A Merchant's Heart

This is a work of historical fiction. Real institutions and events of the era appear throughout - the public reading of the Declaration of Independence in the Pennsylvania State House Yard on July 8, 1776; the 1790 founding of Philadelphia's Board of Brokers; the Panic of 1792 and the Buttonwood Agreement; the Tontine Coffee House; the Embargo of 1807; and the government loans of 1813 and 1814 that financed the War of 1812 - but Thomas Pearce, George Anderson, Charlotte Reid, Andrew D. Barclay, and the particulars of their lives are invented. Second Edition. This edition substantially expands the first, adding Thomas Pearce's Philadelphia childhood, his Scottish grandfather, his schooling at his mother's kitchen table, his friendship with George Anderson, the ruin and recovery of his first years in New York, and the War of 1812