Moon Township, Pa. – Robert Morris is having a birthday party, and you’re invited.
Robert Morris University (RMU) will celebrate its namesake’s birthday with an open house for the Heritage Room from 4 to 5:30 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 26. The Heritage Room is on the third floor of Nicholson Center at RMU’s Moon Township campus. The event is free and open to the entire campus community. It will feature food, prizes and music.
Robert Morris is an American founding father whose personal fortune helped finance America’s war for independence against England. He was born on Jan. 31, 1734 – though some sources list his birthday as Jan. 20.
In 2007, RMU got a unique opportunity to honor Morris when the Tudor House Gallery and Museum in Washington, D.C. donated the plaster bust used by sculptor Paul Wayland Bartlett to create the statue of Morris that stands in Philadelphia’s Independence Mall. The bust is now on display in the Heritage Room, which also features three framed original documents that Morris signed.
Presidents George Washington and John Adams used Morris’s mansion as their official residence before the White House was built. The building’s foundations have been unearthed at the national park at Independence Mall, and a new exhibit is set to open there this year.
Morris was born in Liverpool, England, and emigrated to America in 1748. He and a partner founded Willing, Morris & Company, a Philadelphia import/export firm, and soon Morris was a wealthy and influential businessman.
An outspoken opponent of the taxes levied in the Stamp Act, Morris became involved in the Revolution a decade later when he joined the Continental Congress and helped set up an army and navy. He is one of only two men to have signed all three of America’s founding documents – the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution.
As superintendent of finance during the Revolutionary War, Morris loaned the Continental Army large sums of his own money. Essayist Thomas Paine accused Morris of profiteering, but a congressional investigation exonerated Morris; the two men reconciled and Morris hired Paine to write editorials in support of the Bank of North America, the nation’s first central bank, which Morris created.
Morris was one of Pennsylvania’s first two senators, serving from 1789 to 1795. He then used his fortune to buy millions of acres of frontier land, including much of the land around Pittsburgh. The real estate boom he anticipated did not come in time, and Morris went to debtor’s prison. Congress eventually rewrote the bankruptcy laws, so the “Financier of the Revolution” lived out his final years in dignity at home and died in 1806.