| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Howard Bodenhorn. A History of Banking in Antebellum America: Financial Markets and Economic Development in the Era of Nation-Building. (Studies in Macroeconomic History.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2000. Pp. xxi, 260. Cloth $59.95, paper $22.95.

When bankers and stockbrokers appear at all in most American history textbooks, they usually get a bad press. They play starring roles in "wildcat" banking on the frontier, in periodic financial "panics," and in stock market crashes. They charge usurious interest rates to hard-working farmers and small businessmen, and they form a monopolistic "money trust" in the late nineteenth century to control and concentrate the expanding corporate sector. 1

Even specialists in antebellum banking history have stressed mainly its monetary roles. There has been lengthy debate about Andrew Jackson's "bank war" with Nicholas Biddle and whether Biddle's Second Bank of the United States was a proto-central bank (a precursor to the Federal Reserve) or Jackson's "pet banks" were inflationary. What little attention has been given to the credit-providing function of the banks generally portrays them as conservative, short-term lenders to established merchants, reluctant to meet the credit needs of either agriculture or industry. The work of Lance Davis and others on the gradual integration of a national financial market in the late nineteenth century implies that antebellum financial markets were local or regional, unable to mobilize savings across broad regions or sectors. . . .

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