Slave Agriculture and Financial Markets in Antebellum America

The Bank of the United States in Mississippi, 1831-1852

Richard Holcombe Kilbourne Jr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317315186
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Teoria economica

Offers the study of Antebellum southern slavery and the credit system. This work explains how the Bank of the United States supported the government's and the nation's credit abroad by providing seemingly limitless credit facilities to southern planters, especially in the territories along the lower Mississippi River.

NOTES

1 The term ‘Bank War’ probably stems from Thomas Francis Gordon, The War on the Bank of the United States, Or, A Review of the Measures of the Administration Against That Institution and the Prosperity of the Country (Philadelphia: Key and Biddle, 1834). The Bank of the United States has had more than its share of advocates. Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics In America from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Fritz Redlich, The Molding of American Banking: Men and Ideas (New York: Jefferson Reprint corporation, 1968); Thomas Payne Govan, Nicholas Biddle, Nationalist and Public Banker, 1786–1844 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959). See also Richard E. Ellis, The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States’ Rights and the Nullification Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). However, the Papers of Nicholas Biddle at the Library of Congress contain a wealth of information on the bank’s extensive loans to highly placed politicians, including Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. In addition, those papers indicate that Biddle acted decisively to bring the whole power of the bank to bear in favor of those opposed to Andrew Jackson in the 1832 elections. His policies are manifest in the chaos that reigned in the domestic and foreign exchanges. See generally, The Papers of Nicholas Biddle, Library of Congress, hereafter cited NBP, LC.

2 Henry Clay to Nicholas Biddle. No. 6035. 15 December 1831. NBP, LC. Clay writes: ‘Have you come to any decision about an application to Congress at this session for the renewal of your charter? The friends of the bank here, with whom I have conversed, seem to expect the application to be made. The course of the President, in the event of the passage of a bill, seems to be a matter of doubt and speculation-My own belief is that, if now called upon he would not negative the bill; but that if he should be reelected the event might and probably would be different’. Daniel Webber to Nicholas Biddle, No. 6051. 18 December 1831. NBP, LC. ‘I have seen a great number of persons, & conversed with them, among other things, respecting the Bank-The result of all these conversations has been a strong confirmation of the opinion which I expressed at Philadelphia that it is expedient for the Bank to apply for the renewal of its charter without delay. I do not meet a Gentleman, hardly of another opinion, & the little incidents & anecdotes, that occur & circulate among us, all tend to strengthen the impression. Indeed, I am now a good deal inclined to think, that after Genl. Jackson’s reelection there would be a poor chance for the Bank’. But Thomas Cadwalader writes Biddle that ‘Mr. McLane … says positively that the President will reject the Bill if the matter is agitated at this session-He (the Prest.) & those about him would regard the movement, before the election, as an act of hostility’. Thomas Cadwalader to Nicholas Biddle, No. 6065. 21 December 1831. NBP, LC. And Cadwalader advised Biddle again on 23 December1831 that ‘as far as my consultations with our friends have gone, the Jackson portion of them argue against starting the question at this session-and the Clay portion are especially anxious for its present agitation-The former are clear that we have no chance now, but a good one next year, & the latter are clear that if we let this session go by we have no chance at all’. No. 6071. NBP, LC.

3 William J. Cooper, Jr., Liberty And Slavery, Southern Politics to 1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), p. 171.

4 Nicholas Biddle to Thomas H. Perkins, 7 January 1833. Letterbooks, p. 365. NBP, LC. He writes: ‘[s]ince I have been in the Bank we have added one to our Boston Directors, so as to have two members of the Parent Board from your States. But for several years their attendance has been very rare-and moreover the proportion of Stock owned by Massachusetts has been greatly changed-for while New York owns 40,000 shares-S. Carolina, 39,000-Pennsa. 44-Massachusetts has only 9,000’.

5 Gales & Seaton’s Reports of Debates in Congress. 22^nd Congress, 4 March 1831 to 3 March 1833. Senate, 11 June 1832, p. 1073. House of Representatives, 3 July 1832, p. 3851.

6 ‘An Act to incorporate the subscribers of the Bank of the United States’, Session, 1815–1816. Stock subscriptions were paid in quarterly installments over a period of twelve months. Twenty percent of each installment has to be paid in coin, either foreign or domestic, and the balance in coin or the funded debt of the United States. All of the funded debt was receivable at par except the 3 percent bonds, which could only be tendered at the rate of 65 cents for each dollar of face value. This point is obscure in Peter Temin’s The Jacksonian Economy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), p. 40. The only acceptable tenders for stock subscriptions were, then, coin and government debt. If subscribers afterwards borrowed against their stock, this was a perfectly acceptable course given the Bank’s constitution as a discounter of business paper. It brought the business of the nation’s rich capitalists to the Bank. For more on the history of the U.S. national debt, see Robert E. Wright, ed., The U.S. National Debt, 1785–1900 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005).

7 Temin, Jacksonian Economy, pp. 29–37.

8 L. E. Davis and J. R. T. Hughes, ‘A Dollar Sterling Exchange, 1803–1895’, Economic History Review 13(August 1960), pp. 60–2; Hugh Rockoff, ‘Money, Prices, and Banks in the Jacksonian Era’, in Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, eds. The Reinterpretation of American Economic History (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 456–8; Temin, Jacksonian Economy, pp. 29, 65–7; Lawrence Officer, Between the Dollar-Sterling Gold Points: Exchange Rates, Parity, and Market Behavior (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

9 But see Howard Bodenhorn and Hugh Rockoff, ‘Regional Investment Rates in Antebellum America’, in Claudia Goldin and Hugh Rockoff, eds. Strategic Factors in Nineteenth Century American Economic Development (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 159–87; Howard Bodenhorn, ‘Capital Mobility and Financial Integration in Antebellum America’, The Journal of Economic History 52 (Sept. 1992), pp. 585–602.

10 See generally quotations in the New Orleans Price Current and Commercial Intelligencer. A discussion of the early origins of bank checks will be found in Fritz Redlich and Webster M. Christmas, ‘Early American Checks and an Example of their Use’. Business History Review 41(Autumn 1967), pp. 285–8; Robert E. Wright, The Origins of Commercial Banking in America, 1750–1800 (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), pp. 112, 117, 120–5.

11 But see Harold D. Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800–1925 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968), pp. 60–71.

12 Ralph D. Hidy, The House of Baring in American Trade and Finance, English Merchant Bankers At Work, 1763–1861 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949), pp. 255–9; John R. Killick, ‘The Cotton Operations of Alexander Brown and Sons in the Deep South, 1820–60’, The Journal of Southern History 43 (May 1977), pp. 169–194.

13 Unless otherwise noted, all emphases in quotations appear in the original.

14 May Humphreys to Edward C. Biddle, No. 15,129. 15 December 1837. NBP, LC. See also, Commercial Bank of Natchez Collection, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, hereafter referred to as LLMVC, Louisiana State University Libraries, Louisiana State University, hereafter cited CBNC, LLMVC. ‘Cotton Ledger’, ‘Accounts with Dealers’, ‘Account Sales of Cotton’.

15 Gavin Wright, ‘Capitalism and Slaver on the Islands: A Lesson from the Mainland’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17 (Spring 1987), pp. 851–70; Gavin Wright, ‘Cotton Competition and the Post-bellum Recovery of the American South’, Journal of Economic History 34 (September 1974), pp. 610–35; Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time On The Cross, The Economics of American Negro Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1974), pp. 89–94.

16 Bank of the United States, Natchez Branch, Collection, hereafter cited BUSN, LLMVC. ‘Individual Depositors Ledger’. For other years, see John J. McCusker, ‘Comparing the Purchasing Power of Money in the United States (or Colonies) from 1665 to Any Other Year Including the Present’, Economic History Services, 2005, URL: http://www.eh.net/hmit/ppowerusd/.

17 ‘Hoopes & Moore’, Individual Depositors Ledger, folios 293, 311, 334, 343, 169. BUSN, LLMVC. Financial historians have for generations attempted to distinguish promissory notes and bills of exchange, the principal assumption being that the former instrument generally evidenced an accommodation loan and the latter a self-liquidating ‘commercial’ transaction. This distinction is not particularly appropriate insofar as it reflects contemporary commercial usage. A better distinction is between loans that were local in character and those which were to be paid at some distant point. Promissory notes or bills of exchange could be used to facilitate either kind of loan. It was all accommodation paper. Financial historians have relied principally on legal distinctions that often embodied after-the-fact characterizations that distorted the actualit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Exchange and Money Markets
• 2 The Bank of the United States in Mississippi, 1831–1836
• 3 Pennsylvania and Mississippi: The United States Bank, 1836–1841
• 4 Assignments, Preferences, and Trusts: The Failed Bank of the United States in the Courts of Mississippi and the Nation
• 5 The Business of Making Collections
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index