Unfortunately, Kilbourne spends far too much time plowing old ground. A large literature on the Second Bank and its aftermath—including books by Ralph Catterall, Peter Temin, and Bray Hammond, as well as articles by Peter Rousseau ("Jacksonian Monetary Policy, Specie Flows, and the Panic of 1837," Journal of Economic History 62 [2002]) and Arthur Rolnick and Warren Weber ("New Evidence on the Free Banking Era," American Economic Review 73 [1983])—already exists. So do good models about financial panic, including Peter Diamond's and Philip Dybvig's "Bank Runs, Deposit Insurance, and Liquidity" (Journal of Political Economy 91 [1983]) and Charles Calomiris's and G. Gorton's "The Origins of Banking Panics: Models, Fact, and Bank Regulation" (Financial Markets and Financial Crises, ed. Glenn Hubbard [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991]). Reference to these models could have provided theoretical underpinning for statements like "[t]he Agricultural Bank's experience shows how even a well-run bank with a large paid-in capital could be paralyzed by events beyond its control" (86). Kilbourne himself admits that "[f]ew episodes in American political history have generated as much scholarship as the īBank War' between Andrew Jackson and the Second Bank" (107). I can see why Kilbourne wanted to contextualize his findings, but he could have simply pointed his readers to existing sources for general background. A well-edited journal article focusing on Kilbourne's unique contributions would have been preferable to this rambling and repetitive monograph.

     Let me therefore provide that focus. Kilbourne's data consist of three sets of records: from the Natchez branch of the Second Bank (the last branch to be established before Jackson's veto), including transactions from March 1831 to summer 1833 for about 2,000 accounts (18); from the commercial agency of the U.S. Bank of Pennsylvania that operated in Mississippi from 1836 to 1841; and from the collection agent sent to Natchez by the assignees of the failed U.S. Bank of Pennsylvania (covering the period 1841–52).

     What do these data tell us? Among other things, the sheer variety of transactions throws doubt upon patriarchy-driven models and suggests instead that Mississippians were fairly savvy in dealing with financial risks (23). Mississippi was a bigger antebellum financial player than one might have thought: the Second Bank put 10 percent of its resources into the Natchez branch in the early 1830s (28). What is more, the only place the U.S. Bank of Pennsylvania expanded outside its own state was Mississippi (59–60). Mississippi banks played an important and direct role in cotton markets in the late 1830s (89–92). And the Mississippi trust charged with overseeing debt collection and asset dispersion for the moribund Second Bank actually owned as many as four plantations during the 1840s (127).

     Kilbourne's account (chap. 4) of the various lawsuits facing the Mississippi trust and the legislation passed in the 1840s reveals how powerful market forces can be and how responsive people are to incentives. He offers interesting anecdotes (chap. 5) about how people made money from their neighbors. The details Kilbourne provides about the machinations of trustee Joseph Roberts (chaps. 4 and 5) are fascinating, if a bit drawn out. He notes that slavery provided reliable income streams, although he seems surprised by this fact, terming slavery a "retrograde labor system" (140). Given the amount of research that shows just how productive Southern slavery was, Kilbourne's surprise and his terminology are puzzling.

     One of Kilbourne's principal claims is that slave agriculture generated a vast amount of foreign exchange (10). This may well be, yet he does not showcase his own data to support that claim. Even a few simple tables could have buttressed his arguments nicely.

     The big head-scratcher for me, however, was Kilbourne's conclusion: that a government monopoly on the money supply goes hand in hand with totalitarianism (152). I had trouble figuring out what in the previous five chapters led him to this statement. Sure, we can criticize fiat money and centralized banking. A more reasonable conclusion, however, would have been to stick to what Kilbourne's own data actually reveal: that a state-based case study using accounting records gives us a somewhat more detailed picture of what happened in U.S. financial markets from 1831 to 1852 than we had before.