The Founding Generation Showed Their Patriotism With Their Money

Patriotism today tends to conjure notions of loyalty to country and battlefield courage, but little more. Partisan attempts to capture patriotism for one side and to accuse the other of lacking it is one reason for the narrowness of the current definition, but another is not looking to history for other examples. One of the most significant comes from this country’s founding era, when small numbers of Americans, most of them very wealthy, practiced an “economic patriotism” that put their country’s interests ahead of their own, risking—and sometimes losing—their financial well-being.

An early version surfaced during the late colonial period, among a handful of wealthy merchants in Boston; Charleston, South Carolina; and other American cities. The American Revolution began with the urban working class, mostly in the northeastern colonies. But only when a few wealthy merchants threw their weight behind the fledgling movement did resistance to British rule gain