Sovereign of the Market: The Money Question in Early America

320 Pages·2017·2.388 MB·English

by  Jeffrey Sklansky

Sovereign of the Market
American Beginnings, 1500– 1900
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Sovereign
of the Market
The Money Question in Early America
Jeffrey Sklansky
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2017 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in
critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago
Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2017
Printed in the United States of America
26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 48033- 6 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 48047- 3 (e- book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226480473.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data
Names: Sklansky, Jeffrey, author.
Title: Sovereign of the market : the money question in early America / Jeffrey
Sklansky.
Other titles: American beginnings, 1500– 1900.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Series:
American beginnings, 1500– 1900
Identifiers: LCCN 2017000465 | ISBN 9780226480336 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN
9780226480473 (e- book)
Subjects: LCSH: Money—United States. | Currency question—United States. |
Banks and banking—United States.
Classification: LCC HG501 .S553 2017 | DDC 332.4/ 9730903—dc23
LC record available at https:// lccn.loc .gov/ 2017000465
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1 992 (Permanence of
Paper).
For Helen

Contents
Introduction: The Elusive Sovereign 1
Part I Paper Money and the Problem of
Circulation in the Colonial Era
1 John Wise and the Natural Law of Commerce 21
2 William Douglass and the Natural History of Credit 56
Part II Commercial Banking and the Problem
of Representation in the Jacksonian Era
3 William Leggett and the Melodrama of the Market 93
4 Nicholas Biddle and the Beauty of Banking 131
Part III Big Business and the Problem of
Association in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
5 Charles Macune and the Currency of Cooperation 169
6 Charles Conant and the Fund of Trust 207
Conclusion: The Magician’s Glass 246
Acknowledgments 259
Notes 263
Index 305

Introduction
The Elusive Sovereign
In 1621, a new kind of fictional memoir appeared in London, recounting the
travels of an English coin. Its author was a Thames River ferry boat driver
named John Taylor, a prolific essayist and poet who styled himself a plebeian
counterpart to the celebrated seafaring explorers of his day. The adventure
and fortune described in accounts like Sir Richard Hawkins’s Voyage into
the South Sea (1622) took darker shape in Taylor’s long poem, A Shilling; or,
The Trauailes of Twelue- Pence, the first of hundreds of imaginary autobiog-
raphies of traveling coins and commodities published in seventeenth- and
eighteenth- century England. Like Taylor himself and other itinerant water-
men, the narrator of his story is “tossed too and fro” among people of “all
degrees and trades,” “shifting of Masters, more often then the Serveants do.”
The “world’s greatest traveler” is increasingly wanted everywhere, but like the
growing numbers of the wandering poor, it is nowhere at rest. Presiding over
the dispossession of rural laborers and the enclosure of common lands, the
coin laments:
I am of that great power, and high command,
In joyning house to house, and land to land:
That where one hath a dwelling to abide,
One hundred knowes not where their heads to hide:
And as one may three hundred Tenants have,
Five hundred knowes not where to have a grave.1
Like the famous cover of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), Taylor’s fron-
tispiece depicts a new kind of ruler, an “artificial person” created by a social
contract (figure I.1). But in place of the multitude of subjects that make up the
body politic of Hobbes’s giant monarch, the little king on the shilling is torn