I've decided to do something a little different for a future blog post. On reddit they sometimes host "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) sessions with various individuals based on their occupations or other life experiences, and I thought it might be interesting to do something like this here. So leave a comment - anonymous if you prefer - asking me anything you've ever wondered about what I do regarding this blog. The questions can be about the markers themselves, about my so-called adventures collecting them, people I've met, things I do or do not do, my cats, my books, and so on. As long as it's a reasonable inquiry, I'll most likely answer it. I'm not sure when I'll post all the answers, it'll depend on how many questions I get and how soon.
Meanwhile, for this week's quest, we're going over a marker I collected two and half years ago. When time permits, Kevin and I like to go marker-hunting in Cumberland County after a meeting of our Sherlock Holmes club, the White Rose Irregulars, and this was one of the results of such a hunt. I will admit that part of the reason it's taken me so long to write about this one is that there's a insignificant portion of the gentleman's history that makes me decidedly uncomfortable.
However, what I didn't learn until much later was that this largely-forgotten figure of the American Revolution has a much bigger claim to fame than anything mentioned on his historical marker, and I'm genuinely surprised that it's not included. He devised a little something that we here in the United States use pretty much every day, but I think it's fair to say that most of us barely give it any thought. It's just something we're taught when we're young and use for the rest of our lives and we rarely, if ever, question its origins.
I'm about to introduce to you the man who invented the dollar sign.
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| The marker stands beside Macris Chocolates at 6395 Carlisle Pike, Mechanicsburg |
Not being thrilled with life on the colonial frontier, Oliver relocated within a year of their arrival to Philadelphia and joined the commercial firm of Willing & Morris. They sent him to Havana, Cuba, as an agent to sell provisions to the British Army, and he remained there for several years. Cuba was returned to the control of Spain in 1763, but Oliver stayed where he was; he was in something of a unique situation, being a British citizen but having official permission to live in Spanish territories. This gave him the unusual opportunity to trade with both empires, something that would otherwise have been illegal. It was also during his time in Cuba, in 1765, that he married Margaret O'Brien, the mother of his eight children.
Oliver made his fortune in the Spanish Caribbean. I won't sugarcoat it (I couldn't if I wanted to, since it's right there on the marker) - although he was a merchant, who dealt in goods imported from Philadelphia, he also made a lot of money through the African slave trade. A lot of men did in those days. Like most people, Oliver was a complex individual, and a product of his time period and his environment. I'm not excusing him, I'm not apologizing for him, that's not my job. I'm just stating facts. He did a lot of good with the money he made, as we'll see shortly, but he made a fair amount of that money in one of the cruelest ways our species has ever devised, and I'd be remiss if I didn't state that fact. As I've said in other posts, history isn't always pretty.
Things really began to change for Oliver in 1769, when he was dispatched to New Orleans. There was an uprising against the governor of the Louisiana region, Antonio de Ulloa. Oliver wasn't military and he wasn't there to quell the uprising; rather, he was there because the people were starving as a result of the whole thing. He brought with him a literal boatload of flour, which he sold to the citizens at face value - that is, not for profit, only making back what it had cost him. Alejandro O'Reilly, an Irish general in the employ of Spain's King Charles III, had befriended Oliver during their shared time in Cuba and was deeply grateful for the other man's generosity, as his soldiers were among those going hungry. Oliver was rewarded with free trading rights across Louisiana, which he used to continue building his fortune. He eventually purchased acres of land, including what became a successful indigo planation which he entrusted to his cousin Hamilton Pollock.
Being wealthy and well-connected in the colonies made Oliver a popular guy. So when those upstarts known as the Continental Congress began their rebellion against British sovereignty, they asked Oliver to bring their cause to those governing parts of the New World on behalf of Spain. Oliver had a strong patriotic feeling toward his adopted homeland, and he threw himself into the support of revolution. He was able to arrange for shipments of gunpowder from Spain, and aided his former business partner James Willing, who invaded West Florida and robbed British plantations. This is another instance of his heroism being entirely dependent on your point of view, because as part of helping Willing, Oliver was given permission to sell what had been taken during the raids - eighty-five enslaved men and women. The auction of these individuals was so profitable that Oliver bought a captured British ship, reoutfitted it, and put it to use for active slave raiding.
As the war continued, the leaders sought monetary assistance from Oliver, who responded by pretty much single-handedly financing the efforts of George Rogers Clark. Clark was the highest-ranking military officer on the northwestern frontier, and the leader of what was known as the Illinois Campaign. This was a mission undertaken entirely by militiamen from Virginia, who were able to seize control of a number of British outposts west of the Mississippi River. Oliver supported the Illinois Campaign not only with money, but by using his diplomacy skills to open up several trade routes by which he was able to get supplies delivered to Clark's forces. Oliver also made it possible for Col. David Rogers to deliver a secret message from Patrick Henry to Bernardo de Gálvez, the governor of Spanish Louisiana, in 1778, the result of which was that Spain joined the war on our side.
Unfortunately, while all this was going on, Oliver was drowning in debt. The fortune he had built was draining steadily, thanks in part to the Illinois Campaign; Clark and his people, who had been given bills of exchange in Oliver's name, misjudged just how rich their patron was and overdrew on his accounts. By 1779, he was in fiscal trouble and had to sell off a lot of the property he owned in order to pay his bills, and borrowed heavily to cover the rest. Nevertheless he continued to assist the war effort, and it's been estimated that by the time the war was over, he had personally contributed the modern equivalent of almost one billion dollars to obtaining liberty from Britain. Financially exhausted, and in danger of debtor's prison, he began to request repayment from Congress.
Oliver remained in the home until for a few more years before moving to Baltimore. There he met his second wife, Winifred (maiden name unknown); they married in 1805, and lived in that city until she died in 1814. After that he moved back to the south he had always loved. He eventually received most of the money Congress owed him, but it was very close to the end of his life, so it didn't do him a whole lot of good. He ended up in Pinckneyville, Mississippi, where he spent his final years in the home of his daughter Mary and her husband, Dr. Samuel Robinson. He died there on December 17, 1823, and is buried in the community's Episcopal Church Cemetery. His grave is unmarked, although the Daughters of the American Revolution placed an informative plaque there in his honor. No portrait of him is believed to exist; they were all lost, along with his surviving personal effects, in a fire during the Civil War. The only known image of him is a sculpture bearing his likeness, which was installed in Baton Rouge during the U. S. Bicentennial celebrations of 1976.
But I promised to tell you the part of his story that the marker didn't cover - specifically, the creation of the dollar sign. See, as I mentioned, Oliver made his fortune in the Spanish Caribbean, which meant that his money all came in pesos. The money he contributed to the American Revolution was also pesos. The common abbreviation for pesos was PS, and Oliver, who often wrote in a form of shorthand, sort of merged the two letters into one symbol that resembled a capital S with a forward slash drawn through it. One of Oliver's friends and business associates was Robert Morris, the Founding Father who served as President Washington's Superintendent of Finance. He rather liked the shorthand symbol and decided to make it the done thing. It took a little while for it to become commonplace, but since 1797, "$" has been the official symbol of United States currency. It's mutated a little over the years - people usually write it with the line straight up and down, rather than slanted, or sometimes with two lines instead of one - but its use as representative of the dollar has been continuous.
Oliver's legacy is a mixed one. We probably couldn't have won the Revolution without his funding, but he probably wouldn't have had the funding to provide if he hadn't been in the slave trade. It's hard to know how to view him, really. I'll defer to one of my favorite authors instead: "It is easy to judge evil unmixed. But, alas, in most of us good and bad are closely woven as the threads on a loom; greater wisdom than mine is needed for the judging."
Except where indicated, all writing and photography on this blog is the intellectual property of Laura Klotz. This blog is written with permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. I am not employed by the PHMC. All rights reserved.
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