Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Estess, Jonah Peter

Titel

Bank and State: Money, Law, and Moral Economy in the United States, 1775-1896

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertation & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2024

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This dissertation explores the history of money in the early American republic and postbellum era, with a particular emphasis on the development of a unified monetary system and the implications for the creation of the modern American state. It argues that individual actors including shopkeepers, merchants, pastors, polemicists, debtors, creditors, farmers, miners, and urban laborers, many of whom initially demanded autonomous control over money, eventually set aside that preference to resolve fundamental problems at the heart of American political economy through consensus regarding money's purpose in American society. This history demonstrates how the interplay between policymaking and lived experience prescribed opportunities and limitations for the state as it gradually assumed control over and standardized the United States’ monetary system. As fears around institutional consolidation of money being disadvantageous to the public good intensified, efforts to mitigate increasingly risky or seemingly unjust money markets through law also expanded. The American Revolution unleashed new and politically fraught questions about the role of money in a democratic republic: what was it, who should issue or use it, and whether corporations or government should regulate it. In the early republic, these persistent questions thwarted lawmakers’ attempts at organizing a monetary system and magnified a crisis of public faith in the wake of revolutionary era financial crises. Unstable private banks, which quietly became the stewards of the nation’s currency supply, frequently failed or became insolvent, leaving state courts with sole jurisdiction to determine legal uses of bank currencies. During the Civil War, however, financial necessity forced Congress and the Treasury Department to retake control of currency and begin a path of centralization that wrested currency out of the hands of banks and corporations. Throughout the country, populists attacked federal control of money as immoral and undemocratic, and set the stage for a political and cultural showdown over the nation’s money supply. That conflict would only be resolved by the creation of the Federal Reserve system, which meant that the people’s money was now insulated from politics. At stake in this century-long conflict over currency and rooted in shared experience with many monies was nothing short of the future of the American federal state.