Historians & Archivists - American Revolution Finance Papers

For about a year I've been quietly researching a piece of the American Revolution most Americans have never heard of. This month I decided to start writing about it in public. The project is called The Third Bill — a Substack newsletter on the primary-source financial history of the American founding period. Not the political history. Not the battlefield history. The financial history — the actual mechanics of how the Revolution was paid for, one document and one system at a time. Two pieces are already live. The first, published in late June, tells the story of an Aaron Burr autograph check I carried for thirty-four years before donating it to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 2026. The second, published this week, opens a series on how the Continental Congress financed the war through bills of exchange drawn on Benjamin Franklin in Paris — starting with a single 1778 bill on my desk, made out for ninety livres tournois to a French national named Adrian Renaudel, whose story the National Archives told me they could not retrieve. The pieces run about 2,000 words each and drop weekly. They are written for anyone who is curious about how the founding actually worked at the level of paper, ink, and specific human beings — not just the ideas and the battles. Why I'm writing about this at all: I think there is a gap between the way American history is generally told (as a contest of political ideas) and the way the founders themselves would have described what they were doing (as an improvised financial project that could have collapsed at any point). I've been researching the primary sources for a while, and it seems worth putting the work in public. The next few pieces in the sequence take on: — The British counterfeiting operation that deliberately accelerated the collapse of the Continental dollar (I have Sir Henry Clinton's own admission of the strategy in an intercepted 1780 dispatch) — Robert Morris's arrival at the Treasury in 1781 with the currency in ruins, the army unpaid, and no obvious way to hold anything together — The Continental Loan Office system that quietly paid interest in French currency at Franklin's Passy residence throughout the war — one of the few pieces of Revolutionary financial architecture the British couldn't reach If any of that sounds like reading you would enjoy, the Substack is free and the sign-up is at the link below. I would be genuinely glad to have you along. https://lnkd.in/gNaxhfdy Historians, archivists, dealers, collectors, and anyone with a corrective or a lead I've missed — please tell me. That is exactly the kind of feedback that improves the work. — Paul