How the contentious world of nineteenth-century banking shaped the
United States.
Pieces of paper that claimed to be good for two dollars upon redemption
at a distant bank. Foreign coins that fluctuated in value from town to
town. Stock certificates issued by turnpike or canal companies--worth
something . . . or perhaps nothing. IOUs from farmers or tradesmen,
passed around by people who could not know the person who first issued
them. Money and banking in antebellum America offered a glaring example
of free-market capitalism run amok--unregulated, exuberant, and heading
pell-mell toward the next "panic" of burst bubbles and hard times.
In Other People's Money, Sharon Ann Murphy explains how banking and
money worked before the federal government, spurred by the chaos of the
Civil War, created the national system of US paper currency. Murphy
traces the evolution of banking in America from the founding of the
nation, when politicians debated the constitutionality of chartering a
national bank, to Andrew Jackson's role in the Bank War of the early
1830s, to the problems of financing a large-scale war. She reveals how,
ultimately, the monetary and banking structures that emerged from the
Civil War also provided the basis for our modern financial system, from
its formation under the Federal Reserve in 1913 to the present.
Touching on the significant role that numerous historical figures played
in shaping American banking--including Alexander Hamilton, James
Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Louis
Brandeis--Other People's Money is an engaging guide to the heated
political fights that surrounded banking in early America as well as to
the economic causes and consequences of the financial system that
emerged from the turmoil. By helping readers understand the financial
history of this period and the way banking shaped the society in which
ordinary Americans lived and worked, this book broadens and deepens our
knowledge of the Early American Republic.
