A Polish-born immigrant twice imprisoned as a spy became the financier the Continental Army could not do without — and paid for it with everything he had

“Indispensable” is a word that should be earned, not asserted. Applied to Haym Salomon, it is earned by a specific, well-documented fact: at the single moment the Continental Army’s war effort came closest to collapsing for want of money, there was one man Washington could call on. That does not make Salomon more consequential than Washington. Without Salomon, the war may well have stalled at the moment it needed, above all others, not to.

An Immigrant Who Chose a Side Immediately

Salomon was born in 1740 in Leszno, in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, to a Sephardic Jewish family descended from Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. He traveled and worked in finance across Western Europe as a young man, acquiring fluency in several languages, before immigrating to New York City around 1775 — arriving at the exact moment the colonial crisis was tipping into war.

He did not wait to see which way the conflict would go. Salomon joined New York’s branch of the Sons of Liberty almost immediately and established himself as a financial broker for merchants engaged in overseas trade. In 1776 the British arrested him on suspicion of espionage; his fluency in German led his captors to employ him as an interpreter for their Hessian mercenaries, a position he used to encourage desertions and to assist escaping American prisoners. He was arrested a second time in 1778, reportedly under sentence of death, and escaped to Philadelphia — where he rebuilt his brokerage business and, this time, embedded himself directly in the Continental Congress’s financial........

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