There he took up his domicile and laid the foundation of his fortune in small trading ventures to New Orleans and Santo Domingo.
In 1791 he began to build a fleet of beautiful ships for the China and India trade, their names, Montesquieu, Helvetius, Voltaire, and Rousseau, revealing his ideas of religion and liberty.

So successfully did he combine banking and shipping that in 1813 he was believed to be the wealthiest merchant in the United States.

In that year one of his ships from China was captured off the Capes of the Delaware by a British privateer.

Her cargo of teas, nankeens, and silks was worth half a million dollars to him but he succeeded in ransoming it on the spot by counting out one hundred and eighty thousand Spanish milled dollars.

No privateersman could resist such strategy as this.
Alone in his old age, without a friend or relative to close his eyes in death, Stephen Girard, once a penniless, ignorant French cabin-boy, bequeathed his millions to philanthropy, and the Girard College for orphan boys, in Philadelphia, is his monument.
The Treaty of Amiens brought a little respite to Europe and a peaceful interlude for American shipmasters, but France and England came to grips again in 1803.