Retired database administrator. Independent scholar. In 1992 I bought a framed document at a collectors fair. In 2026 I found out what it actually was.
That story — and what it says about commerce, revolution, and the world before the storm — became The Counting House.
What this newsletter is
The Counting House publishes weekly essays on the primary-source financial history of the American founding. Each essay begins with one document I have in front of me — a bill of exchange, a bank check, a ledger page, an endorsement — and traces the network of merchants, congressmen, and international agents that used it. I write about how the Revolution was paid for, one piece of paper at a time.
Recent subjects:
Aaron Burr’s July 1796 bank order on the First Bank of the United States — $5,000 payable to James Greenleaf, now in the collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania as a documented donation
Charles Carroll of Carrollton’s 1830 check on the Second Bank of the United States for $4,488.87, payable to John McTavish, Carroll’s grandson-in-law and estate executor
The British counterfeiting operation that helped collapse Continental currency in 1777, advertised openly in a Hugh Gaine newspaper in occupied New York
A 1778 Continental Loan Office bill of exchange whose endorsements reveal a supply-chain network connecting Philadelphia to William Bingham at Martinique to a French merchant house at Bordeaux
Each essay is around 2,000 words. Each begins with an object. Each ends with a puzzle worth thinking about.
What it isn’t
This isn’t academic history. I’m not an academic, and I don’t pretend to their credentials. It isn’t popular history either — I don’t summarize or synthesize. The newsletter sits between: essayistic in register, primary-source-driven in method, patient about following one thread at a time.
It isn’t selling anything. There’s no service to book, no book to buy, no consulting practice behind it. The newsletter is the thing.
How I got here
I bought the framed document in 1992. It was Aaron Burr’s autograph on what turned out to be a bank order — his instruction to the First Bank of the United States to pay a private lender named James Greenleaf $5,000. Burr was a signature I could identify. What made the piece unusual — a partial installment on a much larger debt, drawn through Philadelphia to New York during the summer of 1796 — took me thirty-four years to unravel.
Along the way I discovered that the document on your desk is only one node in a network. Burr’s check pointed me to Greenleaf. Greenleaf pointed me to the North American Land Company, which pointed me back to a whole set of merchants who financed the young Republic. Each essay in The Counting House starts with one of those nodes and tries to see the network around it.
The Burr piece now lives at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, where it belongs. I still have the others.
Method
Primary sources drive everything. Every essay quotes the document. Every essay cites where it lives — the archive, the collection number, the finding aid. Every essay is checkable.
I write from Newton, New Jersey. Two hours from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and just over an hour from the New-York Historical Society, which puts most of the archives I need within a day trip.
I’m a member of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. I’ve been published by the Journal of the American Revolution. Other Substacks I read regularly are on the Recommendations page — that list is a fair map of my own reading.
How to read
The newsletter is free. Subscribe below and each essay arrives by email on Wednesday morning.
If you’d like to read backward, the archive is organized by essay number — the most recent as of this writing is The Counting House No. 14 — Filed Under Franklin.
If you’d like to hear from me directly, my email is at the bottom of every essay.
Contact
Paul G. Molé Newton, New Jersey paulm@swartswoodlaketcg.com
The newsletter is written under Swartswood Lake TCG LLC — a New Jersey entity that exists mostly to keep the paperwork clean. Everything reader-facing lives here at The Counting House.
