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The life in the new settlement offered different opportunities for planter men, women, and the slaves. Planter men who had been able to withstand the challenges of the Southwest wished to break free from their families, while the women toiled to preserve their blood ties amidst the distance of the land. In this chapter changes in the family structure and its reconstitution are discussed. The challenge for women and the slaves to keep bonds proved to be harder in the Southwest where good roads and railroad lines were lacking, including the forbidding terrain. Also, the great depression experienced in the Southwest during the Panic of 1837 is discussed in this chapter wherein the kinship, reciprocity, and economic independence of the planter family were again recognized by the new settlers as a primary source of success.

This chapter focuses on William Apess's life as a lecturer in lower Manhattan, the working-class section of New York City, during the period 1837–9. Buoyed by the Mashpee Indians' success before the Massachusetts legislature, Apess now chose the rostrum rather than the pulpit from which to sound his message about Native Americans. His frequent and ostensible topic was their history and rights. Before discussing Apess's lecturing activities in New York after he left Mashpee, this chapter provides a background on the Reverend Peter Williams Jr., an African American leader of the Episcopal Church who was also active in the American Anti-Slavery Society and played a central role in the life of the city's African Americans. It also considers Apess's disappearance from the scene, which may well have been related to the widespread social and economic dislocation caused by the Panic of 1837.

The development of the NYSE from an outdoor market to the major marketplace in the country. The first major scandal after independence in NY; the role of private individuals in financing the war of 1812; raising cash for canals and turnpikes; and the role of individual traders, mostly in New York, in giving the exchanges a reputation as gambling dens rather than serious places to raise money.

In 1836–39, the United States suffered a financial sector collapse that plunged the nation into a severe economic depression. The revenues of state and federal governments evaporated, prompting legislators at both levels to undertake an extraordinary project of fiscal squeeze. By 1842, one-third of American states were in default on British loans. Meanwhile, the decline of federal revenues heightened partisanship and legislative gridlock in Washington. Strategies of managing fiscal squeeze shifted substantially during the crisis. By its end, many states had resumed payments on their debts, developed new methods of collecting taxes, and adopted constitutional changes restricting deficit financing. Meanwhile, federal politicians completed a painful renegotiation of federal tax policies and adopted a more pragmatic attitude about debt financing of federal expenditures. The effect of the crisis was to produce a transformation in the American constitutional order whose effects are still obvious today.

Chapter Five examines the workings of future storytelling, focusing on the mulberry bubble of the late 1830s. During this period, mulberry trees became a focus of financial speculation, not only through the networks of improvement, but also throughout U.S. financial centers. Speculators aspired to create a future empire of silk production, before prices plummeted. This chapter challenges the suggestion that such moments are deviations from normal, rational capitalism. Rather “manias” offer a chance to examine structures of credibility creation. The chapter sets the multicaulis mania in the global context of repeated silk fevers, then follows the particular variety Morus Multicaulis through global botanical networks into the networks of improving print culture. It connects the rise of the tree to the Panic of 1837 and shows how features of the variety itself, its leaf size and its easily calculable reproduction sustained forms of speculation, justified by new calculations about the nature of national consumption. Eventually, rising tree prices became their own justification, a rise punctured by a larger banking collapse. The chapter questions the retrospective justifications that sort successful attempts to create futures from those that fail, judging the first as rational and the second as fevered.

From 1840 to 1842 the B&O issued the principal circulating currency for Baltimore and its environs. As banks stopped redeeming their notes in specie after the Panic of 1837, the railroad company and the city government collaborated to issue a new medium of exchange, the B&O Note, administered by the company and backed by the city’s collected property. The new currency aimed to provide a circulating medium for Baltimore’s citizenry while funding the railroad’s western construction, but in an era suspicious of paper money, it also engendered fierce controversy. Tracking the rise and fall of the B&O Note—dubbed “the people’s currency”—captures a tumultuous moment in monetary history and reconstructs a forgotten instance of popular economic action from the early industrial era.

The political and financial potential of a commercialized sporting culture led to an explosion of sporting businesses in the antebellum period. Competition, along with a contraction caused by the Panic of 1837, led investors and professionals to reorganize the sporting industry yet again in the 1840s and 1850s. By re-establishing distinctively genteel, middling, and rough sporting spaces (after they had gotten muddled by the democratic accessibility introduced in the early national period), the backers and managers of sporting events specialized their enterprises and transformed sporting culture into the country’s earliest version of mass culture – a set of specialized, standardized, accessible, anonymous, commercial experiences intended to sell democracy to white men irrespective of their wealth or ethnicity.

Returning to New York City in 1836, Afong Moy’s sales functions fully ended and her manager, Henry Hannington, employed her solely as an oriental object in his New York diorama and panorama entertainments. After the Panic of 1837, Hannington’s operations collapsed. Those who brought her to America, Nathaniel and Francis Carnes and Captain Benjamin Obear, appear to have abandoned her despite their promise of returning her to China. In 1838, as Chapter 9 relates, Afong Moy, without resources or financial support, entered a poorhouse in Monmouth, New Jersey. Yet, the public did not forget her. Rallying to her defense, newspapers across the nation ran articles decrying her treatment. Citizens forced her guardians to come forward and contribute to her support.