Fortunes were not made rapidly in the olden time. After the Revolution, Girard engaged in commerce with the West Indies, in partnership with his brother John; and he is described in an official paper of the time as one who "carried on an extensive business as a merchant, and is a considerable owner of real estate." But on the dissolution of the partnership in 1790, when he had been in business, as mariner and merchant, for sixteen years, his estate was valued at only thirty thousand dollars. The times were troubled. The French Revolution, the massacre at St. Domingo, our disturbed relations with England, and afterwards with France, the violence of our party contests, all tended to make merchants timid, and to limit their operations. Girard, as his papers indicate, and as he used to relate in conversation, took more than a merchant's interest in the events of the time. From the first, he had formally cast in his lot with the struggling Colonists, as we learn from a yellow and faded document left among his papers:-- "I do hereby certify that Stephen Girard, of the city of Philadelphia, merchant, hath voluntarily taken the oath of allegiance and fidelity, as directed by an act of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania, passed the 13th day of June, A.D. 1777. Witness my hand and seal, the 27th day of October, A.D. 1778. "JNO. ORD. No. 1678." The oath was repeated the year following. When the French Revolution had divided the country into two parties, the Federalists and the Republicans, Girard was a Republican of the radical school. He remembered assisting to raise a liberty-pole in the Presidency of John Adams; and he was one of Mr. Jefferson's most uncompromising adherents at a time when men of substance were seldom found in the ranks of the Democrats. As long as he lived, he held the name of Thomas Jefferson in veneration.