Building the Empire State. Brian Phillips Murphy
riches … the plunder of our citizens, the wages of death and the earnings of slaves” in order to create “influence in a Bank.” There, they would “lay the foundation of power … [and] silence every Whig character who applies to them for aid.” Referring to Alexander McDougall’s leading role in the bank, the writer told readers: “Be not deceived by the names of a few Whig characters who appear…. The danger is the greater while the real agents are behind the curtain.” The writer alleged that bank cashier William Seton was conspiring to unite New York Tories with Philadelphia Tories, and closed his letter with a threatening flourish: those who had “hitherto borne the name of patriots” would be committing “apostasy” if they failed to “withdraw their names when the cloven foot appears to men of discernment”65 This land-bank supporter had therefore decided that the way to defeat the money bank was to ignore concerns about assets and instead scrutinize the patriotism and motivations of those aligned with the Bank of New-York. By linking Tories with money, the writer sought to raise the stakes of the approval of a charter for a money bank; such a legislative act would empower the nation’s most dangerous domestic enemies and unravel the gains of the Revolution by elevating a class of unreliably loyal Americans to positions of financial and political power.
But another rhetorical thread soon developed amid these fights: a call to reject both banks’ petitions for incorporation. Writers argued that neither bank should be incorporated and questioned the propriety of bank chartering altogether.
One letter, punched up with emphatic typesetting in the Journal, pointed to the Tory–Whig coalition and asked whether bank chartering created dangerous alliances and corrupting influences that the legislature should try to extinguish rather than encourage. As the writer understood it, new banks were “extraordinary phenomena.” One in Pennsylvania was composed of “rigid Presbyterians (who have hitherto assumed to themselves the style and character of pure and untainted Whigs), firm and unshaken Quakers, and bigoted, furious Tories (Churchmen and others)” who all “appear[ed] in the Fields of Politicks and controversy.” Meanwhile in New York, “similar coalitions, equally destitute of public spirit, and destructive of the Whig interest, [were] now forming.” The writer demanded that the legislature “guard against” the “dangerous consequences and tendency” of banks, and asked whether “either the land or money Bank, would not be more beneficial to a few money lenders and traders, than to the country at large?” Because the legislature would be vesting an important privilege in a narrowly drawn group, the writer alleged that lawmakers were creating a situation where “Government will be laid under obligations to usurers, & c. who will of course worm themselves into lucrative posts and high stations” while escaping accountability from voters.66
Another letter, printed a week later in the Journal and written by someone who wanted to be known only as “a Mechanic,” echoed these concerns and raised a broader question about incorporated banking: “Where ought credit be placed for the public weal in a republican government?” According to the writer, neither a land- nor money-bank proposal was a suitable answer. Credit should rest “in government only,” because allowing it to reside in the hands of bankers had “pernicious and destructive consequence.” “It removes both power and credit out of the proper hands,” the author said, “and fixes them into those of individuals.” Because those people proposing a bank tended to “assert that government have no credit to circulate their own paper”—meaning that they opposed the emission of state bills of credit and other forms of inflation-prone paper money—the author felt that it was “a burlesque or insult on government” for those same individuals to “ask their sanction to give a credit to the property of individuals.” Bank charters “advance the power of stockholders, and depreciate the power of government,” creating conditions that lead to high interest rates for debtors, the political disenfranchisement of renters, and state legislatures dominated by bank shareholders. In Pennsylvania, the writer warned, “the Assembly must become Brokers for the Bankholders” because lawmakers had taken steps to protect the Bank of North America. The risk was that New York would follow suit, placing bank stockholders “in the path to acquire the same ascendancy and authority over the United States.”67
In both letters, then, the writers’ opposition to incorporated banks did not arise from a preference for a particular kind of asset or method of securing the value of paper money but from a fear that banks were far too dangerous to be entrusted to the care of elected officials. By incorporating a bank, state legislators risked diminishing their own institutional legitimacy by creating a separate, quasi-independent policy-making and regulatory agency that was responsible not to lawmakers or voters but to shareholders. A bank threatened to empower a cadre of unelected financiers whose actions and behavior could not be monitored or tempered by officials or voters; it created a group of people without boundaries who were responsible only to themselves.
Although these letter-writing bank opponents might have been given to hyperbole, they offered a savvy analysis of the competition for bank charters in New York in 1784. Lawmakers were not simply evaluating competing coalitions’ proposals on the basis of political connections or judging relative merits of land and coined metals as sources of bank credit. They would not be selecting one proposal, adopting an incorporation law, and letting that bank run free; any bank that opened under their watch would create an abiding interest among legislators to prevent it from turning into what the legal profession termed imperium in imperio: a state within a state. Because banks could shower lawmakers with credit or offer them lucrative opportunities to become shareholders, banks had an arsenal of tools at their disposal that enabled them to influence public officials in ways that would make them approach policy questions in terms of the banks’ own institutional interests. And if officials became dependent on the credit or services provided by bankers, they would no longer be dependent on voters. Ultimately, banks could distort political economy by shaping policies to their liking and breaking the bonds of accountability that linked voters to their elected representatives.68
The Bank of the City of New-York
From the competing proposals put forward in the spring of 1784, only one bank emerged: the commercially focused money Bank of New-York. And it opened without a charter.
Although it is tempting to imagine that the bank proposals canceled each other out for personal reasons or political expediency specifically related to the events of 1784, lawmakers’ hostility to bank chartering proved durable. A slate of Bank of New-York directors and interested allies won election to the state assembly in April 1784, defeating a group of land-bank supporters that included Stephen Sayre, yet the bank’s petitions were denied. In 1785, a circle of more radical merchants followed their conservative brethren to support the Bank of New-York’s incorporation but to little effect.69 And although subsequent legislatures were not bound by their predecessors’ decisions, future legislators also refused the Bank of New-York’s repeated requests for corporate privileges during the next seven years. The bank reapplied for a charter in the fall of 1784, in the spring of 1785, and again in 1789 and 1790. Each time it was refused. In 1786 the bank had to fend off a proposal to make all forms of private banking illegal.70
State legislators, of course, had never been under any obligation to grant all or any of the petitions for bank corporate charters, and New York’s state government did not incorporate a bank until 1791. Therefore, although a corporate charter was a valued political prize and a clearly desirable legal tool, it was an exceedingly rare species in New York during the 1780s.
But the state legislators’ decision should not be confused with inaction; lawmakers never explicitly banished the corporate form from the state, and petitioners continued to believe they had reasonable chances of success. By refusing to charter a bank in 1784, lawmakers were not preventing a bank from opening; had that been their goal, they could have adopted a law barring the creation of such enterprises or erected onerous regulatory barriers similar to the one considered in 1786. Instead, by taking what seemed to be a neutral policy stance, New York legislators—perhaps inadvertently—ensured that the only bank that opened in 1784 was the merchant-backed Bank of New-York. Without monopoly protections or corporate privileges, the Livingston-led land-bank coalition dissolved; the risks associated with using