A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II

by Murray N. Rothbard

  The United States could have taken this opportunity of monetary crisis to go on either version of a parallel standard.95 Apparently, however, few thought of doing so. Another viable though inferior solution to the problem of bimetallism was to establish a monometallic system, either de facto or de jure, with the other metal circulating in the form of lightweight, and therefore overvalued, or “token” coinage. Silver monometallism was immediately unfeasible since it was rapidly flowing out of the country, and because gold, being far more valuable than silver, could not technically function easily as a lightweight subsidiary coin. The only feasible solution, then, within a monometallic framework, was to make gold the basic standard and let highly overvalued, essentially token, silver coins function as subsidiary small coinage. Certainly if a parallel standard was not to be adopted, the latter solution would be far better than allowing depreciated paper notes to function as small currency.

  Under pressure of the crisis, Congress decided, in February 1853, to keep the de jure bimetallic standard but to adopt a de facto gold monometallic standard, with fractional silver coins circulating as a deliberately overvalued subsidiary coinage, legal tender up to a maximum of only $5. The fractional silver coins were debased by 6.91 percent. With silver commanding about a 4-percent market premium over gold, this meant that fractional silver was debased 3 percent below gold. At that depreciated rate, fractional silver was not overvalued in relation to gold, and remained in circulation. By April, the new subsidiary quarter-dollars proved to be popular and by early 1854 the problem of the shortage of small coins in America was over.

  In rejecting proposals either to go over completely to de jure gold monometallism or to keep the existing bimetallic system, Congress was choosing a gold standard temporarily, but keeping its options open. The fact that it continued the old full-bodied silver dollar, the “dollar of our fathers,” demonstrates that an eventual return to de facto bimetallism was by no means being ruled out—albeit Gresham’s Law could not then maintain the American silver dollar in circulation.96

  In 1857, an important part of the Jacksonian coinage program was repealed, as Congress, in an exercise of monetary nationalism, eliminated all legal tender power of foreign coins.97

  DECENTRALIZED BANKING FROM THE 1830S TO THE CIVIL WAR

  After the central bank was eliminated in the 1830s, the battle for hard money largely shifted to the state governmental arena. During the 1830s, the major thrust was to prohibit the issue of small notes, which was accomplished for notes under five dollars in 10 states by 1832, and subsequently, five others restricted or prohibited such notes.98

  The Democratic Party became ardently hard-money in the various states after the shock of the financial crisis of 1837 and 1839. The Democratic drive was toward the outlawry of all fractional reserve bank paper. Battles were fought also, in the late 1840s, at constitutional conventions of many states, particularly in the west. In some western states, the Jacksonians won temporary success, but soon the Whigs would return and repeal the bank prohibition. The Whigs, trying to find some way to overcome the general revulsion against banks after the crisis of the late 1830s, adopted the concept of “free” banking, which had been enacted by New York and Michigan in the late 1830s. From New York, the idea spread outward to the rest of the country and triumphed in 15 states by the early 1850s. On the eve of the Civil War, 18 out of the 33 states in the Union had adopted “free” banking laws.99

  It must be realized that “free” banking, as it came to be known in the United States before the Civil War, was unrelated to the philosophic concept of free banking analyzed by economists. As we have seen earlier, genuine free banking is a system where entry into banking is totally free; the banks are neither subsidized nor regulated, and at the first sign of failure to redeem in specie payments, a bank is forced to declare insolvency and close its doors.

  “Free” banking before the Civil War, on the other hand, was very different.100 As we have pointed out, the government allowed periodic general suspensions of specie payments whenever the banks overexpanded and got into trouble—the latest episode was in the panic of 1857. It is true that bank incorporation was now more liberal since any bank that met the legal regulations could become incorporated automatically without lobbying for special legislative charters, as had been the case before. But the banks were now subject to a myriad of regulations, including edicts by state banking commissioners and high minimum capital requirements that greatly restricted entry into the banking business. But the most pernicious aspect of “free” banking was that the expansion of bank notes and deposits was directly tied to the amount of state government securities that the bank had invested in and posted as bond with the state. In effect, then, state government bonds became the reserve base upon which banks were allowed to pyramid a multiple expansion of bank notes and deposits. Not only did this system provide explicitly or implicitly for fractional reserve banking, but the pyramid was tied rigidly to the amount of government bonds purchased by the banks. This provision deliberately tied banks and bank credit expansion to the public debt; it meant that the more public debt the banks purchased, the more they could create and lend out new money. Banks, in short, were encouraged to monetize the public debt, state governments were thereby encouraged to go into debt, and hence, government and bank inflation were intimately linked.

  In addition to allowing periodic suspension of specie payments, federal and state governments conferred upon the banks the privilege of their notes being accepted in taxes. Moreover, the general prohibition of interstate branch banking—and often of intrastate branches as well—greatly inhibited the speed by which one bank could demand payment from other banks in specie. In addition, state usury laws, pushed by the Whigs and opposed by the Democrats, made credit excessively cheap for the riskiest borrowers and encouraged inflation and speculative expansion of bank lending.

  Furthermore, the desire of state governments to finance internal improvements was an important factor in subsidizing and propelling expansion of bank credit. As Hammond admits: “The wild cats lent no money to farmers and served no farmer interest. They arose to meet the credit demands not of farmers [who were too economically astute to accept wildcat money] but of states engaged in public improvements.”101

  Despite the flaws and problems, the decentralized nature of the pre–Civil War banking system meant banks were free to experiment on their own with improving the banking system. The most successful such device was the creation of the Suffolk system.

  A FREE-MARKET “CENTRAL BANK”

  It is a fact, almost never recalled, that there once existed an American private bank that brought order and convenience to a myriad of privately issued bank notes. Further, this Suffolk Bank restrained the overissuance of these notes. In short, it was a private central bank that kept the other banks honest. As such, it made New England an island of monetary stability in an America contending with currency chaos.

  Chaos was, in fact, that condition in which New England found herself just before the Suffolk Bank was established. There was a myriad of bank notes circulating in the area’s largest financial center, Boston. Some were issued by Boston banks which all in Boston knew to be solvent. But others were issued by state-chartered banks. These could be quite far away, and in those days such distance impeded both general knowledge about their solvency and easy access in bringing the banks’ notes in for redemption into gold or silver. Thus, while at the beginning these country notes were accepted in Boston at par value, this just encouraged some faraway banks to issue far more notes than they had gold to back them. So country bank notes began to be generally traded at discounts to par, of from 1 percent to 5 percent.

  City banks finally refused to accept country bank notes altogether. This gave rise to the money brokers mentioned earlier in this chapter. But it also caused hardship for Boston merchants, who had to accept country notes whose real value they could not be certain of. When they exchanged the notes with the brokers, they ended up assuming the fu
ll cost of discounting the bills they had accepted at par.

  A FALSE START

  Matters began to change in 1814. The New England Bank of Boston announced it too would go into the money broker business, accepting country notes from holders and turning them over to the issuing bank for redemption. The note holders, though, still had to pay the cost. In 1818, a group of prominent merchants formed the Suffolk Bank to do the same thing. This enlarged competition brought the basic rate of country-note discount down from 3 percent in 1814 to 1 percent in 1818 and finally to a bare one-half of 1 percent in 1820. But this did not necessarily mean that country banks were behaving more responsibly in their note creation. By the end of 1820 the business had become clearly unprofitable, and both banks stopped competing with the private money brokers. The Suffolk became just another Boston bank.

  OPERATION BEGINS

  During the next several years city banks found their notes representing an ever smaller part of the total New England money supply. Country banks were simply issuing far more notes in proportion to their capital (that is, gold and silver) than were the Boston banks.

  Concerned about this influx of paper money of lesser worth, both Suffolk Bank and New England Bank began again in 1824 to purchase country notes. But this time they did so not to make a profit on redemption, but simply to reduce the number of country notes in circulation in Boston. They had the foolish hope that this would increase the use of their (better) notes, thus increasing their own loans and profits.

  But the more they purchased country notes, the more notes of even worse quality (particularly from faraway Maine banks) would replace them. Buying these latter involved more risk, so the Suffolk proposed to six other city banks a joint fund to purchase and send these notes back to the issuing bank for redemption. These seven banks, known as the Associated Banks, raised $300,000 for this purpose. With the Suffolk acting as agent and buying country notes from the other six, operations began March 24, 1824. The volume of country notes bought in this way increased greatly, to $2 million per month by the end of 1825. By then, Suffolk felt strong enough to go it alone. Further, it now had the leverage to pressure country banks into depositing gold and silver with the Suffolk, to make note redemption easier. By 1838, almost all banks in New England did so, and were redeeming their notes through the Suffolk Bank.

  The Suffolk ground rules from beginning (1825) to end (1858) were as follows: Each country bank had to maintain a permanent deposit of specie of at least $2,000 for the smallest bank, plus enough to redeem all its notes that Suffolk received. These gold and silver deposits did not have to be at Suffolk, as long as they were at some place convenient to Suffolk, so that the notes would not have to be sent home for redemption. But in practice, nearly all reserves were at Suffolk. (City banks had only to deposit a fixed amount, which decreased to $5,000 by 1835.) No interest was paid on any of these deposits. But, in exchange, the Suffolk began performing an invaluable service: It agreed to accept at par all the notes it received as deposits from other New England banks in the system, and credit the depositor banks’ accounts on the following day.

  With the Suffolk acting as a “clearing bank,” accepting, sorting, and crediting bank notes, it was now possible for any New England bank to accept the notes of any other bank, however far away, and at face value. This drastically cut down on the time and inconvenience of applying to each bank separately for specie redemption. Moreover, the certainty spread that the notes of the Suffolk member banks would be valued at par: It spread at first among other bankers and then to the general public.

  THE COUNTRY BANKS RESIST

  How did the inflationist country banks react to this? Not very well, for as one could see the Suffolk system put limits on the amount of notes they could issue. They resented par redemption and detested systematic specie redemption because that forced them to stay honest. But country banks knew that any bank that did not play by the rules would be shunned by the banks that did (or at least see its notes accepted only at discount, and not in a very wide area, at that). All legal means to stop Suffolk failed: The Massachusetts Supreme Court upheld in 1827 Suffolk’s right to demand gold or silver for country bank notes, and the state legislature refused to charter a clearing bank run by country banks, probably rightly assuming that these banks would run much less strict operations. Stung by these setbacks, the country banks played by the rules, bided their time, and awaited their revenge.

  SUFFOLK’S STABILIZING EFFECTS

  Even though Suffolk’s initial objective had been to increase the circulation of city banks, this did not happen. In fact, by having their notes redeemed at par, country banks gained a new respectability. This came, naturally, at the expense of the number of notes issued by the worst former inflationists. But at least in Massachusetts, the percentage of city bank notes in circulation fell from 48.5 percent in 1826 to 35.8 percent in 1833.

  CIRCULATION OF NOTES OF MASSACHUSETTS BANKS (IN THOUSANDS)

  Source: Wilfred S. Lake, “The End of the Suffolk System,” Journal of Economic History 7, no. 4 (1947), p. 188.

  The biggest, most powerful weapon Suffolk had to keep stability was the power to grant membership into the system. It accepted only banks whose notes were sound. While Suffolk could not prevent a bad bank from inflating, denying it membership ensured that the notes would not enjoy wide circulation. And the member banks that were mismanaged could be stricken from the list of Suffolk-approved New England banks in good standing. This caused an offending bank’s notes to trade at a discount at once, even though the bank itself might be still redeeming its notes in specie.

  In another way, Suffolk exercised a stabilizing influence on the New England economy. It controlled the use of overdrafts in the system. When a member bank needed money, it could apply for an overdraft, that is, a portion of the excess reserves in the banking system. If Suffolk decided that a member bank’s loan policy was not conservative enough, it could refuse to sanction that bank’s application to borrow reserves at Suffolk. The denial of overdrafts to profligate banks thus forced those banks to keep their assets more liquid. (Few government central banks today have succeeded in that.) This is all the more remarkable when one considers that Suffolk—or any central bank—could have earned extra interest income by issuing overdrafts irresponsibly.

  But Dr. George Trivoli, whose excellent monograph, The Suffolk Bank, we rely on in this study, states that by providing stability to the New England banking system, “it should not be inferred that the Suffolk bank was operating purely as public benefactor.” Suffolk, in fact, made handsome profits. At its peak in 1858, the last year of existence, it was redeeming $400 million in notes, with a total annual salary cost of only $40,000. The healthy profits were derived primarily from loaning out those reserve deposits which Suffolk itself, remember, did not pay interest on. These amounted to more than $1 million in 1858. The interest charged on overdrafts augmented that. Not surprisingly, Suffolk stock was the highest priced bank stock in Boston, and by 1850, regular dividends were 10 percent.

  THE SUFFOLK DIFFERENCE

  That the Suffolk system was able to provide note redemption much more cheaply than the U.S. government was stated by a U.S. comptroller of the currency. John Jay Knox compared the two systems from a vantage point of half a century:

  [I]n 1857 the redemption of notes by the Suffolk Bank was almost $400,000,000 as against $137,697,696, in 1875, the highest amount ever reported under the National banking system. The redemptions in 1898 were only $66,683,476, at a cost of $1.29 per thousand. The cost of redemption under the Suffolk system was ten cents per $1,000, which does not appear to include transportation. If this item is deducted from the cost of redeeming National bank notes, it would reduce it to about ninety-four cents. This difference is accounted for by the relatively small amount of redemptions by the Treasury, and the increased expense incident to the necessity of official checks by the Government, and by the higher salaries paid. But allowing for these differences, the fact is established
that private enterprise could be entrusted with the work of redeeming the circulating notes of the banks, and it could thus be done as safely and much more economically than the same service can be performed by the Government.102

  The volume of redemptions was much larger under Suffolk than under the national banking system. During Suffolk’s existence (1825–57) they averaged $229 million per year. The average of the national system from its start in 1863 to about 1898 is put by Mr. Knox at only $54 million. Further, at its peak in 1858, $400 million was redeemed. But the New England money supply was only $40 million. This meant that, astoundingly, the average note was redeemed ten times per year, or once every five weeks.

  Bank capital, note circulation, and deposits, considered together as “banking power,” grew in New England on a per capita basis much faster than in any other region of the country from 1803 to 1850. And there is some evidence that New England banks were not as susceptible to disaster during the several banking panics during that time. In the panic of 1837, not one Connecticut bank failed, nor did any suspend specie payments. All remained in the Suffolk system. And when in 1857 specie payment was suspended in Maine, all but three banks remained in business. As the Bank Commission of Maine stated,

  The Suffolk system, though not recognized in banking law, has proved to be a great safeguard to the public; whatever objections may exist to the system in theory, its practical operation is to keep the circulation of our banks within the bounds of safety.

  THE SUFFOLK’S DEMISE

  The extraordinary profits—and power—that the Suffolk had by 1858 attained spawned competitors. The only one to become established was the Bank for Mutual Redemption in 1858. This bank was partially a response to the somewhat arrogant behavior of the Suffolk by this time, after 35 years of unprecedented success. But further, and more important, the balance of power in the state legislature had shifted outside of Boston, to the country bank areas. The politicians were more amenable to the desires of the overexpanding country banks. Still, it must be said that Suffolk acted toward the Bank of Mutual Redemption with spite where conciliation would have helped. Trying to force Mutual Redemption out of business, Suffolk, starting October 8, 1858, refused to honor notes of banks having deposits in the newcomer. Further, Suffolk in effect threatened any bank withdrawing deposits from it. But country banks rallied to the newcomer, and on October 16, Suffolk announced that it would stop clearing any country bank notes, thus becoming just another bank.