The salmon fisheries of Celilo Falls

The area surrounding Celilo (pronounced “sea-lie-low”) Falls on the Columbia River is arguably the longest continually occupied place in North America. This is owing to one simple fact: Celilo Falls was once the greatest fishing site on planet Earth. The annual fish runs of the Columbia River, estimated at fifteen to twenty million salmon, had supported an essential human industry long pre-dating the arrival of Columbus in the Western Hemisphere.

All of this is now gone. One Sunday afternoon in March 1957 Celilo Falls and the ancient traditions of its fishing culture were drowned—smothered under the backwaters of The Dalles Dam.

Celilo Falls, its destruction, and the aftermath are among the most important and under-appreciated subtexts of Ken Kesey’s classic 1962 novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Kesey was a native Oregonian. He planned and wrote the novel that defined the ’60s as this historic drama at Celilo Falls played out.

The narrator of Kesey’s novel is Chief Bromden. The mute giant, “Chief Broom” as he’s sometimes called, serves as a haunting embodiment of the shell-shocked Native peoples of the Columbia Plateau who had just lost the center of their ancient salmon-based culture. Celilo Falls had just been ripped from their heart; they were somewhat like Catholics who had just seen the Vatican bulldozed off the face of the earth. This important theme is completely missing in the film version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, starring Jack Nicholson. That is perhaps why so few Americans appreciate the historical significance of Chief Bromden.

I first got interested in this lost world of Celilo Falls in 1976 when my wife and I bought a cattle ranch on the breaks of the Klickitat River, in south-central Washington State. Our ranch sits where the timber meets the desert in the Pacific Northwest, a peninsula of land surrounded on three sides by one-thousand-foot-deep canyons, sixteen miles upstream from the Columbia River.

On my first trip to the Klickitat County Courthouse, I was waiting to purchase license tabs for my pickup truck when I noticed a huge black-and-white framed photo of Indians standing before a huge waterfall pulling mounds of salmon from the frothing river. They used large hoop nets mounted on handles fifteen to twenty feet long. “Where’s that?” I asked, pointing to the picture. “That was Celilo Falls…” the lady behind the counter answered in a voice of infinite sadness. This was for me the beginning of a thirty-year fascination with an enigma, Celilo Falls.

Celilo Falls was the economic and spiritual center of the Indian world in the Pacific Northwest. At Celilo, the churning waters of the Columbia slowed, confused, and blinded the migrating salmon so that the River People might easily catch them. The hot, parching summer winds at Celilo were perfect for drying and preserving a portion of the river’s bounty for the coming winter. This dried salmon, known as ch-lai, was pounded into a fine powder and tightly packed into baskets. It served as a kind of currency in a vast region of the West, stretching from Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming to northern California and Vancouver Island. In its final years, after many decades of declining fish runs, Celilo still produced two and a half million pounds of salmon annually. The salmon runs drew Native Americans from all across the West to help with the fishing at the falls.

Before it was eclipsed by the Hudson Bay Company’s Fort Vancouver in 1824, Celilo Falls was the hub of trade for the entire Pacific Northwest region. Natives came there to trade for many things other than salmon, including seashells, buffalo robes, obsidian, and slaves. They also gambled incessantly there, throwing the bones in the wildly popular “stick game” that had been played at the falls for thousands of years.

The Columbia carries more water to the Pacific than all the other rivers in Washington, Oregon, and California combined. Its maximum recorded flow was 1.25 million cubic feet per second. This occurred during the devastating flood of 1894. But that was a mere trickle compared to any of the Ice Age Bretz Floods that came roaring down the Columbia Gorge at ninety miles per hour and were over one thousand feet deep. Fifteen to twenty-five thousand years ago, a series of massive ice dams impounded much of the river’s enormous run-off east of the Rocky Mountains, turning most of eastern Montana into a lake. The geologic evidence shows that those ice dams broke repeatedly, releasing vast walls of water into the open flatlands of eastern Washington. From the saturated plains, the floodwaters traveled down to the Columbia Gorge, which they filled with a vast west-rushing torrent. From the Columbia’s headwaters to the Pacific, the floods erased all living things in their path. The archeological evidence found in the vicinity of Celilo during the “hurry-up” excavation that preceded the damming of the river, showed that human occupation at Celilo Falls went back in an unbroken string to that very last Ice Age flood, nearly eleven thousand years ago.

Economics were the central reason for those ten-thousand-plus years of occupation. The falls was one of the most productive food-gathering sites on the planet. Every year, as many as twenty million salmon (some researchers say even more) were drawn inexorably up the Columbia River to spawn and die in the gravel bars of their birth. On October 17, 1805, Meriwether Lewis’s co-commander William Clark observed that “the number of dead Salmon on the Shores & floating in the river is incrediable to Say…The Waters of this river is Clear, and a Salmon may be Seen at the deabth of 15 or 20 feet.”

The peoples of the Columbia steadfastly believed that these returning fish were gifts from the Creator, gifts of the earth, gifts that should be treated with both reverence and respect. For, in coming back to spawn, those fish had also come home to feed the River People; the salmon returned each year to Chi wana (the big river) so that the People might live.

The biggest of the Columbia River salmon, the “June hog”, weighed in at over fifty pounds. It had evolved to make a nearly one-thousand-mile, upriver journey from the ocean to the mountain streams of the Canadian Rockies. The June hogs disappeared from the face of the earth after the Grand Coulee Dam was constructed in the late 1930s. The dam lacked a fish ladder that would have allowed them to continue their millennia-old migration upriver. Today, along with the fourteen large hydroelectric dams on the main stem of the Columbia, there are 250 other dams at various sites throughout the drainage system. Half of the salmon’s historic range has been permanently blocked by dams.

The drowning of Celilo Falls in 1957 was simply the most recent and decisive conflict the Columbia River Indians have had with the whites. Their contact with European-based societies began about fifteen years prior to Captain Robert Gray’s 1792 discovery of the Columbia. Around 1775, smallpox from Russian sealers and fur traders had worked its way from Vancouver Island down the Pacific coast—long before the first physical contact—decimating native populations on the coast and up the river. This Old World plague came a full thirty years before the appearance of Lewis and Clark, whose arrival the River People had long prophesied.

In late October of 1805, when Lewis and Clark stopped to portage around Celilo Falls to the Long Narrows just below them, they found the salmon fishery recently finished for the year and emptied of most of its native residents. Left behind were countless vermin, living in the waste left from the manufacture of pounded dried salmon. According to Captain William Clark, by the time the Corps of Discovery landed below the falls, the party was “covered with flees which were So thick amoungst the Straw and fish Skins at the upper part of the portage at which place the natives had Camped not long Since; that every man of the party was obliged to Strip naked dureing the time of takeing over the canoes, that they might have the opportunity of brushing the flees of their legs and bodies.” In just one stack, Lewis and Clark counted 107 finely woven baskets containing thousands of pounds of dried, powdered fish. The cache had been left unattended while most of the people of the falls were off on their annual autumn trip to the huckleberry fields in the nearby mountains.

The journals of Lewis and Clark describe in close detail the Native fishing at Celilo Falls:

“Oct 22 1805…the waters [of the falls] is divided into several narrow chanels which pass through a hard black rock forming Islands of rocks at this Stage of the water, on those Islands of rocks as well as at and about their Lodges I observe great numbers of Stacks of pounded Salmon (butifully) neetly preserved in the following manner, ie after Suffiently Dried it is pounded between two Stones fine, and put into a speces of basket neatly made of grass and rushes of better than two feet long and one foot in Diamiter, which basket is lined with the Skins of Salmon Stretched and dried for this purpose, in this it is pressed down as hard as is possible, when full they Secure the open part with fish Skins across which they fasten tho’ the loops of the basket that part very Securely, and then on a Dry Situation they Set those baskets the Corded part up, their common Custom is to Set 7 as close as they can Stand and 5 on top of them, and secure them with mats which is raped around them and made fast with cords and Covered also with mats, those 12 baskets of from 90 to 100 w. each (basket) form a stack. thus preserved those fish may be kept Sound and Sweet Several years, as those people inform me, Great quantities as they inform us are Sold to the whites people who visit the mouth of this river as well as to the nativs below.”

The numerous baskets of ch-lai that Lewis and Clark saw represented only a portion of what was produced during the six-month fishing season, which began in April and ended in October. How many more tons of dried fish had already been traded away and carried into the hinterlands no one knows.

On their return journey the following spring, Lewis and Clark again passed by Celilo Falls. The fishing season had barely begun. Clark observed “all of those articles [the River People] precure from other nations who visit them for the purpose of exchanging those articles for their pounded fish of which they prepare great quantities. This is the Great Mart of all this Country.”

The modern Indian Nations on the Columbia Plateau—the Yakamas, the Warm Springs, the Nez Perce, and the Umatillas—are comprised of descendents of the far more numerous bands who once inhabited the Columbia Plateau. Epidemics, tens of thousands of settlers pouring over the Oregon Trail, and U.S. government policies did their best to shatter the Native peoples’ traditional ways of life. In the Treaty of 1854, signed at Port Elliot in Puget Sound, and then the Treaty of 1855, signed at Walla Walla, the Territorial governments set out to extinguish most Native land claims west of the Cascades and to cede to the Indians large reservations in the dry and almost worthless interior.

Many of the River Indians refused to leave for the reservations. The WyAm people of Celilo Falls were among the most steadfast of them. Chief Tommy Thompson, the last salmon chief at Celilo Village, always kept with him in a beaded deerskin pouch the treaty, which had been signed by his uncle Stocketly, granting the WyAms uncontested rights to fish at Celilo. Even though their treaty created a large new reservation, Warm Springs in central Oregon, the WyAms stayed on the river and continued to fish in the old way, even as the Army Corps of Engineers built The Dalles Dam.

In Ken Kesey’s version of the loss of Celilo Falls, Chief Bromden is the son of the chief who sold out the falls, a man who—in Kesey’s fictional rendering—becomes smaller and smaller as his white wife grows bigger and bigger.

About two-thirds of the way into the novel, Bromden’s friend, the defiant Randal McMurphy, asks Chief Bromden about his father and about the monumental forces working to make him little:

“…they beat him up in the alleys, and I told him that they wanted to make him see what he had in store for him only worse if he didn’t sign the papers giving everything to the government.”
“What did they want him to give to the government?”
“Everything. The tribe, the village, the falls…”
“Now I remember; you’re talking about the falls where the Indians used to spear salmon—long time ago. Yeah. But the way I remember it the tribe got paid some huge amount.”
“That’s what I said to him. He said, What can you pay for the way a man lives? He said, What can you pay for what a man is? They didn’t understand. Not even the tribe. They stood out in front of our door all holding those checks and they wanted him to tell them what to do now. They kept asking him to invest for them, or tell them where to go, or to buy a farm. But he was too little anymore. And he was too drunk, too. The Combine had whipped him. It beats everybody. It’ll beat you, too.”

Ken Kesey got many, many things right in this defining novel of the ’60s, but the Chief of the Falls selling out to the government definitely was not one of them. Yes, the government paid twenty-six million dollars for Celilo Falls. This was the amount its actuarial accountants calculated the fishing resources’ amortized value to be, figuring salmon at five cents per pound. And it was a huge fortune at the time. But the money did not go to Chief Tommy Thompson of the WyAm people, the keeper of Celilo Falls. It went instead to the reservation tribes who still came annually to the falls for the fishing but had left the life on the river years earlier.

Chief Thompson had refused to sell. For years before the dam was built, the Army Corps of Engineers would approach him, and every year he refused to take their money. He said, time and again, further negotiations were useless. But in the end, the government went around him. They used the power of eminent domain, condemning the falls in the courts. The government went ahead and built its dam anyway.

Even after The Dalles Dam was built, Chief Thompson still refused to take any money for Celilo. In addition, unlike the fictional character, Chief Tommy was not married to a white woman, and he didn’t drink himself into oblivion, either. The real Chief Tommy Thompson was a most exceptional human being, a cross between Jim Thorpe and the Pope. Tall, handsome, and athletic, a famed swimmer and boatman in his youth, he was married to as many as seven women at one time but never to a white woman; it would have been unthinkable. Chief Tommy Thompson was a holy man. His ancient religion was that of the Waashat, the drums.

Chief Tommy was 102 years old when the falls were drowned. He had begun serving as salmon chief at Celilo Village in 1875, when he was but twenty, after the death of the previous chief, his uncle Stocketly, who had been killed by friendly fire while serving as a scout for the U.S. Army. Tommy was salmon chief of Celilo Falls for the next eighty-five years, making him, without much question, the longest-serving public official in American history. Chief Tommy Thompson was also the most revered man on the river, the last true chief.

The death of Celilo Falls in 1957 foreshadowed the death of Chief Thompson two years later, at age 104. The River People believe he died of a broken heart.

Slipping now from memory, as the people who fished at Celilo Falls pass from this life, the history of the falls is in danger of disappearing. Celilo Falls and the deep well of culture there is so far below the radar screen of the dominant white society that a search of two popular encyclopedias—The On-line Columbia Encyclopedia and the last print edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica—reveals no entry under the heading of “Celilo Falls”. A trip to Google, thankfully, is far more productive.

With our modern engineering skills in the 1950s, we certainly could have done something very different. We could have improved the ship canal that had been built around the falls in the early 1900s, and we could have saved Celilo Falls and the rich life that went with it. If only we had put our minds to it.

This article originally appeared in issue 6.2 (January, 2006).

George Rohrbacher is a cattle rancher and an amateur historian. He lives near Centerville, Washington, three miles from his next-door neighbor. George is the inventor of The Farming Game, an award-winning educational board game, and is author of the memoir/love story, Zen Ranching. A former commissioner of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, he also served in the Washington State Senate. This article is adapted from George’s first novel, Celilo Falls … the story of a murder, which will be published in late spring 2006.

The planet is in the spotlight somewhat literally these days. Arguably interchangeable locutions of global warming, climate change, or “solar variations” have made headlines in the past decades—yes, those same decades that brought us An Inconvenient Truth and extreme storms. The underlying science has effectively bisected Washington, with the left and right offering partisan legislation aimed at the decidedly nonpartisan climate. Yet despite circular debates on Capitol Hill, options are being proffered to Americans for their fight to protect the global environment.

Efforts from Capitol Hill, you say? Given American’s conflicted relationship with the regulatory powers of Washington, this fight is unsurprisingly politicized. Where the battlegrounds lie, however, is at once surprising and historically awkward.

Recently, media channels have brought to our attention the efforts underway to provide Americans with alternatives—federally mandated alternatives, no less—to the good ol’ familiar light bulb. Scientists and engineers, tasked with developing eco-friendly light sources that mimic Thomas A. Edison’s (1847-1931) incandescent bulb aesthetically while improving on it technologically have unveiled an LED version of the original with all the federal subsidies and fanfare that Washington can offer. This past summer, Philips, the Netherlands-based producer of consumer electronics, collected $10 million in prize money for developing a highly efficient alternative to the standard sixty-watt incandescent. The award, familiarly known as the L Prize, was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy in the wake of George W. Bush-era legislation that requires light bulb makers to improve efficiency of bulbs by twenty-five percent. The L Prize, then, was instituted as a government-sponsored nudge to spur lighting manufacturers to develop higher efficiency alternatives to Edison-era products disparaged as “dated” on the prize website. And in a dangerous flirtation with the “nanny state,” the Website promises the prize will drive market adoption.

Apparently, however, Edison’s familiar glass-bulb-meets-metal-filament is near and dear to many American hearts. Despite those years of thoughtlessly tossing cardboard boxes of replacements into our shopping carts, we’ve become inextricably connected to these devices. Edison, we shout, championing for our American-scientist-hero who bore innovation. We are sure that there is some mistake, that Edison could not have led us astray; his light bulb seems irreplaceable and must be compatible with modern-day America.

Of course, the issue isn’t really the light bulb. At best it’s an issue of constitutionality—specifically the question of whether such federal intervention in consumer choice satisfies the framework laid out by the Founding Fathers: are individual liberties protected? And furthermore, is it the job of the federal government to protect them in this instance? At worst, the issue evokes shades of impassioned debates on the right to choose. When it comes down to it, the issue is an oft-revisited one—indeed, since the time of the drafting of the nation’s Constitution—and one that generally straddles party lines: the continual struggle between public and private, federal and local, the individual and the collective. It is an issue of authority; namely, who has enough of it to be qualified to decide what’s best for the global environment. It’s a question of appropriating federal dollars. It’s a question of equal access. It’s a question of American-brand free-market capitalism, which argues that surely many light bulb manufacturers should share the shelves without intrusion from Washington. These are some of the same questions that the founders struggled with in drafting the Constitution, and they are the same questions that crop up time and time again as Americans attempt to define the role of governance.

The case of the light bulb offers a unique entryway to considering these fundamental issues. To start, we should revisit Edison’s own efforts to popularize his invention, examining the factors that motivated our American hero in developing his ubiquitous light bulb. As it happens, Edison’s narrative offers us some hints as to how to navigate the waters of technological change and social necessity.

Edison’s story is not much different from that of the little yellow LED lamp. Edison, too, struggled to enter into a market dominated by the good ol’ familiar gaslight industry. In 1878, armed with a prototype of a working incandescent bulb (well, the idea of one, but in typical Edison fashion he saw no need to bother media outlets with that detail), Edison fervently began studying the gas lighting industry in the spirit of knowing thine enemy. He read. He walked the streets, meticulously noting details—hundreds upon hundreds of notebook pages—of consumer usage and metering technology. He compiled tables of economic comparisons that incontrovertibly presented electric light as superior to the gaslight in use at the time; this data was later used as “judicious advertising” in company bulletins. He collected data on injuries and fatalities resulting from gas leaks that were eventually published as a near-endless string of disturbing vignettes explaining the cause of death of hapless hotel-goers. Lest the reader assume that the sixty-five listed vignettes constituted the full extent of the dangers lurking around every hotel corner, the reader was reminded that “The full statistics have never been written on this subject, but almost every hotel proprietor has had his own experience.” Similar anecdotes about restaurant fires and leaks followed, carrying with them the implied safety of the new electric lights. He examined existing central distribution systems and considered their potential modifications for dispensation of electric light. And then he sought to improve on them, embarking on a mission not unlike those aiming for the L Prize: to develop “high quality, high-efficiency solid state lighting products to replace the common [gaslamp] bulb.”

Edison, as is well known, was not the only innovator working to perfect the incandescent bulb in the 1870s. Some argue that he wasn’t even the first to produce a working model. (The satirical newspaper The Onion ran an article titled “Thomas Edison Invents Marketing Other People’s Ideas,” which indicates the widespread perception of the tenuous nature of Edison’s claim to innovation.) These initial years of invention and trial, of late nights in Menlo Park, are not the crux of Edison’s biography, however, and can be effectively dismissed with a recall of Edison’s own words in recounting his biography—”the remainder of the story belongs to the annals of commerce.” The invention, then, is not the story; the story is in the practical implementation and widespread distribution of the invention. Edison and his bulb cannot be extricated from the market, nor from the civic structure that houses it.

To Edison, the light bulb was “only the opening number” of his program, and with its invention he had “merely stepped over the threshold of a complete system.” The system, indeed, was always the carrot for Edison; from his undoubtedly premature, arguably deceptive, and patently competitive announcement of his invention of the incandescent bulb—not to mention his plans for lighting the entire lower part of New York—to the New York Sunin late 1878, Edison was focused on the economy and practicability of a lighting empire.

One thing Edison needed was money. Though financing initial research was relatively easy—Edison was well connected and professionally respected—his investors balked at the sums required for, oh, replacing the existing structural system of gaslights (that worked well enough, thankyouverymuch) for an elaborate installation of a system that many felt had yet to be properly tested. A lighting system that stretched wires “up town as far as the Cooper Institute, down to the Battery, and across to both rivers”—Edison’s boastful claim—seemed awfully ambitious for a system never before used on such a scale. His Wall Street cronies politely made their apologies (though Edison quipped that he thought they were only “Wall Street sorry”) so Edison turned to the government.

It is important to remember, however, that Edison had a much different government to turn to than the one we are familiar with today. In his attempts to raise funds and obtain civic support, Edison looked not toward Washington, but instead to local government. Well, at first he did. In the late nineteenth century, federal government was nearly non-existent in the private sector, with the possible exception of transportation. In the laissez-faire climate of the 1870s, Edison pursued a local strategy, looking first to New York City’s business community for allies who could help woo the city’s government. Politics change, however, and as the reigning laissez-fair ideology was gradually replaced by Progressivism, federal regulation of economic matters began to be seen as a necessary protection to ensure competition and free enterprise. Alongside changing political fashions, Edison’s strategy also evolved as he pursued his dream of an electrified city.

Edison was aided in his initial endeavors by his friend and business advisor, Grosvenor Lowrey. With law offices in the same building as financier J. P. Morgan’s investment firm, Lowrey was well connected financially and savvy politically. Edison gave his friend free rein to obtain both funding and the necessary agreements from City Hall, promising to “agree to nothing, promise nothing and say nothing to any person leaving the whole matter to you. All I want at present is to be provided with funds to push the light rapidly.” In October of 1878, Lowrey formally established the Edison Electric Light Company, creating shares for potential financiers to invest in. Now able to capitalize on his financial connections, Lowrey could demonstrate his acumen for politics by organizing a lobbying extravaganza for the inventor.

Lowrey and Edison knew they needed to tread carefully in wooing city officials. At the time, local politics were effectively run by Tammany Hall, a New York political organization known for its corruption. Gas lighting held great sway within New York politics—the industry was deeply embedded in a web of monopolistic suppliers, eager consumers, and established regulatory agencies. Area gas companies diverted profits to line the pockets of politicians in the Tammany political machine. Upon first applying for an operating license, Edison was turned down by the mayor, with gas industry and lamplighter interests often cited as reasons for maintaining the status quo. Lowrey was well aware that a successful dissemination of Edison’s electric light rested entirely on his ability to convince government officials to switch allegiances. Though a difficult charge, Lowrey was up to the challenge.

In December of 1879, Lowrey invited the mayor and aldermen—as well as a handful of potential investors—to visit the Menlo Park laboratory in the hopes of securing a franchise that would allow the Edison Illuminating Company to lay the underground distribution system for a commercial lighting system (Edison had formed a second company to distribute his system of illumination). A special train carried the officials into New Jersey, where guests could see an exhibition of lights. First, individual groupings of lights were illuminated along the snowy streets. Then Edison promptly shut them off in unison with the turn of a handle, only to bring them back ablaze with another touch to the handle. Nothing like this had ever before been seen, and no doubt the demonstration left many considering the practical, commercial, and promotional value of introducing such technology citywide. Indeed, this demonstration netted the Edison Electric Light Company $57,568 in new investments, with which the young entrepreneur could help underwrite the next phase of his commercialization process.

Edison followed this pageant with a somewhat numbing presentation of his abundance of other accomplishments, parading new inventions and touting their uses. With a pre-arranged mention of thirst from one of Edison’s own, the entire group was led to the laboratory floor—likely to the chagrin of the Edison-weary listeners. In the lab, however, was a spread fit for a king—or at least fit for the men who, it was hoped, would support Edison’s ambitious plans. Lowrey had spared no expense, filling tables with a lavish spread of turkey, duck, chicken salad, and ham from the famous Delmonico’s. Fine wines and champagnes, too, flowed freely, which no doubt helped lubricate the political transaction. By the end of the evening, Edison had his contract.

Even with contract in hand, Edison didn’t consider his empire to be adequately secure. Beginning immediately, he filed about seventy applications for patents in 1880 alone; many of these patents eventually played a central role in Edison’s subsequent string of patent suits against rival electric companies. Along with arguing the merits of electric lighting versus gas, Edison also found it necessary to defend his system of direct current versus his main rival, George Westinghouse, who was a proponent of alternating current. Edison’s vehement support for direct current was threefold: first, he remained protective of his patent royalties; second, DC was practicable in the early years of electrifying America, and Edison thereby built his model of electrification around its use; and finally, for all his merits, Edison was not a mathematician—and AC required a mathematical savvy with which Edison was not equipped. Crucially, Edison’s decision to rely on DC (which, it should be noted, was a decision he later rued) required a prodigious infrastructure to be effected—namely, the limitations of distribution of DC necessitated the construction of generating plants at close intervals throughout the city. Though AC would ultimately prove victorious in the pursuit of economic advantage, Edison led the path to illuminating America with his DC in the early 1890s. The manner in which he ultimately succeeded is yet another example of how Edison cooperated with government—this time the state government—for his own commercial gain.

As the “battle of the currents” unfolded, it became increasingly clear that alternating current remained economically superior because of its physical properties. Supporters of direct current vociferously argued the inherent risk attributed to the higher voltage alternating current, citing examples of accidental death that did occur on occasion. Advocates of alternating current continued to support their product of choice as overwhelmingly safe, despite a few examples of misfortune. In 1886, however, this seemingly dead-end argument branched off, allowing Edison an opportunity to attack his competitors from a different angle.

At this time, the State of New York formed a commission to investigate and report on more humane methods of carrying out the death sentence at the state prison. The commission suggested electricity as a possible alternative, thus motivating Edison to become personally involved. Though promising to publicly oppose capital punishment, Edison, an opportunistic businessman extraordinaire, suggested alternating current as the ideal form of electricity to be used in electrocutions. The chairman of the committee was greatly influenced by the acclaimed Edison’s endorsement, and the commission ultimately recommended an alternating current machine to replace the existing method of execution: hanging. The ensuing legislative act did not specify the type of current desired. Responsibility for determining the technical details of the law fell to the Medico-Legal Society of New York; many of the experimental procedures carried out through this charge were undertaken at Edison’s own laboratory, a fact not ignored by Westinghouse in his later rebuttals. Following these experiments, the New York Times reported “alternating current to be the most deadly force known to science.”

Ultimately, the State of New York commissioned three generators to be installed and put in operation in the state prison in January 1889. At the instigation of the Edison Electric Light Company, considerable financial assistance for the purchase of three Westinghouse generators came from the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, a competitor of Westinghouse. With the delivery and installation of the first generator, the State of New York ordered a prisoner to be executed. Before electrocution could commence, the state had to defend death by electricity, as the prisoner’s attorneys argued that electrocution was unconstitutional as a cruel and unusual punishment. One of the people who appeared to give testimony on behalf of the state was Thomas Edison. If he could not provide empirical evidence that alternating current would be certain to bring instantaneous and painless death, he opined forcefully that one thousand volts of alternating current would provide the desired result. Although agreement on the predicted efficacy of electrocution was not unanimous, in August of 1890, the prisoner was killed. His death was widely reported to be sudden and painless. Though some complications were ultimately brought to bear on the efficacy and suitability of DC, Edison maintained his opinion—thus publicly supporting the state—that alternating current was ideal for quick and painless execution.

With the streets of New York lit, and the death machine humming within the walls of the penitentiary, Edison set his sets on yet bigger targets. In 1892, the Edison General Electric Company merged with another smaller rival electric company to form General Electric (GE). Comfortably established and well on its way to a flirtation with monopoly, GE quickly adapted to thrive within a new, dynamically changing governmental structure. The fledgling corporation began looking toward the federal government as it inched into the realm of the regulation of commerce in the wake of the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act and the subsequent emergence of federal government intervention in the private sector. It would be Washington, it seemed, that could make or break Edison’s empire of light.

The electrical industry of the late nineteenth century was not tranquil; like most industries of the time, it was involved in buy-outs, mergers, patent suits, price rigging, and corruption in the attempt to eliminate the competition. GE was no exception—soon after its establishment the company became known as the “Electric Trust,” a moniker derived from the anticompetitive activities of the young company. Still, though, the specter of the Sherman Antitrust Act loomed large, even if not yet actively enforced. Leaders at GE recognized that ultimate success rested on the company’s ability to prosper between the lines of new federal regulatory powers.

This was achieved through some political savvy on the part of GE management. Though between 1901 and 1906 GE bought out most of the independent electrical manufacturers, very few were privy to the man-behind-the-curtain; these smaller competitors continued operations under their own names and thus presented the image of free-market competition to the public. Most employees of GE and the newly established National Electric Lamp Company—the group that oversaw the subsidiary acquisitions—were similarly in the dark (figuratively, of course), despite the whopping near-seventy-percent national industry share enjoyed by the monopoly. GE made certain to engage in anticompetitive action only when conducted without fear of federal regulatory reprimand.

With the overwhelming market share, GE saw little need to tinker with a system that effectively balanced their books. In particular, the incandescent light bulb—so inextricably linked to a growing network of consumers and generating stations and firmly established as the status quo—was not a high-priority candidate for modification. According to most Americans, Edison’s light bulb was here to stay (or so it seemed, a century and a score ago) in a world that had been forever changed by a thin filament of carbon.

Or had it?

Certainly, Edison and his inventions have affected American life in innumerable ways. Our national hero’s innovation, vigorous work ethic, and masterful marketing skills can—and should—certainly be celebrated. But as we revisit Edison’s impact in the 9.7-watt light of modern replacements to the traditional bulb, it is important to remember the market in which Edison sought to introduce his new-and-improved, higher-efficiency, lower-cost product. Edison was trying to update an existing system, to work within the normative structure of his time, not to invent a new wheel. “The light,” he argued, “is designed to serve precisely the same purposes in domestic use as gaslights;” Edison assured the consumer that the new bulbs would be comparable practically, though “it may be safely affirmed that the limit of economy, simplicity, and practicability has been reached.” Funny, it can sometimes be hard to shake the eerie feeling that marketers for the new Philips bulb are conjuring up some of Edison’s own language.

Though the new bulb—squarish, weirdly yellow, and fully compatible with the existing lighting infrastructure—is taking the brunt of the hostility, the underlying target is the threat of government encroaching on those vaguely defined yet constitutionally protected civil liberties. Right-wing Republicans are making clear (most noticeably in the months leading up to the announcement of the 2012 Republican candidate) that having a government that tells its citizens what kind of light bulbs, of all things, to buy is wholly unacceptable. It’s a Big Brother intrusion, an example of the nanny state, an assault on personal freedom. Yet the central tenet of these claims is that the government is banning the beloved bulb that one Republican representative describes as having “been turning back the night ever since Thomas Edison ended the era of a world lit only by fire in 1879.” Another Tea Party activist considers the Great Light Bulb Ban to be “the world’s greatest marketing scheme: you get the government to ban the competition.”

The funny thing is, it’s not. The 2007 legislation only demands that products meet specifications intended to address environmental needs; starting in January 2012, 100-watt light bulbs are to be more than 25 percent efficient, and the traditional incandescent emits most of the energy it consumes as heat, not light. Edison might have turned back the night, but he didn’t do so with a finger on the pulse of melting ice caps. The incandescent bulb isn’t banned outright—this isn’t a demonstration of Big Government restocking shelves at Mom & Pop stores across the country—it’s just being held to standards set under normal regulatory operations of the modern federal government. Especially as these regulations were set under a recent Republican administration, the resulting vehemence of partisanship is perhaps misplaced.

Self-proclaimed mouthpiece of the Radical Right (as well as author of the Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act aimed at repealing the 2007 legislation), U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann extolled Edison’s heroism at a campaign stop in New Hampshire this past March: “I think Thomas Edison did a pretty patriotic thing for this country by inventing the light bulb. And I think darn well, you New Hampshirites, if you want to buy Thomas Edison’s wonderful invention, you should be able to!” Perhaps, but it is important to recognize how government intrusion in the nineteenth century helped march that wonderful invention onto New Hampshire’s shelves. Edison developed the light bulb with full and open recognition of the practical parameters imposed by American government, infrastructure, economics, and public opinion. He capitalized on the governmental institutions of his time, fostering relationships with New York City and state governments to make his product commercially viable, and ultimately leading his business successfully into the modern era of federal regulatory pressures. Edison sought a franchise deal that would allow the Edison Illuminating Company exclusive rights for citywide distribution. He came armed with careful arguments, including personally collected case study data on the feasibility of a potential lighting market in the Wall Street District and economic calculations of materials and operating costs. Without the cooperation of the city government (secured after heavy-handed lobbying, lavish displays of light, and decadent, catered meals presented to government officials), Edison could not have dreamed of introducing his product to the market. Without a partnership with the State of New York at the death penalty hearings, Edison might well have failed to vanquish his opponent in Westinghouse. And without navigating the terms of burgeoning federal involvement, GE would have failed to maintain a lighting empire within the American economy.

Yes, that’s right—Edison mobilized the government to put his product on the proverbial shelves in a manner that uncomfortably parallels today’s federally sponsored LED bulbs. Even after the crowded commercial blocks of lower Manhattan were illuminated by his light, Edison capitalized on public opinion and state and federal legislative powers to increase the power of his hold on the market. Edison was acutely aware of the social component to the success of his innovation, and it can be argued that honoring his legacy rightly includes a consideration of the needs and desires of the receiving culture and its domicile. Reconsidering the light bulb, then, is not rebuking a national hero, but rather embracing his tradition.

Further Reading:

Learn more about the U.S. Department of Energy’s L Prize at the award website. For Edison Lighting Company bulletins and assorted correspondence, explore the collections in the Thomas Edison Papers collection at Rutgers University. For a history of the development of electric light, see Jill Jonnes, Empires of Light: Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World (New York, 2003). For further information on Edison’s relationship with New York City government, see Thomas P. Hughes, “Edison and Electric Light,” in Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman (eds.), The Social Shaping of Technology (Buckingham, England, 1999). For discussion on the New York state controversy over execution by electricity, see Thomas P. Hughes, “Harold P. Brown and the Executioner’s Current: An Incident in the AC-DC Controversy,” Business History Review 32:2 (July 1958). For commentary on the recent partisan controversy over the purported light bulb ban, see Andrew Rice’s recent article in the New York Times Magazine.

This article originally appeared in issue 12.2 (January, 2012).

Did cattle cause King Philip’s War? Might swine give new meaning to the term Bacon’s Rebellion? Could dumb brutes exert agency in shaping human history? The answer to all three questions is “Yes—sort of.” And yes, there are many more, and probably better, questions to emerge from this smart and fascinating study of the role of farm animals in seventeenth-century American society. With a clear sense of where she’s going and how to get there, Virginia DeJohn Anderson skillfully shepherds us through a familiar time and territory that we thought had already been grazed over far too many times, leading us into greener intellectual pastures, which give us plenty of fresh ideas to chew on.

Anderson is by no means the first historian to focus on the importance of animals in early American history—works by Alfred Crosby, Calvin Martin, William Cronon, and Richard White come immediately to mind—but she does offer one of the most sustained studies of the ways Native Americans and English colonizers thought about animals and, by extension, about each other. With a nod to Crosby and Cronon, she notes that domesticated livestock had a profound effect on the environment of the eastern woodlands of North America: cows and pigs “not only infiltrated places where Indians lived but also changed them” (185) by grazing selectively on certain plants, tromping down the ground to compact the soil and cause erosion, and displacing other animals, like deer, that could not accommodate the intrusion of these seemingly greedy beasts. But Anderson maintains that her book “moves the story in a new direction” by arguing that “animals not only produced changes in the land but also in the hearts and minds and behavior of the peoples who dealt with them” (5). In that sense, domesticated animals emerge here not just as an environmental nuisance, but as a cultural nexus that helps explain the nature of both contact and conflict between the peoples of early America.

Indians and English people shared a measure of common ground in their understanding of animals. They hunted and ate them, of course, but they also endowed them with a spiritual significance that went far beyond merely feeding the body. Native peoples in what came to be called New England often ascribed manitou to the deer, bears, foxes, rabbits, and other game animals that were so important to their survival but also so elusive to their arrows. In both New England and the Chesapeake, native inhabitants sometimes described their deities as having the ability to take the form of animals. In turn, Indian people often adorned themselves with the symbolic images or body parts or even whole bodies of animals for the sake of ornamental display and power. Animals likewise figured prominently in the folklore and Christian cosmology of the English. The robin, with its red breast, could be a sign commemorating the blood of Christ’s crucifixion. Black cats and crows could be omens of bad luck, while owls, pigeons, and ravens could be even more disturbing portents of death. Cats, dogs, pigs, and swallows could predict changes in the weather, and so on. In discussing the various meanings that Indians and Europeans gave to animals, Anderson does not condescend to her subjects, nor does she conflate their beliefs into a common culture of pre-scientific superstition. Rather, she makes the sympathetic and very sensible point that “people who regularly encountered animals (not to mention the forces of nature) in their daily lives . . . took refuge in the search for correspondences between unusual behavior in animals and unexpected turns in human fortune” (48). In this sense she reminds those of us who live in the twenty-first century, perhaps keeping the occasional dog or cat or caged bird as a house pet, that people who lived in the seventeenth century had a much deeper and more immediate relationship with a much greater diversity of animals in their midst.

For seventeenth-century English settlers, of course, the animals most prominently in their midst were cattle and pigs, those four-footed imports that had long been so central to early modern English culture and economy. Anderson notes that seventeenth-century England, with a human population of just over five million, also contained an estimated four million cattle, twelve million sheep, and two million pigs. Indeed, she also cites a contemporary reckoning that “the ideal husbandman spent far more time each day with his livestock than with his wife and children—as much as 14 of 17 waking hours” (85). Such familiarity could breed something other than contempt, and some farmers “developed sentimental ties with their animals that seemed to match in emotional intensity their connections to relatives and friends” (91). This emotional intensity occasionally led to licentious excess, and bestiality became both a concern and a capital crime on both sides of the Atlantic, especially in Puritan New England, where four men suffered execution between 1640 and 1647. For the most part, though, English husbandmen in America considered their livestock to be a living form of private property, domesticated capital that could provide for subsistence and could produce—and reproduce—wealth. As such, farm animals had to be “managed in such a way as to maximize economic benefits and minimize costs” (88). But the management of these animal assets took different forms in different regions. In New England, where both the standards of community and the severity of the climate encouraged enclosure, townspeople attempted to govern their livestock in an orderly fashion, emphasizing common grazing, well-marked cattle, and well-fenced fields. Taken in the larger context of seventeenth-century society, the concern over undisciplined animals represented an extension of Puritans’ problems with undisciplined people; in both cases, Puritan practice never quite lived up to Puritan prescription. In the Chesapeake, by contrast, the control of animal movement came to seem as haphazard as the pattern of human settlement, with unpenned pigs and cattle roaming on their own to forage for food in the woods. This free-range approach to animal husbandry deviated considerably, of course, from the standards that pertained both in England and in New England, but that, writ large, seems to be the standard story of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake. “Had they been able to examine their own behavior objectively,” Anderson observes, “Chesapeake colonists would surely have been stunned to see how far they had drifted from English practices. For all their presumptions of civility, they acted more like native farmers than English husbandmen” (116).

The question of the English husbandmen’s relationship with those native farmers emerges as the main issue in the book. To be sure, Indians had their own domesticated animals, especially dogs and occasionally birds of prey (the latter kept near cornfields for the sake of crow control). But native peoples had never kept large domesticated animals like cows and pigs—at least not until the English settlers encouraged them to do so. From the English perspective, Indians who learned to live with livestock would also learn to live in a more generally “civilized” manner, accepting a settled form of habitation and adopting different gender roles in which men, not women, did most of the main farm labor. English cattle thus became a means of Anglicizing Indians, and “English people . . . never doubted that domestic animals would become their partners in colonization” (170). If Indians could not grasp the finer points of English law and religion, colonists hoped, they could at least cope with cattle.

Yet living with English livestock became the bane of Indians’ existence and eventually a critical point of contention. Even though native peoples did understand the possible benefits of acquiring English livestock—especially hogs, a more self-sufficient source of food than cattle—they never fully followed the English model, nor did they ever find a workable way to coexist with land-hungry colonists, not to mention their equally land-hungry cattle and swine. No matter how much English settlers tried to organize the landscape with the visible and invisible lines of fences and deeds, “colonists’ animals did not respect boundaries” (221). Allowed to forage for food, they ranged beyond the legal limits of English settlement and claimed land as their own. Thus they became, as Anderson explains, “agents of empire . . . forcing native peoples who stood in their way either to fend the animals off as best they could or else move on” (211). In turn, native people came to see these slow-moving shock troops of settlement as the essence of Englishness, and they therefore determined that one way to strike back at the colonists was to capture or kill their animals: “no form of property offered a more tempting or appropriate target than livestock” (226). This tension between trespass and retaliation came into especially sharp focus during the concurrent crises of 1675-76: King Philip’s (or Metacom’s) War in New England and Bacon’s Rebellion in the Chesapeake. “Livestock acted in several ways as necessary, if not wholly sufficient, causes for these tragic confrontations” (232), Anderson concludes, and by the time she says that, it actually makes sense.

Throughout the preceding pages, Anderson has made a clear, compelling, and sometimes surprising case that the barnyard can no longer be mere background in the study of early America, and her book challenges other scholars to roam even farther afield than the familiar limits of seventeenth-century New England and the Chesapeake. Do the docile-seeming animals in Edward Hicks’s painting of The Peaceable Kingdom, for instance, reflect the reality of early Pennsylvania, or would livestock turn out to be as big a blow to native inhabitants as the Walking Purchase? Do the cattle—and African cattle-drivers—of early South Carolina, which Peter Wood mentions in Black Majority, deserve a more detailed treatment? Anderson has shown us that people in the past lived closely with animals and knew them well, appreciating both their prosaic value and their symbolic meanings. To understand those people better, she tells us, we need to learn more about their animals as well.

This article originally appeared in issue 6.1 (October, 2005).

Gregory Nobles is professor of history at Georgia Tech, where he teaches early American history and environmental history. He is working on a book, Naturalist Nation: The Art and Science of Birds in Audubon’s America.

On May 23, 1811, James S. Ewing of Philadelphia wrote to lawyer and New Jersey official Jonathan Rhea of Trenton, asking the latter to sell his property there. The Philadelphian, a former medical student, druggist and grocer turned distiller, had defaulted on one of his debts and was bankrupt. He was nevertheless intent on repaying as much of his debt as he could. “I shall give up everything,” he explained despondently, “and am without any plan or means of subsisting my little family. I have rendered my misfortunes doubly distressing, by having brought very heavy losses on my friends, through too sanguine expectations of ability to repay, until I have no reasonable claim to anything further from them.” And while these same friends, which included his brother Samuel, had insisted that Ewing keep his furniture rather than release it to the creditors, he maintained that this “should in no way be an obstacle to the general arrangement, if any one objects on account of it.” He would willingly release his table, chairs, and beds, though of little value, if Rhea thought it was proper.

Bankruptcy was a common occurrence in 1811. Jefferson’s government could do little to protect U.S. trade from the effects of the clash between the two superpowers of the era, France and England. But Ewing’s letter reveals more than just a temporary economic downturn, showing that his actual problem stemmed from the fact that he could not make any more “claims” on his friends. A few months earlier, in December 1810, the prominent Boston trader Henry Lee had reported to a correspondent that “the greatest want of money prevails among those who are among our richest men, who have such good credit that they have calculated upon getting what money they wanted, as indeed they may in common times, but credit avails nothing now, nothing will produce money.” For both Ewing and Lee, then, access to money was a function of a larger set of mutual obligations, of “good credit” and “claims.” Hard times ensued when these sources dried up.

To understand why and how this happened, we need to explore the complex interplay between cash and credit common at the time, one that extended far beyond the calculation of balances in black or red ink. Dealings in both cash and credit entailed a whole set of social, cultural, and even political relationships, similar to the shifting interpersonal dynamics described by Marcel Mauss in his famous 1924 essay, “The Gift.” When managing the vacillating dynamics of business in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, traders—whatever their social status or gender (for there were numerous women in business as well, not all positioned at the bottom of the pecking order, either)—had to constantly take calculated risks for which account books offered very imperfect guidance, at best.

Both Ewing and Lee knew very well that credit was the highest priority, dwarfing cash in value and comprising numerous non-monetary assets that were central to all trading activities, including the constant need for quality control, access to markets, and accumulation of privileged information. An entire set of relationships was thus built up between traders in which cash transactions played a relatively marginal role. At the same time however, hard cash was essential to the workings of the system, and its shortage could send everything crashing down at a moment’s notice. No amount of foresight and precaution could ever insulate traders from such catastrophic failure, for it was built into the very heart of their trading operations. As such, credit in all its forms—personal as well as financial—was at once the main tool and the main threat in the cash-poor commercial life of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. No profits could be made without it, and yet its use could turn the biggest profits into no less significantly crippling losses .

To understand why credit was more important than cash in the activities of any eighteenth-century trader, we have to recapture what it was to buy and sell goods at the time. First, imagine never being sure of exactly what one was buying. Some products, mostly luxury items, were controlled by state inspectors who enforced a standard of quality often linked to some legal privilege, as in the case of the famed Manufactures royales set up under Louis XIV in France. But most goods did not benefit from any kind of state supervision or certification of their production process, and even when they did, such inspections were powerless to stem the tide of counterfeit and smuggled goods. A piece of cloth with all the markings and seals of the Manufacture royale of the town of Mazamet, in southwestern France, could just as well be a cheap imitation made by counterfeiters in nearby villages and then combined with higher-quality products by unscrupulous wholesalers. The quality of imported goods, furthermore, was supposed to be assessed by customs officers, but they were wholly unequal to the task. In England itself, an estimated three-quarters of the tea drunk by the third quarter of the eighteenth century came via French, Swedish and Dutch smugglers; and the strict enforcement of tariff duties was such an unusual occurrence that when the British government tried to achieve it in its North American colonies, the resulting outrage led to the Boston Tea Party and eventually to a revolutionary insurrection.

Even when the products were not imitations, the absence of both state-enforced norms as well as consistent, uniform standards of production meant that any given good could differ slightly in size, shape, quality and raw material even within a well-defined general category. Customs officers, when assessing the value of the goods before taxing them, sought to establish scales of quality that would adequately capture the bewildering array and diversity they faced. The result was almost comically complex: by 1772, New York custom officials were using 45 separate categories, each containing a separate measure of quality, merely to tax English-made woolen cloth arriving in the colonies. Less cumbersomely, merchants fell back on general terms that were often based on the original region of production (“cambrics” or “osnabrucks” for instance), and made practical judgements concerning each good they bought or sold. But this was hardly any easier. Did a certain barrel contain superfine flour, as claimed by its New York importer? Or was it a mix of inferior grades? Were these silk scarves really from Lyons, or from a subcontractor in nearby Saint-Etienne who used pilfered silk, pirated patterns and inferior laborers? Any trader could know a few products well enough after a lifetime of practice to effectively judge their quality, but no one could hope to master the whole range of goods being sold in most stores at the time.

Specialization could have solved this problem, but in the market structure of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, that would actually have increased the risk of failure. The demand for discrete products was divided into many isolated islands of customers separated by distance, borders, and all the attendant risks of transportation associated with seafaring before steam and roads before macadam, not to mention plundering armies and navies in times of war, as well as thieves during all periods. Even in the best of circumstances, crossing the Atlantic took several weeks. Market prices could fluctuate wildly in the meantime and a trader could end up with a net loss on what had first looked like a golden opportunity. Multiple investments in various goods was the only way to spread the risks. Errors of judgment were also more costly to traders who specialized. A few sales of inferior products at higher-quality prices, or of goods with latent defects, could result in a massive loss of customers who would know by word of mouth that the offending retailer was not to be trusted when it came to the goods in question. Since no trader could avoid occasional mistakes, highly specialized merchants ran a constant risk of seeing their customer base dry up without any alternative source of business to fall back on. This is not to say that no specialization took place, especially in the slave trade. But that may well be because even slave traders were never really able to see the commerce in human chattel as a regular business any more than they were able to see human beings as mere merchandize, to be mixed with other goods.

Whatever the trade, then, the key problem for the merchant was how to select the right goods which would be the basis of his or her reputation and credit. Any merchant would go far to safeguard a relationship with a reliable supplier of quality goods since this helped to escape the vagaries of markets, and provided up-to-date information on the state of these markets. A well-connected dealer in a certain type of cloth could form a general picture of its availability as well as the demand for it by learning from other regions and other traders and then estimating the possible evolution of the market. Thus, when Henry Lee wrote to a correspondent in 1810 that “Sugars remain @ $11.50 @ 13.50 they will rise here unless they fall in Havana, there are not many more that will be wanted from consumption [but] 20,000 Boxes will be wanted in February to make up the cargoes for the Baltic and Archangel,” he was using inside information about past movements and present situations culled from half a dozen ports spread over three continents, all to build a thumbnail description of an entire product market, complete with future prices.

Knowledge about a product included knowledge of the customers to whom it would be sold. Traders’ demands reflected customers’ demands, which again allowed a well-connected wholesaler to get an early peek at new trends and fashions. This kind of information was crucially important, since the often-invoked ultimate arbiter—the taste of customers—was only another name for the range of qualities from which one could choose, each choice attracting a slightly different subset of customers and commanding a varying set of prices. In many ways, a merchant’s identity was determined by the customer’s portfolio, as David Hancock nicely puts it. Keeping and enlarging that portfolio meant finding the right goods for the right people at the right price. This was necessarily a joint venture between suppliers and retailers. Both had to play their part if the customer was to be satisfied.

When it came to goods, the building of a reputable business was thus heavily dependent on cooperation and mutual trust between various traders. This was the case in regards to the other side of the balance sheet as well: money. Payments were no less dependent on reputation and mutual trust as were supplies since, in most cases, no money at all changed hands. What was given instead was some promise to pay, that is, credit. The systematic use of credit instruments was partly a matter of expediency since some areas of the world were chronically short of metal currencies. Cash-starved colonists in North America, for instance, could rarely get their hands on actual gold or silver. In 1754 even such a large Boston merchant as Thomas Hancock had to pay for four pair of “breeches” (one for his adopted nephew John, the future Revolutionary leader) with “4 po(d) of Tee, 1 Quire of Cartridge paper, 1 Doz(e) of women’s glazed Lamb Gloves” worth £2 6s. This assortment of goods was nonetheless listed by the tailor as “cash paid in full,” proof enough that “cash” in the eighteenth century could mean a variety of currencies, few of them actual cash as we know it. Traders would also swap fish, wood, or sundry other goods in order to balance their accounts with each other. And yet, most debt settlements involved neither cash or commodity money: what was swapped, rather, was credit itself, very often through complex, multiple transactions.

The basic principle was always the same: a trader transferred credit he had with another to a third to whom he was in debt. Some of these transactions gave rise to commercial paper, which played the role of both our paper money and bank credit. The modern letter of exchange, by which a drawer ordered a drawee to pay a certain sum to a third party (the payee), had to follow certain legal rules formalized in the Middle Ages. But by the end of the eighteenth century most paper debts existed in the form of promissory notes or IOUs, which were called “notes of hand” or “bills,” in which one trader promised to pay a given sum, with interest, on a given date, often to a certain person. Both formal letters and informal notes circulated by endorsement and so constituted a quasi-currency. The notes of the largest traders, which were as good as cash, could travel all over Europe and the Americas. Exiled Boston loyalist John Amory could thus pay his way in Brussels in 1781 with the proceeds of a “note of hand” from a Parisian trader which was originally used to pay off John’s brother Thomas, in Boston. The latter sent the note to a London house with which John had an account, and the Londoners drafted a new order of their own to their correspondent in Brussels, who in turn credited John with the sum thus transferred. The original French note was resold to some other London house, or sent to Paris to be cashed. The whole circuit had taken place in the midst of the war between France and England. Indeed, credit systems among traders were so vital that they proved impervious to national loyalties and political conflict.

In Amory’s case, paper actually changed hands, the French note being supplemented with a standard bill of exchange on a Brussels house for the last leg of his journey. But credit operations could, and often did, involve no physical transaction at all. Every time a customer opened an account with a trader, book credit was generated because accounts were seldom closed. The customer would owe money, or actually be owed money, as in the case of a supplier having an account with a retailer, but in both cases a certain amount of money was loaned by one party to the other, at no interest. Commercial paper usually bore interest. In other words, every trader functioned as a small bank extending free loans to customers. In the year 1808, Princeton grocer Josiah Worth loaned a total of more than $500 to more than twenty different local customers, that sum representing close to 10 percent of the total value of his goods on hand. The further back in time one goes (or the farther away from those areas, such as large European cities, where metal currency was plentiful), the smaller was the number of cash transactions. In 1753, Boston grocer Joseph Green sold £25 worth of British goods in one month, £20 of that on book credit.

Josiah Worth had a very small local operation in what was a village of a few hundred inhabitants. Joseph Green’s Boston suffered from a dire shortage of cash. But even the largest traders in the most vibrant commercial centers of Europe were as dependent as their poorer brethren on the other side of the Atlantic on credit transactions. The house of Gradis, in Bordeaux, was one of the largest French merchant houses in the country’s wealthiest port prior to the Revolution. Almost 60 percent of all the transactions registered in the account books of the Gradis partnership during one month in 1754 involved no cash, even though these large négociants were bound to use more cash than did most small dealers. Even more strikingly, half of the 600,000 livre tournois (worth approximately $5 million at current prices) which changed hands in these operations did so by compensating accounts, that is, without utilizing either cash or commercial paper. Assets from Nantes or Saint-Domingue were transferred to traders in Quebec or Lisbon by moving them from one of the Gradis’ accounts to another in the back room of some small Bordeaux shop. Traders large and small were thus entirely dependent on their credit networks, just as they were dependent on their supplier networks.

All transactions thus entailed credit, both in a financial as well as a more general sense. For to give credit meant to trust—to trust that the goods were satisfactory, that the book account would eventually be settled, that a promissory note would be “honored,” or paid when presented. Whom to trust, when to trust, and for how much to trust—the answers depended on a variety of issues, not least of which was the social status of the debtor. “Credit” to noble patrons in France or England was very often an outright gift, which, once advertised, would attract other, less illustrious customers intent on shopping where grandees such as the Duke of Rohan or Lady Waldegrave shopped. British potter Josiah Wedgwood built his fortune upon such snobbish associations, combined with clever advertisement, selling his earthenware as “the Queen’s ware” from 1762 on. At the other end of the social scale, local retailers needed to attract enough less privileged people to their store to sustain their business. Tight credit would not have served this purpose. Village grocers, careful not to antagonize their customers, could thus only hope for episodic payments as debts often extended over months or years. And then there were all sorts of personal issues that could interfere, ranging from family ties to shared religious or political loyalties. Credit at the local level was very much a matter of balancing reputations, of practicing a Maussian give-and-take, and of ever-precarious equilibria being constantly renegotiated.

The same was true for larger traders. In practice, almost all credit was revolving credit. New credit was constantly extended. Notes of hand bore interest, the interest often being paid when the note was renewed. Book debts were a different matter since they were apparently free, allowed to stand for years, although some form of interest could, in fact, show up in the form of inflated prices, especially with impecunious noble customers. But not all open accounts were treated the same way in this respect. Accounts between partners or close business associates remained open year after year, just like the accounts of small customers, but price rises or interest charged on the debts of the former were extremely rare. Close associates had the right to demand immunity in this respect. In practice, interest charges varied wildly and a number of other considerations, ranging from family relations to personal association, could significantly alter the rate that was applied.

The thorniest issue in regards to credit had less to do with what interest rate to charge to whom than when to start saying no. Non-payment, or a bad credit record, was only one of several parameters to keep in mind, and a trader could well decide to bear a likely loss for various reasons. As with local grandees, relations with a prominent merchant could bring privileged access to local markets as well as to other traders. Thorough knowledge of a certain product was also worth bankrolling, which is why failed traders rarely found themselves unemployed—their knowledge could be usefully recycled. Boston merchant Henry Lee, who voiced his worries in February 1811, did indeed go bankrupt in March but then resurfaced five months later as the agent of a fellow trader on a ship en route to Calcutta. Lee had logged significant experience in the Calcutta market and could still be counted on in this respect, regardless of his bankrupt status. And so, knowledgeable correspondents could be worth much more than the book debt or the note of hand they owed, and pressing payment of these debts would have been a very bad move indeed.

Except, of course, if the same correspondents were on the verge of bankruptcy, in which case it was best to try and recoup as much as possible and as fast as possible. The bankruptcy of a debtor usually meant the loss of most of the funds that had been loaned since legal proceedings were long, haphazard, and ultimately provided little compensation to creditors. Bruce Mann describes the many ways by which a bankrupt debtor in the Early Republic could delay judgment. He could, for instance, “keep close,” that is, stay home and keep out the sheriff, the deputies and the court orders they could not serve because they were forbidden from forcibly entering a debtor’s home. Consequently, creditors were rarely keen on pushing a debtor into bankruptcy, all the more so because that could also earn them a very bad reputation among other traders as being too hard-hearted and unforgiving. While bankruptcy proceedings were constantly brandished as a threat, most traders in practice tried to discreetly negotiate some kind of preferential treatment. That is why backroom negotiations continued even after bankruptcy, as Ewing’s example shows. Still, once bankruptcy was declared, it was essential to act fast since in common law most creditors were refunded on a first-come, first-served basis. And so, as with commodities, early and accurate information was crucial.

Information was also crucial because business failure constituted a potential threat to a wide circle of traders. This brings us back to the subject of cash. The whole credit system was built like an inverted pyramid, resting on a relatively narrow basis of hard cash. It was consequently most important to preserve that cash basis, thus according it a central economic role. Using no cash at all would raise questions about one’s solvency, so a certain amount of cash had to be provided in each transaction, if only for symbolic reasons. This led to a constant flow of creditors showing up on a trader’s doorstep and requesting at least partial cash payments, which they in turn needed to use in other deals. Determining the amounts of cash one should pay became another complex issue. Some cash was always kept “on hand,” as the saying went, though excessive caution (that is, keeping on hand a large amount of unused cash) meant lost opportunities as well as the risk of being cut off by fellow traders who would have no reason to “credit” a colleague who was so “unaccommodating,” that is, unwilling to extend loans to others. In any event, the sheer amount of credit involved in any trading business meant that even the largest houses could only pay off part of their debt at any one time.

On the other hand, failure to repay even a small note when asked to do so would bring an avalanche of panicky demands on the part of all one’s creditors, hence the absolute necessity of keeping a flow of hard currency moving through the system. And because all traders relied on an array of fellow traders to provide the necessary funds, each subgroup worked like a highly interconnected set of financial institutions of the kind we are familiar with today. If one failed, a domino effect would ensue. Failure would freeze needed funds and cripple all creditors, who lost a precious source of currency. If their dependency on the failed trader was considerable they would fail in turn. The bigger the failed business, the bigger its fallout. Robert Morris, the Philadelphia merchant who bankrolled the War of Independence, “can’t fail,” a contemporary, himself the son of a failed merchant, exclaimed in 1788. “If he does[,] ruin on Thousands” would result. The Lehman Brothers of his times did indeed fail in 1797, consequently ruining thousands.

Failure could obviously be brought on through excessive optimism or a lack of caution or foresight. But it could also be the result of sheer bad luck. Risks could not be addressed by insurance since the latter was costly and available only for some operations, such as shipping and transportation. Using pricing in order to compensate for the numerous unknowns remained an approximate affair at best in an environment of highly segmented, constantly fluctuating markets with highly imperfect information. Indeed, information again proved to be crucial since it helped one recognize which traders were unwisely expanding their operations and therefore constituted a risk. Certainly, Henry Lee’s buying spree in India in the last months of 1810 in the face of an increasing shortage of money should have warned off other traders, had they been aware of it.

But there was no protection against the sudden death of an important creditor. Testamentary executors would then have to insist on immediate repayment of debts which would have otherwise been left to mature much longer. And so, as with suppliers, the best protection against risk, and the best method for reducing uncertainty, was diversification, that is, having as many different debtors and creditors as possible. But even then the most cautious, clear-eyed, diversified trader could still be caught high and dry. British and U.S. bankruptcy law admitted as much, providing as they did relief for commercial but not for personal bankruptcies on the explicit grounds that the former were most often the result of unavoidable professional hazards while the latter were supposedly caused by excessive, overindulgent spending.

Ewing’s failure, by his own rueful admission, was not quite unavoidable. He had been “too sanguine,” too optimistic. Still, his story fits the general pattern of commercial bankruptcies before the advent of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century. He had come to grief by allowing the delicate balance between the claims he had on others and those others had on him to go out of kilter. Maintaining this balance was no simple matter if one keeps in mind that monetary credits and debts were only part of the equation. No account could be evaluated in isolation, nor in strictly accounting terms. There was the larger flow of trade, the constant struggle to buy quality goods, to which were added downturns, wars, and sudden shifts in markets. One had to judge how one’s own combination of credit flows would fare, which investments would earn and which would lose, when it was time to contract or to expand. The basic accounting figures for each venture would not be enough because each account was bound up, as we have seen, with future ventures and with past profits. One also needed to factor in the intangible benefits of one’s debtor’s enhanced reputation, improved information, and better market access, as well as consider what had so far been gained in the relationship. The fact is, ingratitude had its risks as well since it could cause one to lose the respect, and thus the cooperation, of other traders, as Avner Greif pointed out long ago. There were also networking issues at play. A delinquent debtor could be protected from pressure if he was closely associated with other traders that one needed to do business with. On the whole, assessing credit situations meant parsing a constant flow of diverse information and trying to separate the true signals from unfounded rumor and hearsay.

Other, larger social forces were also at work. The need to rely on fellow traders at all times and for all aspects of business made it imperative for a trader to take part in the merchant community. In this respect, the scions of old, established merchant families enjoyed clear comparative advantage over upstarts and recent arrivals. They had bigger, older, and hence more compelling sets of claims and counterclaims, as well as more extended and hence more resilient networks of family, friends, allies, and acquaintances. James Ewing was well-connected up to a point, being the son of a notable Presbyterian minister in Philadelphia who had been rector of the College of Pennsylvania. His unfortunate investment in a distillery was made in partnership with members of the well-established Philadelphia firm of Robert Waln. Indeed, the day before Ewing wrote to Rhea, his main creditor in Philadelphia, one William Clark, had also sent a letter to Rhea agreeing to except furniture from the settlement. There was a definite whiff of class solidarity in Clark’s statement that “no human person would wish to deprive a worthy family from the articles necessary to their comfort, when it must be well known that misfortune alone have brought the head of that family to the present distress.” A farmer or craftsman in the same situation would not necessarily have enjoyed such benign treatment.

But Ewing did not come from merchant stock. His grandparents were farmers and he disappeared from the trading scene after 1811. Other bankrupt merchants from more established families might have done better. The fact that Ewing was forced to default might have been connected to his status as a relative outsider. Henry Lee’s failure gave rise to a telling anecdote concerning his brother-in-law Patrick Tracy Jackson, who later helped to establish the Massachusetts textile industry. In 1811 Jackson was a Boston merchant closely linked to the recently failed firm of Joseph and Henry Lee, the relation resting both on blood ties and on a common interest in the India trade. Quite reasonably, rumors began to circulate that Jackson himself was on the verge of defaulting. According to the New York gazetteer Freeman Hunt, of Merchants’ Magazine fame, Jackson “called upon some of his principal creditors, made a most lucid exposition of the state of his affairs, and showed that, if allowed to manage them in his own way, his means were abundantly sufficient; while, so great was the amount of his liabilities, that, under the charge of assignees [i.e. in bankruptcy proceedings], not only might all his hard earnings be swept away, but the creditors themselves be the sufferers.”

The question Jackson addressed was a standard one: given the uncertain outcome of legal proceedings, which could well bring no gain at all for the creditors, should the debt be put on hold? The interesting point here is that Jackson was technically bankrupt since his liabilities were much larger than his assets, to the point where he could not meet his obligations without a grace period from his creditors. In fact, he admitted as much. And yet, he was allowed to continue in business. Hunt explains this happy turn as follows: “So admirably had his accounts be kept, and so completely did he show himself to be master of his business, that the appeal was irresistible. He was allowed to go on unmolested.” Whatever the veracity of this story, it points to a deeper truth about merchant failure, namely, that it was always, first and foremost, a failure of trust on the part of fellow merchants. For a variety of possible reasons—ranging from his undeniable talents as an accountant and manager to more elusive issues of family and elite class solidarities—Jackson was able to keep the trust of his fellow traders, in spite of his obvious inability to repay his debts. To sustain one’s credit among others, then, included much more than regular payments or debt avoidance, which were impossible anyway given the circumstances. A whole social realm was bundled up in the credit networks of traders, which became most evident in times of crisis when bankruptcy loomed large on the horizon.

At once roilingly uncertain and happily insulated, the eighteenth-century world of trade and failure faded away during the industrial revolution. By the second third of the nineteenth century a series of new business tools was being developed that deeply revolutionized the management of risk. After several decades in which they functioned as glorified investor’s clubs closed to outsiders, banks turned into large lending institutions available to the general public and eventually backed by the state as a lender of last resort. Individual traders could increasingly rely on a secure source of credit outside of their own network of associates. The advent of the corporation also made a new breed of business ventures possible that were impervious to the hazards of the market, and even the deaths of their participants. Information was formalized and distributed by such credit-rating agencies as Dun and Bradstreet, reducing the need for rumor and gossip. Insurance could be purchased for anything and everything, its price dramatically reduced by sophisticated risk-measuring tools. And an increasing control of the production process ushered in an age of standardization and normalization, again with a heavy dose of institutional oversight from public or quasi-public organizations.

Increasingly able to rely on standardized goods and accurate information regarding the state of the markets and the solvency of both customers and suppliers, traders all over the world started to specialize, which further reduced risk and uncertainty. The good feelings of associates and an extended network of personal ties would still play a role among industrial capitalists but these no longer constituted their core assets. Eventually credit itself acquired a much narrower economic meaning: its broader connection to issues of trust, social status, kinship and class solidarity disappeared (only to be recovered by the recent revival of scholarship in the history of credit). Older merchant strategies began to look somewhat opaque and haphazard in retrospect because the rules that constrained trade and the logic generated by these rules were no longer widely understood. Meanwhile, merchant princes were being displaced by bankers and industrialists, and local grocers and shopkeepers found themselves on the losing end of the retailing revolution. Trade, which had been a way of life, was reduced to an ancillary role as the focus shifted to production costs and product quality. In this new incarnation, sales and marketing—a narrative of technical standards and the scientific study of focus groups—replaced personal credit networks as the main source of information for making strategic choices. A faint resonance of the expansionist nature, manic activity, and essential instability of merchant life in its golden age remained alive in the popular imagination, however. In Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman, which also chronicles the death of an era, Willy Lohman’s reliance on “a shoeshine and a smile” was no less than a latter-day, debased echo of the cultivation of personal networks which for centuries served as the main protection for traders against commercial failure.

Further reading

Merchant groups and their operations in the eighteenth century have been extensively studied, most recently in David Hancock’s Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste (New Haven, 2009); see also his Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 (Cambridge, 1995), as well as Cathy Matson’s study of New York traders, Merchants and Empire: Trading in Colonial New York (Baltimore, 1998). Other regional studies, older but still useful, include Thomas Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (New York, 1986) as well as Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchant in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1955) and Conrad Edick Wright and Katheryn P. Viens eds., Entrepreneurs: The Boston Business Community, 1700-1850 (Boston, 1997). One should note that there is also a large array of recent works in French for readers proficient in this, most notably Pierre Jeannin’s brilliant collections of articles, Marchands du Nord (Paris, 1996) andMarchands d’Europe (Paris, 2002), and Silvia Marzagali’s Les boulevards de la fraude (Villeneuve d’Ascq, 1999).

The minutiae of credit relationships remain little studied, even among accounting historians: William Baxter’s The House of Hancock (Cambridge, 1945) is still one of the most detailed works available. As Basil Yamey pointed out in a recent cautionary article in Accounting, Business and Financial History (“The ‘particular gain or loss upon each article we deal in:’ an aspect of mercantile accounting, 1300-1800,” ABFH10-1, 2000), merchant accounting strategies are still far from clear. Another key source, merchant correspondence, can also be accessed through older editing ventures such as Kenneth Wiggins Porter’s The Jacksons and the Lees (Cambridge, 1937, 2 vol.). On the whole, detailed quantitative analysis of accounts remains limited, even in studies directly concerned with such issues. Consider for instance Edwin J. Perkins, Financing the Anglo-American Trade: The House of Brown, 1800-1880 (Cambridge,1975), or the collection of essays edited by Peter A. Coclanis, The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel (Columbia, 2005) ; also Sheryllynne Haggerty’s The British-Atlantic Trading Community, 160-1810: Men, Women, and the Distribution of Goods (Leiden, 2006), otherwise useful for her pioneering analysis of gender roles.

The institutional underpinnings of credit are better known thanks to Bruce Mann’s Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence (Cambridge, 2002). Theoretical discussions among sociologists, anthropologists and economists are also worth following, and range from Marcel Mauss’ 1924 essay, “The Gift” (Glencoe,1954) down to Avner Greif’sInstitutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade (Cambridge, 2008). Credit issues are also one of the most burning topics among economic historians in Europe, and especially in French historiography, both from a socio-cultural prospect (Laurence Fontaine, L’économie morale: pauvreté, crédit et confiance dans l’Europe préindustrielle, Paris, 2008) and from heterodox economic angles (Guillaume Daudin,Commerce et Prospérité: la France au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, 2005; also Jean-Yves Grenier, L’économie d’Ancien Régime: un monde de l’échange et de l’incertitude , Paris, 1996).

This article originally appeared in issue 10.3 (April, 2010).

Pierre Gervais, associate professor, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales/Université Paris VIII, France, is the author of Les Origines de la révolution industrielle aux Etats-Unis (2004), which was awarded the Willi Paul Adams prize of the Organization of American Historians in 2007. His most recent publication in English is “Neither Imperial, nor Atlantic: A Merchant Perspective on International Trade in the 18th Century,” History of European Ideas, 2008.

In 2010, I found myself living in a small Maine town, helping my spouse establish a bankruptcy law practice. This was not long after the beginning of the financial crisis, so bankruptcy law seemed a promising gig. It was also a few years after the passage of a bankruptcy reform bill in 2005, with new regulations that made it much harder to establish oneself as a so-called honest debtor eligible for a discharge of debts. That also made more work for lawyers. So, in breaks from writing my dissertation about eighteenth-century literature, I pasted paystub data into spreadsheets, tallied up living expenses and debt, and learned to think about bankruptcy as a shorthand for relief, rather than a code for failure.

On occasion I sat in courtrooms and watched the presiding trustee march through the rolls of petitioners, raising questions about the value of an RV or the ownership structure of a family cabin. At the end of each hearing the trustee would rattle off a half-hearted benediction, sending the petitioners out into the world for another try at making a living. The bankruptcy code is designed to provide debtors with a fresh start, he would say; I hope it works out that way for you. The phrase fresh start stuck out to me. It seemed so colloquial, so non-legalistic. It is, in fact, contained in the official glossary of bankruptcy terms provided by the state. It says:

Fresh Start—the characterization of a debtor’s status after bankruptcy, i.e. free of most debts. (Giving debtors a fresh start is one purpose of the Bankruptcy Code.)

Beyond the oddness of the framing, I was struck by the concept of the fresh start. The idea of bankruptcy as redemption, as the rock-bottom that precedes a new rise, looked to me quite different from the stories of bankruptcy that appeared in eighteenth-century literature. There, bankruptcy often signals vice and corruption. A fictional bankrupt is often also a seducer, a gambler, and any number of other terrible things. When a person is broke, his story is over. If he wants a fresh start he is going to have to move away, to some hazy other-country with richer soils for self-reinvention. Often, that country is America. But what about those who were already here?

You don’t come across a lot of bankruptcy hearings in eighteenth-century novels. This is pretty easy to explain: they didn’t happen much. But they did happen, and I’m going to go into some depth about one early American novel that touches on the subject, in the process opening a window into the turbulent waters of debt, failure, and new beginnings. This novel is Arthur Mervyn, published in 1799 by Charles Brockden Brown. It’s a long, rambling novel that follows a young naif, Arthur, as he travels through turn-of-the-century America. The novel is most often remembered (when it is remembered) for its gothic descriptions of Philadelphia in the grip of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic. Critics also like to discuss its unreliable narrative; it’s impossible to follow the turns of the plot, and the veracity of the first-person account is constantly challenged by other characters. However, I take the side of a small but longstanding critical cadre that believes Arthur Mervyn is best read as a tale of financial transactions. Specifically, I read it as a novel about debt.

The growth of a mercantile Atlantic economy through the eighteenth century caused a sea change in concepts of credit and risk, one so momentous that we continue to sort through its effects today. Borrowing and lending became depersonalized; debt shifted from a moral hazard to a cost of doing business, and a business in itself. Both the radically unstable narrative of the eponymous hero and the raging career of Welbeck, the villain, can be understood as critiques of the unmoored economy of speculation, in which fortunes were won and lost in what seemed then, before nanotrading, like the blink of an eye.

Charles Brockden Brown came from a commercial family, and makes clear throughout Arthur Mervyn that he has a professional’s knowledge of financial transactions and the consequences they can carry. (His father was once imprisoned for debt.) The novel teems with reversals of fortune: sudden plunges from middle-class respectability caused by bad banknotes or fraudulent insurance arrangements, as well as by disease, seduction, ill-will, or bad luck. Precarity is the background hum behind the novel’s picaresque plot. Time and time again, Arthur Mervyn finds himself without a penny or a crumb to his name, starting fresh. Yet, while his progress shines a light on the instability of personal finances in early America, Arthur himself remains optimistic, seemingly untouched by failure.

Arthur goes bankrupt almost as soon as he leaves his rural home for Philadelphia. He starts with a little money, but is so naïve that he spends it all on two sorry meals. As he walks along, ruminating on his plight, he finds that he has already entered the city. And he realizes something else. “Suddenly I recollected that I had not paid the customary toll at the bridge; neither had I money wherewith to pay it.” He is stuck: “I had nothing to pay, and by returning I should only double my debt. Let it stand, said I, where it does. All that honour enjoins is to pay when I am able.”

Arthur’s progress, therefore, begins with insolvency. He considers himself in debt, promising himself he will pay when he can. He decides immediately that the answer to his problem is more debt, and sets out to find a farmer he knows who might lend him enough for a meal. In the process he leaves behind his bundle of clothes, and even his shoes, as if to underscore his total lack of worldly capital. For Arthur, however, indigence is opportunity. While he claims to be in search of honest work, he never does settle down to any task. Instead, he lets himself be swept along by the currents of the commercial city, until they carry him out of it.  Before long he finds himself again at the bridge, and again penniless. Far from recalling his old debt, Arthur cheerfully doubles it. “With light steps and palpitating heart I turned my face towards the country. My necessitous condition I believed would justify me in passing without payment the Schuylkill bridge.”  Bankrupt, Arthur is free to follow his destiny.

Let’s pause for a moment on the debt of the bridge. At the beginning of the novel, the rusticated Arthur believes that “honour enjoins” him to pay the toll later. A quarter of the way into the book, having begun an education in the commercial economy, he has acquired a new approach to debt: having nothing justifies nonpayment. In other words, bankruptcy undoes obligations, and provides opportunity.

Arthur’s constant optimism in the face of loss makes him exceptional, but he is far from singular in his bankrupt status; ruin seems an occupational hazard of being a character in this book. I’d like to focus on two of these insolvents. The first is Welbeck, the sensational, irredeemable villain, who drives much of the novel’s plot through his career as a swindler, seducer, and forger, as well as through his patronage of Mervyn. The other is Carlton, whom nobody remembers.

In a novel so overstuffed with plot and characters, the mild-mannered Carlton fails to draw much attention. Carlton is a bankrupt, but he is not a gambler or a drinker, nor does he attempt to seduce heiresses under false pretenses of prosperity. He’s an honest man who happens to have both a poor head for business and an importunate creditor.

Carlton enters the narrative when Arthur’s friend receives a mysterious note requesting him to come without delay “to the debtors’ apartments in Prune Street,” the infamous debtors’ prison. The gothic atmosphere of the prison reminds readers of the scenes of yellow fever that began the book. Prune Street is “filled with pale faces and withered forms,” the air a “noxious element” that makes it hard to breathe. Yet Arthur’s friend, named Stevens, is unsympathetic: “The marks of negligence and poverty were visible in all; but few betrayed, in their features or gestures, any symptoms of concern on account of their condition. Ferocious gaiety, or stupid indifference, seemed to sit on every brow.”

This is a fitting place for a villain, in other words. Thus when Stevens finds that the prison contains a dying Welbeck, a narrative loop seems closed: debtors’ prison is not the gallows, but is a suitable end to a rake’s progress. This morality tale, however, is disrupted by the figure of Carlton. Stevens finds him “Seated on a bench, silent and aloof from the crowd, his eyes fixed on the floor, and his face half concealed by his hand.” Unlike the thoughtless mob, Carlton is “governed by an exquisite sensibility to disgrace” and anguished by the thought of what will happen to his dependent sisters. But, Stevens tells us, “fortitude was not among my friend’s qualities,” and he seems likely to share Welbeck’s fate of dying in debtors’ prison.  

What great mistake or tragic misunderstanding brought this seemingly innocent person to this place, we wonder? As is typical in this novel, the story is slow to unwind. We learn that he “lives by binding fast the bargains others made”—I take this to mean that he is a commercial lawyer. Brown himself, it bears noting, was intended for the law by his family. We might assume that he knows whereof he speaks when he writes that Carlton’s “impatient temper and delicate frame unfitted him for the trade.” Unlike Brown, who chose to write instead, Carlton had gone ahead with the profession, and “pursued it with no less reluctance than diligence, devoting to the task three nights in the week, and the whole of each day,” even to the risk of his health. Hardworking and responsible, Carlton is nevertheless “embarrassed with debts which he was unable to discharge.” We learn later that there is just one debt, contracted by Carlton’s father, who had himself been imprisoned for it. To free his father from prison and save his health, Carlton had co-signed the debt, and had steadily worked to pay it off. Finally, however, he had fallen short, with $400 left to pay.  

Stevens gets Carlton a private room in the debtors’ prison, which, with great narrative convenience, is already occupied by Welbeck. Side by side, they are the two faces of bankruptcy: the swindler and the unfortunate. If Welbeck, who seduces and lies and forges because he refuses to do honest work, represents the reckless speculator, poor forgotten Carlton is his milquetoast foil, the insolvent. If Welbeck shows the spectacular potential and dangers of mercantilism, Carlton raises questions about how society handles the collateral damage of capitalism. Does it leave him to perish in the prison, or does it give him another try?

This is the question that the earliest forms of bankruptcy law tried to answer. Debts should be paid, it was generally agreed, but a growing movement suggested that when payment was impossible, it was cruel and counterproductive to punish the debtor. “Is the state of the creditor such as to make the loss of four hundred dollars of more importance to him than the loss of liberty to your brother?” Arthur asks Carlton’s sister, incredulously. He continues more pragmatically: “Your brother cannot pay the debt while in prison; whereas, if at liberty, he might slowly and finally discharge it. If his [that is, the creditor’s] humanity would not yield, his avarice might be brought to acquiesce.” This particular creditor, however, is motivated by a sense of vengeance, and would rather see Carlton expire in prison than recover his money. In a world of ruthless lenders, it won’t do to rely on individuals for a sense of proportion in dealing with debt. We will have to look to the law to maintain humanity—and to keep individuals properly productive within the capitalist system.

It is indeed through law that Carlton’s situation is resolved. After he has marinated in the Prune Street prison for another quarter of the novel (though only a few days, according to its murky accounting of time), Stevens returns to his friend, whom “with much difficulty, he persuaded to take advantage of the laws in favor of insolvent debtors.” In other words, he petitions for a discharge of debts under a bankruptcy law. This proved successful: “by rendering up every species of property, except his clothes and the implements of his trade, he obtained a full discharge. In conjunction with his sister, he once more assumed the pen, and, being no longer burdened with debts he was unable to discharge, he resumed, together with his pen, his cheerfulness. Their mutual industry was sufficient for their decent and moderate subsistence.” The inhumane creditor is overridden by law, and a useful citizen returned to productive activity.

While Brown was writing Arthur Mervyn, what he calls the “laws in favor of insolvent debtors” existed in a shifting patchwork of state ordinances. Very few citizens would have had access to the kind of discharge Carlton received. The first federal bankruptcy act was passed in 1800, just after the publication of Arthur Mervyn. Given the extensive political debate around the 1800 law, the question of bankruptcy would have been in the air when Brown was writing the book. Legislators discussed the same problems suggested by the novel: How could the law protect insolvents like Carlton, while leaving the villainous and the irresponsible to their fates? Who, in other words, deserves a slate wiped clean, a second chance?

The question has proved difficult, to this day. The 1800 law lasted only three years, and no federal legislation had any staying power until the end of the nineteenth century. Even after another century of refinements, the Manichean quality of bankruptcy appeared again in the title of the 2005 revision to the law: the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act. Creditors (specifically, credit card companies) had come to feel that bankruptcy relief was obtained too easily, and with too little shame. Most commentators agree that “consumer protection” is much less a focus of the law than creditor protection, but the title does reflect the continuing sense that a commercial society needs some way to offer relief from overwhelming debt. Elizabeth Warren, who strenuously opposed the act, argued that, “If Congress is determined to sort the good debtors from the bad, then it is both morally and economically imperative that they distinguish those who have worked hard and played by the rules from those who have shirked their responsibilities.”

The 2016 election (like the publication of Arthur Mervyn) proved one of the rare moments when debates around bankruptcy emerged from legislative and legal chambers into popular culture, with self-styled “king of debt” Donald Trump bragging about his companies’ multiple bankruptcies as demonstrations of business savvy while a Hillary Clinton ad titled “Who Got Hurt?” presented, over murky scenes of Atlantic City, “How Donald Trump made millions while bankrupting his businesses, laying off his workers, and stiffing his contractors.” In the terms of this article, Trump is a Welbeck—a swindler whose careless investments wreak havoc on individual lives and the national economy, protected from Welbeck’s fate by his “brilliant” use of bankruptcy law.

But Arthur Mervyn is neither a Carlton nor a Welbeck, neither a good debtor nor a bad one. As often as he is penniless, he is lucky; as often as he is lucky, he is foolish; as often as he loses credibility, he talks his way back to credit. At the novel’s end he finally achieves financial stability by marrying well—indeed, by abandoning his first love to be the second husband of a wealthy European. As Arthur prepares to depart for the Old World, he leaves us with the sense that under American capitalism, speculation and diligence alike are mugs’ games. 

Perhaps we are more than ever in need of the idea of Arthur Mervyn, who is such a shameless bankrupt, who can turn inability to pay into a backward form of currency, a constant stream of fresh starts. Arthur is a free radical in the system of credit and debt, punishment and forgiveness.

Reading Arthur Mervyn as a book about debt and relief, we are reminded that it might be possible to be penniless and free, to take insolvency as opportunity.    

Further Reading

The text of the novel referenced here is Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn, or Memoirs of the Year 1793 (Kent, Ohio, 1980), first published by H. Maxwell, Philadelphia, 1799. For a thorough and excellent discussion of debates around bankruptcy law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Bruce Mann, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence (Cambridge, Mass., 2009). Mann’s wife, Senator Elizabeth Warren, is equally lucid and erudite on the legal and social aspects of bankruptcy. Her books on the topic include As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America (Frederick, Md., 1999) and The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt (New Haven, 2001), both coauthored with Teresa Sullivan and Jay Westbrook, and The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke (New York, 2003), with Amelia Tyagi.

This article originally appeared in issue 18.1 (Winter, 2018).

Katherine Gaudet is associate director of the Honors Program and affiliate faculty in Humanities at the University of New Hampshire. Her scholarly focus is the cultural and social history of reading practices, which she sees as part of a larger project of linking humanities scholarship with public discourse. She is also a freelance editor and writer in southern Maine, where she lives with a charming bankruptcy lawyer and their two children.

Early in the last decade, an Ayn Rand disciple named Alan Greenspan, who had been trusted with the U.S. government’s powers for regulating the financial economy, stated his faith in the ability of that economy to maintain its own stability: “Recent regulatory reform coupled with innovative technologies has spawned rapidly growing markets for, among other products, asset-backed securities, collateral loan obligations, and credit derivative default swaps. These increasingly complex financial instruments have contributed, especially over the recent stressful period, to the development of a far more flexible, efficient, and hence resilient financial system than existed just a quarter-century ago.”

At the beginning of this decade, in the wake of the failure of Greenspan’s faith to prevent the eclipse of one economic order of things, Robert Solow, another towering figure in the economics profession, reflected on Greenspan’s credo and voiced his suspicion that the financialization of the U.S. economy over the last quarter-century created not “real,” but fictitious wealth: “Flexible maybe, resilient apparently not, but how about efficient? How much do all those exotic securities, and the institutions that create them, buy them, and sell them, actually contribute to the ‘real’ economy that provides us with goods and services, now and for the future?”

Solow’s distinction between the “real” economy and the “exotic” realm of securitized debts like mortgage bonds, credit default swaps, toxic debt, and zombie banks is not uniquely his. As a widespread assumption—a persistent distinction in our thought between “real” and “fictive” money, wealth, or productivity—it may be one factor that accounts for the reluctance of many historians to delve into financial dynamics when seeking to account for “Hard Times.” Reflexively, we analyze such dynamics with the tools of the linguistic turn, and so spend our time demonstrating that the fictions on which economic actors build their worlds are, in fact, fictional. (Most historians are also reluctant—maybe even unprepared—to work with numbers.) But when collective euphoria, financial innovation, and astonishing disproportions of power mix together, what bubbles into being is anything but mere vapor. We can minimize its weight by calling it fiction, but we do so only at grave risk to our understanding of what happened and why. For in such financial exchanges we see not only the generation and transfer of real wealth—that is, real effects in the social and political world—but also that such transfers can incorporate great violence and disruption for some as the causes of great profit for others.

Read casually through the pieces of paper that document Jacob Bieller’s life and enterprises, and this planter of Concordia Parish, Louisiana might look like someone who lived not just thousands, but millions of miles away from the center of international financial markets in the 1830s—and his business might seem even more distant in kind from the markets that worry us in our own day. Browse through the letters between Bieller and his son Joseph, the latter writing from the bank of Bayou Macon, thirty miles or so from Jacob’s own place on the Mississippi River. Joseph wrote his father in an untutored orthography, recounting the events of life on a cotton labor camp, or what contemporaries called a plantation: “I shall be short of corn,” or someone has found the body of the father of Enos, Bieller’s overseer, the old man having “drownded in Deer Drink.” The cyclical rhythm of forced agricultural labor thrummed onward—”I send you by Enos fifteen cotton pickers they are all I can spare. We have twelve thousand weight of cotton to pick yet from the appearance of the boals yet to open.” Always the urge to extract more product clashed with the objection of the enslaved to their condition: “I have had a verry sevear time among my negros at home. they have bin swinging my hogs and pigs. Harry & Roberson I caught. I stake Harry and gave him 175 lashes and Roberson 150. since that I found two hogs badly crippled.” You can almost see the Spanish moss on the low branches, parting as the whining hog lurches out; can picture Enos’s father as he poles his pirogue. His booted foot slips on the wet edge; you hear him splashing frantically as the dark water gurgles.

For good and for ill, though, there is much more in common than what we might initially suspect between Jacob Bieller and—for instance—the men and women who “broke the world” in the most recent collapse of the global financial system. The Panic of 1837 launched America’s biggest and most consequential economic depression before the Civil War. And it was the decisions and behavior of thousands of actors like Bieller that created a perfect financial storm: bringing an end to one kind of capitalist boom; destroying the confidence of the slaveholding class, impoverishing millions of workers and farmers who were linked to the global economy; demolishing the already disrupted lives of hundreds of thousands of people like Harry and Roberson. Historians have usually described the Panic of 1837 differently, fitting it in their own categorical boxes: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the court historian of New Deal Democrats, saw “the business community,” with their “dizzy pyramiding of paper credits,” as the problem. Historians of American banking, usually a specialized breed interested in, what else, banking, often blame the Panic on Andrew Jackson—in their telling, an ignorant lout obsessed with the idol of precious metal. For them, the cause of the Panic was the Specie Circular of 1836, which forced U.S. government agencies to stop accepting the paper banknotes pumped out by state-chartered banks and to demand specie (metal coins: gold or silver, usually) in payment for federal land and other obligations.

These versions of the Panic are capsules that carry other versions of the history of American capitalism into the bloodstream of historical consciousness. Was the Panic the result of a struggle between factory owners and factory workers, with a dash of hardy Jeffersonian farmers suspicious of the new way of making money? No, it was created by a struggle for greater efficiencies, a process of sweeping away old institutions and prejudices so that the market could be all in all! Yet we have received a recent education in booms and busts, bubbles and panics, one that alerts us to other stories. The first lesson we have learned (or relearned) is that a financial crisis is a mighty and powerful thing. The actors will respond to its impact with language and we historians will want to interrogate those words with the tools of cultural history. Surely it is significant that businessmen were “embarrassed” when their “friends” would not “sustain” their “credit” (Note how the scarequotes “problematize” each word, demanding that we unpack its contextual meaning.) Yet if that is all historians care about, they leave the mechanics of historical financial crises to the court historians of the great banking dynasties, or to economists. The history of financial panics reminds us that we have to integrate the study of big, impersonal forces with the study of how people shape meaning out of their individual lives.

If we look closely at the transformations and innovations that led to the Panic of 1837, we find new evidence about the role of slavery and slave labor in the creation of our modern, industrialized—and post-modernly financialized—world. Look a little more closely at Jacob Bieller, who can tell us things worth the due diligence. In 1837 Bieller was 67 years old. He had grown up in South Carolina, where in the first few years of the nineteenth century he and his father took advantage of that state’s reopening of the African slave trade and speculated in survivors of the Middle Passage. In 1809, little more than a year after Congress closed the legal Atlantic slave trade, Bieller moved west. Driven in part by divorce from his first wife, but drawn by the opportunities for an entrepreneurial slave owner in the new cotton lands opening to the west, Bieller took his son Joseph and 27 enslaved African Americans and settled just up the Mississippi River from Natchez, on the Louisiana side.

The enslaved people that Bieller brought to Concordia Parish became the root of his fortune—as they and a million others like them would become the root of the prosperity of not just the antebellum southwestern states, but of the United States as a whole. And perhaps one could go further than the U.S. By the 1830s, the cotton that enslaved people grew in the new states and territories taken from Native Americans in the early nineteenth century was the most widely traded commodity in the world. Its sale underwrote investments in new forms of enterprise north of slavery. It was also the raw material of the industrial revolution. The creation of textile factories in the British Midlands launched a process of continuous technological innovation, urbanization, and creation of markets that broke the Malthusian traps of traditional agricultural society. First Britain, and then the U.S., and then the rest of Western Europe achieved sustained rates of economic growth never before seen in human history.

The easy way out is to credit this astonishing growth to the increasing division of labor and high pace of technological innovation—the spinning jenny, the mechanical loom—that emerged in the eighteenth-century British manufacturing sector. But world historian Kenneth Pomeranz insists that we also have to look at the capacity of environments to produce resources if we want to understand what really allowed the West to emerge from the rest of the pack. The cotton fields of the slave South were particularly crucial because they allowed Britain to break out of its own “cul-de-sac” of resources: the limits imposed by the delicate balances between labor, land, fuel, food, and fiber that kept such a revolution from occurring in other societies. Even if every acre in Britain were converted into fiber production, the island would have been incapable of matching the capacity of the slave South to produce the raw materials for a textile-based economic transformation, to say nothing of the labor that would have to be taken out of the pool of potential factory workers to produce fiber.

When Jacob Bieller put his two dozen slaves to work growing and picking cotton, his whip was also driving the creation of a new, more complex, more dynamic world economy. In the lifetime between the ratification of the Constitution and the secession of the Confederacy, enslavers moved more than a million enslaved African Americans to cotton-growing areas taken by the new nation from their original inhabitants. Forced migrations and stolen labor yielded an astonishing increase in cotton production: from 1.2 million pounds in 1790 to 2.1 billion in 1859, and an incredible dominance over the international market—by the 1830s, 80% of the cotton used by the British textile industry came from the southern U.S.

We live today with the results of the long days that Bieller’s slaves sweated out in the field, but we also live in a world distantly shaped by the financial decisions of cotton entrepreneurs on both sides of the Atlantic—as well as by the forgetfulness of those who have not learned from their lessons of two centuries ago. Specifically: their decisions about how to obtain and use credit, as well as to manage risk. And there was risk aplenty. Up and down the chain of (mostly white) people who sold, traded, shipped, and speculated on the cotton that enslaved people made, credit and risk were imminent to the task of moving the world’s most important commodity through a chain of buyers and sellers that stretched from Louisiana cotton field to Liverpool cotton exchange. Prices suddenly dropped when rumors raced through New Orleans, New York, or Liverpool: “Optimism prevailed”—till the market learned that the U.S. crop is too big for the demand this year. Cloth isn’t selling because of “overproduction.” The mill workers in Manchester have been “turned out”—laid off.

When rumors of bad news overwhelmed the desire for speculative gain—when the “animal spirits” of the marketplace, to use a term coined by John Maynard Keynes, turned negative—a massive, systemic crash could result. This is what almost happened in 1824-1825, when cotton buyers were initially convinced that the 1824 crop was small. After buying all the bales that they could at rising prices, middlemen discovered that in fact the crop had been very large. Beginning with Adam Smith, utopian economists have argued that the logical outcome of profit-maximizing behavior by all market actors is the maximum collective benefit. In this case, when the price of a pound of cotton plummeted, merchant firms were unable to pay back the short-term commercial loans they had taken, and so they demanded repayment from their fellow firms to whom they had made loans. This individually rational behavior—shoring up liquidity as pressure for payment increased—led to collectively irrational outcomes. Every firm was suddenly moving in the same direction, every firm faced the same crisis, each one responded in the same way. The result was crash and paralysis in the British cotton and credit markets.

The mini-crash of 1824-26, like every financial panic, underlined the problem of systemic risk. The fact that the mid-decade’s outbreak of animal spirits did not end in full-scale economic disaster in the U.S. was a result, some believed, of the expanded ability of the Second Bank of the United States to regulate the level of systemic risk in the American economy. Under the direction of Nicholas Biddle the B.U.S. fulfilled many of the functions of a modern central bank. By forcing smaller, state-chartered banks to redeem their own credit in highly convertible currency, like gold dollars, British pounds, or banknotes of the B.U.S. itself, Biddle’s Bank kept a tight rein on those institutions. They could not issue too much credit. By making and by calling in its own loans, the B.U.S. also “curtailed” speculation on the part of private individuals. The B.U.S. ensured a level of systemic stability that in turn enabled individual market participants to devise workable strategies for hedging against individual counterparties. To avoid the possibility that they might be left holding the hot potato if cotton prices dropped suddenly, middlemen began insisting on shipping cotton bales on consignment. This meant that planters still owned their crop and bore much of the risk of a drop in price, up until one of the buyers working for the Manchester textile companies purchased it.

The Bank not only worked to prevent financial panics but to drive steady growth. As the single biggest lender in the economy, it lent directly to individual entrepreneurs—including enslavers like Jacob Bieller, who were always eager to buy more human capital whom they could put to work in the cotton fields of the southwest. “The US Bank and the Planters Bank at this place has thrown a large amt of cash into circulation,” wrote slave trader Isaac Franklin from Natchez in 1832. Franklin was the Sam Walton of the internal slave trade in the U.S., selling hundreds or even thousands of men and women in New Orleans and Natchez in a given year. In fact, by the early 1830s, the Natchez and New Orleans branches had lent out a full third of the capital of the B.U.S., much of it used to buy thousands of enslaved people from the Chesapeake, Kentucky, and North Carolina. Some of the lending was in the form of renewable “accommodation loans” to large-scale planters who were members of, or connected to, the clique of insiders who ran the B.U.S. branch and the series of state banks chartered by the Mississippi government. Even more of the lending was in the form of commercial credit to cotton buyers. This kept the price of cotton steady and, finding its way to the planters themselves, inspired Natchez-area enslavers to buy more of the people that Franklin and others were purchasing in the Chesapeake states and shipping to the Mississippi Valley.

While planters like Jacob Bieller waited for payment, merchants like the Natchez broker Alvarez Fisk, a Massachusetts-born man who funneled bank money to planters and cotton to Liverpool, lent them operating funds. But ultimately the entire structure was bottomed on, founded on, funded by the bodies of enslaved people: on the ability of slaveholders to extract cotton from them, and on the ability of slaveholders (or bankruptcy courts) to sell them to someone else who wanted to extract cotton. And the fact that cotton fields were the place where the margins of growth were created meant that they presented lenders with both needs and opportunities to hedge against the risk that individual counterparties would default.

For there were many things that could cause individual counterparties, especially planters, to fail. They depended on the bodies and the lives of people whom they also brutally exploited, beginning with their forced migration to a deadly environment. The cotton country of the Mississippi Valley was hot and wet, and the people transported there died of fevers in great number. One of the chatty letters written by Daniel Draffin, an Englishman Jacob Bieller hired to tutor his grandchildren, described the mosquitoes that flew in phalanx formation: “I have been out gunning when I could not take sight they were so numerous.” Mosquitoes loved all of the new blood; and there was plenty of it: 155,000 transported from the old slave states to the new ones in the 1820s, for instance, according to the best existing estimate. And other diseases besides malaria thrived in the radically new environment of the ghost acres. In 1832-33, cholera raged through the slave labor camps of Mississippi and Louisiana, carried on the same steamboats that brought new slaves in and took cotton out. At the “Forks in the Road,” the huge slave market just outside of Natchez, Isaac Franklin desperately hid the evidence of epidemic among his “fancy stock of wool and ivory,” as his cousin coarsely put it. “The way we send out dead negroes at night and keep dark is a sin,” wrote Isaac about secret burials in the woods behind his barracoon. He kept the secret hidden, and the price of men up at $700 per, until “I sold Old Man Alsop’s two scald headed boys for $800 one of them Took the Cholera the day afterwards and died and the other was very near kicking the Bucket.” During boom times in particular, death rates for the enslaved in the new southwestern states and territories were comparable to those in the Caribbean, or in the lowcountry of South Carolina.

Then there was simple failure, sometimes for reasons endemic to slavery’s new frontiers, sometimes not. Even as cotton markets soared in the 1830s, Jacob Bieller, for instance, plunged into his own personal crash. His daughter by his second marriage eloped with an ambitious young local lawyer named Felix Bosworth. She was only fifteen or so, but it seems likely that Bieller’s wife, Nancy, encouraged the elopement because she quickly left home to join her daughter, and began divorce proceedings—claiming half of Bieller’s property. According to Nancy, not only had Jacob threatened to shoot her in 1827, but for years “he kept a concubine in their common dwelling & elsewhere, publicly and openly.” (The courts of Louisiana declined to rule on either charge when they eventually granted the couple a divorce. Jacob’s last will gave tacit freedom “to my slaves Mary Clarkson and her son Coulson, a boy something more than five years old, both bright mulattoes.”)

In a moment of despair, Jacob wrote on the cover of a family bible that his daughter’s elopement had “destroyed my welfare, family, and prospects.” But it was clear that the ultimate hedge for him, for Nancy, and for Alvarez Fisk and Isaac Franklin, was the relative liquidity of enslaved people. (Bieller had recently purchased dozens of additional slaves on credit from Isaac Franklin, paying more than $1,000 each, bringing his total number of captives to over eighty). All he and Nancy had to debate about was the method—he wanted to sell all those determined to be community rather than separate property, and divide the cash. She wanted to divide the men, women, and children up, “scattering them,” she wrote, intentionally. Enslaved people, Nancy said, were “susceptible to a division in kind without injury to us.” Or to a sale, so long as the system was not in crisis and there was a steady market, Jacob could have retorted. Either way, the families of the almost one hundred people listed in Bieller’s documents would be melted like ice in his summer drink.

For everyone who drew profit in the system, enslaved human beings were the ultimate hedge. Cotton merchants, bankers, slave traders—everybody whose money the planter borrowed and could not pay until the time the cotton was sold at a high enough price to pay off his or her debts—all could expect that eventually enslaved people would either 1) make enough cotton to enable the planter to get clear or 2) be sold in order to generate the liquidity to pay off the debt. In 1824, Vincent Nolte, a freewheeling entrepreneur who almost cornered the New Orleans cotton market more than once in the 1810s, lent $48,000 to Louisiana-based enslaver Alonzo Walsh. The terms? Walsh had to pay the money back in four years at a rate of about eight percent. To secure payment he committed to consigning his entire crop each year to Nolte to be sold in Liverpool. And, just in case, he provided collateral: “from 90 to a 100 head of first rate slaves will be mortgaged.” In 1824 those nearly five score people meant up to $80,000 on the New Orleans auction block—a form of property whose value fluctuated less than bales of cotton.

Yet enslavers had already—by the end of the 1820s—created a highly innovative alternative to the existing financial structure. The Consolidated Association of the Planters of Louisiana (despite its name, the “C.A.P.L.” was still a bank) created more leverage for enslavers at less cost, and on longer terms. It did so by securitizing slaves, hedging even more effectively against the individual investors’ losses—so long as the financial system itself did not fail. Here is how it worked: potential borrowers mortgaged slaves and cultivated land to the C.A.P.L., which entitled them to borrow up to half of the assessed value of their property from the C.A.P.L. in bank notes. To convince others to accept the notes thus disbursed at face value, the C.A.P.L. convinced the Louisiana legislature to back $2.5 million in bank bonds (due in ten to fifteen years, bearing five percent interest) with the “faith and credit” of the people of the state. The great British merchant bank Baring Brothers agreed to advance the C.A.P.L. the equivalent of $2.5 million in sterling bills, and market the bonds on European securities markets.

The bonds effectively converted enslavers’ biggest investment—human beings, or “hands,” from Maryland and Virginia and North Carolina and Kentucky—into multiple streams of income, all under their own control, since all borrowers were officially stockholders in the bank. The sale of the bonds created a pool of high-quality credit to be lent back to the planters at a rate significantly lower than the rate of return that they could expect that money to produce. That pool could be used for all sorts of income-generating purposes: buying more slaves (to produce more cotton and sugar and hence more income) or lending to other enslavers. Clever borrowers could pyramid their leverage even higher—by borrowing on the same collateral from multiple lenders, by also getting unsecured short-term commercial loans from the C.A.P.L., by purchasing new slaves with the money they borrowed and borrowing on them too. They had mortgaged their slaves—sometimes multiple times, and sometimes they even mortgaged fictitious slaves—but in contrast to what Walsh had to promise Nolte in 1824, this type of mortgage gave the enslaver tremendous margins, control, and flexibility. It was hard to imagine that such borrowers would be foreclosed, even if they fell behind on their payments. After all, the borrowers owned the bank.

Using the C.A.P.L. model, slaveowners were now able to monetize their slaves by securitizing them and then leveraging them multiple times on the international financial market. This also allowed a much wider group of people to profit from the opportunities of slavery’s expansion. Perhaps it was no accident that the typical bond issued by the C.A.P.L. and the series of copycat institutions that followed was denominated at $1,000, which was roughly the price of a field hand. For the investor who bought it from the House of Baring Brothers or some other seller, a bond was really the purchase of a completely commodified slave: not a particular individual, but a tiny percentage of each of thousands of slaves. The investor, of course, escaped the risk inherent in owning an individual slave, who might die, run away, or become rebellious.

Between 1831 and 1834, for reasons about which historians have argued long and hard (without, alas, reaching consensus), President Andrew Jackson fought a brutal battle against the Second Bank of the United States. The Bank had pumped millions of dollars of loans into Mississippi and Louisiana in Jackson’s first term—almost half of the Bank’s total balance sheet was there by 1832—but it remained unpopular in the large sections of the southwest. Creditors are not always loved among those to whom they lend. Jackson vetoed the recharter of the B.U.S. in 1832, and won reelection that fall against a pro-Bank opponent. The next year, he ordered the transfer of the government’s deposits out of the Bank. Jackson claimed that by giving the B.U.S. effective control over the financial market, the federal government had made “the rich richer and the potent more powerful.” No doubt it had done so. But he distributed the deposits to a horde of so-called “pet banks”—state-chartered institutions that, at least initially, were run by his political allies—who in turn were often not members of the old cliques that had run the banks that the B.U.S. treated as favorites. In reaction, Biddle called in millions of dollars of loans, provoking a recession that began in late 1833. In early 1834, however, the B.U.S. had to concede and move on to doing business as a still large, but significantly shrunken ordinary bank. Now, nothing—no bank, no other institution—regulated the financial economy of the U.S.

The utopian faithful, more like Greenspan than like Keynes, have controlled both academic economics and economic policy-making over the last quarter-century. They have argued that a self-regulating market will unleash innovation, leading to the best possible outcome. The history of the 1830s, however, suggests otherwise—insisting, instead, that unregulated financial markets permit financial innovation that then leads to speculative bubbles. They in turn popped, as bubbles do. The consequences can be massive, complex, and lasting.

Economists of financial crisis such as the late Hyman Minsky and Charles Kindleberger (names unfashionable before 2008), argued that most historical bubbles contain three crucial elements: policymakers who believed markets were stable and did not need regulation; financial innovations that make it easier to create and expand the leverage of borrowers; and what economic writer John Cassidy helpfully shorthands as “New Era thinking typified by overconfidence and disaster myopia.” By “New Era thinking” he means those who believe that, to quote the title of another recent work on financial panics, “This Time is Different”—that the rules have changed and prices will continue to climb. Belief leads one to want to buy into speculation, even if one must assume large debts to do so, because one is confident that prices will keep rising and one can sell to some other buyer further down the road. In this way, every boom takes on aspects of a Ponzi scheme. “Disaster myopia,” meanwhile, refers to the common propensity of economic actors to underestimate both the likelihood and the likely magnitude of financial panic. The magnitude is exacerbated by the extent of indebtedness (entered into because of overconfidence) and the degree to which individual hedging and unregulated over-leveraging make it likely that pulling one card will bring down the whole structure.

The anti-B.U.S. elements in Jackson’s administration did not replace Biddle’s institution with any other check within the financial system, opening the way for all three developments. State politicians, to whom the ball was in effect handed, apparently assumed that nothing could go wrong. After 1832, the securitization, world-wide marketing, and multiple leveraging of enslaved people, pioneered by the C.A.P.L., proliferated. Across the southwest, cotton entrepreneurs created a series of banks, many of them far larger than the C.A.P.L. In 1832, the state of Louisiana chartered the Union Bank of Louisiana, which issued $7 million in state bonds. The bank contracted with Baring Brothers to sell them, and Baring sent some to their American partners, Prime, Ward, and King in New York City. Soon Union Bank securities were circulating in all the financial centers of Europe and North America. Next, in 1833, came the mammoth Citizens’ Bank of Louisiana, which was capitalized with an issue of $12 million in bonds that Hope and Company in Amsterdam agreed to market.

Still the Louisiana legislature churned out new bank charters. The New Orleans and Carrollton Railroad and Banking Company—$3 million. The New Orleans Gas Light and Banking Company—$6 million. And on and on, until, by 1836, New Orleans was, per resident, the U.S. city with the greatest density of bank capital—$64 million in all. Other states and territories in the area, self-consciously copying Louisiana, began to create new banks of their own, each one exploiting the loopholes of the now-unregulated system with innovative financial devices. Mississippi issued $15.5 million in state bonds to capitalize its own Union Bank. Alabama did not issue state bonds, but the Rothschilds, financiers of London and Paris and bitter rivals of the Baring Brothers, invested heavily in Alabama’s banking system. Florida sold $3 million dollars of bonds to capitalize its own Union Bank, and another million or so for smaller institutions. Arkansas, with almost no residents, did something similar. By the end of the 1830s, the state-chartered banks of the cotton-growing states had issued bonds for well over $50 million dollars.

Armed with repeated infusions of new cash lent by banks who handed it out with little concern for whether or not mortgaged slaves had already been “hypothecated”—assigned to someone else as a hedge against loans—southwestern enslavers brought tens of thousands of additional slaves into the cotton states. Some of the purchasers were long-time residents in states like Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. Some were new migrants fired by the “spirit of emigration,” the belief that “there is scarcely any other portion of the globe” that could permit “the slave holder or merchant of moderate capital” to convert said capital into a fortune. They calculated the money that they would make: from the labor of one “hand”—one enslaved person in a cotton field—”between three and four hundred dollars” a year, said one man who thought his expectations modest—”though some claim to make six or seven hundred dollars.” Not bad returns for an “asset” purchased for only two or three times that amount, which could also be mortgaged to produce multiple streams of income. So migrants and longterm residents alike trooped to the banks, mortgaged property (some of which, later critics would charge, did not even exist) and spent the credit they received. Huge amounts of money were shifted around: to slave traders, to the sellers of goods like food and cheap clothing, to slave owners in the Chesapeake who sold people to the southwest, to the banks in Virginia and elsewhere who took their slice of profit as the financiers of the domestic slave traders. By the time the decade was out, at least 250,000 enslaved men, women, and children had been shifted from the old terrain of slavery to the new. There they were set to work: clearing forests from which Native Americans had recently been evicted by Andrew Jackson’s policies; planting cotton seed; tilling it while the harvest neared.

A quarter million people were moved by force, sold, mortgaged, collateralized, securitized, sold again 3,000 miles from where they actually toiled. Each summer they learned how to pick the fields clean faster, at the end of a whip. From 1831 to 1837, cotton production almost doubled, from 300 million pounds to over 600 million. Too much was reaching Liverpool for Manchester to spin and weave, much less to sell to consumers in the form of cloth. Prices per pound at New Orleans, which had begun the boom in 1834 at eighteen cents, slipped to less than ten by late 1836. “Everybody is in debt neck over ears,” was the word from Alabama, but slave “traders are not discouraged”—many of their buyers believed that cotton prices would begin to climb again. They had no evidence to suggest a return to rising prices. Supply clearly exceeded demand. Yet here was the psychology, the animal spirits of the typical bubble at work, saying: this time is different. But as the slowing prices began to pinch, the Bank of England, alarmed at the outflow of capital to the U.S. in the form of securities purchases, cut its lending in the late summer of 1836. (At the about the same time, Andrew Jackson issued his Specie Circular, which slowed the purchases of public land, but appears to have had little effect on what transpired next in the cotton market.) Merchant firms subsequently began to call in their loans to each other.

In early 1837, a visitor to Florida, which was already—as it has ever been—one of the most bubble-prone and speculative parts of the U.S.—wrote that “there is great risk to the money lender and paper shaver—for the whole land, with very few exceptions, are all in debt for property and a fall in cotton must bring a crash with most tremendous consequences to all trades and pursuits.” Back in Britain, the crash had already begun. Three massive Liverpool and London firms, unable to meet their commercial debt because cotton prices had dropped, collapsed at the end of 1836. The tsunami rushed across the ocean to their trading partners in New Orleans. By late March each of the top ten cotton-buying firms there had collapsed.

Except for planters, who were mostly debtors, almost every market actor—cotton merchants, dry-goods merchants, Southern bankers, Northern bankers—now realized that they were both creditors and debtors. But as they scrambled to collect debts from others so that they could pay off their own, two things were happening. The first was that their individually rational pursuit of liquidity created the collectively irrational outcome of systemic failure. No one was able to pay debts, and so most buying and selling ground to a halt. An attempt to restart the system failed. A second, bigger crash in 1839 finished off many of the survivors of the 1837 panic. During those two years, meanwhile, a second consequence had emerged: the discovery that most of the debt owed by planters and those who dealt with them was “toxic,” to use a recent term. It was unpayable. The planters of Mississippi owed New Orleans banks alone $33 million, estimated one expert, and could not hope to net more than $10 million from their 1837 crop to pay off that debt. Nor could they sell off capital to raise cash because prices for slaves and land, the ultimate collateral in the system, had plummeted as the first wave of bankruptcy-driven sales tapped what little cash there was in the system. This meant that the financial system wasn’t just frozen, but that many creditors’ balance sheets were overwhelmed.

After the cotton-brokerage and plantation-supply firms, the next to go were the southwestern banks, whose currency and credit became worthless. They were unable to continue to make coupon payments—interest installments on the bonds they had sold on far-off securities markets. Some might have been able to collect from their debtors by foreclosing mortgages on slaves and land, but, of course, the markets for those two assets had collapsed. Many slave owners had layered multiple mortgages on each slave, meanwhile, and were using political leverage to protect them from the consequences of their financial over-leverage. The ultimate expression of this practice was the repudiation of the government-backed bonds by the legislatures of several southwestern states and territories, most notably Mississippi and Florida—in effect, they toxified the bonds themselves, emancipating slave-owning debtors from the holders of slave-backed securities. The power of the state had created the securitized slave, and now the power of the state destroyed it, in order to protect that slave’s owner from his creditors.

But not all debts could be repudiated. And many of the creditors were located in northern states. Their attempts to collect increasingly brought Southern planters to calculate the value of the Union. Nor could Southern entrepreneurs recapitalize their own institutions. After repudiation, outside investors were cautious about lending money to Southern institutions. In the 1830s it was still not clear where the center of gravity of the national financial economy was located—Philadelphia, home of the B.U.S., and New Orleans were both in contention. By the early 1840s, Wall Street and New York had emerged as the definitive victor. Slave owners continued to supply virtually all of the industrial world’s most important commodity, but the post-1837 inability of Southern planters to control their own financing or get the capital that would enable them to diversify led them to sacrifice massive skimmings of their profits to financial intermediaries and creditors. They sought greater revenues in the only ways that they could. The first was by making more and more cotton. They forced enslaved people to achieve an incredible intensity of labor, developed new kinds of seed, and expanded their acreage, but the increase in cotton production (which rose from 600 million pounds in 1837 to two billion in 1859) was more than the market could absorb. The price remained low in most years in comparison to historic levels.

The second method of enhancing revenues was by seeking new territory, both in order to add to the land under cultivation and with the hope of provoking a new boom. Unleashing the animal spirits of speculation in new territories had almost worked before, so why not try it again by acquiring California, Cuba, Mexico, or Kansas for slavery? The result of the commitment of political capital to that end, of course, was the Civil War, in which the consequences of the long-term financial difficulties of the cotton economy played a major role in Southern defeat.

Financial innovation in the 1820s and 1830s thus had massive, unforeseen, and often ironic consequences. But they were consequences in the “real” economy. Of course, there is something magical, fictitious, and strange about commodifying houses, land, and most of all, human beings. Each of those things has its own claim to being treated as something unique, with moral rights. The house acquires extra-financial value from the lives that are lived in it and which turn it into a home. Its market value depends, as well, on the domestic and family ideologies that “invest” it with more value than wood, stone, and skillful carpentry alone can supply. The land, still more immovable than the house, teems with claims, both human and non-human, historical and ecological. The securitization of a human is far more offensive still to our moral sensibilities, turning persons into numbers and paper bonds, and so dividing them up and recombining them by legislative fiat that you can carry them across the ocean in suitcases and sell them to people who profess their support for emancipation. If that isn’t fiction, then I don’t know what is. And yet in the end the reverberations set off by the leveraging of slavery’s inequities into further equity for those who exploited them were what brought the structure of real-life slavery crashing down.

Further reading

The records of Jacob Bieller and the people he brought to northeast Louisiana can be found in the Alonzo Snyder Papers at the Hill Library of Louisiana State University. Another excellent primary source that illuminates the issues discussed in this article is the R.C. Ballard Papers, located in the Southern Historical Collection of the University of North Carolina. A recent book that looks at the aftereffects of Andrew Jackson’s victory over the Second Bank of the United States is R.H. Kilbourne, Slave Agriculture and Financial Markets in Antebellum America: The Bank of the United States in Mississippi, 1831-1852 (London, 2006.) Kilbourne argues that the fall of the Bank made the ultimate calamity of 1837 inevitable.

A recent award-winning dissertation by Jessica Lepler—”1837: Anatomy of a Panic,” (Ph.D. Diss., Brandeis University, 2007)—recreates the collapse of the international economy. Perhaps the most significant book in recent years about world history on the grand scale is Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World-Economy (Princeton, 2000), which argues that “ghost acres” of southwestern cotton fields enabled Europe to break out of the “resource cul-de-sac” that trapped the Chinese economy before it could reach what scholars used to call the takeoff point of modernization.

Finally, an excellent introduction to the way that the economic profession has, over the past fifty years, increasingly hidden from the investigation of historical issues like panics and crises in the “utopian economics” of simple models and free-market panaceas is John Cassidy, How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities (New York, 2009).

This article originally appeared in issue 10.3 (April, 2010).

Edward E. Baptist is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University. He is writing a book on how the expansion of slavery in the nineteenth century shaped African America, the United States, and the world.

On a day in 1835, a young man named Harry Franco leaves his father’s house and sets out for New York from his native village, “a quiet little out-of-the-way place, about a day’s ride from one of the steamboat landings on the Hudson.” Harry’s father is a former merchant, ruined by the trade embargo imposed by Thomas Jefferson in the period of the Napoleonic Wars. He has therefore grown up in an impoverished backwater, his small “stock of knowledge” gleaned from reading his mother’s collection of novels. But Harry is spurred into leaving home by the sight of his wealthy cousin wearing a handsome coat with a fur collar. His plan is to find a position as a clerk in a New York counting house as the first step in his own social rise. After a series of picaresque escapades involving mint juleps, phrenologists, oyster-cellars, and a soiree at a Fire Engine Company which culminates in a “race with the machine,” Harry finally turns to the more mundane business of gaining employment. But when he applies for the post of clerk at a clothing store he is told that there are precisely “six hundred and eighty-three” other applicants.

Tocqueville’s men of small property belong to an antebellum lower middle class that lived in a state of gnawing anxiety and permanent suspense.

Harry is the hero of Charles F. Briggs’s novel, The Adventures of Harry Franco (1839), a popular morality tale about the perils of the financial world—perils which took multiple forms. Competition for places combined with the extreme volatility of financial markets to make it difficult for country boys like Harry Franco to be sure of their “prospects.” Just as unsettling was the pervasiveness of speculation, both as an economic practice and as a habit of mind, which made the telling of fact from fiction a tricky business. When Harry ventures into the financial district of Wall Street he finds the “walls of houses, the trunks of trees, the fences, and the lamp posts” plastered with “innumerable plans of lithographed towns and cities”—adverts for the so-called “imaginary cities” which were springing up in the fevered imaginations of property speculators and developers across the land. He then meets Mr. D. Wellington Worhoss, an impoverished congressman’s son, unemployed clerk, and aspiring author, who tells him that “getting rich fast” means “speculating in fast property.” As an example of “fast property,” Worhoss shows Harry a plan for the as yet unbuilt Gowannus City.

Harry jumps in, lending his entire savings of $1000 to Mr. Dooit, a commission agent for a New England hook and eye concern now, he says, “worth millions.” Dooit offers Harry “some endorsed paper as collateral security” which will pay one quarter per cent interest per day. Convinced of his credit—worthiness, Harry accepts instead Dooit’s own note, without “the collaterals.” Harry then promises to buy one hundred lots in the city of Communipaw, at one hundred dollars each, from Worhoss, with money he no longer has. They are, he is informed, “water lots,” consisting of divisions of the river, which “require nothing but merely to be filled up.” When Dooit fails to repay the loan, Harry is informed by a lawyer that his note “isn’t worth two straws.” Harry’s $1000 has dissolved into water and become as intangible as his prospects. “I was always hoping for something,” he tells us, mournfully, “I hardly knew what; a dim form, like the shadow of a desire, was ever before me.” 

Set in the period leading up to the 1837 Panic, Harry’s story resonates beyond its immediate historical moment and speaks to recurring concerns about the tendency of the financial market to establish its own characteristics of constant exchange, insecurity, and risk as the normal conditions of everyday life. Briggs’s novel shows that a market society is inherently unstable: economically, socially, spatially, and psychologically. One response by free, white men of modest means, disoriented—like the fictional Harry Franco—by the market’s instability, was to formulate new ideas about masculinity. Young men were urged by authors of a burgeoning advice literature to embrace market disequilibrium: to recast constant flux as an opportunity for both increased self-control and enhanced possibilities of self-realization.

Just how disoriented antebellum men were is brought out by Alexis de Tocqueville in his account of his travels through America in the 1830s. Tocqueville noticed “an innumerable multitude” of men like Harry Franco who were driven by equal amounts of anxiety and aspiration. Matching affect, or emotional register, to economic standing, Tocqueville described them as the “eager and apprehensive men of small property,” a “class” that is “constantly increased” by the “equality of conditions” he sees prevailing in America. Still “within the reach of poverty,” they “see its privations near at hand and dread them,” since “between poverty and themselves there is nothing but a scanty fortune.” This precarious position ensures that “[n]o one is fully contented with his present fortune; all are perpetually striving, in a thousand ways, to improve it.” All of these men are in a state of “ceaseless excitement,” like atoms in a constant, Brownian motion, “but each of them stands alone, independent and weak.”

Like Harry, Tocqueville’s men of small property belong to an antebellum lower middle class that lived in a state of gnawing anxiety and permanent suspense. Subordinate clerks in white collar occupations hoped to be elevated to the status of partner, while dreading the bureaucratic dead-end faced by Melville’s character, Bartleby the Scrivener, who is placed by his employer by a lightless window and made to copy endless reams of legal documents. Clerks performed a multitude of commercial tasks. They worked in the wholesale warehouses and dry goods stores which brought the new world of manufactured goods to customers. They filed, copied, and kept the accounts of the nation’s developing financial system in credit agencies, banks, insurance brokerages, auction firms, and merchant houses. Their handwriting skills were required to produce the multiple copies of the legal documents needed to maintain the market’s ceaseless circulation and exchange of goods, money, and property. Clerks were, in Scott Sandage’s words, the “shock troops of American capitalism.” But by the 1840s, some journalists and commentators were expressing concerns about the financial and emotional hardships endured by young men far from home in capitalism’s new, white collar world.

In August of 1846, Walt Whitman was visited in his office at the Brooklyn Eagle by “a young gentleman” who had just found himself “out of a ‘situation'” after a rise in the tariff provoked his wealthy employer to cut costs. Clerks, Whitman tells his readers, “receive the most miserable pittance for working like dray-horses,” receiving from $50 to $150 a year, “out of which they are expected to pay their board, and clothe themselves neatly.” Whitman is particularly concerned by “how rarely the employer enters with anything like friendly interest into the personal hopes, aims, and schemes of those who work for him.” These are young men of “spirit and ambition,” but their employer seldom “condescends to aid them, even by the cheap assistance of kind inquiry, or a word of sympathy and companionship!” There are no father figures in this harsh, commercial world. As Harry Franco finds, the “clerk market” is “overstocked,” leaving clerks to suffer the effects of competition: poor pay, unstable employment, and precious little emotional support in the workplace. These socioeconomic structures produce their own ontology, their own forms of knowledge and textures of lived experience, which it is the business of Briggs’s novel to represent. 

The key features of this world of relentless competition and exchange are instability and immateriality. When Harry returns to his boarding house after a period at sea he finds that “no house stood there now: a street had been cut through the very spot, and towering high brick stores, with square granite pillars, had sprung up all around it.” The entire social order is founded on a kind of generalized precariousness, in which all that is solid threatens—quite literally—to melt at any moment into air. But Harry’s sense of self is also curiously unanchored. If Harry is the classic ingénue or rural innocent, then Briggs draws attention to the ways in which he is both under-capitalized and dangerously adrift, “afloat on the wide world, ignorant of its ways, with no definite object of pursuit, and with but slender means of support.” Harry’s sense of self is linked to his economic status: a lack of solid capital and firm connections creates a peculiarly unmoored subjectivity. Harry is open to an experience which remains diffuse and cloudy, an experience which he cannot quite grasp.

Cultural and moral signposts were hard to discern in a society undergoing the transition to capitalism, which gradually replaced the rural household economy with the impersonal mechanisms of the market. In the mythos rehearsed in Briggs’s story, the young man leaves the farm for the city and leaves the father behind. He leaves behind a lifeworld based on simplicity, permanence, and patriarchal authority for an urban landscape which is complex and shifting, one in which the sources of authority are not so readily found. The father becomes a kind of revenant: an ashen, eclipsed figure. He still warms the abandoned hearth, but his version of manhood, based on the traditional republican virtues of honest industry and frugality, has, it seems, become redundant. In a metropolitan society based on buying and selling, on self-promotion and the search for a quick return, a new kind of masculine identity has to be fashioned. This issue is particularly pressing for Harry Franco, since he arrives in a New York City about to suffer the shocks of the 1837 financial panic.

In a pattern which was, as the Wall Street historian Steve Fraser observes, “so often repeated as to suggest some underlying pathology,” the long speculative boom of the 1830s turned suddenly and catastrophically into bust, triggered by the collapse of the brokerage house of J. & L. Joseph & Company. By April 8, New York City had witnessed the failures of banks and mercantile houses with combined debts exceeding $60 million. Propertied Americans watched helplessly as the value of their assets was eaten away by the savage deflation that followed hard on the heels of the panic. Money literally disappeared as panicked patrons rushed to the banks to exchange banknotes for specie, draining them of reserves. “[I]mmense fortunes,” the merchant Phillip Hone lamented, simply “melted away like snows before an April sun.” But the Panic also spurred a number of journalists, lecturers, and preachers to formulate a new ethic of masculine independence, one capable of meeting the challenges of the market. Prominent among these “apostles of the self-made man” was Henry Ward Beecher.

The financial crisis came at a particularly inopportune moment in Beecher’s career. Twenty-four years old, Beecher had just taken the post of pastor to the First Presbyterian Church of Lawrenceburgh, Indiana, and married his fiancée, Eunice Bullard, of Massachusetts. Their first home together is described by Beecher’s biographer, Debby Applegate, as “two filthy rooms above a warehouse near the wharf, overlooking a backyard filled with old junk and sewage.” Beecher had been given a salary of $300 which, Applegate observes, amounted to little more than the seventy-five cents a day earned by laborers on the nearby Whitewater Canal. Anticipating a raise, Beecher bought furnishings to make his shabby home tolerable, in the process running up debts all over the town. When the shock-waves of the Panic reached Lawrenceburgh, Beecher’s no-nonsense parishioners began to accuse him of “fine living,” and complained that he spent more time fishing or loafing around the cracker barrel than on pastoral visits. Suitably chastened, Beecher told his journal that he would mend his ways and try to “diminish self-estimation.” By 1840, he had begun a new ministry at the Second Presbyterian Church of Indianapolis. In December 1843, Beecher began a series of weekly lectures on the vices menacing the youth of the city which were published as book the following year. Seven Lectures to Young Men sold an impressive 3000 copies in its year of publication, and went into forty editions over the next fifty years. 

The Panic forms the omnipresent background to Beecher’s lectures. Beecher invites his readers to feel that they are playing a major role in an apocalyptic drama, one in which their own moral integrity will be tested. “The violent fluctuations of business,” he declares, have covered the ground with “rubbish over which men stumble; and fill the air with dust, in which all the shapes of honesty appear distorted.” “The scheming speculations of the last ten years,” Beecher thunders, “have produced an aversion among the young to the slow accumulations of ordinary Industry,” meaning that now, “manhood seems debilitated.” Americans’ ties to home have been broken by the new commercial order: they have become “a migratory, restless people,” with almost every young man making “annual, or biennial visits to famous cities; conveying produce to market, or purchasing wares and goods.” Young men have become addicted to “gadding, gazing, lounging, mere pleasure-mongering,” with their moral and physical character severely vitiated as a result. Impatient for wealth, they have learnt to become proficient in “gambling stakes, and madmen’s ventures.”

Beecher sees gambling everywhere: it produces a constant background hum. The “clatter of dice and cards” can be heard on river boats and in hotels, as well as in stores and in artisans’ workshops, while at night the “secreted lamp dimly lights the apprentices to their game.” Clerks are particularly vulnerable to gambling’s delusive spell—men such as the “young cashier,” who cannot “pay the drafts of his illicit pleasures” from his “narrow salary,” and so is tempted into “brilliant speculations” which, “vampire-like,” haunt him in dreams. He embezzles money from his employer, until, worn down by shame, he “slinks out of life a frantic suicide.” Speculation, formerly a specialized vice, has become a normal part of everyday life, the defining activity of an expanding market society, and a chief corrupter of young men.

Honest labor, by contrast, polishes the faculties “[a]s use polishes metals,” so that the body “performs its unimpeded functions with elastic cheerfulness,” knowing the “manly joy of usefulness.” Industry “gives character and credit to the young,” no small matter in a commercial society where creditors use a man’s reputation to determine whether he will be a safe investment. Traditional virtues of “veracity, frugality, and modesty,” Beecher insists, can still serve a young man in a modern economy. In a world of indolent sluggards addicted to idle amusements and surface impressions, it still pays to be early-rising, hard-working, and prudent. Better to be a patient plodder than a conceited loafer, or a burnt-out case.

But beyond the enumeration of these virtues, the essence of manhood remains elusive. It’s as though, for Beecher, manhood is something known negatively, by what it is not, rather than what it might actually be. In all the reversals and the derangements of commerce there is no more terrible spectacle than a man “wrecked with his fortune.” Manhood is something intangible and precious, a quality that must be preserved, saved from the wreckage wrought by financial panics. “Can anything be more poignant in anticipation,” Beecher asks, “than one’s ownself, unnerved, cowed down and slackened to utter pliancy, and helplessly drifting and driven down the troubled sea of life?” Instead, he urges his reader to “stand composedly in the storm, amidst its rage and wildest devastations,” and “let it beat over you, and roar around you, and pass by you, and leave you undismayed.” Simply to do this is “to be a MAN,” since “[a]dversity is the mint in which God stamps upon us his image and superscription.” 

Beecher confronts head-on the problem in all injunctions to virtue: that the picture they paint of vice is more compelling and attractive than the staid, dutiful path of righteousness. In towns and cities, the young man continually comes into contact with “a very flash class of men,” “swol[le]n,” or puffed up clerks, “crack sportsmen, epicures, and rich, green youth.” His vivid experiences at the theatre, the circus, and the race track cause him to loathe “industry and didactic reading.” Beecher combats this threat by offering a point of anchorage for market culture’s unmoored subjectivity. In the floating world of antebellum capitalism, reality is one densely woven veil of illusion: speculative schemes, fictitious capital, paper promises, counterfeit notes. The young man treads his perilous way amid a “mimic glow,” a painted Paradise. The devilish serpent in this garden of illusory delights is the Tempter, the “dangerous m[a]n” who lies in wait to snare the young man “by lying, by slander, by over-reaching and plundering him.” The commercial world is one in which copies proliferate: the young man, seeing the brilliant wit, is “smitten with the itch of imitation,” driven to emulate “the smooth smile, the roguish twinkle, the sly look.”

Faced with this threat, Beecher reiterates his message: take the plunge and enter the market’s storm, but, having done so, buckle down, shun the superficial, the illusory, and the transient; seek the enduring and the real by patient endeavour. This is a lower-middle-class ethics of scarcity: the self’s resources must be guarded, husbanded, nurtured, and preserved in a society in which all is deceitful appearance, and constantly slipping away. To turn away from plain and prudent habits, to deck oneself with “[c]opper-rings, huge blotches of breastpins, wild streaming handkerchiefs, jaunty hats, odd clothes, superfluous walking-sticks, ill-uttered oaths, stupid jokes, and blundering pleasantries,” is to violate the essential integrity of the self, to corrupt its innermost sanctity and leave it vulnerable to further losses.

In valuing the self so passionately, Beecher supplies the affective or personal bonds Whitman found to be missing in the white collar world of the new commercial order. He fills the paternal space left empty by the eclipse of the household economy, providing a moral compass for young men in the post-patriarchal world of the market. “I stood by your side when you awoke in the dark valley of conviction, and owned yourselves lost,” Beecher tells the young man. The kind of virtual fellowship he offers, achieved through the medium of print, is “not commercial, not fluctuating.” Father figures and human fellowship have been swept away by the market’s atomizing force: in their place are the popular lecture and the mass market book.

But what is striking, finally, about Seven Lectures is its panicky emphasis on failure rather than success. Why, as historian Clifford Clark asked more than thirty years ago, should something as innocuous as “idleness or inactivity” appear to be so threatening? Why should an interest in recreation or the pursuit of leisure create such a sense of fear and foreboding? The answer, I think, is that Beecher’s appeal was to Tocqueville’s men of small property: precarious, lower-middle-class individuals, whose economic, moral, and cultural capital needed to be jealously guarded and preserved against the vicissitudes of the market, just to ensure that a life in the market might be possible at all.

If Beecher offers to treat lower-middle-class precariousness in an ethical and affective register, then The Adventures of Harry Franco addresses that precariousness by offering a fantasy resolution to its hero’s predicament. Harry eventually finds employment at the counting house of Mr. Marisett. As personal assistant to Marisett, Harry learns the value of “industry and punctuality,” and of “shrewdness and honorable dealing.” Finding that “[c]opying mercantile letters is a dull business,” Harry nevertheless sits up half the night writing in his room. He also falls in love with Marisett’s niece, Georgiana De Lancey, and attends prayer meetings with her. At a social gathering, he comes across his sneering cousin, now a speculator who has made a fortune by selling his own father’s land for building lots. This time, though, Harry is able to resist the lure of emulation.

Speculation, formerly a specialized vice, has become a normal part of everyday life, the defining activity of an expanding market society, and a chief corrupter of young men.

On a business trip to New Orleans to buy up cotton, Harry is tested by the stresses and confusions of the approaching Panic, almost succumbing to the city’s atmosphere of “strange, daring recklessness,” which is strangely “mixed up” with “despondency and apprehension.” Tempted by the option of gambling with the firm’s remaining money at the faro table, he overhears a preacher intoning a sermon from the Book of Revelation, makes his conversion to Christianity, and returns to New York. There, he finds Marisett a broken man, who “couldn’t survive the loss of his credit.” Even surrogate fathers cannot preserve their manhood in a world this unstable; the task of self-preservation must be assumed by sons, who must learn to survive by their own unaided efforts.

Searching for news of Georgiana in the Five Points, Harry comes across another discredited familial figure, his cousin, who has also been ruined by the Panic, his clothes now “shabby,” his face “pale and haggard,” with a “wild and desperate look.” Later, we learn that he has committed suicide. Harry is destined for better things. He marries Georgiana, who inherits property from her rich uncle, together with a “considerable estate” from her mother. They move back to Harry’s hometown—now called Franco Ville, since his father’s modest and shrewd real estate dealings have helped to create a new prosperity—and live happily in the restored homestead, “in the enjoyment of blessings innumerable.”

Briggs’s resort to the fail-safe of fantasy reveals wider cultural tensions. Clerks were encouraged by advisors like Beecher to experience economic structures as avenues for agency, to see the playing out of market forces as so many opportunities to pull up one’s bootstraps. In an anonymous, impermanent world, one had to take what historian Michael Zakim identifies as “ethical responsibility towards one’s own well-being.” Faced with life on the roller coaster ride of the market, the antebellum lower middle class developed a preference for sentiment and sympathy, for inspiring sermons and uplifting lectures, rather than socio-economic analysis. But the need simply to survive, to retool the self in line with marketplace contingency, generated an abiding paradox. It was the market which set young men adrift to re-make themselves, while the intense preoccupation with self that drift engendered prevented the market’s shaping, determining role from being grasped. It is the market which both offers the possibility of a life of power and purpose for the privileged and the lucky, and, for the rest, takes that possibility away. While men of small property pursue the arduous, incremental gains of self-improvement, it is Worhoss the speculator who thrives on Wall Street.

Further reading

An e-text of Charles Frederick Briggs’s The Adventures of Harry Franco: A Tale of the Great Panic (New York, 1839) is available at the University of Virginia, Early American Fiction collection. For more information on Briggs, see Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville (New York, 1956).

Henry Ward Beecher’s Seven Lectures to Young Men on Various Important Subjects: Delivered Before the Young Men of Indianapolis, Indiana, During the Winter of 1843-4 (Indianapolis and Cincinnati, 1844) is available at the Internet Archive. On Beecher, see Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York, 2006); Clifford Clark, “The Changing Nature of Protestantism in Mid-Nineteenth Century America: Henry Ward Beecher’s Seven Lectures to Young Men,” Journal of American History 57:3 (1971) 832-46. Alexis de Tocqueville’s portrait of “men of small property” is in Democracy in America, Volume 2, trans. Henry Reeve (New York, 1990), 251-63. Whitman’s article, “Junior Clerks,” appeared in the Brooklyn Eagle, 4 Sept, 1846, and can be found in The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: The Journalism, Vol. 2, edited by Herbert Bergman (New York, 2003).

On the antebellum lower middle class, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York, 1986). Scott A. Sandage’s Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, Mass., 2005) presents a vivid picture of life in the antebellum market economy. On the 1837 Panic, see Steve Fraser, Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life (New York, 2006); Edward J. Balleisen, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commerical Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, 2001). On clerks, see Thomas Augst, The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, 2003), and Michael Zakim, “The Business Clerk as Social Revolutionary,” Journal of the Early Republic 26:4 (2006) 563-603. On clerks and gambling, see Ann Fabian, Card Sharps and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1999). On changing conceptions of manhood in the early republic and antebellum period, see Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, 1998); E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993); David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca, 1989).

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

Andrew Lawson is Senior Lecturer in English at Leeds Metropolitan University. He is the author of Walt Whitman and the Class Struggle (2006) and is currently writing a book on downward social mobility and literary realism in the nineteenth century.

The birth of an underwriting society

Part I

In early June of 1721, near Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia, John Copson became the first American to open an insurance office. Strictly speaking, Copson was a broker of marine policies, decreasing the costs of bringing buyers and sellers of insurance (also called “assurances”) together. The role meant that he was responsible for a more complex and more historically revealing array of services than one might suppose. Like other perceptive businessmen of his time, Copson was adept at capitalizing on new arenas of self-promotion—particularly pubs, coffee and tea houses, and the newspaper. Moving from these venues, Copson became a clearinghouse of social assurances, representing as he says, the “integrity” and “reputation” of the underwriters “in this city and province” to prospective policyholders.

In so doing, he marketed a product that helped to define and broaden what it meant to be both civic-minded and self-interested. This was because Copson’s market can be seen, depending on how one chooses to analyze it, as a function of the republican world of public service or as a product of the growing world of self-aggrandizing commerce. And it can be viewed in both these ways because of the conceptual peculiarities of insurance itself. Insurance—as we see played out in post-Katrina debates about public responsibilities versus private capabilities—has always resisted its formulation as an exclusively private or public method of improvement and safety. It is of service to neither individuals nor to society, but rather to both. Insurance may protect the distinct interests of property owners; but at the same time, it saves society from the costs of failure and destitution. Copson implied as much in an advertisement from the May 25, 1721, American Weekly Merchant.

Assurances from Losses happening at Sea ect. [sic] being found to be very much for the Ease and benefit of the Merchants and Traders in general, and whereas the merchants of this city of Philadelphia and other parts, have been obliged to send to London for such Assurance, which has not only been tedious and troublesome, but even very precarious. For remedying of which, An Office of Publick Insurance on Vessels, Goods and Merchandizes, will, on Monday next, be Opened, and Books kept by John Copson of this City, at this House in the High Street, where all Persons willing to be Insured may apply: And Care shall be taken by the said J. Copson That the Assurors or Underwriters be Persons of undoubted Worth and reputation and of considerable Interest in this City and Province.

One is struck by the term “public insurance.” To the contemporary ear, the phrase might sound contradictory, suggesting a quaint and outmoded notion of common welfare. But it does the important work of bridging private interests and public virtue in a way that seemed quite natural to Copson and his customers.

That customary connection fostered significant changes to many social and cultural practices of colonial America. For instance, the discourse of safety pioneered by the insurance industry brought about important transformations in urban design, architecture, and public health. The assurances of underwriting derived from forms of public knowledge (from actuarial statistics to commercial news) and law (from contract theory to municipal fire codes) that contributed in turn to the conservation of private property. With the impetus of insurance and its private methods of managing property, government saw fit to promote public infrastructure projects that provided shipping and trade amenities—roads, harbors, and wharves—all of which made cargo shipping and early industrial equipment safer and more efficient.

Part II

Like the story of John Copson’s waterfront office, the broader history of the insurance business in colonial America appears deceptively informal. But beneath that informality, so typical of early modern business, lies the rise of an effective and powerful industry that would shape America’s national finances.

Insurance underwriting began its colony-wide rise in the northeast as a result of the growth of transatlantic shipping. While Copson was the first to open a marine insurance office, he was soon followed by others including Francis Rawle, Joseph Saunders, and John Kidd. Kidd was one of six members of the partnership agreement of the first American marine insurance company with “surviving bylaws,” drawn up in Philadelphia toward the end of the 1750s. That company included in its list of partners Thomas Willing, who would go on to be president of the Bank of North America and the First Bank of the United States, and Robert Morris, the superintendent of finance for the Continental Congress.

At midcentury, the hub of underwriting in Philadelphia had become the London Coffee House on the banks of the Delaware River, close to Penn’s Landing. “By 1758,” historian Mary Ruwell notes, “the Insurance Office at the Coffee House had two clerks on duty every day from noon to one and from six to eight at night to take care of writing out policies of insurance and securing underwriting signatures . . . [B]y the end of the eighteenth century, Philadelphia merchants had used the services of at least 150 private underwriters subscribing in about 15 insurance brokerage offices.”

Boston’s marine insurance scene began not long after Philadelphia’s. Joseph Marion, a notary, opened an agency in 1724, thereby breaking free of the coffee house “office.” In the beverage-free office, Marion retained the relatively low-pressure method of linking underwriters with vessel owners: the policy was left on a table for underwriters to pursue as they wished. What Marion pioneered was a kind of full-service emporium where insurance buyers and underwriters could meet and do business.

Marion was still in business as late as 1745, though there is scant evidence to establish just how substantial his business was. Benjamin Pollard opened an office in Boston in 1739 with the innovative practice of systematically procuring the underwriters and their capital in advance, rather than waiting for the random connections that happen in the coffee-house or pub settings. Pollard’s unique service was to forge commercially branded intellectual and civic connections, demonstrating just how powerfully knowledge and social capital became the foundation of insurance underwriting.

Perhaps the most successful Boston underwriter in the pre-Revolutionary period was Ezekiel Price. A notary like Pollard and Marion, Price is described by historian William Fowler as “the archetypal insurance man—he knew everyone and everything.” In colonial New York City, it was the Beekman family that pioneered marine insurance. Already important merchants, the Beekmans saw marine underwriting as a profitable and somewhat logical diversification. Their prior mercantile activities meant that they were comfortable in all aspects of the business, acting as brokers, consumers, and underwriters.

Colonial American fire insurance is a newer phenomenon, beginning its development in the mid-eighteenth century. Part of the reason the business took longer to evolve was the longevity requirements of a credible fire insurance business. Unlike ship underwriting, which could be sustained by loose networks of underwriters and which insured ships that could complete their voyages in weeks or months and thus complete the term of the policy, fire insurers underwrote houses and buildings, which could ride out the terms of a policy over the course of decades. Firms needed to be well capitalized and less partner driven, which is why mutuals (in which the policyholders are also the owners of the company) were often the best form for fire-insurance concerns.

The first mutual society in the colonies was established in Charleston in 1735 and was called the Friendly Society. The private underwriters were unable to build adequate reserves, and in 1741, a large fire wiped out the firm. The first truly successful fire-insurance company was Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia Contributionship, begun in 1751 and, by 1781, responsible for about two thousand policies worth almost $2 million. Fire insurance companies were more likely than banks to have substantial cash reserves, allowing them to play a vital role as lending institutions, funding both private and public enterprise.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, American insurance underwriting was becoming a relatively prosperous industry. But, despite the growth of the underwriting business in Philadelphia, and indeed the colonies at large, the bulk of the colonial underwriting business continued to go to London’s better-financed companies. Monetary capital, in the form of the numerous individual underwriters to be found in a place like Lloyd’s Coffeehouse, was just too scarce in the colonies.

This changed by the 1790s for a number of macro- and microeconomic reasons. The essential components of thriving underwriting communities, what Fowler refers to as “information, capital, and men willing to act as underwriters,” reached critical mass in the 1790s. This development was of a piece with Alexander Hamilton’s successful efforts to establish national capital markets through the Bank of the United States, the extension of new forms of credit, and the first steps in centralizing the national monetary system. Insurance companies were no less important than banks in this nationalizing of capital markets and the building up of a healthy belief in solid credit instruments.

In short, insurance underwriting gained influence in the political and cultural development of the new nation because it became a primary source of finance capital. Once capital markets began depending on the business for credit, insurance companies were able to write riskier policies and expand into new insurance markets.

If there was an easy congruence between the needs of capital markets and the inherent fundraising capacities of fire and marine insurance, life insurance was a different matter. The main reason for this was moral. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the boundary between life insurance and mere gambling had been unclear. This was most obvious in the widespread practice in England of buying a life insurance policy on somebody other than one’s self—a soldier, a sea captain, a prominent statesman. By the end of the eighteenth century, the British had outlawed this practice; Americans soon followed suit. With this prohibition on third-party life insurance policies, the cloud of immorality that had hung over life insurance was lifted. Moralizers could no longer claim that the practice encouraged a macabre disregard for life, and underwriters could defend life insurance for its obvious humanitarian value. Now, the beneficiaries were not simply gamblers but women, children—the dependents of the deceased. With these large moral shifts, the business began to flourish.

Taken together, the rise of marine, fire, and life insurance is the story of a massive but intricately articulated industry. It spread its influence across the vast geography of America and into the most intimate spaces of American lives. Insurance came to dominate not only the planning and decisions made by cities, towns, and individuals but also the deeper structural fates of various components of the American economy—from slavery to pension funds to public welfare. What that meant as a social phenomenon is manifest for an alert pedestrian looking upward in any major American city—insurance company buildings are among a modern city’s tallest, signifying in their opaque reflections a monumental bureaucratic success.

But what insurance underwriting meant in other ways, as both artifact and method, is not so obvious. How did Copson’s new marketplace of personal assurances and public insurance affect other areas of American cultural and social life? How and why did we become an underwriting nation? What cultural logic and political stratagems were at work? And what does it mean to say we are an “underwriting society”?

Part III

When one takes seriously the word “underwriting,” a more developed cultural analysis that helps to explain the power of insurance in American life becomes possible.

I want to end this brief essay with some speculative conceptualizations, using the idea of “underwriting” as a kind of poetics. I hope such abstract descriptions help to explain a little better the less tangible effects of America’s insurance history. First, I think it’s necessary to ask: what concepts might be said to underwrite the underwriters? To answer this question it is crucial to look to the early use of money as a practical symbol in the transatlantic sphere. Indeed, the emergence of not only new forms of money and new methods of accounting but also the concepts that made possible these monetary instruments and commercial practices reveal the complexity of value—as represented by paper, coin, credit, and assorted other instruments of worth. Literary critic Marc Shell, in Money, Language, and Thought, notes that when the uniform use of paper money as national currency began in the United States, it sparked a discussion of the critical symbolic functions of coinage and printed money. He goes on to show how historical conceptualizations of literature and money have been strangely similar. Shell’s point is equally true for insurance, a manifestation of the conceptual workings of property, text, and value.

To describe both the emergence of paper currency and the growth of insurance underwriting is to delineate in all its tenacity the determination of monetary capital to harness unreliable experience, to once and for all channel risk and instability into material (or at least textual) certainties. A major part of that delineation involves the very notion of the imaginative text. Shell posits (and indeed it is a major premise of not only Marxist and classical economic thinking about specie, commodities, and paper money but also much older theological theories of money) that the history of language and money revolve around a common problem: the creation of symbolic value (what we’ve come to call “meaning”) out of an irreducible absence.

Historian of mathematics Brian Rotman, in Signifying Nothing, shows how modern forms of money have been primed in crucial ways by the arithmetic evolution of the symbol for nothing, zero. As a concept that can be traced back to an absence in the signifying chain, money (whether coin or paper) bases its power on the introduction of the concept of zero into Western modes of economic thinking.

Money, in whatever form, presupposes a conservationist dynamic that promises an assurance of value. Economic actors—those who, in the most basic sense, are counters—form relationships with numerical hypotheses. The counting subject, John Copson’s customer for instance, must be comfortable with the idea of both wealth and debt; but, in a critical development, he does not have to accept the inevitability of loss and absence. This is where insurance appears as an important episode in the story of money’s conceptual relation to the manufacture of real values from what might seem like nothing at all.

But insurance does this in the opposite way from circulating currency. By force of artifice, printed money extracts worth from that creative idea of nothing, without which Western modes of capitalism might never have developed as powerfully as they have. Underwritten property (a form of fiduciary or entrusted money) represents, however, the obverse of this creative circuit. Insurance underwriting seeks to efface zero from the realm of material property, thus placing an artificial stabilizer on property. Rather than creating value out of nothing, it preserves value (or meaning or property). Insurance underwriting is a crucial means of assuring that money’s numbers refer to countable values that will not—indeed cannot—disappear. Copson’s customers, it would seem, got more than liability insurance or a new profit possibility—they found a new kind of stability in an increasingly doubtful world.

Because it is in essence a “writing business,” insurance invites comparisons and critical connections with the methods and genres of nonbusiness writing—whether dictionaries or grammars or poetic elegies, whether autobiography or advertisements for public financing or fictional responses to accidents. Thus, the questions that circulate through the history of insurance are wrought in critically productive ways in the literature of Phillis Wheatley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville, as well as the textual projects of Noah Webster and, of course, Benjamin Franklin. Here the echoes of commercial life are located in tropes of loss and possession, themes of anxiety and risk, and the evolving and intricately cross-calibrated mechanics of self-mastery and genius. These authors are but strong cases in a wider cultural logic in which business discourses persistently challenge and assist literary conventions. As a practice that translates material commodities and their fate as underwriter’s contracts into real value, insurance asks us to grasp what ownership, in all its senses, might mean for American writers as well as American businessmen.

After all, when we go deeper into the cultural methods of John Copson’s economic milieu, we find not only novel ways of turning profits. Maybe more important, we find original ways of thinking about the individuals and groups that were able to realize those material gains. Here, in the underwritten colonial world, are newly visible texts of self-identity, imaginative possibility, and public expression.

Further Reading:

For the history of economic institutions, particularly insurance enterprises in colonial America, I have relied heavily on a number of histories. Among the most import are: John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard’s, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill, 1985): 347-48; Mary Elizabeth Ruwell’s, Eighteenth Century Capitalism: The Formation of American Marine Insurance Companies (New York, 1993); William H. Fowler, “Marine Insurance in Boston: The Early Years of the Boston Marine Insurance Company, 1799-1807,” in Conrad Edick Wright and Katheryn P. Viens, eds., Entrepreneurs: The Boston Business Community, 1700-1850 (Boston, 1997): 151-180; C. Mitchell Bradford, A Premium on Progress: An Outline History of the American Marine Insurance Market, 1820-1970 (New York, 1970); Thomas M. Doerflinger’s A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill, 1986); and, finally, Edwin J. Perkins’s superb history, American Public Finance and Financial Services, 1700-1815 (Columbus, 1994).

For those interested in recent renditions of the relationship between economics and literature, see Martha Woodmansee’s and Mark Osteen’s collection, The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics (New York, 1999), as well as Marc Shell’s work in Art and Money (Chicago, 1995); Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Baltimore, 1993); and The Economy of Literature (Baltimore, 1978).

The study of the rise of finance capital and its relationship to the novel has been especially vigorous in British eighteenth-century studies. See James Thompson, Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham, N.C., 1996); Colin Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1994); Samuel L. Macey, Money and the Novel: Mercenary Motivation in Defoe and His Immediate Successors (Vancouver, 1983). For accounts not exclusively limited to the eighteenth century, see John Vernon, Money and Fiction: Literary Realism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984) and Anthony Purdy, ed., Literature and Money (Atlanta, 1993).

This article originally appeared in issue 7.1 (October, 2006).

Eric Wertheimer is an associate professor of American literature at Arizona State University. His first book, Imagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, and the New World of American Literature, 1771-1876, was published in 1998 by Cambridge University Press. The essay here is drawn from Underwriting: the Poetics of Insurance in America, 1722-1872 (2006). With Jennifer Baker, he is coediting a special issue of Early American Literature, dedicated to economic criticism in early American literary studies.

Surrounded on all sides by predatory lenders, rapid refund tax shops, and multinational credit card companies “charging interest on interest,” we might stop to notice the lowly pawnbroker. Unlike those other firms, “pawnbrokers provide clear information about loan terms;” they are explicit on “the interest rate and any additional fees being charged, when the loan will come due, and how much money in total is required to retrieve collateral” (186). Nonetheless, the corporate entities which dominate the current landscape of lending and credit enjoy far more social legitimacy than the maligned and stigmatized pawnbroker. In In Hock, Wendy A. Woloson forces us to abandon our misconceptions about the world of pawnbroking, as she provides us with a fully realized and nuanced account of a profession and a set of practices that have “occasionally intersected with, sometimes subverted, and often circumvented wholesale and retail exchange” (3).

Woloson’s well-written book, complete with fascinating image reproductions, is both an economic and a social history of the pawnshop that contains running threads of the history of crime, policing and anti-Semitism in the United States. Both the pawnbroker and the pawner are given the benefit of three-dimensionality, to erase the flat stereotype of the pawnshop as the location where the vice-ridden and the gullible are taken advantage of by the heartless and the parasitic. It is the dismantling and replacement of the crude caricature of the world of pawning and brokering that is the principle ambition of In Hock. Ultimately, Woloson leaves her reader with the understanding that, far from being antagonistic and exploitative transactions, exchanges of objects for short term loans have often been cooperative interactions, rooted in trust between the working poor who were trying to meet their needs, and pawnbrokers who were trying to make a living.

Woloson argues that the negative stereotypes associated with pawnbrokers originated with anti-Semitic attitudes and prejudices. The history of ideas related to loaning money at interest, and the development of money-lending as a Jewish profession, culminate in the despised character of Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. This “most famous and notorious Jewish character” first appeared on an American stage in 1752 in Virginia. The vulgar depiction of the Jewish money-lender quickly fused with the depiction of the pawnbroker, and throughout the nineteenth century, the pawnbroker was portrayed in novels, newspapers and cartoons as a hook-nosed opportunist. “Works of popular culture had largely succeeded in creating a coherent, seemingly logical stereotype: the pawnbroker had become implicitly the Jewish pawnbroker—the Jew broker—and as Jews and pawnbrokers became increasingly stigmatized, the stereotypes reinforced each other” (37). Despite the popular conception of the pawnbroker as Jewish, Woloson shows that the profession actually included significant numbers of Irish Americans, as well as American-born Protestants.

Regardless of who was engaged in the business, the very nature of the business seemed to contradict the United States’s conception of itself, and thus the broker and the pawner were to remain objects of a derision that went beyond ethnic prejudice. “Pawnbrokers were aliens in a commercial world populated by supposedly moral and upright Christian entrepreneurs, and the very nature of the business set it apart from ‘normal’ economic dealings. The antithesis of merchants, pawnbrokers doled out money instead of taking it in, profiting from customers who lacked capital rather than possessed it” (29). In contrast to the optimism embedded in the purchase of an item from a normal retail store, pawning was viewed as an “aberrant act.” In the world of pawning, “Items that were once indicators of hope, economic vitality, and physical comfort became, as collateral, markers of a downward fall, loss of prospects, alienation” (30). Yet despite the common view of the pawnshop as a perversion of normal economic activity within capitalism, Woloson steadily argues that the pawnshop was a necessary outgrowth of capitalism, and should be “understood as a manifestation of capitalism’s inherent inequalities” (53).

Throughout the book, Woloson offers examples of people who turned to pawning as a means of survival in an economic system that left the working poor unable to meet basic needs such as food and shelter. A material item could be exchanged for cash and a pawn ticket. The loans themselves carried interest rates lower than that which we might encounter with a contemporary credit card company. If the loan along with the interest was repaid on schedule, then the item was “redeemed” to its original owner. If the pawner could not pay the entire loan amount on schedule, then he or she could pay the interest in order to extend the loan and prevent the item from being resold. The pawnbroker’s intention in the transaction was for the item to be redeemed, rather than resold. Woloson argues that pawning was often a rational, manageable transaction, rather than an effort to prolong a gambling or drinking binge, or some other act of desperation. A person might pawn an item to engage in a new business venture, to meet a payroll, or to provide for a family until a crop comes in. According to Woloson, “Artisans’ collateral yielded relatively high loans,” as “Carpenters’ saws, masons’ trowels, and leather workers’ punches found easy conversion into capital during periodic lulls in work, often yielding enough money to tide families over entire seasons of unemployment” (90).

Pawning practices were often seasonal or rhythmic in nature. Customers pawned and redeemed in regular patterns. “Often, women ‘put in’ the family’s Sunday best on Monday morning in order to cover the week’s food and rent, redeeming the clothes Saturday night for the next day’s church services” (94). The pawnbrokers, many of them having been in the business for multiple generations, often built up relationships of trust with their customers, choosing to extend loans even when the items offered for collateral were nearly worthless. Items that went unredeemed were usually funneled by the brokers into secondary and tertiary markets for used goods, ultimately serving to meet the needs of the same poor communities in which the items were originally pawned. “Although pawnbroking played a crucial role in the development of capitalism, it harked back to earlier economies in which economic and social relationships were interlinked” (85).

Perhaps the most commonly pawned item of the nineteenth century was the timepiece. Countless Americans, including Ulysses S. Grant, traded one for a short-term loan at one point or another. Woloson’s writing on the pawning of timepieces, and the interplay between the emergence of the need for keeping track of time under capitalism, together with her characterizations of pawning as a means of “buying time,” amounts to some of the finest and most insightful writing in the book. Less illuminating is Woloson’s exploration of pawnbroking and criminal activity. Nonetheless, she accomplishes her goal of establishing that the pawnbroker was rarely embedded in the criminal economy, and more often than not, the pawnbroker was likely to be the victim of crime, or to be of assistance to the authorities in solving crimes.

The book maintains a focus on the nineteenth century, and in the end, does not explore how pawning changed with the rise of “throwaway culture” in the twentieth century (192). In her conclusion, Woloson leaps to our own time, when ubiquitous credit card companies offer products that are “slick, convenient and wholly anonymous,” and thus “enable a form of borrowing that is pawning’s mirror opposite” (182).

Although Woloson takes the credit card companies and large rent-to-own chains to task, the book stops short of a full-throated critique of capitalism, much less pawnbrokers. At one point Woloson writes of the pawnbrokers’ abilities to appraise items: “Appraising was as much an art as a skill.” Later on the page she defines this “art” as “assigning monetary value to material goods to be used as collateral for loans” (168). Perhaps in this case, Woloson is leaning on a cliché, but the statement indicates a larger ambivalence in the book. At times capitalism is critiqued in defense of pawnbrokers, and at times pawnbrokers are defended as good capitalists.

In all fairness, at no point does Woloson proclaim that she has set out to bring down capitalism by the weight of its own contradictions. Rather she defends a profession and a historical practice that she clearly respects, and she has succeeded in debunking numerous myths and misunderstandings. In Hock will prove to be a useful book for instructors and researchers working in areas such as the history of American material culture, the history of urban poverty and the coping mechanisms of the poor, as well as the history of American anti-Semitism. The book will no doubt also offer some measure of consolation to anybody working in or depending upon the much maligned industry, which Woloson has so thoroughly explored.

This article originally appeared in issue 10.3.5 (May, 2010).

Matthew Vaz is Lecturer of American History at The City College of New York, City University of New York.

In March 1792, fifteen-year-old Christina Arcularius put the finishing touches on her Tree of Knowledge sampler, a precocious display of needlework prowess and genteel accomplishment. Celebrated by decorative arts scholars as one of the most ambitious examples of New York’s Biblical sampler style, Christina’s needlework picture has been published and periodically exhibited in recent years. Nevertheless, her life and the circumstances surrounding the sampler’s creation have remained largely obscure. In 2003, Christina’s masterpiece was featured in the New-York Historical Society’s exhibition “Home Sewn: Three Centuries of Stitching History” as one of many hand-stitched items mined for the stories they could tell about their individual makers and the milieu in which they were produced. Considered in a broad cultural context, Christina’s sampler yields rich insights into female education and cultural aspirations in federal-era New York.

Christina’s delightful, if bewildering composition is brimming with Biblical and secular motifs organized in three tiers, all centered on a bird-filled Tree of Knowledge with a beguiling serpent coiled around its trunk. Worked mostly in cross-stitch using silk threads on a linen ground of twenty-four warps and wefts per inch, the 16-x-22-inch sampler contains more than 200,000 stitches. Created under the tutelage of a teacher who outlined the design, the sampler incorporates prescribed images intended to impart religious and moral values combined with creative flourishes from Christina’s own imagination. The Biblical imagery—the Tree of Knowledge, Adam and Eve, Jesus preparing to feed the multitude loaves and fishes, Jacob’s Ladder rising into heaven (lower band); the Spies of Canaan (middle band, right); and Zacchaeus in the tree (middle and top bands, left)—closely resembles that found on other New York samplers as well as on Dutch, German, and English prototypes. Christina industriously stitched her requisite Bible stories. But she also embellished them with numerous whimsical elements that were likely of her own creation. Over forty birds, symbolic of domesticity and marriage, flock to her Tree of Knowledge and perch throughout her Biblical land. Dogs, emblematic of faithfulness, stand beneath the trees. Many human figures—including at least four couples—populate the sampler, suggesting that the adolescent Christina may have been somewhat distracted by ruminations on courtship and love. The single building in the upper right, representing a church, house, or school, is illustrative of the comfortable intermingling of religious and secular instruction that pervades this sampler and also characterized elementary education in 1790s New York.

Christina’s Tree of Knowledge sampler is one of the finest extant examples from a group of Biblical samplers produced in the colony and later state of New York between the 1740s and the 1830s. These elusive embroideries, as yet not linked to any specific teacher or school, are thought to have originated in one of the elite French girls’ schools in New Rochelle, New York. Christina’s picture bears all the hallmarks of New York Biblical samplers: a solid ground worked in cross-stitch, with some decorative borders in Queen’s stitch; a profusion of Biblical motifs; and division into horizontal bands. The plethora of Biblical motifs seems to suggest that these samplers were produced in the context of religious instruction, and Christina did indeed come from a devout family of Lutherans-turned-Methodists. However, extant samplers reveal that the girls who stitched these exercises came from a range of Protestant religions, including Dutch Reform, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Methodist. In addition, the Biblical motifs are linked to a long tradition of such imagery in European schoolgirl samplers, particularly those originating in Holland and northern Germany. Christina’s sampler is less significant as an artifact of religious instruction than as a document of the values and aspirations of the Arcularius family, particularly those of her father, Philip Arcularius. 

Born in Marburg, Germany, around 1748, Philip Jacob Arcularius immigrated to New York prior to the Revolution and engaged in the baking business with his brothers. According to family legend, Arcularius volunteered to supply the city’s soldiers with bread during the Revolutionary War. By the 1790s he had left the baker’s trade to become a tanner and evidently prospered as a master artisan. Philip married Elizabeth Grim in New York City’s Lutheran Church in 1775, and the couple settled into a home on Frankfort Street. There they became parents to eleven children, seven of whom survived to adulthood. Christina, the eldest, was born in 1777. 

Christina undoubtedly executed her sampler while attending a New York City school, likely within walking distance from her parents’ home in the city’s North Ward. In 1790s Gotham, most children were educated within an informal system of “pay schools” presided over by independent schoolmasters and schoolmistresses. For the average price of sixteen shillings or two dollars a quarter, students received instruction in reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, and morality. These schools generally enrolled both sexes, though boys typically outnumbered girls two to one. Unfortunately no documentation of Christina’s education survives, but we know that Christina’s siblings attended coeducational pay schools in lower Manhattan, where they mingled with children from a wide range of economic and religious backgrounds. In January 1803, Philip Arcularius paid Widow Catherine Mott of William Street two pounds for three quarters of teaching, as well as an additional sixteen shillings toward wood to heat the schoolroom. Ten months later, he again paid an installment for wood. Though the bill provides no specific details suggesting the focus of Widow Mott’s instruction (such as a charge for silk thread), it is possible that she taught needlework to girls in her care, including Christina’s younger sisters Margaret and Maria. 

Bills also reveal that the Arcularius boys and girls received at least some of their education together. Schoolmaster Samuel Rudd charged Arcularius four dollars in August 1805 for the quarterly tuition of Margaret, two dollars for half a quarter’s tuition for Peter, and 37 1/2 cents for ink and quills. Rudd, whose schoolroom was located at 18 George Street, had been teaching in the city since the 1790s. His income of 200 pounds for the 1795-96 school year placed him among the city’s highest paid schoolteachers. More telling details are known about the school that the younger Arcularius girls attended the following year. In July 1806, Philip Arcularius was billed $6 by Ephraim Conrad for “education of daughters,” and another 50 cents for ink and quills. Conrad ran a coeducational school at the back of 32 Nassau Street and counted Maria and Margaret Arcularius among his pupils. A broadside announcing the school exercises—an evening showcasing student talent, open to the public for the admission price of two shillings—records presentations by the Arcularius sisters. Maria, along with classmate Margaret Tonnelle, delivered a “Dialogue on good behaviour,” while Margaret, with Mary Alstine, presented a dialogue on female education. The program’s subjects ranged from religious to literary to patriotic, indicating that a broad spectrum of students—sons and daughters of grocers, tailors, and merchants alike—were receiving a solid liberal education, designed to outfit them as citizens of the young republic.

It is clear that Philip Arcularius valued education, sought out well-respected teachers for his children, and viewed their schooling as a ticket to securing a solid future. While the Arcularius sons were being prepared for apprenticeships that would launch their careers as master artisans or merchants, the daughters were being groomed as domestic matrons, capable of managing the household of a respectable middle-class family. Like other parents of his era, Arcularius educated Christina in genteel pursuits with the aspiration that she would marry well and lead a comfortable life. Philip Arcularius was himself prospering during these years, rising as a successful master artisan to mingle with the ranks of the city’s mercantile and cultural elite. He played an active role in the religious and civic life of New York, holding positions generally reserved for citizens of higher status. He was elected to the state’s General Assembly five times between 1798 and 1805, serving as a Democratic-Republican. At the local level, he served as assistant alderman for New York City’s Fifth Ward from 1796 to 1800. In 1805, the Common Council appointed Arcularius superintendent of the almshouse, a prominent post implying credentials worthy of public trust. 

Philip Arcularius’s rising star peaked in late 1805, when he became embroiled in a scandal at the almshouse. By early 1806, he had been removed from his position in disgrace. The incident had occurred on November 27, 1805, when Omey Kirk, a free black woman in labor, presented herself at the almshouse and was turned away for not having the required permit from a magistrate. She subsequently gave birth to a mulatto boy in a nearby yard and abandoned the baby there. Kirk was later discovered and committed to Bridewell Prison for abandoning her infant. William Coleman, Federalist editor of the New-York Evening Post, published an account of the incident in his paper two days later, laying the blame at the hands of the almshouse superintendent. Despite Arcularius’s protests that he was unaware of her condition, Coleman effectively destroyed his reputation. Two months later the Common Council passed a resolution removing him from his position as almshouse superintendent. Arcularius never recovered from the humiliation. After the incident, he never again held a publicly elected position.

Considered within this rich context, Christina’s Tree of Knowledge becomes a powerful artifact. As the eldest child of immigrant parents, Christina embodied the hopes of a family striving to make its mark in a new country and play an active role in the formation of the young republic. As an adult, Christina is reported to have regaled her children with stories of the new nation’s early struggles and triumphs, and according to her daughter “never tired of telling what she had witnessed in old New York.” She recalled the dramatic British evacuation of New York in 1783, which she experienced as an eight-year-old, and witnessed George Washington’s inauguration as first president of the United States on the balcony of Federal Hall in 1789. She claimed to have vivid memories of the gallows, pillory, and whipping post that stood not far from her Frankfort Street home, recalling that “hanging day was a general holiday and schools were dismissed that the children might witness the horrible sight.” While primly stitching Eve’s fall from innocence on her canvas, Christina likely reflected on the brutal consequences suffered by those who succumbed to temptation in her everyday world. The sampler’s cross-stitched Eden conveys a bountiful optimism that parallels the Arcularius family’s rising status in 1792; however, Christina’s towering Tree of Knowledge, weighty with moralistic overtones and avian overabundance, suggests potential threats to Christina’s imagined idyll and domestic reality. One wonders whether Christina sensed the dangers that lay ahead as her father ascended New York’s perilous social ladder.

At age twenty-two Christina married New York City grocer Samuel Barker Harper and assumed the conventional domestic role of wife and mother, likely fulfilling the expectations of her ambitious father. On the occasion of her marriage in 1799, Philip Arcularius presented her with a collection of silver dollars that soon thereafter were melted down to make a fashionable silver tea set. Following their marriage, Christina and Samuel Harper set up their own household and raised five children to adulthood.

The couple had formal portraits painted of themselves around 1830: Christina was portrayed as a conservatively attired matron with searching brown eyes, an intent gaze, and a face set with determination. As Harper’s grocery business prospered, the family moved to ever more fashionable neighborhoods, eventually building their own home on St. Mark’s Place in 1842. The Harper and Arcularius families, both devoutly Methodist, became progressively intertwined as Christina’s younger sister Maria married Samuel’s nephew James Harper (later the mayor of New York City), and Samuel took on Christina’s brother Andrew as a business partner. 

Christina’s Tree of Knowledge sampler probably remained in her home on St. Mark’s Place until her death in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War. It likely passed to her eldest daughter Amanda, whose own New York sampler of c. 1815 (which survives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) speaks to the continuing tradition of educating Arcularius/Harper daughters in needlework. Christina’s grandchildren recognized a perfect home for her needlework picture in the vast collection of European and American samplers gathered by Mrs. Lathrop C. Harper (Mabel Herbert Urner), wife of Christina’s grandson. Mrs. Harper collected over six hundred examples by 1924 and more than eight hundred by the time of her death in 1957, probably the largest sampler collection in America, mostly gathered on annual buying sprees in Europe. An article on her collection in the March 1924 issue of The House Beautiful illustrates some of these treasures displayed in her gracious home amidst Harper family heirlooms. Fittingly, the oil portrait of Christina Arcularius Harper hangs in one corner of the drawing room, surrounded by a sea of exquisitely crafted samplers. 

Mrs. Harper bequeathed her extensive collection of samplers to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1957. Interestingly, she singled out only one piece from her vast holdings—Christina’s Tree of Knowledge sampler—for donation to the New-York Historical Society, recognizing its greater value as a historical document than as a work of art. Presumably she realized that Christina’s sampler represents more than a schoolgirl exercise or a display of needlework talent: it is a potent cultural artifact that opens a window into young women’s education and the social fabric of 1790s New York.

Further Reading:

Primary documents in the library of the New-York Historical Society provided the starting point for unearthing Christina’s personal and family history. The extensive Lathrop Colgate Harper family papers—including correspondence, diaries, scrapbooks, and financial records—span four generations of this quintessential New York City family. Numerous photographs of Christina’s children, grandchildren, and their residences can be found in the Lathrop C. and Mabel H. Urner Harper photograph collection. A printed pamphlet, “A Faithful Report of the Trial of the Cause of Philip I. Arcularius, and William Coleman, Gent.,” provides fascinating details about the almshouse incident that disgraced the Arcularius family. 

The Biblical samplers of colonial and federal New York are analyzed in the second volume of Betty Ring’s major work, Girlhood Embroidery: American Samplers & Pictorial Needlework, 1650-1850 (New York, 1993), to date the only significant published analysis of this important group. For the social history of American needlework, see Susan Burrows Swan’s Plain & Fancy: American Women and Their Needlework, 1700-1850 (New York, 1977). The inspiration to weave a story from one seemingly ordinary needlework picture is owed to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York, 2001).

The cultural environment of Christina’s New York was reconstructed with the aid of city directories, census records, and the Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, as well as Carl F. Kaestle, The Evolution of an Urban School System: New York City, 1750-1850 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), Paul A. Gilje and Howard B. Rock, eds. Keepers of the Revolution: New Yorkers at Work in the Early Republic (Ithaca, 1992), and Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York, 1984). Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace’s comprehensive Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1999) offers a richly detailed account of everyday life in 1790s New York City.

This article originally appeared in issue 4.4 (July, 2004).

Margaret K. Hofer is curator of decorative arts at the New-York Historical Society, where she organized the exhibition “Home Sewn: Three Centuries of Stitching History,” on view from November 18, 2003, to April 18, 2004. She is the author of The Games We Played: The Golden Age of Board and Table Games (New York, 2003) and co-author of Seat of Empire (New York, 2002).