Willing, George Clymer, and other prominent Philadelphia men of affairs. It is possible that he was not largely engaged in the public security transactions,[[179]] for he was an extremely cautious man in finances, and had got into serious discredit with the patriot party during the Revolution, because it was rumored that he had advised his brother against accepting the payment of debts in paper which was sure to depreciate. He was also unhappily involved with Robert Morris to the amount of £7000 at the time of the latter’s embarrassment, and may not have wished to incur further risks.[[180]]
Oliver Ellsworth, of Connecticut, was the son of a clever Connecticut farmer who inherited a hundred pounds and “had the industry and the shrewdness to accumulate a considerable estate and to win the reputation of an excellent farmer.”[[181]] Oliver was educated at Yale and Princeton and became a lawyer in spite of his father’s determination to force him into the ministry. Though he was almost briefless during the early days of his practice, he had the good fortune to wed the daughter of William Wolcott, of East Windsor, “a gentleman of substance and distinction.”[[182]] He is described by his biographer as a man of great purpose, persistency, and of little imagination, and he rose rapidly to wealth and power at the bar of his native state. “It is doubtful,” says Brown, “if in the entire history of the Connecticut bar any other lawyer has ever in so short a time accumulated so great a practice.... Measured either by the amount of his business or by his earnings, it was unrivalled in his own day and unexampled in the history of the colony. Naturally shrewd, and with nothing of the spendthrift in his nature, he quickly earned a competence, and by good management he increased it to a fortune which for the times and the country was quite uncommonly large. From a few documents still in existence it is clear that he became something of a capitalist and investor. He bought lands and houses and loaned out money at interest. He was a stockholder in the Hartford Bank and one of the original subscribers to the stock of the old Hartford Broadcloth Mill (1788).”
With that natural shrewdness and economy which his latest biographer ascribed to him, Ellsworth accumulated a by no means negligible amount in public securities from which he profited by the rise of credit that accompanied the establishment of the new government. He was among the first citizens of Connecticut to have his paper funded into the new government securities, for he appears in December, 1791, with $1330.50 in deferred sixes, $2660.98 in funded sixes, and $1995.75 in 3 per cents.[[183]] His wife, Abigail, and other members of her family, the Wolcotts, had also invested in securities.[[184]]
William Few, of Georgia, was almost unique among the members of the Convention in being a representative, in origin and education, of the small farming class. His father was a Maryland farmer who was led by a successive failure of crops to try his fortune in North Carolina, where young Few labored with the ax and plow. Even here the elder Few did not prosper, and he became so deeply involved in debt that his son had to take over the management of his property. William, afterward, in 1776, settled in Georgia, and soon became engaged in politics and the Revolutionary War.
At the close of the War, he relates, “I possessed not much property nor had I any expectation that I did not acquire by my own industry. I therefore determined to commence the practice of law, although I had never spent one hour in the office of an attorney to prepare for business, nor did I know anything of the practice.” He adds, however, that his practice grew in spite of his deficiencies and that his “pecuniary prospects were very flattering,” by the time he was elected a member of the Convention. At all events he acquired a plantation in Columbia County, and after the expiration of his term as Senator in 1793, he retired there and engaged in agricultural pursuits. In 1799 he left Georgia for New York, where he managed his small fortune in real and personal property, according to his own estimate, about $100,000.[[185]]
Few’s personal interest in the new government was probably rather small, but the absence of the full records of Georgia from the books of the Treasury Department renders impossible a categorical statement. He was connected with the Georgia Union Company, which was involved in the Yazoo land deals;[[186]] and he presented for funding a certificate of the issue of 1779 to the amount of $2170 nominal value, which he had secured from one Spears.[[187]] His name appears occasionally on other records for small amounts, and the index in the office of the Register of the Treasury cites him as being among the security holders recorded in a volume not found.[[188]]