Page:A History of Banking in the United States.djvu/290

 centers of this country from two sides at once. The expansion in England had reached its limit and there was a reaction with a decline in demand for cotton. With the fall in the price of cotton, the whole cotton producing region was prostrated and could not pay for the supplies it had drawn from the Northeast. At the same time the credit which had been enjoyed in England by northern merchants and bankers was lost and payment was demanded. This overthrew the "credit system" here, and everything which depended on it. The latter revulsion fell upon the commercial and financial centers directly. Some writers on the events laid stress upon one of these sets of circumstances; others on the other.

During the month of March the failures followed rapidly. On the 28th a committee of New York bankers turned to Biddle for help. He went to New York, where an agreement was made that the New York banks should increase their discounts $1.5 millions; that the Bank of the United States should issue bonds payable in London for $5 millions and send specie to the amount of $1 million; the Manhattan Company was to issue bonds, half payable here and half in London; for $2 millions; the Bank of America was to draw on Rothschild for $200,000 and the Girard Bank to issue bonds payable in London for $500,000 and the Morris canal for $1 million. These bonds were sold for the bills receivable of the merchants at 112 and a half, and were sold by the merchants for current paper at 109, specie being at seven per cent. premium. Exchange was at 111 and a quarter or 112. The shares of the Bank were at 119 or 120. The bonds were made payable at the Barings. Biddle made the reservation that he must submit the exportation of specie to his Board of Directors.

Issuing bonds under such circumstances is a transaction which may have very different phases and significance. It may be that a great and strong institution puts its credit in the place of that of a solvent debtor who can give proper security to the Bank near at hand which he could not give to his creditor at a distance. Under other circumstances a weak and rotten bank issues post-notes to insolvent debtors, pretendedly for their relief, but it is really making use of their distress to borrow from them, or to borrow elsewhere on their security, thus driving them down to lower depths of bankruptcy. In the case now before us the Bank of the United States was supposed to be acting on the former principle. This was only partly true, and in the next two years that Bank gradually went over to the second use of post-notes. The great banks of the Southwest fully illustrated the second use of these instruments.

The Bank held a great amount of securities which were not immediately available and others which had fallen in value. It did not want to sell them. Hence, while borrowing by its post-notes, it was speculating in these securities. Although its margin on the bills receivable which it had taken from the merchants was wide, yet it really took a risk on the liquidation of