Stephen Girard Net Worth is $105
“He personally saved the U.S. government from financial collapse during the War of 1812, and became one of the wealthiest people in America, estimated to have been the fourth richest American of all time, based on the ratio of his fortune to contemporary GDP.”
http://www.getnetworth.com/tag/stephen-girard-stolen-money/
You can tell more about a person from their checkbook than anything else.
Regarding Stephen Girard:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Girard
n 1793, there was an outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia. Although many other well-to-do citizens chose to leave the city, Girard stayed to care for the sick and dying. He supervised the conversion of a mansion outside the city limits into a hospital and recruited volunteers to nurse victims, and personally cared for patients. For his efforts, Girard was feted as a hero after the outbreak subsided.[6] Again during the yellow fever epidemic of 1797-1798 he took the lead in relieving the poor and caring for the sick.[4]
Girard was the sole proprietor of his bank, and thus avoided the Pennsylvania state law which prohibited an unincorporated association of persons from establishing a bank, and required a charter from the legislature for a banking corporation.[9]
Girard’s Bank was a principal source of government credit during the War of 1812. Towards the end of the war, when the financial credit of the U.S. government was at its lowest, Girard placed nearly all of his resources at the disposal of the government and underwrote up to 95 percent of the war loan issue,
At the time of his death, Girard was the wealthiest man in America[12] and he bequeathed nearly his entire fortune to charitable[13] and municipal institutions of Philadelphia and New Orleans, including an endowment for establishing a boarding school for “poor, male, white orphans” in Philadelphia, primarily those who were the children of coal miners, which opened as the Girard College in 1848. Girard’s will[14] was contested by his family in France but was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in a landmark case, Vidal et al. vs Girard’s Executors, 43 U.S. 127 (1844).[15]
Most of his estate was left to what became Girard College, still going: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girard_College