Stephen Girard: A Philadelphia business genius

Ned Warwick

is a former editor with The Inquirer

It's a museum few people know exists, housing the collection of a man about whom most people are only vaguely aware. And yet the Stephen Girard Collection provides an extraordinary look at one of the most remarkable figures in the history of Philadelphia and of this country.

The collection, housed on the second floor of Founders Hall on the Girard College campus in Fairmount, rekindles in all its day-to-day detail the life and times of a man who, when alive, was America's richest person. We can see not only how this particular genius of business conducted his affairs but also how, through this prism, commerce in the late 18th and early 19th centuries worked.

The museum is off the beaten trail of this museum-choked city - hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and lacking the cutting-edge interactivity common to most museums these days. Get past those minor inconveniences, and that the museum is open only on Thursdays, and a time and a place unfold before you through the nearly complete contents of one wealthy man's house - a rare gift to posterity.

There is the convertible gig that Girard drove - a Ford of a carriage, not the Cadillac of its time; the correspondence in which former President James Monroe hits up Girard for a $40,000 loan - no speaker's fees, much less a pension, back then for ex-presidents; and a letter from Thomas Jefferson that goes over his order for books and wine. The furniture and accessories capture the spare luxury of a wealthy merchant prince whose house and business were located where I-95 now carves through lower Center City. There is his canopied bed, desk, wig, darned and re-darned socks, the ceramics from the Far East, and furniture made in France as well as Philadelphia. And there is his Masonic apron, marking him a member of the Charleston, S.C., Masons. (He was denied membership in the Philadelphia chapter for not being "perfectly formed," owing to a badly deformed and blind right eye.) There is, for scholars especially, an exceptionally rich bounty of Girard's correspondence - outgoing and incoming - bills of lading, receipt books, ship logs, and instructions and contingencies for his merchant ships once they were beyond the horizon and his immediate control. Nothing, it appears, was ever thrown away.

But none of this can be really appreciated without an appreciation of the man whose possessions became this collection. And Stephen Girard, despite a list of accomplishments that would make the Most Interesting Man in the World of the Dos Equis commercial, comes off as a piker, remaining little known at best and dismissed at worst.

Why?

For starters, as one of his biographers, Harry Emerson Wildes, snarls, "Philadelphia does not hate its heroes, it ignores them utterly." Part of that is attributed to the long-lingering and oversize ethos imprinted on us by our self-effacing Quaker forefathers.

But perhaps more to the point, Stephen Girard's reputation has been warped by time; a man who wrote a will in the 1830s that for its time was uncommonly progressive, but by the mid-20th century stood for segregation and bigotry and led to a showdown over the integration of Girard College - which at the time, according to the terms of Girard's will, admitted only poor orphan white boys. The battle drew in the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the U.S. Supreme Court, and very splashy and large national headlines.

The result, according to Bruce Laverty, a Girard scholar and curator of architecture at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, had a "significant negative impact" on Girard's reputation. Girard and the college "became a symbol of the oppression and discrimination . . . and one of the first places to come to a boiling point" during the civil rights struggle, Laverty said.

Slowly, Laverty predicts, as time moves on, Girard's reputation will regather itself.

As Washington, Jefferson, and even Lincoln must be matched to their times to comprehend their magnitude, despite our modern-day conception of their flaws, so must Girard. Born a Frenchman, he happened on Philadelphia in 1776 when, as captain and part owner of a storm-battered merchant ship, he headed up the Delaware to evade British naval ships blockading the coastline of the American colonies.

In Philadelphia, he saw opportunity. The city was young and vibrant. He was single-minded, driven, and frugal. He also possessed that rare capacity to be simultaneously wise and audacious. He gave up captaining ships and became a full-time merchant, sending a growing fleet of trading vessels to the far corners of the Earth. He became a banker and finally a huge landowner, and in each of these endeavors he was stupendously successful. He became a millionaire before the term even existed.

He was also a hero in desperate times. In 1793, yellow fever hit Philadelphia with a ferocity that sent thousands, including President Washington, racing to get clear of the city. Girard stayed and took over the running of Bush Hill, a former mansion turned into a hospital for sick and dying yellow-fever victims. The city lost 16 percent of the population that did not leave during the epidemic.

He helped run weapons - once - for Simon Bolivar's forces during their uprising against Spanish rule in Latin America.

When the First Bank of the United States folded after Congress refused to renew its charter, Girard bought it with cash - lock, stock, and barrel - and renamed it Stephen Girard's Bank.

And when the United States declared war on Britain a second time without any means to finance it, he covered more than half the $16 million needed to see the war executed successfully. Had America lost the war, Girard would have been ruined.

He bought thousands of acres of land in upstate Pennsylvania, anticipating correctly that the coal beneath was going to power the industrial revolution - yet another fortune piled atop the others. And, oh, yes, he invested heavily in the rail and canal systems that would carry the coal to the docks of Philadelphia.

For all his wealth and power, he - like Albert Barnes, another man with a rigid will and an unusual vision for doing good - Girard made no effort to be part of Philadelphia's establishment.

"Girard is not going to Cliveden for dinner," said Elizabeth Laurent, director of historic resources for Girard College, referring to the summer house built in Germantown in the 1760s by Benjamin Chew, the colonial chief justice of Pennsylvania. And, Laurent notes, Girard chose to live on Water Street, just north of Market, not Society Hill, where the Cadwaladers, Morrises, and other first families of Philadelphia dwelled.

In 1831, at age 81, Girard died. Such was his wealth at the time, merchants worried that the world economy would be stricken by his money being removed from circulation.

He left a painstakingly drawn up and massively voluminous will that would stun the times and reverberate for many years.

It was like no other will. For starters, it involved a fortune - nearly $7 million, which in today's terms, according to one calculation by the Wall Street Journal, amounts to about $50 billion. Fortune magazine ranked him as the fourth-richest man in the country's history based on a percentage of wealth pegged to the GDP at time of death. And very little of it went to family. He had no children and never remarried after his mentally disturbed wife died.

He gave massively to the city - the first time anyone had given money to a city - and one of his stipulations was that money be spent to build Delaware Avenue in order that the waterfront be properly and efficiently connected to maintain Philadelphia's status as a world-class seaport.

There were large gifts - including the money to build Girard College - and numerous small ones, as well; money, for instance, set aside to help provide heating for the poor. "The quiet giving of alms," said Williams College professor Michael J. Lewis, who specializes in the architectural history of Philadelphia.

"He is the first great capitalist and philanthropist in American history," Lewis said. "He devotes the entirety of his fortune to charity."

The idea of Girard College as a school for poor white male orphans was revolutionary. It was just the dawning of public education and, up until then, the poor did not go to school. But why just white boys?

"As a progressive and enlightened moment in history that was a pretty significant one," said Sam Katz, whose production company is building a documentary history of Philadelphia and made an 18-minute documentary on Girard for the college. "Had Girard suggested at that time that girls and Native Americans and African Americans [be educated at Girard College], the probability of that will being sustained in court was pretty small, not because of law but because of the racial lines in the sand that existed at the time."

Once the civil rights battles began over the will, Katz said, "it was essential to cast Girard as a racist . . . and that moniker does not get shaken loose, if at all, without a lot of effort, and no one is making that effort right now."

Following the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling of 1968, Owen Gowans was in the initial group of four African Americans to enroll at Girard College. Today, the 51-year-old SEPTA employee is adamant that Girard, a slave owner, needs to be seen "as a contemporary of his time."

"He was an amazing man and what he did for the United States was amazing," Gowans said. "He was the Bill Gates of his time."