Page:A History of Banking in the United States.djvu/320

 and security to deliver cotton by February 1st, to cover a bill on New York running not beyond February 10th, the bank will buy such bill. The drawer, when he delivers the cotton, may take up the bill on New York by one on Mobile at nine months. If the cotton is not delivered, the bill to be sent to New York and protested.

We shall see below what the effect of this plan was on the bank which adopted it, but we may be sure that it was very popular at the time. It was considered a "liberal policy," and the bank which undertook it was thought to discharge its great function as a Bank of the State. In a case which grew out of it the Court said that it was strange that the error in the plan was not perceived that, in offering to advance more than the value, speculation and lawsuits were sure to be fostered. Some features of the plan are so strange that a great deal of familiarity with local and temporary circumstances seems necessary to understand them. The Court say that "the bills and the property are primary and concurrent securities," and add that the usual way formerly had been that the owner shipped his own cotton and sold the bill against it to a bank. After the commercial revulsion came on this method seems to have been almost entirely abandoned.

The reason given by this bank, in its circular, for the plan proposed was, in order to get specie funds with which to resume.

A new Board of Directors of the Mobile Branch a year later abandoned the plan of these advances on cotton, because of the wild speculation which threatened losses. Of the notes received by the previous Board with endorsements for the fourth quarter of the assumed value of the cotton not a dollar had been paid.

In June, 1838, a commercial convention was held at Richmond which recommended an increase of the banking capital and an extension of the means of communication, then being constructed, as essential means to the development of the South. The banks of the Gulf States "after having gone headlong into cotton, have turned their attention towards provisions. They have bought up nearly all the pork (in New Orleans) and their purchases in Cincinnati and other places have been on a monopolizing or forestalling scale. The article, in consequence, has advanced $6 per barrel. There have been more meetings in Mississippi to inquire into the conduct of the banks. The planters find that the depreciated currency will not pay for their supplies, unless at exorbitant prices, and that the high rates they received for their cotton was a mere delusion of the bank system."

As the season of 1838-9 opened attempts were made to make the cotton monopoly more comprehensive and more close. In a statement published a year later we find the situation and the program set forth as follows:

It is stated that Biddle had carried out his plan on the short crop of 1838, "by granting facilities to southern banks," but that for the following year, according to the principle of all monopoly, that the compass of the