Why would a Philadelphian who is indebted to a bank, and not a 
shareholder or note holder, fear for the collapse of the bank? 
 
Gee, I must have missed that part of the quote.  "Is it because the 
collapse entails the immediately calling in of loans?"  could well 
be.  But I am not sure a collapse WOULD mean the immediate calling 
in of loans -- that is, PRIOR to the collapse you would see a mad 
scramble, but once the bank collapsed then it would be in the 
hands of trustees or creditors of the bank, yes?  Which could take 
a little time to unravel.  The big problem would be if a loan was 
called in in the middle of a panic, you could not get a loan from 
anyone else to cover it.   
 
Keep in mind, though, that PRIOR to the proliferation of these 
institutions it was very common to extend credit to people for 
long periods of time.  When someone died, there was then a massive 
accounting back and forth of who owed  what to whom.  The early 
merchants often did not actually KNOW the full status of their 
own accounts.  This was one of the reasons Morris ended up in 
bankruptcy court.                
 
I hadn't really thought of it (and don't recall reading it), but 
certainly the apperance of the earlier banks in the 1790s must have 
improved that situation considerably.  You had a regular schedule 
instead of the irregularities of having loans called in when 
someone kicks.  (Or when someone is being pressured by a creditor.) 
 
On the other side -- in the antebellum period, entrepreneurs went 
bankrupt A LOT.  It is very common to read the life history of 
one of these early businessmen and see just one bankruptcy after 
another.  So -- the implications of having loans called in in the 
middle of a panic -- yes, of course that would be a problem, but 
there was a history in the previous generation of having loans called 
in unexpectedly for all sorts of things, and bankruptcy was more 
common then than today (unless you belong to Generation X, which 
seems to be rediscovering personal bankruptcy just like they 
discovered consumer credit cards in college ...) 
 
Sources?  Well, first and foremost would be Temin on the jacksonian 
economy and then the proliferation of articles that followed.  The 
end result was a MUCH more sophisticated picture of the financial 
system in the 1820s-1840s.  I think that most of this stuff is still 
in article form (except for Temin) but I could be wrong because I 
haven't worked in this period for a while.  So you would want to 
look at the JEH and BHC papers and MAYBE EEH (tho it's not something 
they are THAT interested in) -- just shuffle through bound volumes 
and pick out th articles on the subject and period.   
 
Hammond used traditional sources such as personal letters to construct 
his narrative.  Consequently, his interpretation is greatly 
entangled with what people THOUGHT was going on as well as what 
politicians were trying to persuade people was going on.  The research 
that was jump-started by Temin and has flourished since has focused 
on the direct evidence -- bank account sheets.  (come to think of it, 
some of this did make it into journals such as the JPE but, blush, I 
would have to go look it up; don't have it here.)  So, for example, 
we find out that the wildcat banks weren't as irresponsible as they 
were reputed to be.                                           
 
The interpretation of the 1790s is also highly colored by the 
view of Hamilton as prescient and the Bank of the U.S. as a modern 
institution.  Nope.  (For that, you might just go back and READ 
Hamilton.)  Again, much of the interpretations that are found for 
this period rely on very old-fashioned methodology -- a little bit 
of info from the letters of the famous, and then what they EXPECT 
to find.  Even Ed Perkins' massive effort to pull together information 
on Public Finance and Financial institutions in America from roughly 
1700 to 1815 suffers from this problem -- he attributes powers to 
public finance and to Hamilton that neither could possibly have 
possessed back then.  Just as E. James Ferguson's thesis about the 
Constitution and the federal debt is outdated (now we're getting into 
my own work), so too it's a bit out of place to assume that just 
because hamilton THOUGHT his policies CREATED a market for  
securities, it really did.  Innovative financial arrangements 
flourished in Philadelphia through the 1700s.  The sudden explosion 
of marine insurance corporations with (for their day) big 
investment portfolios had absoltuely nothing to do with Hamilton 
or the Federalist or the federal debt.  Period. 
 
When we get to the period 1790-1815, this history hasn't really 
been written yet.  What happened, I guess, is that historians 
working backwards from the "industrial revolution" didn't bother 
with much before the War of 1812.  Conversely, historians working 
forward from the colonial period quit after reaching 1789.  Political 
and foreign policy issues have continued to define the scholarship 
on the early republic, with everyone relying on studies that are 
now decades old for the economics part.   
 
It also seems to me that economists who work in this area (and 
there are precious few who do!) read onlyh articles.  And only 
things that seem to be about "economic history".  Much of the 
nuggets to be found on this period are in what are called 
"social histories".  The interpretation maybe could use some  
work, but a lot of creative evidence is there.   
 
Well -- my interest in trying to figure out what was going on 
is subservient to my interest in figureing out what they BELIEVED 
was going on, how those beliefs changed -- that is, how they 
formed ideas and expectations about the relationships among the 
economy and government and institutions.  I'm after the sea 
change in thought where "capitalism" comes to dominate the lingo 
on both sides.  And looking for what ideas were pitched in the 
process, and what history has been ignored out of what we 
expect we should find.  If, for example, this is the era of the 
so-called "merchant capitalism", what are we to make of the 
active role of institutions in financial innovation in this period, 
the growth of DOMESTIC indusry and DOMESTIC trade?   
 
That is, I know enough to know that the old version is inaccurate -- 
but I cannot point you to a single study that is going to explain it. 
Just give me a few years ... <g>  No, seriously, my first advice is 
still the best -- leaf through isues of the JEH; you will find a 
lot of recent work on this area.   
 
- Mary Schweitzer, Dept. of History, Villanova University