Reviewed by Carolyn Eastman | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 66.1

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the WMQ online. About 699 words from this article are provided below; about 952 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you can:: • subscribe here.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the William and Mary Quarterly (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the William and Mary Quarterly.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

Reviewed by Carolyn Eastman | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 66.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America's First Banking Collapse. By Jane Kamensky. New York: Viking, 2008. 464 pages. $29.95 (cloth), $17.00 (paper).
Reviewed by Carolyn Eastman, University of Texas, Austin
There are times when one can only marvel at a scholar's prescience in selecting subject material with current-day relevance. It is even more impressive when combined with elegant prose and a pointed, vivid story that resembles such engaging histories as Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale, Patricia Cline Cohen's The Murder of Helen Jewett, and Jill Lepore's New York Burning.¹ Like those texts, Jane Kamensky's The Exchange Artist propels readers through the story—an unnerving tale of a young Boston businessman who defrauded thousands of Americans with paper money and then absconded to Canada—and yet still manages to educate us in the history of banking, speculation, and architecture in the early Republic. At the same time, one of the pleasures of reading The Exchange Artist is the occasional appearance of references and short documents that remind us of the delights of accidental discoveries during archival research. Kamensky has woven all of these elements into a tight story with true narrative drive.	1
At its heart this book is concerned with the problems of trust and personal reputation in the economic environment of the early American Republic. The central figure in the story is Andrew Dexter Jr., a Harvard-educated son of a respectable and comfortable New England ministering and mercantile family, who took advantage of the possibilities offered by the new paper money economy of the early nineteenth century. Dexter leveraged his own prestige to engage in vast real estate speculation, weaving together a network of small-town banks to back the scheme. Comparisons to the confidence men of the era such as the self-described "notorious" (169) Stephen Burroughs (who makes a gleeful appearance in the story) might seem obvious, but this would oversimplify the author's aim. For Kamensky, the case of Dexter demonstrates that businessmen and con men "emerge as remarkably similar creatures, their different fates as much the result of chance as of character" (12): these men are far closer to those depicted in the work of Jean-Christophe Agnew and Toby L. Ditz, men fully enmeshed in a culture of theatricality and the performance of credibility.² Dexter dedicated his time to developing personal relationships with banking leaders in small towns, earning their trust, and then proceeding to use them in an elaborate scheme to build a house of paper—an environment in which vast numbers of New Englanders needed to trust the value of paper money in order to sustain the fantasy of economic growth and prosperity. "The buildings, the bridges, the newly paved streets themselves: all rested upon a paper foundation. Paper turned land and crops and even people into capital," Kamensky writes with characteristic eloquence. "More than furs, more than whale oil, more than stone or lumber or bricks, paper revived Boston's sagging fortunes" (51)—but not for long.	2
At the same time that he built his empire on questionable accounting practices and reassurances to skeptical associates, Dexter also undertook to build a literal castle: the Exchange Coffee House, a massive 153-room, marble-encrusted, gold-domed architectural wonder that, at seven stories high, became the tallest building in the nation. Situated in the heart of the city, only a building away from the Boston Massacre site and the Old State House, the Coffee House contained under a single roof a hotel, a ballroom, meeting rooms, a reading room, and the elegant Coffee Room. The parallels between Dexter's two projects provide Kamensky with some of her richest analytic moments, for she shows that each spurred the other. Building the Exchange required enormous amounts of credit and forced Dexter to stretch himself ever further, but the building also promised to strengthen his business dealings by serving as a visible symbol of Dexter's creditworthiness. All of these subjects serve to prompt contemplation on the question, "When does a scheme (a blueprint, a plan) become a scheme (a trick, a plot)?" (127). Then as now, the line between confidence men and legitimate businessmen was a thin one.	. . .

There are about 952 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.