Reviews for Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War

The average rating for Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-04-19 00:00:00 Tony Starks For historians the sad irony is that histories usually don't age well, and this book has some age behind it. It was published back in 1956 (when it won a Pulitzer) and its author (a former banker) offhandedly mentions his personal memories of the 1896 McKinley/Bryan presidential campaign. That IS old. Yet this book fully deserves its Pulitzer and is probably the best single book on American banking out there. It is doorstopper, but its worth it. As a former banker, Hammond intimately understands the banking procedures most historians only pretend to grasp (bills of exchange, deposit-liability ratios, discounting notes, etc.) and he is happy to explain them in clear, concise English. This alone should garner him a prize. Yet he has also conducted an incredible amount of research on the entire history of the American banking system and placed it in the center of US history more broadly. His narrative of the Second Bank of the United States, which of course takes up a significant chunk of the book, is enlightening and even exciting. He shows the drama and the importance behind bank charters, free banking, capital reserves, and commercial bills, all of which were not just economic issues, but were widely regarded to have national political importance. He does spend too much time harping on the agrarians' opposition to banking (we get it, they WEREN'T William Jennings Bryan, they liked "hard" money), and in the later part of the book he gets repetitive extolling the virtues of central banking, but this would still be at the top of my list to recommend for people who want to understand American economic history.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-07-16 00:00:00 Susan Singer Kind of longwinded but informative on the subject. Disjointed in the end after the end of the Second Bank of the US.