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In an effort to encourage immigration and expand commercial agriculture, several southern states created and subsidized plantation banks designed to monetize agricultural economies and provide long‐term mortgage credit. These experiments typically failed, not because of the inherent inconsistency between issuing short‐term liabilities and holding long‐term assets, but due to unfortunate timing. Most were established in the mid‐1830s and could not establish themselves prior to the panics of 1837 and 1839. Other southern and western states allowed free banking, which was neither particularly good nor bad. Still other states built branch banking networks that performed well in good times and bad, largely because their small numbers encouraged intrabank and interbank cooperation.

The development of trusts and the popularity of trusts as investments. Introduction of the Sherman Act, the consolidation of industry, merger creating U.S. Steel, Andrew Carnegie & Morgan, Panic of 1894, Panic of 1903, Panic of 1907, Morgan's role in averting panic, and the development of the money trust among New York banks. Dow Jones average begun.

This chapter investigates how the notion of panic crystallizes in representations of the market and how it affects the hierarchy of speculators. The charismatic features of the latter cannot withstand crowd movements like panic. One of the major contradictions at the boundaries of markets appears to be the same as that between an individualism grounded in a vitalistic notion of force and the crowd's stampede. The chapter explores how the notion of (financial) panic, emerging almost simultaneously in economic and psychiatric writings, deals with this contradiction. It also examines how representations of panic—from the media, for instance—are used by market participants to make sense of their own actions. Based on a reconstruction of actual practices, the chapter argues that such representations should be understood as material observational tools, which help dispersed actors to see their situations as identical or similar.

The introduction shows how Americans in the antebellum period were troubled by a growing sense that reality was becoming opaque and abstract, with the economic structure resting on an expanded credit system consisting of promises to pay. By contrast, the household economy of the rural Northeast offered the vision of a world more securely based on the local, the bounded, and the concrete. The introduction traces the origins of realism to the moment of the 1837 financial panic, which forced the entry into the literary market of downwardly mobile women writers from within the Northeastern gentry class. These writers attempted to restore a sense of reality to a dematerializing and radically destabilized world. The introduction shows how their experience was shared by the urban lower middle class, whose economically precarious and culturally marginal position led them towards the “solider ground” of a mimetic rather than a sentimental literature.

Bank chartering in New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland was contentious, often corrupt, high‐stakes politics. The corruption surrounding bank chartering made it difficult for cooperative interbank relationships to develop. Although a regional clearinghouse arose in New England in the 1820s, comparable clearinghouses were not formed in the principal Middle‐Atlantic cities until the 1850s. Corrupt chartering practices also meant that many banks became entangled with state internal improvement schemes, often to a bank's detriment. The financial panic of 1839 threw the region's banking systems into turmoil. New York and Pennsylvania's systems nearly collapsed during the depression of the early 1840s.

Banks in the South and West received large state subsidies, became embroiled in infrastructure projects, and were expected to promote social welfare and the “commonwealth ideal.” In accordance with theories of the connection between financial development and economic growth, southern banks were designed to help late‐developing economies catch up with early developers. These institutions also played a secondary role in that they insulated regional economies from financial panics, extended recessions, and potentially devastating debt‐deflation cycles.

William McChesney Martin Jr., who served as chairman of the Federal Reserve System from 1951 to 1970, is the son of Rebecca Woods and William McChesney Martin Sr. The elder Martin's father, Thomas L. Martin, was a co-owner of the McChesney and Martin Grain Company, which went bankrupt in 1894 due to a nationwide financial panic that often struck Americans in the second half of the nineteenth century. Thomas's bankruptcy convinced William McChesney Martin Sr. and his younger brother, Louis, to seek greener pastures in Missouri. Martin would become chairman of the board and agent of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank in 1914 at a time when the burning issue was the proposal for a National Reserve Association to strengthen the nation's banking system.