Page:Forgotten Man and Other Essays.djvu/386

 harder and harder to carry. Three English houses, Willson, Wildes, and Wiggins, had become especially engaged in these American credits which they found it necessary to curtail. The winter was one of continual stringency, aggravated by popular discontent, riots, and trades-union disturbances, arising from high prices and high rents. The failures commenced on the fourth of March, 1837, the day that Van Buren was inaugurated, in Mississippi and Louisiana. Hermann, Briggs & Co., of New Orleans, failed, with liabilities said to be from four to eight millions. As soon as this was known in New York, their correspondents, J. L. & S. Joseph & Co. failed. The first break in the expanded fabric of credit therefore came in connection with cotton. The price had advanced so much during the last three or four years as to draw many thousands of persons who had no capital into cotton production, but the profits were so great that a good crop or two would pay for all the capital. The planters of Mississippi especially had accordingly organized themselves into banking corporations and issued notes as the easiest way to borrow the capital they wanted. From 1830 to 1839 the banking capital of Mississippi increased from three to seventy-five millions, which of course represented one credit built upon another, on renewed and extended debt, as the old planters bought more slaves and took up more land instead of paying for the old, or as new settlers came in. Mississippi was therefore indebted to the Northeast for the redemption of their immense bank debt, or for the capital bought with it. The high rates for money in England and this country at last checked the rise in cotton in 1836. Bad harvests and high prices for food fell in with a glut of manufactured cotton, and when cotton began to fall ruin was certain. As soon as the revulsion came it ran through the whole speculative system. The new suburbs which had been laid out in every city and village never came to anything.