In On the Make (2010), Brian Luskey leads us into the world of the nineteenth-century clerks—white-collar workers struggling for upward mobility and social recognition in a volatile economy. Common-place asked him: can the struggles of working people during the great expansion of capitalism in the United States suggest any lessons for Americans today in devising strategies to deal with unemployment, poverty, and inequality? Or is our situation today decisively different from that faced by Americans in the early republic?

The promise of trickle-down economics has finally hit American shores in the guise of a tsunami. Reckless speculation in key sectors of the economy has proven devastating for ordinary Americans. Even as those on Main Street lose homes, savings, jobs, and hope, the giants of finance and manufacturing remain reluctant to acknowledge the damage their transactions have done to others’ lives. Instead, they plaintively request government bailout funds to support firms they claim are “too big to fail,” a telling phrase that reveals their conception of themselves as the indispensable stewards of the American economy.

It is banal to assert that capitalism benefits capitalists—elites have long been able to accumulate wealth in good times and weather economic storms in greater comfort than those who are less fortunate. Such banal assertions bear repeating, however, because elites obtain power through a culture of capitalism that shapes our assumptions about the legitimacy of economic conduct and our hopes and dreams for economic and social advancement. Nineteenth-century clerks—the copyists, bookkeepers, and salesmen whom I examine in On the Make—played various roles in the making of this culture. Some exhibited disdain for poor people who “scraped by” and insisted that their own economic pursuits were morally pure by comparison; dishonest embezzlers imperiled the economy, serving as contemptible figures who helped to justify capitalism; downtrodden clerks found themselves threatened by the economy and struggled to make ends meet. In On the Make, I show simultaneously that clerkships appeared to offer opportunities for upward mobility and that the young men who pursued them were clearly considered subordinate laborers. The debates about clerks and clerkships in nineteenth-century America are indeed relevant to our own times: as contests over the meanings of important keywords such as ambition, character, and class, they show the ways in which capitalism’s opportunities and inequalities became the unquestioned organizing principles of American society and culture.

It is not enough for capitalists to have wealth; they feel that they must justify their access to and possession of capital. The pithy phrase “too big to fail” not only validates firms’ impressive capital accumulation, but also privileges their economic survival over that of others without means. Many nineteenth-century clerks shared this condescending attitude toward the challenges ordinary folks faced during times of economic uncertainty. The New York City importer’s clerk Edward Tailer cynically observed poor people in 1849 who were desperately combing the gutters for items that had been lost or discarded by the city’s large population of renters as they moved to new homes on May 1. The scene was not merely “sad,” he wrote in his diary. It was “disgusting.” Tailer disparaged the people who stooped “upon a level with the hog” because the things they found were what he called “articles of no apparent value.” A careful observer of negotiations on the waterfront, in the auction house, and behind the sales counter, Tailer believed he had become a fair judge of goods’ worth. Here in the gutter, though, were poor people “turning” items of “paltry value to a good account.” How dare they make something out of nothing and ignore assessments of worth made by powerful market actors? Tailer endeavored to cast their search for value beyond the pale by making invidious comparisons. In his capacity as clerk, he calculated vast sums in his firm’s account books, double-checked invoices on shipments from distant shores, and sold products to merchants from all corners of the United States. He was cosmopolitan. The poor saw nothing but what was in front of them, unwilling to “turn their thoughts to … more exalted … subjects” that would “elevate and … enlarge the reasoning powers of the mind.” Writing about the activities of the poor was a means for Tailer to bathe the commercial world of clipper ships and countingrooms—the clerk’s world—in the warm glow of legitimacy. While the poor scraped to survive, Tailer lived to strive. While he affirmed in his diary that he was hardworking and persevering, he eventually made his fortune the old-fashioned way: he married into it. And although he was an earnest inquisitor of poor people who committed no crime, he refrained from editorializing when his employer “obtained” the release of a shipment of dry goods from Liverpool “by bribing” one of the custom house’s clerks. Such malfeasance was simply how worldly businessmen did business.

Nineteenth-century Americans assigned dishonest clerks—rather than shady employers—a place alongside a handful of other social types as bogeymen whom contemporaries used to proclaim capitalism’s legitimacy and explain away its uncertainties and inequalities.

But in blaring capitals, nineteenth-century newspaper editors fingered “DISHONEST CLERK[S]” who embezzled small and large fortunes—these criminals were the especially odious market actors who threatened capitalist enterprise everywhere. A New York City police court judge sounded the alarm in 1860, as the depredations of thieving clerks appeared ready to upset the balance of power in the commercial world. “If there is not some check put upon clerks and other subordinates who are in responsible stations,” he thundered, “there will be no safety for capital.” Bad businessmen and business practices were widespread and not new. Yet nineteenth-century Americans assigned dishonest clerks—rather than shady employers—a place alongside a handful of other social types as bogeymen whom contemporaries used to proclaim capitalism’s legitimacy and explain away its uncertainties and inequalities.

What’s old is new again. In January 2008, the French bank Société Générale revealed that it had lost more than $7 billion because one of its traders, Jerome Kerviel, had sought to make his fortune through unauthorized ventures valued at more than ten times that sum. Caught red-handed, Kerviel now faces a prison term of five years and more than $500,000 in fines. The “rogue trader,” and not the risky futures market he played, was at fault for bringing a mighty bank—and even the global economy—to its knees.

According to newspaper reports, Kerviel had been hired as a “plain vanilla trader”—just another mid-grade employee. Despite their assumptions that clerkships were platforms from which young boys could become independent businessmen, nineteenth-century observers such as the minister Henry Boardman confirmed that clerks were workers. In a published sermon entitled The Bible in the Countinghouse, Boardman would have popped Tailer’s pretensions when he called clerks “subalterns” who must learn to “stoop” in the “service of a firm.” Tailer was in control of the story he told about himself—I soar while others stoop—because he was able to make and sustain connections with the rich and refined. But economic and cultural capital slipped through many clerks’ fingers. Embezzlers refused to moderate their ambitions, simultaneously rejecting and highlighting the inadequacies of the popular correlation between character development and slow-and-steady gains. They were also unable to do what Tailer did so easily—tell stories of self-making that contemporaries would credit, laying bare the power dynamics of the culture of capitalism.

Despite the rare pilfering clerk who escaped to California or Cuba, most attempts to succeed through graft in the nineteenth century were, like Kerviel’s modern efforts, failures. As the City of New York’s District Attorney Indictment Records show, most defendants in these cases kept their mouths shut, either because they were guilty or because they understood that those who listened would not believe their declarations of innocence. They also may have been cowed into silence by the testimony of the powerful men who employed them. On a few occasions, though, we can reconstruct clerks’ counternarratives by way of merchants’ answers to questions on cross-examination, illustrating the conflict over the meanings of a clerkship and the making of the culture of capitalism. In March 1850, Leopold Helbronner, a New York importer of artificial flowers, accused his clerk, Albert Cohen, of embezzlement. Helbronner had hired Cohen in 1847, agreeing to pay him $400 a year. But after that first year, the merchant reduced his clerk’s pay to $200, with the difference to be made up through Cohen’s efforts to foster new clients and make money on sales commissions. The idea, Helbronner explained, was “to encourage him the more & stimulate him” to greater industry. In the fall of 1848, Helbronner sent Cohen to New Orleans and Mobile for several months to expand the firm’s clientele. He paid his clerk a six-percent commission on the sales he made along the Gulf Coast, dwarfing the one-percent commission given for Manhattan transactions. In his telling, Helbronner was a benevolent master, giving Cohen a twenty-dollar gift one New Year’s Day. He also considered himself extraordinarily patient after he discovered that Cohen routinely pocketed money from his own sales above and beyond his commission. Only after repeated warnings did Helbronner begin docking his clerk’s salary before finally dismissing him and pressing charges.

Cohen’s blustering response when he was fired—”do you think you have got a fool to deal with[?] I will make out an account against you for Commissions”—suggests that he had a different story to tell about the nature of his relationship with the firm. Questioned by Cohen’s lawyer, Helbronner claimed that he had neither promised nor given his clerk an “interest” in the firm. He did not “owe him … money.” Cohen believed otherwise. Helbronner acknowledged that his clerk had talked to him about an increase to two-percent commissions on New York sales, and perhaps there was a discussion about a return of six percent for purchases made by his Alabama and Louisiana customers who came calling at the Manhattan office—but Helbronner claimed that he refused to grant these increases. Obviously, Cohen was trying to make up the shortfall in his salary. Since portions of the firm’s account books were read into evidence, we know that if he sold all of the goods consigned to him on his trip south, his commissions would have netted him $147.88. Combined with his annual $200, he would still have been more than fifty dollars short of his original salary. Helbronner had his own explanation for Cohen’s failure to earn more money: “he was not very industrious.” It would be foolish to accept Cohen’s story—he was bitter at his inability to negotiate more advantageous financial arrangements and he stole to recoup his losses. But it would be equally foolish to ignore the high probability that Helbronner made promises to Cohen that he never meant to keep. Employers used the idea that a clerkship was full of promise to shape their employees’ expectations and line their own pockets.

Weighing the potential offered by the occupational label against clerks’ uncertain social position provides us with an opportunity to assess how class operated in nineteenth-century America. Only infrequently and inconsistently about formation or consciousness, class in this period is, as I argue in On the Make, best understood as the day-to-day struggle for power and prestige among Americans who had unequal access to wealth and the trappings of refinement. The case of George Wendelken, a clerk who tried to use counterfeit two-dollar bills to purchase a ten-cent loaf of bread, a thirteen-cent pair of socks, and a pound of liver puddings—value unknown—illustrates some clerks’ desperation in an economy that did not always serve their interests. While the dishonest clerk of the newspaper column often made a pitch for riches, his counterpart in legal documents often merely tried to keep body and soul together. Many clerks, unlike the well-connected Edward Tailer, were stooping subalterns.

For honest, unemployed Americans in the twenty-first century, clerkships are clearly subordinate posts—useful in a pinch to stave off repo men and credit card companies. Honest or dishonest, clerks of yesterday and today have had to be good subalterns, for according to the Reverend Boardman—speaking to us from the distance of 160 years—a clerk could “steal” from his employer in a variety of ways “short of … thrusting his hand into the money-drawer.” Tardiness, laziness, intemperance, and any character flaws that might “alienate customers” were theft in his mind. Class, a struggle for power and prestige that conferred wealth and respect on the winners, was everywhere evident in nineteenth-century America. The powerful contended that a lack of character—not capital—was the reason that many clerks did not realize their ambitions. In debating dishonest clerks, capitalists muted their employees’ complaints, sustained their own power, and made the economy that benefited them appear to be legitimate. Twenty-first-century capitalists rely upon culture just as readily to justify their own wealth and shape Americans’ expectations about character, morality, and mobility. As a result, those who are “too big to fail” will continue to succeed.

This article originally appeared in issue 10.4 (July, 2010).

Brian P. Luskey teaches history at West Virginia University and is the author of On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America (2010).

Every revolution is a civil war. But the American Revolution was peculiar, because it has been deemed a civil war in so many senses. A civil war within the British Empire between English people on both sides of the ocean. A civil war in the colonies between the Patriots and the Loyalists. A civil war among the Patriots to determine “who shall rule at home.” And now, in the new scholarship, a civil war between Americans who chose sides and those who refused to choose sides unless and until they were forced to do so. It is this last sort of civil war that has long escaped the sight of historians.

As Hannah Arendt remarked, revolutions in modern times have usually been related to war, and war has usually released violence destructive not only of life and property but also of social relations and psychological stability. For those not voluntarily involved in such civil strife, the devastation might have been especially severe and hazardous. For them, the very meaning of the Revolution might not have been what it was for partisans on either side.

In the past forty years or so, historians such as Jesse Lemisch, Alfred Young, Gary Nash, T. H. Breen, and Woody Holton have done much to probe the roles that ordinary people and marginalized groups played in the Revolution. But we still need to know more about the many, many people who were neither Whigs nor Tories. The papers at hand make fruitful efforts to depict the ordeals and sufferings of those people and to interpret the significance of their experiences in multi-dimensional contexts.

These presentations reinforce our belief that “the transforming hand of revolution” did indeed transform many things. We are always told that the Revolution promoted changes in the political structure and the social order, lifting some prominent people to historical positions and crowning them “Founding Fathers.” These papers tell us that the Revolution also altered and remolded the lives of tens of thousands of ordinary Americans and that many of them were distressed, frustrated, and even forced into exile during the war. The Revolution created divisions, tensions, and resentments in families and communities across the continent. The consequences of these conflicts left imprints on the social fabric that await exploration and explanation. In other words, the legacies of the movement for independence were much more complicated and diversified than we used to imagine.

New narratives of the Revolution will undoubtedly address issues of loyalty and apathy as illustrated by Michael Zuckerman and Aaron Sullivan.

While reflecting on such matters, I cannot help thinking about the historiography of the Chinese revolutions of the twentieth century. It is well known that China went through a number of uprisings and revolutions in the past hundred years. Those rebellions were genuine civil wars, which had a profound impact on the lives and the social relations of hundreds of millions of people. Chinese historians have only recently begun to touch such topics: the experience of ordinary Manchu people after the Qing dynasty was overthrown in the revolution of 1911, the attitudes of peasants toward the land reforms of the 1940s and 1950s, the tribulations of anti-revolutionaries after the revolutionary Party’s takeover of China in 1949. And this new research has not yet been incorporated into the mainstream of the scholarship on the Chinese revolutions.

My impression is that the turn of attention to the uncommitted not only provides new and different lenses to see the meaning of the American Revolution but also indicates possibilities of rewriting its history. The past is often portrayed in ways that celebrate the victors, and we are all familiar with versions of history that function as propaganda for those who hold power. If we focus on the disaffected, the neutrals, the losers, and all those others who were “in but not of the Revolution,” and if we reveal the destructive effects of a constructive rebellion, we may deconstruct some of the many myths that have enveloped the struggle and achieve a more balanced and nuanced picture of it.

Nonetheless, I think there are great challenges in this kind of rewriting. First, our understanding of the past is restricted primarily by survivals from the past. If there are not good sources, there are not good histories. The scarcity of evidence pertaining to commoners in the Revolution may entice us to say more on the basis of less. Even if we unearth some individuals for whom there are substantial records, we may still have difficulties reading the meaning of their lives in wider social and historical contexts.

Second, it is unclear how to encompass ordinary Americans and the founding elite in the same framework of interpretation. Were these groups always antagonistic in the Revolution? Were the elites always the less moral ones when they were in conflict with commoners? The leaders of the rebellion surely had aspirations, disillusionments, anxieties, and fears that were different from those of the lower and middling ranks, but the difference was not necessarily to their disadvantage. When Daniel Shays and his fellows mounted their protests in western Massachusetts, their primary concern was probably their own distress in the aftermath of the winning of the war. When the framers gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to deliberate on a new form of government for the United States, they probably cherished their own interests too. But the men who met in that constitutional convention were also aware that their newborn nation had come to a complicated and dangerous pass, and they believed they had a duty to steer it safely through. The result of their assumption of such a mission turned out to be somewhat constructive for the young republic in terms of political order, socio-economic development, and national security. An empathic understanding of those Revolutionary leaders is still meaningful and significant.

Last, there are methodological factors that do matter. In dealing with the personal, social, and psychological dimensions of the Revolution, we may need to employ a variety of approaches and perspectives, such as those of social history and the new cultural history. In any case, we need to think about the overlaps and differences in the history of the American Revolution and the history of revolutionary America. We need to ask some basic questions: What was the American Revolution? What is the American Revolution now? What are the bounds, if any, of the American Revolution? Whose experiences must be incorporated into narratives of the American Revolution? And in all of this, we need to be careful. If we extend the reach of the Revolution too far, we risk fragmenting it or imposing on it a burden beyond its power to bear.

This article originally appeared in issue 14.3 (Spring, 2014).

Li Jianming is a professor of history at Peking University.

The typo in the Playbill did not bode well. According to the program, the action of The Crucible begins “in the spring of the year 1792.” Clearly, uncovering the real history of the 1692 Salem witch trials was not a high priority. Like all productions of the play since its premier in 1953, director Richard Eyre’s Crucible, just opened on Broadway, tells us much more about its own time than about colonial America. That strange mixture of timelessness and timeliness is the play’s greatest strength, and, paradoxically, its greatest weakness. It’s always relevant, but always just a little bit trite.

Most Americans learn what they know about the Salem witch trials from high school readings of Arthur Miller’s most famous play. All things considered, this is really too bad. Miller’s Salem–an indictment of McCarthy’s red baiting–is a far cry from the world Cotton Mather knew. A large part of the audience during the preview performance on February 28 was teenagers, including a whole row of students clearly there on school assignment. For these students, as for many college undergraduates, Salem will be forever the story of a young, virile John Proctor (the real man was in his sixties), a seductive adolescent Abigail Williams (who was only eleven at the time of the trials), and a scheme by unscrupulous townspeople to steal land from their neighbors. Most importantly, The Crucible is what most of these readers and theater-goers will associate with the phrase “witch hunt,” whether describing historical events or the rounding up of al Qaeda suspects.

Eyre’s production, at the Virginia Theatre, first announces its interpretation of witch-hunting through its sets. Tim Hetley’s set design and Paul Gallo’s lighting present us with stark, bare rooms, illuminated from above with streaks and bars of light. The effect manages to suggest at once a church and a prison, a combination that reflects prevailing popular opinion about the Salem trials: that they were a product of an oppressive religion mixed with unyielding government authority. This is in fact the interpretation that Miller himself put forward in his notes on the script: that the trials were about the power of “theocracy” in New England.

Eyre presses this point too far. When Tituba (Patrice Johnson), the Reverend Samuel Parris’s West Indian slave, is accused of witchcraft in the first act, she quickly confesses, with Parris egging her on. Eyre plays this scene like a televangelist revival meeting, with Tituba waving her hands above her head and chanting her lines in a near-parody of Southern Baptist singsong. One almost expects Parris (Christopher Evan Welch) to turn to the audience and ask for donations or for Tammy Faye to enter, stage right. Eyre’s attempt to modernize the magico-religious worldview of seventeenth-century Calvinists falls flat, and inspired little more than laughter from the audience.

Indeed, the full hall at the Virginia Theatre snickered every time God, the Devil, or magic was mentioned. For a New York theater-going audience the notion that such ideas could carry intellectual and emotional weight seemed ludicrous. They even tittered during a scene in which the possessed girls turn on one of their own–one of the most terrifying moments in the play.

And yet the audience was drawn into the play’s world. The other half of theocracy’s power, the power of unrestrained legal authority, is something Americans–especially those who’ve sat through a few too many Oliver Stone movies–can easily comprehend. Eyre makes the law’s abusive power the emotional center of the production. He presents John Proctor (Liam Neeson) not as a man brought down by sexual indiscretion with a scheming woman, Abigail Williams, but as Everyman caught in a Kafkaesque legal system.

One disadvantage of this approach is that Abigail (Angela Bettis) becomes a mere device to set the action in motion. This may explain why Bettis’s performance seemed uninspired. Despite her vixenish beauty, there is little sexual spark between her and Neeson. Bettis’s speeches about the hypocrisy of Salem’s “Christian women and covenanted men” are delivered dutifully, without the seething resentment that the script suggests. Even Abigail’s best scene–where she turns on her former ally Mary Warren in order to discredit Warren’s recantation–plays here like the revenge of a junior high alpha girl. Similarly, Laura Linney’s Elizabeth Proctor fades into the background. Her character seems truly to be little more than, in Abigail’s words “a cold sniveling woman.”

Since putting the law at the center of the play pushes the female characters to the margins, it is doubly important that the male leads capture the audience’s imagination. And they do. Neeson portrays John Proctor as a man whose independence and simple moral code tragically bring about his downfall, a portrayal well suited to Neeson’s physicality: his broad shouldered physique and bluntly handsome face fit Proctor’s earthy personality. The director takes advantage of this asset by having Proctor strip to the waist and vigorously splash himself with water on his return from the fields. The scene serves to distance Proctor from the (unearned) stereotype of the “Puritan”–a sexless, repressed human being who is a hypocrite at heart. As Proctor splutters and stamps, suddenly Abigail’s description of him as a “stallion” rings true, and not just the sexual connotation. This is a man who will take action without giving much thought to possible consequences.

Proctor’s main adversary is the steely Deputy Governor Danforth (Brian Murray). Danforth’s faith sustains him and gives him moral certainty even as innocents go to the gallows. In this spirit, he delivers what may be the most chilling speech in the play, expounding upon the necessity for relying on spectral evidence in cases of witchcraft, with reasoning that is in fact very close to seventeenth-century thinking on the matter: “Witchcraft is ipso facto, on its face, an invisible crime, is it not? Therefore who may possibly be witness to it?” Murray delivers these lines with a cold conviction and unctuous reasonableness that brooks no disagreement.

Proctor finds himself caught in this nightmare logic. When he tries to disprove the unprovable, he himself is accused. In the end, it is Proctor’s virtue that is his tragic flaw, ably embodied by Neeson. Clenching and unclenching his fists, Neeson’s decision to die rather than give a false confession seems wrung from him against his will–but once he makes it, he walks offstage to the gallows with the same bullheaded determination that characterizes his entire performance. And here, at last, the audience was won. The same crowd that laughed at God and the Devil sat rapt as Proctor made his moral choice (and greeted Neeson with a standing ovation at his curtain call).

Historians as well as artists, over the years, have offered more than a few interpretations of what really happened in Salem in 1692. But the use and abuse of power lies at the heart of all of them. What kind of power is abused is a sign of the times. Most recently, a 1996 Hollywood film starring Daniel Day Lewis and Winona Ryder presented the witch trials as a parable about sexual harassment (of Proctor by Williams, in a sort of seventeenth-century version of Fatal Attraction.) The current Broadway production focuses squarely on how fear of hidden evils can lead to abuses of the law, blindly supported by an unthinking public. History may have been the last thing on the audience’s mind in New York in this year of tragedy, but, in the end, they could not help but be profoundly moved by a Crucible that plays like a cautionary tale about the loss of civil liberties.

This article originally appeared in issue 2.3 (April, 2002).

Rebecca Tannenbaum is visiting assistant professor of history at Yale University and the author of the forthcoming Healer’s Calling.

Historians are often lucky in their sources. My dissertation, for example, focused on the lives of four women, all of whom had extensive letter collections or diaries, or both. Whatever difficulties I may have had with my dissertation’s argument, or structure, I was not at a loss for primary material. I knew the reading habits, political interests, and social engagements of my subjects. I even knew what they ate and how well they slept at night. I have subsequently discovered, however, that other historical characters left no paper trail to follow, or worse, one that is elusive, uninformative, or downright misleading. Yet these can be the most interesting people of all, and the lack of sources is tantalizing and frustrating. I am now in just such a predicament.

A few years ago I was seduced by the story of a woman who tried to kidnap the governor of Pennsylvania in 1816. The reason you probably have not heard of Ann Carson is because she did not succeed in her attempt. But she did leave a memoir in which she explained the circumstances of her plan and her subsequent criminal activities. Foolishly, I was overjoyed at the prospect of such an abundance of riches. The History of the Celebrated Mrs. Ann Carson (1822) is a two-hundred-page tell-all tale of love, lust, murder, and criminal daring. Yet this seemingly transparent memoir is about as clear as mud when it comes to inconsequential details like names, dates, and actual events. So the real work then began. Each of Carson’s crimes needed substantiation in legal records, newspapers, census records, and city directories. With a great deal of help from my then co-author Susan Klepp, who introduced me to the memoir, we corroborated almost all of Carson’s activities. We also discovered that trial transcripts existed for three of Carson’s four trials. We found evidence of what she did, and, because of the memoir, we had Carson’s interpretation of events. And such a nice juicy story!

I thought I had been lucky in my sources once again, until Susan and I learned that Carson did not write her memoir. She had a ghost writer named Mary Clark Carr. Nine years after Carson’s death, this Mary Carr published a much expanded second edition of Carson’s biography, with a new title, The Memoirs of the Celebrated and Beautiful Mrs. Ann Carson (1838). Only this time, she revealed herself to be the true author of the History, and she told her side of the story for the first time. Here Carr, not Carson, is the heroine of the piece. Mary Carr explains to her readers the true nature of her relationship with the self-styled “beautiful and celebrated” Ann Carson, including the fact that Carson continued to associate with “gentlemen of the black cloth” while living with Carr. And after relying on Mary Carr for room, board, and authorship, Carson betrayed Carr’s trust by stealing her furniture and the unsold copies of the History. The Memoirs offers an intriguing glimpse into the life of this literary ambulance chaser–a woman who walked a fine line between respectability and notoriety. Mary Clark Carr, it turns out, is even more interesting than Ann Carson. Anyone with a gun and a few friends can kidnap a governor, but how many women in the early republic had the talent, initiative, and opportunity to earn their living by writing?

But unfortunately Carr has been much harder to track down. If the History revealed every nook and cranny of Carson’s loves, hates, sexual encounters, and criminal exploits (she was a self-promoter extraordinaire), Mary Carr did her best to keep her private life private–except when she had some reason to do otherwise. And even when she did share facts about herself, they are partial, undated, and unsubstantiated.

I have been completely unsuccessful in uncovering any vital statistics for Carr. She claims to have first met Carson when the two attended confirmation classes under Bishop White at Christ Church (Carson was born in 1785 so I assume this would have been sometime in the 1790s). But no records of a Mary Clark (or any other Marys of the right age) exist. Carr also claimed that her husband died about the same time as Carson’s second husband, Richard Smith, in the summer of 1816. There are no death records for any male named Carr at that time. Mary Carr publicly expressed her wish to be buried where Benjamin Franklin was laid to rest in Christ Church burial ground. But again, the burial records list no Mary Carr. I know only what Carr was willing to reveal. 

I soon discovered that Carr wrote other books, and they offer further tantalizing hints about her life. To begin with, Carson probably chose Carr to write the History because Carson knew Carr as the editor of the Intellectual Regale, or Ladies Tea-Tray, a short-lived women’s magazine. In December 1814, Carr announced in a Philadelphia newspaper, the United States Gazette, her proposal for “a Weekly Miscellaneous Paper.” Carr made her motives for undertaking such a risky venture clear: “A Mother will brave death for the support of her children, and she has five who look up to her for support and protection; and by patronizing this work each subscriber will contribute their mite towards assisting her with her family.” Her husband, alive at the time, was never mentioned. 

The Tea Tray is unremarkable in its content (F. L. Mott did not even list it in his chronology of magazines). But it is noteworthy for what it reveals about Carr’s business and domestic affairs. Carr inserted frequent comments, apologies, and announcements in the magazine. Almost every issue mentions the difficulties she faced. For instance, Carr relocated her home and the Tea-Tray office in 1815 when she could not pay her rent. She then notified contributors that “in the confusion of moving, several communications have been lost.” A notice in a June 1815 issue reads, “We have to beg pardon from Miss E. B. and our friend S. for not presenting theirs earlier: but they unfortunately fell behind a bureau, from whence they were this week rescued.” Two weeks later another note states, “The editress is mortified to be obliged to present Edgar’s answer to William imperfect. But a part of the copy was carried out of the window by the wind, and was not missed till too late to be replaced.” We can imagine Carr’s household, with five small children and a distracted mother, as untidy, noisy, and disorganized. Unfortunately this information, which delights the modern historian with its peek into the quotidian disarray of Carr’s existence, probably drove away subscribers. The Tea-Tray ended in December 1816, after struggling along, without sufficient funding, for two years.

But what happened between the time the Tea-Tray folded in 1816 and Carr agreed to write Carson’s memoir in 1822? The Memoirshints that Carr published poems and songs. But none seem to have survived. More intriguing still, Carr was a hanger-on in the theatrical world. In addition to The Intellectual Regale, or Ladies Tea-Tray, the History, and the Memoirs, Carr authored several plays (one, The Fair Americans, was performed in Philadelphia in 1815) and two theatrical biographies. 

In 1837 Carr published The History of Edwin Forrest. A year later A Concise History of the Life and Amours of Thomas S. Hamblin appeared. Carr included autobiographical details in the biographies to lend authenticity to her version of the lives of these famous (and in the case of Hamblin, infamous) men. For instance, Carr claimed a friendship with Forrest’s brother, William, and based most of what she related in the biography on conversations with him “in the green room of the Chatham Street [New York] theater.” Carr admitted that she had only a nodding acquaintance with Edwin Forrest. What is remarkable, frustrating, and tantalizing is that Carr says she gave the youthful Edwin Forrest “free admission to the theatre of which I was then manager.” Furthermore, she claims he partly owed his professional success to the reviews Carr wrote of his performances, “on his first coming into New York.” Carr managed a Philadelphia theater? Carr wrote theatrical reviews in New York? According to secondary sources, no Philadelphia theaters (there were only a handful) were managed by Carr or by any other woman in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Nor have I been able to find any reviews in her name, unsurprising since many reviews were anonymous. Was Carr lying? I can only assume that there were enough people who could have verified or denied her claims to make it unlikely that she would have fabricated this story. 

There is further autobiographical material in Carr’s biography of Thomas Hamblin. Carr wrote it, she says, to expose to the world his greed and immorality, and to show how he had wronged his former wife, actress Elizabeth Blanchard. There may also have been an element of spite in its production: Carr says that Hamblin refused to stage her play The Fair Americans after telling her to her face that “he would be glad to see her prosper.” This biography was written, in large part, as a narrative dictated to Carr by Blanchard, with whom Carr became friends sometime after the Hamblins arrived in New York in 1825. The biography is engaging and salacious (among other things, Carr alleges that Hamblin procured many of his actresses from brothels). But it also hints at Carr’s activities after 1824, the last year chronicled in the Memoirs. In Hamblin’s biography, Carr recounts conversations she witnessed firsthand and confidences shared with her by William Forrest. She also claims that she “edited and published a dramatic paper in New York.” Which one? When? Again I have no evidence to confirm this. 

Mary Carr seems to have moved back and forth between Philadelphia and New York, attending the theater and writing critical (and anonymous) reviews of many of the performers named in Hamblin’s biography. What happened to her remains a mystery. I do not know where she died. I do not even know when she died. Mary Carr is an intriguing woman: a pioneer for female authors, publishers, theatrical managers, and critics. But of course I only have her word for that.

This article originally appeared in issue 5.3 (April, 2005).

Susan Branson is associate professor of historical studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her book, Notorious by Design: Women, Crime, and Class in Nineteenth-Century America, forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press, details the lives and experiences of Ann Carson and Mary Carr.

Money Matters

Money. It’s a constant preoccupation, whether anyone wants to admit it or not. People obsess about how to get it or daydream about what could be done with it: a new car, a meal at a fancy restaurant, a child’s college education. But most of us rarely stop to contemplate a larger question. What is money, really? Is it the change in your pocket, the bills in your purse, the vaporous flicker of a bank balance on a computer screen? Or is it something more substantial, like gold and silver?

One of the strangest incarnations of this ancient question has surfaced recently, in the development of real-life markets for virtual goods. Internet game players can go on eBay and pay real U.S. dollars for magic powers, enchanted weapons, or goblin gold—rare and precious items that exist only in the fantasy world of online gaming. This raises some peculiar questions. If your gaming alter ego defeats a dragon and wins a virtual pot of gold, do you have to pay income taxes on its market value? Will the IRS accept virtual gold as legal tender for the payment of taxes?

Odd as this may seem, virtual gold is only the latest permutation of a subject that has been a constant obsession in American history, from the founding of the first colonies to the present. If, as some historians argue, capitalism arrived with the first ships, so, too, did monetary experimentation, arguments about what money was, and debates about how it could legitimately be used. The experimentation was less a choice than a necessity: the first settlements were rich in promise but poor in precious metals. The imperial powers of Europe may have been awash in gold and silver from the mines of the New World, but their coins rarely lingered long in colonial coffers, thanks to imbalances in trade. The colonists necessarily developed what may seem (by today’s standards) a bewildering diversity of substitute currencies—everything from wampum to tobacco to gunpowder.

But it is an obsession with paper money that has distinguished American monetary history. Beginning with the first notes issued by a government in the Western world (the Massachusetts Bay Colony), through a war of independence underwritten with paper money (the Continental Dollar) and a similar experiment during the Civil War (the greenback), paper money has been a recurrent motif in the nation’s history. To many who watched these experiments unfold, the willingness to accept paper in place of coin seemed an act of alchemy, a radical reordering of value that substituted trust and confidence for “real,” intrinsic worth. Yet what once seemed like a sham has become the foundation of the money supply today. Absent a gold standard, faith in the fiscal prudence of the nation-state has become the basis of value.

Money is more than a medium of exchange or repository of value; it is also an incarnation of political sovereignty. Money, as we know it today, cannot exist without the formally defined political entities we have come to call nation-states. It is these that give money a value that transcends the particular qualities of money itself. But perhaps more importantly, without money there can be no nation-states. Few appendages of government do more to reinforce the power of the state than money. Hence, as early modern governments worked out their own meaning, the value, quantity, and reliability of their money were always central concerns. A state with a feeble or suspect money supply lacked the ability to enhance what John Brewer has called “the sinews of power”—overseas commerce, internal taxation, and military strength. Whether in seventeenth-century England, which witnessed an acrimonious debate over whether government could dictate the value of coin, or in the colonies, where assemblies claimed the right to print their own bills of credit, the story of money making has also been the story of nation making. Look at the audacious message of imperial ambition that adorned coins minted in Massachusetts. Examine the nationalist messages on Ben Franklin’s revolutionary currency, the dollar signs that first appeared in the 1790s, and the symbols of federal sovereignty that adorn the first legal tender notes. They all speak the language of sovereignty, and as these monies passed from hand to hand, they did more than facilitate exchange: they built—and rebuilt—a nation.

Yet if money is so often an emissary of sovereignty, it does not obey the boundaries set by sovereign powers. Silver from the mines of Potosi circulated in the colonies in the eighteenth century and in the United States in the nineteenth, where it remained legal tender until midcentury. Only after the discovery of gold in California and silver in bordering territories did the United States manage to mint substantial quantities of its own coin. A good argument can be made, in fact, that the federal government became truly sovereign—truly the superior governing power—only with these developments, for they allowed the government, really for the first time, a significant measure of control over money that circulated within its borders.

Things have come full circle since that time, with paper dollars competing with, if not supplanting, local currencies in countries as different as Canada and Ecuador. The mighty dollar has become the global currency of choice, a kind of monetary lingua franca that ties together disparate nations in a common circulation. The connection between money and sovereignty has grown so strong that now it is neither gold nor silver—what Mark Peterson calls “big money”—that has supreme value in the global market place. It is power, the same sovereign power that lay behind all those peculiar eighteenth-century symbols that adorn American currency.

The history of money, then, is about much, much more than the thing itself; it is about all the things that money has come to represent: power, value, wealth, etc. Indeed, to even think about money as a “thing,” as an object easily grasped and identified, is to conceive of it in terms too narrow. The history of money is also about processes of representation and documentation, whether in ledger books, balance sheets, or online bank accounts. In the endless business of monetary exchange, there inevitably arises a desire to measure wealth and fix value—to capture a sense of what someone or something is worth. But as anyone following the fortunes of the stock market, the federal government’s finances, or the housing market knows full well, these distillations of value are fleeting approximations. They are not so much a reflection of objective reality as an exercise in collective wish fulfillment. Money is a fickle beast; it does not sit still and can evaporate at a moment’s notice. Value means nothing unless it is translated into “real” money. And yet real money is no stable store of value. Whether greenbacks or gold, its value depends on the endless fluctuations of the now-global market.

There’s a history to all this, and for the most part, it is rarely told—which is not to say that historians have failed to appreciate economic forces; witness the scholarly fascination with the “market revolution” or the transition to capitalism in the early republic. But for all the attention to such massive economic shifts, the money that made those transformations possible has all too often escaped scrutiny. While economists have written extensively about money, they have done so as if it can be captured and described by the laws of physics. They write of quantity or velocity. The essays in this special issue of Common-place approach money from a somewhat different perspective. They treat it in a qualitative rather than a quantitative fashion, revisiting subjects that have been neglected, if not forgotten.

In so doing, these essays introduce a cast of characters both familiar and strange: money-lending Puritans, bills of credit that speak the language of satire, poetry-spouting bankers, and racist gold bugs with dreams of empire—to name but a few. As different as these stories may seem, all lead to a larger point: money does matter. We hope you agree.

This article originally appeared in issue 6.3 (April, 2006).

Stephen Mihm is assistant professor of history at the University of Georgia. He is the author of the forthcoming Making Money, Creating Confidence: Counterfeiting and Capitalism in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Harvard, 2007).

Mark Peterson teaches in the history department at the University of Iowa. He is the author of The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England (Stanford, 1997) and is at work on a book on Boston in the Atlantic World.

The Dutch appetite for Spanish silver

It usually happens when the Dutch national soccer team is winning a game. Someone in the crowd begins to sing the opening lines of an old song:

Have you heard the news about the silver fleet,
The silver fleet from Spain?
They had lots of Spanish silver coins on board
And oranges as well.

Piet Hein, Piet Hein, Piet Hein, his name is short,
His deeds are big,
His deeds are big,
And he has captured the silver fleet.

Then the rest of the crowd chimes in, filling the stadium with the chant: 

He has captured, has captured the silver fleet,
He has captured the silver fleet!

One of the few events of the seventeenth century that still arouses the Dutch imagination, the defeat of the Spanish fleet as it sailed from New Spain to Seville in 1628 epitomizes the seventeenth-century Dutch obsession with Spanish silver. To the Dutch, Spanish power in Europe was based on the seemingly endless supply of precious metals from the New World. The association of America with Spanish silver—or Spain with American silver—was accentuated during a “ceremony of possession” in the Strait of Magellan on August 25, 1599. Exhausted from protracted hardships, the six chief officers of a Dutch fleet decided to form the Brotherhood of the Unleashed Lion. They swore to each other that neither danger, necessity, nor fear of death would make them act to the prejudice of the fatherland. Their intention, they went on, had been to harm the “hereditary enemy” as much as possible, planting Dutch arms in the province—America—from where the Spanish king amassed the treasures that he used to sustain a lengthy war against the Netherlands.

In 1621, the Dutch government allowed a group of merchants to create the Dutch West India Company (WIC). The company’s main purpose was to coordinate Dutch mercantile activities in the Atlantic Basin. But the WIC had another, less obvious purpose: to serve the cause of Dutch patriots fighting for independence from Spain, the political and economic capital of the Habsburg Empire. The Estates General, the representative body that governed the revolting Dutch, concluded that the war against Spain would succeed only if extended to Spain’s American provinces. To this end, the WIC was charged with overseeing attacks on Spanish possessions in the Americas. It was necessary, wrote one of its directors, Johannes de Laet, to “cut off the nerves of the King of Spain’s annual income and the veins from the blood and the life-giving spirit spread in that large body [i.e., the Spanish empire].” The WIC therefore organized an expedition aimed at the conquest of Brazil’s capital city Bahia. Brazil was not a major source of silver, but the Portuguese colony—since 1580 Portugal had been part of the Habsburg Empire—was the world’s largest producer of sugar, a commodity almost as valuable as silver. In May 1624, a Dutch fleet caught the Portuguese defenders by surprise, and the Dutch became masters of the city, only to lose control again the next year. Brief as it was, this interlude further whetted the Dutch appetite for precious metals. In October 1624, many Dutch officers made off with gold, jewels, silver specie, and bullion after a richly laden Iberian fleet, on its way to Spain, unsuspectingly put into Bahia. The silver alone weighed two hundred and fifty thousand pounds.

Some American silver ended up in the hands of the ubiquitous Dutch privateers, or government-sanctioned pirates. Privateering had been the West India Company’s main activity in its start-up years, but the major commodity seized was sugar, not precious metals. The lure of silver remained, however. For years on end, the Dutch studied the movements in the West Indies of the flotas and galeones—the shipping fleets that formed the lifeline of Spain’s Atlantic empire.

Spain’s colonial defense had been organized in a systematic way since the 1560s, with naval escorts for transatlantic fleets, cruiser squadrons in the Caribbean, and fortifications built to protect the principal Caribbean ports. To many, it seemed foolhardy to try to seize a Spanish silver fleet, but that is precisely what the WIC managed to do. On September 8, 1628, in the Cuban bay of Matanzas, a Dutch naval force under the command of Piet Hein (1588-1629), equipped with twenty-three hundred sailors and one thousand soldiers, approached the Spanish flota bound for Seville from Veracruz. The ships carried precious metals, indigo, cochineal, tobacco, and dyewood. Just to count all the silver coins on the ships required several days. Gross proceeds of the seizure would amount to an estimated 11.5 million guilders, or roughly one million pounds sterling. Faced with the sudden appearance of the Dutch fleet, the Spanish commanders decided to seek safe harbor in the Cuban town of Matanzas, but before the ships could anchor, they ran aground on a sandbank. Some two thousand Spanish crewmembers and passengers thus found themselves swimming to the beach or rowing ashore amidst a shower of enemy gunfire. Demoralized, the Spaniards abandoned their ships and pushed on, some barefoot, others in only their shirts, many losing their way in the mountains. And yet, there was a silver lining: all who could make off with precious cargo did so. The general, admiral, and officers, as well as passengers, functionaries, sailors, and soldiers absconded with large amounts of gold and silver, a costly failure for Piet Hein. But still, there was enough left by the fleeing Spaniards to give the Dutch a dizzying haul.

From the moment he first heard the news, Spain’s King Philip IV considered meting out an exemplary punishment to the fleet commanders—putting their heads on display in Matanzas as an eternal reminder of the ignominious event. General Juan de Benavides Bazán did indeed lose his battle against infamy in the spring of 1634, when his life ended on the gallows in Seville. The contrast with the reception that was given to the Dutch commander in his home country could not have been greater. Huge crowds in The Hague, Leiden, Haarlem, and Amsterdam welcomed Piet Hein as a hero. His valor appealed to the imagination of many young men, especially orphans, who broke off their vocational training to sign up as sailors with the WIC.

Not everyone shared in the euphoria about the capture of the silver fleet. Three or four dozen drunken soldiers and sailors who had sailed with Piet Hein tried to force their way into the so-called West India House, the WIC headquarters in Amsterdam, with drums beating. They suspected that the confiscated silver was stored in the building and that the directors had adjusted their estimate of the spoils downwards so they would not have to pay the soldiers and sailors, whom they owed three or four months’ pay. One eyewitness remarked that the group could have succeeded in their endeavor had they not been so noisy.

Investors in the WIC cashed in on the capture of the fleet, receiving a dividend of 70 percent on investment for the year. The company directors were also pleased about the fear Piet Hein had instilled in enemy ranks. One treasure fleet from Peru, for instance, was held up, delaying payment for Habsburg soldiers in the Netherlands, to the benefit of the Dutch army. 

Between 1629 and 1640 the Dutch would make four more attempts to capture a Spanish silver fleet, but these ended in failure. Not all was in vain, though. One fleet from New Spain did not reach its destination in 1631, having lost its battle with the elements, and private individuals incurred losses that totaled an estimated five million pesos, or a little more than the value of Piet Hein’s entire booty. This catastrophe was not simply the result of bad luck. Rather, it was at least in part a result of Spanish fear of the Dutch, fear that had delayed departure until late in the year—the hurricane season.

With its profits soaring, the West India Company decided to return to Brazil. Since Piet Hein was no longer in the service of the WIC (he had been killed in action while fighting Dunkirk privateers), Hendrick Loncq was appointed as the general of the Dutch fleet. Loncq’s expedition was successful, enabling the Dutch to establish a foothold in Pernambuco, the sugar-producing captaincy in northern Brazil, and making it necessary to add other colonies to the Dutch empire. The Company directors were particularly keen on incorporating Angola in their empire. Not only, they thought, would that guarantee a steady import of African slaves, but it would surely deal the Spanish archenemy a severe blow since his silver mines would be unable to operate without the influx of Africans. Little did they know that Indians, not Africans, made up the bulk of the miners.

The Dutch invasion of Brazil also opened up the possibility of finding precious metals in South America. From the early seventeenth century, the search for silver had been a leitmotif in Dutch activities on the American mainland. An important reason to pursue colonization in Guiana was the discovery of a mine that yielded both gold and silver, or so it was believed. And Brazil promised to offer even more mineral wealth. Six Brazilian Indians who had been brought to the United Provinces after the defeat in Bahia informed the Dutch about the existence of silver, lead, and crystal reserves in the vicinity of Ceará. It would not be hard, the natives asserted, to locate the silver: everyone could spot it in passing. They had themselves used small pieces of it as weight for their fishnets. When these assertions were finally tested by explorers two decades later, no silver was found. Other expeditions into the interior were equally frustrating, but the stream of people who claimed to know the location of mines never stopped. A local Portuguese monk reported, for example, that a mountain in a wooded area near the town of Sergipe was home to two silver mines “as good as those of Potosí in Peru.”

Potosí appears almost mythical in some of the stories, but the Dutch knew that it was an actual place that they might be able to reach, in spite of its remote location. In 1641 Governor Johan Maurits sent an expedition to the island of São Luis off Maranhão in northern Brazil, which was believed to provide access to the mines of Peru. In the same year another expedition, guided by scores of natives, marched to the interior of Paraíba to find out if the mines of Potosí could be reached through a backdoor. Although neither endeavor was successful, the search for American silver continued for a few more years. The end finally came around 1648, when after three generations of warfare Spain buried the hatchet with the Netherlanders and presented them with a gift more precious than silver: independence.

Further Reading:

The capture of the silver fleet is documented in S. P. L’Honoré Naber and Irene A. Wright, eds., Piet Heyn en de Zilvervloot. Bescheiden uit Nederlandsche en Spaansche Archieven (Utrecht, 1928) and Irene A. Wright, ed., Bescheiden over de verovering van de Zilvervloot door Piet Heyn (Utrecht, 1928). Information about the Dutch search for Brazilian silver can be gleaned from “Memorie door den Kolonnel Artichofsky, bij zijn vertrek uit Brazilië in 1637 overgeleverd aan Graaf Maurits en zijnen Geheimen Raad,” Kroniek van het Historisch Genootschap gevestigd te Utrecht25, fifth series, volume 5 (1869): 253-349 and “Journaux et Nouvelles tirées de la bouche de Marins Hollandais et Portugais de la Navigation aux Antilles et sur les Côtes du Brésil. Manuscrit de Hessel Gerritsz traduit pour la Bibliothèque Nationale de Rio de Janeiro par E. J. Bondam,” Annaes da Bibliotheca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro XXIX (1907): 97-179.

This article originally appeared in issue 6.3 (April, 2006).

Wim Klooster is an assistant professor of history at Clark University. His most recent books are Power and the City in the Netherlandic World (forthcoming in 2006; coedited with Wayne te Brake) and The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination (2005; coedited with Alfred Padula).

Reading credit and character in early America

“Money talks,” we’re often told, because it can convey far more meaning than mere words. But in eighteenth-century America, paper money could literally talk. When I undertook years ago to write a book on economics and letters in early America, I expected that paper money would figure thematically in the era’s essays, broadsides, poetry, novels, and drama. I was surprised to discover, however, that paper money was often a literary character with much to say: a tale-telling traveler, a shameless liar, a martyr offering up his dying words.

As literary devices, these talking personae produce mixed results. Sometimes they are clever, and just as often they are contrived and heavy handed. But, putting aside the question of their literary merit, I have often wondered why writers were inclined to make paper money a fictional character in the first place. Why give a piece of money an identity and a platform from which to speak? What can this peculiar literary maneuver tell us about paper money as a social phenomenon?

By turning paper money into the character Paper Money, writers could draw a compelling analogy between personal and national credibility. In contrast to coins or “hard money,” which obtained currency through the metal’s market value, paper money relied extensively on the faith of buyers and sellers in the government’s word. These “bills of credit,” which constituted a debt on the government’s part, were essentially IOUs issued by legislative proclamation at times when there were not enough metal coins in the public coffers to cover expenses. Like an individual seeking credit, then, the government needed to offer proof of its integrity to make these monetary promises convincing. As one Massachusetts politician proclaimed in 1787, states “become respectable on the same principles by which the character of individuals is maintained.” This analogy was serviceable to both critics and supporters of paper money.

In the hands of critics, the persona of Paper Money becomes, not surprisingly, a charlatan. He speaks words the reader can never entirely trust, and he dramatizes the risks inherent in all forms of money that rely on verbal promises rather than tangible forms of wealth. When Benjamin Franklin penned an essay publicly supporting a 1775 issue of Continental dollars, for example, critics responded with a series of satiric pieces depicting Paper Money as a social-climbing masquerader. In these satires, man and money mislead readers in similar ways. Franklin is the humbug who fashions himself as learned by speaking a smattering of Latin. Paper Money, who not coincidentally bears Latin mottoes, is also an imposter of sorts: he proclaims a value that cannot be backed up by collateral.

such writings, the persona of Hard Money often provides a foil to his paper counterpart. Hard Money insists that the accurate assessment of personal character and monetary value alike is the prerogative of an elite class of “reading men” who are “able to conceive that first appearances are oftentimes deceitful, and that all is not gold that glitters.” He is a man of substance, honorable birth, and fluency in all languages (metal’s widespread acceptability making it universally conversant). Paper Money, by contrast, is the obscure and untrustworthy child of a Philadelphia printer and given to “affecting an importance, as if he had been equal to the solid coin.” In the most obvious sense, he is the brainchild of Franklin, a retired printer, and the product of the Philadelphia printing house Hall and Sellers. But Paper Money’s parentage also aligns credit use with the tradesman. In the class-conscious satire of these essays, “substance” refers both to the tangible material of metal coins and to the status and capital of landowners.

This character’s lineage also implicates paper credit in a larger print culture that is susceptible to corruption. By making possible mass-produced and standardized texts, printing lent an aura of legitimacy to paper money, promissory notes, newspapers, tracts, broadsides, and other media. But a man might also hide behind print and assume a false identity in a newspaper or broadside that he could not so easily assume in a face-to-face encounter. And a printed bill might seem official and yet still make promises it could not keep. Worse yet, it might be a fake, for the more standardized and generally reproducible a bill was, the more easily it might be counterfeited.

A decade later, a series of speeches by Paper Money in the Worcester Magazine dramatically illustrated these risks for readers. In the September 1786 issue, the much maligned Paper Money defends himself by reminding readers that he was instrumental in funding the Revolutionary War. But, in the November issue, Paper Money rescinds this claim and admits to having been a “tool of knavery, dishonesty, fraud, and injustice.” In the January 1787 issue, however, Paper Money announces that the November speech was submitted by an “imposter.” He repeals the repeal and stands by what he said in the first speech. Paper Money has been impersonated in print, highlighting just how easily a paper bill might be counterfeited.

The November masquerade is somewhat ironic, given that it aims to castigate dishonesty, but its creator would likely have drawn a distinction between the impersonation of a fictional device and that of a living individual. To the writer of the November speech, the real frauds are paper money and its supporters. Such a critic would perceive little difference between these supporters and a man like Stephen Burroughs, the notorious eighteenth-century confidence man whose dreams of easy wealth drove him to counterfeit coins. One might argue that Burroughs distorted the initial logic behind credit by creating unauthorized money that constituted theft rather than borrowing. But, in the minds of its opponents, even legitimate paper money was a counterfeit like the one Burroughs admired—a pretense of material value that is not present or tangible.

As we might expect, paper money cuts a very different figure in the literary efforts of its supporters. Advocates of paper money did not deny its risks, but they also saw it as a resource that could expand the money supply and, in so doing, facilitate exchange and stimulate enterprise. In their writings, the character Paper Money is still a man lacking in “substance,” but his insubstantiality takes on a decidedly positive spin. 

Paper Money cannot match Hard Money in material value, but, as a printed text, he is kin to the progeny of great authors: “If a Printing-office was the place of my nativity,” he writes, “so has it been of the noblest productions that ever blessed or adorned the world.” He boasts elsewhere, “I am by the mother’s side of the family of Paper; a family that has been of more service to the commonwealth of letters than all of the name of Hard-Money that ever have existed.” Paper Money acts without the backing of material wealth and so is a testament to the power of legal language. In a political climate that has enshrined documents like the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, his lineage is something to be celebrated.

This version of Paper Money certainly lacks wealth and status, but for this reason, it also fits nicely into a story of American opportunity. A case in point is “The Adventures of a Continental Dollar,” a serial narrative of which two installments appeared in The United States Magazine before the periodical folded in December 1779. In this tale, Paper Money admits he has neither the capital nor prestige that Hard Money enjoys, but he insists nevertheless that readers not overlook his potential. Far from an “upstart coxcomb,” as his detractors have dubbed him, he is an “enterprising genius.” This Paper Money is the son not of the printer but of Liberty. He is a risk-taker, born “in the centre of the vast continent of North-America” where “boundless and unexplored regions” are fit for such “free and uncountrouled souls” as his.

The spaciousness of the American continent links paper money to New World exploration and immigration. Readers of North American settlement narratives and promotional tracts know how consistently they embrace the language of potential and opportunity. It is worth emphasizing, however, how often such narratives make debt and credit use the first step to realizing that potential and acting on that opportunity. In William Bradford’s archetypal account of the Plymouth colony, the Puritans must brave rough waters and a hostile wilderness but also borrow heavily from London merchants in order to finance their journey. In the next century, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s “What is an American?” would proclaim that the model American immigrant uses borrowing to exceed the limitations of his capital and convert dreams to reality.

In keeping with this equation of indebtedness with liberation, Paper Money sometimes figures as a martyr who has died bringing about individual and collective autonomy. A broadside by Joseph Green, published as the colony of Massachusetts began retiring its bills of credit in 1750, features the “Dying Speech” of a paper bill who is soon to be permanently removed from circulation and relegated to the flames. Although the speaker admits that his value was inflated and he was manipulated to serve “the worst of Mortals,” he also reminds his readers that he helped the poor man in distress and provided funding to fight colonial wars and build communities. Similarly, Green’s 1781 ballad broadside, “A Mournful Lamentation On the untimely Death of Paper Money,” eulogizes paper money as a martyr who died for American freedom:

He rais’d and paid our Armies brave.
     To guard our threaten’d State;
Whose val’rous Deeds their Country save,
     And num’rous Foes defeat.

Sung to the traditional English tune of “Chevy Chase,” this ballad celebrates a recently retired issue of Continental money for its role in national independence.

Although Green laments the death of Paper Money, other writers considered his death essential to American success. For example, M’Fingal, John Trumbull’s 1782 epic poem of the Revolution, proclaims that the Continental dollar must die in order to do its duty. Marching to his grave in the vision of the fourth canto, Paper Money appears limping on crutches, draped in tattered robes, and bearing a breastplate that reads, “The faith of all th’ United States.” Although an admirable patriot, he must “perish in his country’s cause,” for only with the retirement of its debt can the nation’s honor be maintained. Trumbull anticipates the day when the Continental bill will lie buried in eternal peace, and he does not envision a permanent national paper money.

That Paper Money, as living hero and martyr, was often a national liberator was amply reinforced by the rhetoric of bills themselves. The 1775 “Sword in Hand” bill (fig.1), engraved by Paul Revere and issued by Massachusetts at the start of military conflict with England, features a soldier holding the Magna Charta and the words, “Issued in defence of American Liberty.” In another issue the following year, the soldier’s Magna Charta is replaced by the Declaration of Independence. Two 1777 South Carolina bills also celebrate freedom (figs. 2 and 3). One announces Servitus Omnis Misera, or, “All Forms of Slavery Are Wretched” (with obvious irony, given the prevalence of chattel slavery in the region). A second bill features a bird fleeing a cage and the motto Ubi Libertas Ibi Patria, or, “Where There Is Liberty, There is Homeland.”

Even in his most flattering portraits, the figure of Paper Money must compensate for his deficiencies. Paper money is a “necessity” in the specific eighteenth-century sense of the term: prompted by pressing economic constraints and a paucity of monetary options. But that should not obscure the extent to which many writers perceived the instability of credit schemes and their reliance on popular opinion as a valuable communal resource. If commercial credit was the trust one placed in a person’s ability and willingness to meet financial obligations, public credit was the trust one placed in a government’s ability and willingness to do so. What initiated public credit was a debt, and hence a limitation, on the government’s part, but public credit was nevertheless an expression of confidence in the new nation’s viability. For this reason, the rhetoric of Continental dollars typically tried to foster this confidence by implicitly linking financial venture to communal commitment. In a one-third dollar bill (fig.4), for example, the motto, “We are One,” is accompanied by the image of thirteen interlocking rings, suggesting that the fates of all states are intertwined by the political and economic venture of rebellion.

If we return to “The Adventures of a Continental Dollar,” it is clear that Paper Money necessarily relies more than Hard Money on faith and that such faith figures as a valuable expression of public commitment. Speaking of men who publicly endorsed him shortly after his birth in America, Paper Money recalls, “They were the first men that owned me, and stood up for me in the infancy of my affairs, entered into a league with me, and stood firm to it in despite of all the hazards of an uncertain fortune.” Here Paper Money acknowledges the hazards he has brought to the new nation but also insists these hazards exact a measure of commitment. In this and other instances, the speaking bill describes financial faith but also, in so doing, attempts to solicit faith from the reader as well. When Paper Money speaks, in other words, he has in mind a reader who may well be in a position to extend his or her credit to the nation’s money.

As twenty-first-century readers, we cannot experience the persona of Paper Money just as our eighteenth-century counterparts did. These bills are not our own but the relics of a past era. Monetary experience has changed dramatically, and we have no expectations today that our greenbacks will ever be redeemed for metal coins. We might be optimistic or pessimistic about the strength of the dollar or of our economy in general, but we do not think of a paper bill as a voucher awaiting redemption. Eighteenth-century paper money talked by using legal language to proclaim a value not backed by collateral, and buyers and sellers were not always sure how to read these promises. At times a trickster, at times an underdog beseeching support, Paper Money took to talking as a response to Americans’ mixture of skepticism and faith.

Further Reading:

For general histories of early American money, see Eric P. Newman’s The Early Paper Money of America (Iola, Wisc., 1990) and William G. Anderson’s The Price of Liberty: The Public Debt of the American Revolution (Charlottesville, Va., 1983). Newman’s book includes facsimiles of many bills, and more images of bills can be found on the Website Colonial Currency, a project of the Robert H. Gore, Jr. Numismatic Endowment at the University of Notre Dame. For a sustained analysis of paper money and early American writing, see Jennifer J. Baker’s Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America (Baltimore, 2005). For examples of Paper Money as a literary protagonist, see Joseph Green, “The Dying Speech of Old Tenor” (Boston, 1750) and “A Mournful Lamentation On the untimely Death of Paper Money” (Wilmington, Del., 1781); “The Adventures of a Continental Dollar,” United States Magazine (June 1779): 264-268 and (September 1779): 385-387; “Paper Money once more speaketh for itself!” Worcester Magazine 2:31 (November 1, 1786): 372-373; “Paper Money once more speaketh for itself!” Worcester Magazine 2:40 (January 1, 1787): 482-484; “Paper Money, raised from the dead, speaketh for itself!” Worcester Magazine 1:25 (September 15, 1786): 294; “Reply of Continental Currency to the Representation and Remonstrance of Hard Money” United States Magazine (February 1779): 72-81; “The Representation of Remonstrance of Hard Money,” United States Magazine (January 1779): 28-31.

This article originally appeared in issue 6.3 (April, 2006).

Jennifer J. Baker is assistant professor of English at Yale and the author of Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America (Baltimore, 2005). She is currently writing a book on antebellum American literature and the Victorian life sciences.

Nicholas Biddle and the beauty of banking

“The Tomb of Many Fortunes”

When Charles Dickens visited Philadelphia in 1842, he found a ruined capital. “Looking out of my chamber-window, before going to bed,” he wrote of his first night, “I saw, on the opposite side of the way, a handsome building of white marble, which had a mournful ghost-like aspect, dreary to behold.” The next morning, he learned why. “It was the Tomb of many fortunes; the Great Catacomb of investment; the memorable United States Bank. The stoppage of this bank, with all its ruinous consequences, had cast (as I was told on every side) a gloom on Philadelphia, under the depressing effect of which it yet laboured.” Outside the shuttered city, Dickens paused over another deserted monument to its past prosperity: “a most splendid unfinished marble structure for the Girard College . . . which, if completed according to the original design will be perhaps the richest edifice of modern times.”

The stone frames of the bank and the college stood as the most celebrated examples of the Greek Revival in antebellum America, the architectural expression of the newly won riches of planters and financiers. Had Dickens traveled a little farther up the Delaware River, he would have come upon a third classical memorial to the moneyed men of the new Athens, a brick mansion encased in a massive marble colonnade modeled on the Temple of Theseus. There lived the deposed president of both the United States Bank and Girard College, the chief sponsor of the Greek Revival, Nicholas Biddle. Dismissed by the bank stockholders and college trustees, he was spending his last days, as William Cullen Bryant wrote upon Biddle’s death two years later, “in elegant retirement, which, if justice had taken place, would have been spent in the penitentiary.”

Having begun his career as one of the first Americans to tour the ruins of ancient Greece, Biddle may have taken what he called a “melancholy satisfaction” in his own demise amid the Grecian relics of the early republic and the national bank that both united and divided it. The bond that he forged between classical beauty and modern banking helps to explain what made the Bank War of the 1830s the climactic struggle of the new nation and a precursor of the Civil War soon to follow. The long conflict over money and banking in nineteenth-century politics came down to a question of representation: what did the nation’s founding principle of representative government mean for the governance of the burgeoning market economy, and what did the new forms of currency on which it depended themselves represent? Americans’ answers to those questions had much to do with the different ways they understood representation in literature and art as well as in politics and economics. For, like classicism, what came to be called the “money question” formed a central part of the popular culture of the nineteenth century, before becoming the exclusive province of an educated elite.

“A Bank on Parnassus”

When Nicholas Biddle became president of the Bank of the United States in 1823, the only business he had ever run was his wife’s family estate, and his sole experience in banking consisted of a two-year term on the bank’s board of directors. His national reputation derived rather from his work as editor of the leading American literary journal, author of the standard history of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and amateur authority on ancient Greece. “Alas!” Biddle mused in a poem, “had the ancients, who so much surpass us, / In their pure golden age, fixed a bank on Parnassus, / What a model of wisdom and pleasure to follow! / Only think now—to sign one’s bank-notes like Apollo!” “Enclosed in my vast marble tomb,” as he called the bank’s new headquarters modeled on the Parthenon, he pictured himself “’Mid vaults of damp stone and huge chests of cold iron, / That would quell all the fancy of Shakespeare or Byron.” But the obituary for his youthful passions proved premature, for Biddle’s subsequent financial career owed much to his earlier literary one.

Born with the early republic in 1786, Biddle was the son of a prosperous Philadelphia merchant. A prodigious reader as a child, he entered the University of Pennsylvania at the age of ten. At thirteen, he transferred to the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), where he excelled in Latin and Greek and took a leading role in a debating society as “Grammaticus.” Returning to Philadelphia to study law, Biddle joined a circle of local luminaries who wrote for the nation’s premier literary magazine, the Port Folio, which wedded love of belles lettres to contempt for democratic politics. His own contributions reflected his restlessness for a higher office commensurate with his talents. In the form of a letter to the journal’s editor, Biddle mocked the pseudo-military “manœuvres” and “reconnoitring” of “valourous knights” and “damsels” at a tea party, describing himself as a “mere ‘looker-on here in Vienna,’” like the Duke in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Disdaining melodramatic efforts to find heroism within ordinary life, he longed for the means to turn his “looker-on” into a leader.

When the American minister to France, John Armstrong, invited Biddle to join him as an unpaid secretary in 1804, he leaped at the chance. The following year, he embarked from Paris on a grand tour of Europe, joining a growing stream of travelers through southern Italy and on to Greece. Being a mere observer now proved invaluable as he moved freely among Greek peasants and their Turkish occupiers as well as among warring British and French forces. “I look from my window so coolly on the noise of Trieste that I seem like one of Plato’s wise men who sees the vanity of the shadows which deceive the people in the hole,” he wrote in his journal. Biddle’s pilgrimage culminated among the ruins of golden-age Greece, which he was reputedly only the second American to see. (The first, a young Grecophile from Charleston named Joseph Allen Smith, preceded him by just a few years.) “I believe the turn of my mind, or what may properly be called my genius, has at length decided itself,” Biddle wrote to his brother. “. . . To govern men, and particularly by means of eloquence . . . a study which roused the slumbering glories of Greece.”

Though Biddle’s legal practice upon returning home fell short of his lofty ambition, his business flourished. At the same time, he became increasingly involved in running the Port Folio, and he took over as editor in January 1812. He made the journal a platform for the kind of impassioned patriotism he identified with classical oratory. Not “cold and prudent calculation” but “kindred feelings” must bind Americans in common struggle, Biddle wrote amid the War of 1812, calling for poetry and song that would “make us not merely know, but feel that we have a country.” Among the most influential works of American literary nationalism in this period came from Biddle’s own pen. In 1810, Colonel William Clark hired him to edit the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-06. Biddle completely reworked the chronicle, adding extensive material based on his own research, merging the journals of the two commanders into a seamless narrative whose genteel prose bore faint resemblance to the raw material. His two-volume History of the Expedition of Captains Lewis and Clark (1814) served as the definitive account until the journals themselves were published in 1904-05. Submerging the personal conflicts and courts-martial of the original company, he fashioned “our national epic of exploration,” as the naturalist Elliott Coues wrote in 1893.

At twenty-four, Biddle was elected to the lower house of the Pennsylvania legislature, and four years later he entered the state senate. He gravitated toward the mercantile and nationalist wing of the Republican party, promoting a network of roads, canals, and river improvements designed to make Philadelphia the metropole of an agricultural empire stretching from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. In this effort, as in his related support for Philadelphia’s first Bank of the United States, Biddle largely lost out to the agrarian wing of the party, loyal to the Jeffersonian ideal of limited government and decentralized development. Retreating from the statehouse to his country estate, he ran twice for Congress and appealed repeatedly for a federal appointment, without success.

Plato’s wise man appeared a poor fit for electoral politics. Biddle later became a sought-after public speaker, and he often used the occasions to decry the decline of the “philosophical statesman” whose learning made him a leader rather than a follower of his constituents. “Undoubtedly the public councils should reflect the public sentiment,” he said in a eulogy for Thomas Jefferson in 1827, “but that mirror may be dimmed by being too closely breathed on.” On the eve of the Jacksonian revolution in American politics, which enfranchised many poor and propertyless men for the first time, Biddle harked back to an earlier elitist model of republican government. At the same time, he looked forward to the growing importance of money and banking, in which he found an alternative system of representation.

“Serving Men”

In 1829, Biddle wrote a poem for his young daughter, Meta. Published together with an earlier poem about banking, “Ode to Bogle” was a mock tribute to the leader of a surprisingly similar occupation: Robert Bogle, the city’s first “public waiter” or caterer, who transformed the position of private butler into a kind of public office for black Philadelphians. Much as Biddle’s bank controlled the cash and credit vital to all kinds of commercial enterprise, so Bogle presided as the ultimate arbiter of taste and decorum at baptisms, weddings, and funerals. In an age when statesmen were devolving into mere servants, as Biddle saw it, Bogle symbolized the rising power of “serving men” themselves. Yet if democracy meant rule by representatives in this sense, Biddle could claim a comparable authority for the role of public banker, which he more than any other American defined.

The competition for that honor was peculiarly intense. For unlike European banking, which was generally the business of wealthy families, American banking was born public, the creature of the state governments that chartered the first commercial banks in the years after the Revolutionary War. Modeled on lone national banks like the Bank of England, public incorporation remained the rule in the new nation as the number of banks mushroomed—from just three when Biddle was born to more than three hundred by the time he became president of the Bank of the United States. These “state banks” were supposed to help support the state governments and promote economic development in exchange for the corporate privileges they enjoyed. Chief among these privileges was limited liability, which meant that a bank’s owners were not legally liable for its debts beyond what they individually invested. Limited liability allowed banks to lend out much more money, in the form of paper notes redeemable in gold or silver, than the gold or silver they actually kept in their vaults. Amid a chronic shortage of coin, these banknotes served as Americans’ main currency until the federal government began printing its own paper money during the Civil War.

Whom did state banks, which were primarily privately owned and operated, really represent? What did banknotes, whose value rested largely on trust, likewise represent? The wrenching national debate over these issues focused on the Bank of the United States, chartered by Congress from 1791 to 1811 and again from 1816 to 1836. As the exclusive depository for the revenues of the federal government, the Bank of the United States collected the notes of all the other banks. It was intended to use its power as their biggest creditor to ensure that state banks behaved like public servants in practice as well as in theory.

Biddle’s earliest comments on the controversy over banks’ control of the money supply came in a speech championing the recharter of the first Bank of the United States, delivered before the Pennsylvania House of Representatives on his twenty-fifth birthday. In sweeping terms, he refuted the popular charge that a representative government had no right to delegate its Constitutional authority over currency to an unelected body of self-interested stockholders. Deputizing private persons to provide public services, he argued, was simply the most effective means of attaining some of the basic ends for which government was empowered. Far from establishing a “monied aristocracy,” chartered banks protected poor debtors from rich creditors by interposing between them “an association of individuals whose private or political feelings are merged” in the service of the collective. A public corporation represented the American people better than either elected officials or private individuals could.

“I have however little concern with Banks,” Biddle wrote to President James Monroe in 1819, accepting his appointment to the board of the second Bank of the United States. Three years later, he wrote to another board member that the next president of the bank ought to be someone with “talent for business rather than what is commonly called a man of business,” for businessmen lacked “liberal habits of thinking,” and he should likewise “stand well with the Gov^t” without being “an active partizan.” In other words, the job should go to an impartial observer such as himself, as it shortly did.

Under Biddle’s direction, the bank took a dominant role in guiding the dizzying expansion of the market economy in the 1820s and 30s. He reined in lending by the state banks while turning up the volume of paper issued by the Bank of the United States’ eighteen branches, aiming to create a uniform national currency under the bank’s control. He geared the bank’s business away from small farmers and toward merchants engaged in long-distance trade between the cotton plantations of the American South and the industrializing regions of the American Northeast and Europe. Biddle’s promotion of large-scale development based on staple-crop production for a world market ran counter to the teachings of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), one of the founding texts of classical economics. Smith and his many American disciples within the ranks of Jeffersonian and later Jacksonian democrats favored a broader diffusion of wealth among smaller farmers and tradesmen producing a wider range of goods for a mainly domestic market. But the deepest difference between Biddle’s outlook and that of Smithian political economy concerned his understanding of money.

According to the traditional view dating back to Aristotle, money was simply something of sufficiently stable value that could be divided into standard units and passed from hand to hand, so that it could serve as a measure of value in general and a means of exchanging other goods. Age-old proscriptions on profiting from monetary transactions gained force from the presumption that money was merely a “sterile” medium of exchange, possessing no productive power of its own. Beginning in the fifteenth century, however, the development of banknotes and other kinds of paper currency led European merchants and bankers toward a view of money as much more than an intermediary. Allied with monarchical governments, financiers came to see the money supply as a fundamental force in its own right, like a great river of liquidity irrigating commercial farms, powering manufactories, and carrying trade on its current.

It was this “mercantilist” conception of money that Smith repudiated. Far from being the golden goose that merchants and monarchs imagined, money was for the classical economists essentially what it had been for pre-mercantilist thinkers: a “veil” covering the “natural economy” of land and labor, goods and services. In the late eighteenth century, this deep-rooted dispute blossomed into a major political issue on both sides of the Atlantic. Developments in banking made it possible for the kinds of bills and notes long used by merchants to circulate much more widely, becoming common currency. Currency came unhitched from gold, silver, or other commodities and attached instead to credit instruments, while the credit instruments themselves became detached from their original lenders and borrowers. Money took on a life of its own, apart from the industry and commerce it was meant to represent.

Nowadays, we are so accustomed to viewing money as autonomous in this way that early Americans’ preoccupation with what lay beneath the “cash nexus” (as Thomas Carlyle called it) can seem simple-minded, bespeaking an apparent inability to think abstractly or an uneasiness with flux and fluidity in general. But to people schooled in the struggle against British rule, the growing power of money and of those who controlled it naturally raised the specter of corruption and tyranny. For, as a popular writer put it, “Money is as much the representative of the property of the people, as the legislature are the representatives of their constituents.” The further money became separated from the property and people it was supposed to represent, the more many Americans worried that the banking system was becoming an irresponsible power unto itself.

Biddle’s answer to this problem came less in his short-lived policies and pronouncements than in his enduring architectural influence. Joining his ideas about representative government to his notions of classical beauty, he created an artistic idiom that helped validate the authority of bankers and bank money in democratic America.

“Refined Simplicity”

Biddle was famously handsome. Proud of his looks, he sat for at least eighteen portraits, recording his development from the rakish youth in a French drawing of 1805 into the elder statesman with the Grecian portico of the national bank in the background in an engraved painting of 1837. Probably his best-known likeness, painted by Thomas Sully in 1826, depicts the boyish president of the bank in romantic repose, softly lit in an open-necked shirt and fur-collared coat, his long brown hair draping his flushed face as he sits pensively at a window opening onto a cloudy seascape—the picture of a poet with more on his mind than cotton bills and discount rates.

Biddle drew the face of American banking with equal panache. He began sketching it long before he became a banker, in his painstaking traveler’s notes on ancient Athenian architecture. Back in Pennsylvania, he persuaded his prospective mother-in-law to let him build a Doric garden house at the family estate, twenty years before he had the main mansion renovated along similar lines. European architects had been copying Greek temple remains since the mid-eighteenth century, but the Greek Revival made little headway in the United States before the 1820s. Revolutionary-era Americans’ enthusiasm for the ancients ran strongly toward republican Rome, and early national architecture clung to the stately red-brick boxes of British and Dutch colonialism—with the crucial exception of Jefferson’s classical Roman plans for the University of Virginia and Monticello. Awestruck by the ruins of Greece, Biddle believed such buildings could have a similarly ennobling effect in his own country. Like patriotic songs and epics of exploration, the timeless grandeur of Greek design could awaken in Americans a visceral sense of national unity.

What Biddle called its “refined simplicity,” evoking at once republican virtue and romantic idealism, made the Greek temple a fitting symbol for his vision of banking. He was hardly the first to connect the two. Commercial banking and neoclassical architecture arose together in Renaissance Italy, and eighteenth-century bankers became the leading patrons of the Greek Revival in Britain. The first authentically Grecian building in the United States was the Bank of Pennsylvania, designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe and constructed between 1798 and 1800. In 1811, Biddle published in the Port FolioLatrobe’s manifesto for the Greek Revival, calling for Philadelphia to capitalize on its financial wealth (and abundance of marble) by becoming “the Athens of the Western world.” Biddle took an eager interest in his friend William Strickland’s Doric design for the second Bank of the United States, built between 1818 and 1824. As chair of the bank’s building committee and then as president, he saw to it that branches of the bank across the country—and scores of state banks as well—came to be modeled on Greek temples.

More broadly, Biddle sponsored the rapid spread of the Greek Revival from its hub in Philadelphia throughout the Bank of the United States’ principal dominion, extending along the Atlantic seaboard from Washington and Baltimore to New York, westward across the “inland empire” of canal towns to the riverbank cities and frontier communities of the Northwest Territory, and southward through the old tobacco country of Virginia and North Carolina. Cotton planters brought neoclassical architecture to the Deep South, following the lead of Biddle’s nemesis, Andrew Jackson, who had his Tennessee manor rebuilt to fit his image as a latter-day Cincinnatus. But the white-columned mansions of the cotton kingdom only loosely resembled the Greek models that Biddle promoted in the North. By the 1830s, these were generally viewed as “the ‘official’ style of financial Whiggery,” in the words of the architectural historian Roger G. Kennedy.

Like the Whig party, which split from the Democrats after Jackson vetoed the recharter of Biddle’s bank, the Greek Revival appeared avowedly in but not of the revolutionary tide that swept across the Atlantic around 1830. The democratic ferment from Poland to Paris to the English Parliament went furthest in the United States, inspired in part by the recent triumph of the Greek revolution against the Ottoman Empire. The “refined simplicity” of the Grecian style associated the fortunes of finance with the ascendance of popular politics. Yet at the same time, as the historian Caroline Winterer has shown, classics scholars came to identify Greek art with a defiantly unpopular reverence for beauty, truth, and genius as opposed to the money-grubbing mediocrity of Jacksonian America. Such superiority naturally appealed to profit-driven southern planters who fancied themselves courtly cavaliers. In much the same way, the antimodern character of the Greek Revival lent itself to Biddle’s image of banking as a critical check on the irresponsibility of “men of business” and their representatives in government.

Both sides in the Bank War cast themselves as guardians of representative government against corruption. The crux of the Jacksonian position was that the Bank of the United States, like all specially chartered banks, served the private interest of its investors at the expense of the public interest represented by elected officials, conferring quasi-governmental power upon a “paper aristocracy.” The paper currency such banks created, untethered to either the gold and silver for which it substituted or the purchases and sales for which it served, likewise turned money into an end in itself, fueling a vicious cycle of boom and bust that Jacksonians chalked up to “speculation.” Defenders of the Bank of the United States countered that the danger to democracy came from politicians who followed too faithfully the caprice of popular sentiment, who vowed “that they will never act nor think nor speak but as we direct them,” as Biddle said in an 1835 talk to Princeton alumni. A free people depended on the “independence” of public servants able to represent its real interests rather than its “crude opinions.” The national bank’s very autonomy enabled it to play such a regulative role, without which, he warned, a free market could sustain itself no better than a free people. The national bank’s necessary instrument for governing the market economy was its control over the supply of paper money. And the bank’s Grecian architecture set its sovereignty in stone.

“Melancholy Satisfaction”

Ever since visiting Greece, Biddle had been drawn to architecture as a lasting memorial to its makers. Calling for the construction of a monument to George Washington in 1811, he recalled the relics of ancient republics, which “still shed their melancholy glories on the desert.” Addressing the Princeton alumni a quarter-century later, he was reminded again of the marble fragments and crumbling columns, “all that represent the buried glories of Sparta, of Corinth, or Argos.” In leading the Greek Revival, he looked forward with “melancholy satisfaction” to the ruins of his own realm. Freed from the political fray in which it was born, the bleached remains of the Bank of the United States might finally attain the Olympian authority for which it stood.

In his desire to remove public banking from the political arena, Biddle was ahead of his time. President Bush’s recent nomination of Ben Bernacke as chair of the Federal Reserve barely registered in American politics, though the job wields more power than Biddle’s did. When the selection of the nation’s chief banker attracts little interest beyond Wall Street, it is hard to imagine that the president of the national bank was once almost as controversial as the president of the United States. In Biddle’s lifetime, the separation of currency from commerce became an open, urgent political question, comparable to the separation of labor from capital. The money question remained hotly contested throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, only gradually becoming eclipsed along with the labor question. The beauty of banking was Biddle’s effort to bring that contest to a close.

Further Reading:

Charles Dickens’s comments may be found in his American Notes (New York, 1996). For an admiring biography, see Thomas Payne Govan, Nicholas Biddle: Nationalist and Public Banker, 1786-1844 (Chicago, 1959). Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton, 1957) remains the fullest survey of its subject, including a spirited defense of Biddle’s ideas about banking along with much biographical detail. For a brief and judicious synthesis of the Bank War and its broader political context, see Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York, 1990); readers interested in a more in-depth treatment should consult John M. McFaul, The Politics of Jacksonian Finance (Ithaca, 1972) and Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Bank War: A Study in the Growth of Presidential Power (New York, 1967). Major L. Wilson, “The ‘Country’ versus the ‘Court’: A Republican Consensus and Party Debate in the Bank War,” Journal of the History of the Early Republic 15 (Winter 1995): 619-47, discusses the common concern with corruption and conspiracy on both sides of the Bank War. On Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in the early American republic, see Michael Merrill, “The Anticapitalist Origins of the United States,” Review: A Journal of the Ferdinand Braudel Center (Fall 1990): 465-97. For a lively history of Greek Revival architecture, see Roger G. Kennedy, Greek Revival America (New York, 1989), which includes an excellent discussion of Biddle’s leading role, as does Architecture, Men, Women and Money in America, 1600-1860 (New York, 1985) by the same author. For a rich study of classicism in American thought and culture in this period, see Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 (Baltimore, 2002). On Biddle’s travels in Greece, see R. A. McNeal, ed., Nicholas Biddle in Greece: The Journals and Letters (University Park, Penn., 1993). On his history of the Lewis and Clark expedition, see Gunther Barth, “Timeless Journals: Reading Lewis and Clark with Nicholas Biddle’s Help,” Pacific Historical Review, 63:4 (Nov. 1994): 499-519. On the many portraits of Biddle, see Nicholas B. Wainwright, “Nicholas Biddle in Portraiture,” Antiques 108 (Nov. 1975): 956-64. On Robert Bogle and the profession of public waiter, see W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia, 1996).

This article originally appeared in issue 6.3 (April, 2006).

Jeffrey Sklansky is associate professor of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American intellectual and cultural history at Oregon State University and author of The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920 (Chapel Hill, 2002). He is currently working on a book about the rise and fall of the “money question” in the nineteenth-century United States.

Capitalist knowledge in nineteenth-century America

Of all the numerous claims made on behalf of bookkeeping in the nineteenth century its importance as an ideology was never noticed. In fact, it was adamantly ignored. The exploding number of those charged with posting accounts, and with teaching others how to do so, all preferred to emphasize bookkeeping’s rigorous, scientific character, together with its consequent ability to uncover the truth buried within a mass of disinterested figures. Frederick Beck made a representative claim in his Young Accountant’s Guide, first published in 1831: “Mercantile Book-keeping is the art of recording and stating accounts in such manner, that the true state of each and all the accounts, and the merchant’s situation, may at any time be easily, speedily, and distinctly comprehended and known.” In other words, accounts, which would obstinately refuse to add up if anyone tried to make them tell anything but the whole story, were perceived as an island of disinterested neutrality in the era’s tidal wave of profit seeking. They were, so to speak, an ontological check on what everyone agreed to be the national free-for-all in pursuit of riches.

In fact, locating incontestable truth within the very heart of business avarice had considerable ideological value in the age of capital. Christopher Columbus Marsh, an author of accounting manuals and bookkeeping promotional literature, explained in 1835 that the science of bookkeeping was distinct from the art of trading. “You may be an excellent business man, and no book-keeper at all; or, an accomplished book-keeper and possess few requisites indispensable in the character of a merchant.” The latter, as everyone knew, was bound “by a thousand threads” to “every change in the market.” It was little wonder, then, that the merchant was invariably so anxious, animated, depressed, and disappointed, for those threads “may be severed in an hour by a wave on the ocean of political opinions, policy, or local interests.” Bookkeeping, on the other hand, was immune to such shocks for it was dependent on nothing but itself. It recognized no other policies or interests, and certainly no political opinions. As a result, the bookkeeper “eats and sleeps as usual,” in contrast to the merchant. In fact, the widespread public interest in bookkeeping during the early decades of industrial revolution meant that everyone slept a little better.

Why was this so? Because keeping accounts became as important to the social life of a market society as it was to proper business administration. Nineteenth-century capitalists were frantic system builders, not because of any innate personality trait or some vague ethical imperative handed down by the Protestant Reformation, but because they had destroyed the existing foundations of social order in their rise to power. Such “creative destruction” gave birth to a post-agrarian conundrum, which defined the liberal age: how could stability be founded on the ever-shifting value of exchange—that is, on the fluid relations governing merchandise, consignments, stocks, shipments, moveables, bills receivable, bills payable, drafts, remittances, commissions, insurance, and interest payments? These were all bookkeepers’ categories, of course, and they became the basis of a balanced picture of the whole economy, “easily, speedily, and distinctly comprehended and known,” as Frederick Beck claimed. Bookkeeping, in other words, proved that the constantly varying signs of value—whether Mr. Holmes’s broadcloth, Mr. Brown’s hardware, Mr. Lloyd’s miscellaneous merchandise, or Mr. Jones’s bill payable at thirty days’ sight—could serve as the foundation of equilibrium and that the perpetual movement of commodities was actually the key to stability. In a dialectic suited to such revolutionary times, the problem thus became its own solution. Once the source of instability, monetized trade and the individual ambition that drove it now emerged as the foundation of certainty, if not, in fact, of truth: that is, of the “bottom line.”

This is why a technology invented in the fourteenth century achieved unprecedented popularity in the nineteenth. By the 1830s bookkeeping was a subject of common-school curricula, of scores of competing instructional methods, of public lectures on the fast-growing Lyceum circuit, of morning and evening classes in Mercantile Libraries and in the country’s numerous new “commercial academies,” and even of parlor entertainments that filled leisure hours. For instance, Henry Patterson, a young business clerk recently arrived to New York City from Suckasunny, New Jersey, attended a double-entry study group every Tuesday evening, which counted among its regular participants “Mr. and Mrs. Crane, Ann Maria, Turner, and Edgar.”

“No gentleman’s education is complete without it,” Frederick Beck exclaimed, and the hyperbole was not without basis. Benjamin Franklin Foster likewise declared in his Origin and Practice of Book-keeping (1852) that the science teaches “those things which the [young] will need to practice when they come to be men.” Foster, who was referred to as a “counting-house oracle” by the Educational Times, was the author, in addition to the Origin and Practice of Book-keeping, of The Counting-House Assistant, A Concise Treatise on Book-keeping, The Clerk’s Guide, Hints to Young Tradesmen, Foster’s School Book-Keeping, Commercial Book-keeping, The Merchant’s Manual, Double Entry Elucidated,and The Origin and Practice of Book-keeping, among other related works. Foster also offered courses in bookkeeping at his Commercial Institute on Broadway in New York City, as did C. C. Marsh, and Brown and Pond, and a Mr. Renville, and Mr. Dolbear, and Mr. Paines. All were pedagogical entrepreneurs seeking to build an enterprise out of the close relationship between the expanding market and the democratic spread of business ambition. Thus, C. C. Marsh could claim with a perfectly straight face that “book-keeping is so extensively required, that it becomes difficult to say who may not stand in need of the knowledge embraced under its name.”

The knowledge itself—namely, the system used to organize accounts—was singular. That is, none of the competing manuals or courses of study offered a different technology but only a purportedly better method for learning “the theory and practice of the art.” At the same time, these sundry teaching methods all shared a common pedagogical principle, asserting that the student needed to grasp the business logic of accounts rather than simply learn by rote the rules for listing debits on one side of the ledger and credits on the other.

Thomas Jones explained in his Analysis of Bookkeeping as a Branch of General Education in 1842 that “when [the pupil] understands the theory [my emphasis] of debit and credit, . . . [then] he makes his journal entries without any necessity of help from his teacher, he knows what must be done in order to get at his result, and he perfectly understands how each step bears upon it.” Likewise, James Bennett in his American System of Practical Bookkeeping wrote that “in order to make a correct Journal entry, it is first necessary perfectly to comprehend the business transaction on which it is founded.” And so, Samuel Crittenden’s Elementary Treatise on Bookkeeping promoted the day-book, which contained the initial record of each transaction, to the center of its course of study, challenging the student to then “depend upon his own mental resources” in deciding whether to list the transaction in the cash book, the bill book, the journal, the invoice book, the sales book, the accounts current, the book of commissions, the expense book, copy book, letter book, ships’ accounts, receipt book, bank book, check book, or memoranda book.

The aim was for “the learner [to] exercise his judgment” and so become “a responsible and free agent.” Such responsible use of freedom was not just a desideratum of business, of course, but an essential trait of political life in the republic, which turned bookkeeping into something of a civics lesson. Further, with principles as demonstrable and universal “as those of Euclid,” the bookkeeper became part of an accounting profession with a standard skills set bound to no particular industry or individual. C. C. Marsh explained, “A person may keep correctly the accounts of the house in which he was brought up, but as the business may be quite different in any other house, change his situation, and he who was capable will be incapable . . . Not so with the individual who is master of the science, he is at home in the accounts of any business.” And so, for instance, graduates of Comer’s Commercial Academy in Boston were qualified for any employment “from Maine to California.” Like all important industrial technologies, bookkeeping knowledge became interchangeable, which meant that a fluid labor market in bookkeepers could develop, essential for an economy undergoing revolutionary growth that now required legions of clerks to administer all the new exchanges.

In the double-entry system of accounts that everyone was learning, each transaction is recorded twice in the books—each transaction, that is, actually consists of two exchanges. If something is debited, something else needs to be credited. If I sell J. J. Astor ten thousand pipe cleaners for one hundred dollars, then I record a credit in my books for the outgoing cleaners and a debit for the incoming cash. This symmetry is what promised an “equilibrium of results” and is what made the books a neutral ground, always balancing a record of what goes out with one of what comes in. If we were, theoretically, to line up all the accounts being kept by double entry, we would have a complete picture of the economy—of the great chain of exchange—since someone’s debits would always appear as someone else’s credits, and vice versa. In fact, if the market—which no longer manifested itself in any specific time or place—had a tangible existence in industrial society, it was here in the bookkeeper’s ledger. This was where all parties met. And this was where flesh and blood commodities became abstract equivalents, making the movement of capital synonymous with the economy (while disqualifying other activities as no longer economic at all, such as the efforts of the village cobbler who “doesn’t even keep accounts”).

Thomas Jones, whose system for teaching double entry had recently garnered the endorsement of New York’s American Institute, explained in an early number of Hunt’s Merchant’s Magazine that bookkeeping is a “problem of arrangement.” In other words, comprehension of the business transaction that was now required of everyone was a taxonomic exercise of knowing where to list each transaction within the matrix of accounts. “Each class of items has therefore its proper place assigned, and to know these places, and the object of each collection, is to know the plan.”

How, exactly, were these “proper places” assigned? And how was the “plan” itself created? An instructive example is to be found in a controversy that erupted in the merchant banking firm of Brown Brothers in the 1850s. The controversy concerned the proper manner for recording bad debts in the company’s books. Debts had been listed as a company asset because they were money owed to the firm. As such, they had benefited the senior partners, whose income was derived from those assets. But because some debts were bad debts and thus would probably never actually be collected, the partners were effectively receiving payments “which [have] not been fully earned.” This meant that they were pocketing money that would never exist, a practice that discriminated against those not included in the firm’s profit sharing and that injured the firm’s solvency in general.

The practice provoked protest within Brown Brothers, which led to the creation of a “suspense account” for listing such questionable debts. The suspense account was to be written off against the senior partners’ personal capital accounts, thus reducing their income in accordance with the amount of bad debt. However, the amount written off was less than the entire sum of bad debt. Part of the debt was left on the books as a full asset, thus showing up in the firm’s balance sheet as profit and consequently lining the partners’ pockets.

This compromise between rival personal interests at Brown Brothers became the company’s effective financial reality. Of course, it had nothing to do with “material reality,” neither with the legal status of the debt as outstanding nor with the practical recognition of the debt as worthless. But “material reality” was a non sequitur anyway since no firm could sell all its paper, debts, and assets on a given date each year in order to determine their true market value. What, then, constituted true value? On what did the balancing act between creditors, debtors, goods, receipts, and cash rest? Actually, it rested on none other than the firm’s own definition of balance. For regardless of how interested or even arbitrary these specific categories may be, they satisfied scientific accounting criteria as long as they strictly and systematically adhered to internal laws and logic. The invention of a new entity called a “suspense account” for certain debts thus proved to be a most practical solution even though it exposed the “science of accounts” as an entirely artificial phenomenon. Of course, there was no actual contradiction here since such artificialities were highly suited to an increasingly plastic, fungible world. The solution was practical, furthermore, because the categories that effectively guided the business’s activities were invented by the business in the first place. Brown Brothers functioned on the basis of its balance sheet, which rested on categories the firm had made up. These, in turn, gave it considerable power to act in the economy. Such tautologies, it turned out, were double-entry bookkeeping’s strength—proof that accounting’s perfect Euclidian logic required no referent outside of itself to be true.

The accounting paradigm thus proved to be not only descriptive but prescriptive. That is, the “proper place” for recording transactions was not just that which best reflected market activity but that which best managed market activity and, in managing it, largely created and even defined it. Bookkeeping showed that that system was stronger than reality, or that that system—in this case, a system translating qualitative differences into common financial values—was reality. Accounting not only revealed how the essence of goods lay in their exchangeability but demonstrated just how naturally commodifiable everything was.

Anthropologists and sociologists have correctly argued that this view of value as a single, impersonal, rational instrument of civilization is a naked ideologization, if not a fetish, and that money actually assumes a great variety of forms and uses, even in capitalist societies. But the more important historical task is to understand how money did, after all, become colorless (in Simmel’s famous aphorism) and acquire a universal status—how it came to function as an absolute standard, applicable to all equivalences, and, as such, was seemingly free of any political commitments. This contributed to the creation of an environment of calculative norms by which an economic science was detached from the caprice of avarice and seemingly grounded in objective material logic itself. It naturally followed that capitalists would claim common sense as their own.

And so, ideology might be too modest a description for the political work carried out by accounting. Epistemology might be more to the point. Businesses might fail, resulting in bankruptcies that traumatize personal lives and disorder society, but at the level of paradigm, double entry can explain them—and often predict them—making such apparent failings of the market an entirely normal economic event. (Indeed, bankruptcies were presented as the result of a failure to maintain proper accounts.)

Bookkeeping thus proved capable of naturalizing and then taming the market, an essential contribution to the rise of industrial capitalism. What’s more, by organizing the mass of individual acquisitions (and personal acquisitiveness) into a single matrix encompassing all of the economy’s agents, by turning the short-term, self-interested activities of our atomized lives into the stuff of a broad, secular social and scientific order, bookkeeping helped to synthesize the potentially destabilizing dualities at the heart of the liberal paradigm: freedom and order, fluidity and stasis, individuality and universality. It is little wonder, then, that of all the competing forms of knowledge jockeying for position in an age yet to be crowned the age of capital, bookkeeping proved to be one of the most powerful of all.

Further Reading:

There is a vast critical literature on accounting with a strong base in post-structuralism, the sociology of knowledge, and business history. Unfortunately, this scholarship has made little impression on social, labor, and cultural histories of industrial revolution in the United States, no doubt because of the general tendency to downplay capitalism’s domination of American life in the nineteenth century. For those otherwise inclined, the best place to start is in the tables of contents of the following journals: Critical Perspectives on Accounting; Accounting, Organizations, and Society; Accounting, Business & Financial History; The Accountant; Accounting Review; and Abacus.

This article originally appeared in issue 6.3 (April, 2006).

Michael Zakim is the author of Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic, 1760-1860 (Chicago, 2003). The present essay takes up where Ready-Made Democracy left off in exploring the cultural and political meanings of capitalist revolution in America. Zakim teaches history at Tel Aviv University.

At a moment when Americans are deeply divided about the role of care, and the obligations we owe to those who need it, Common-place brings together a group of scholars whose work asks us to think about how age and illness have shaped the possibilities for individual and communal identity. These essays include explorations of how dependence evokes state interference ranging from a penal institution to an old age home, and questions about how illness and youth, and the vulnerabilities that accompany them, can shift or reinforce prejudices.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.2 (Winter, 2017).

Anna Mae Duane (Associate Professor of English and American Studies, University of Connecticut) and Walter Woodward (Associate Professor of History, University of Connecticut) are co-editors of Common-place.