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