[There are a
number of significant
anniversaries in 2019, so for this New Year’s series I’ll highlight a
handful of such historical anniversaries. Leading up to a special weekend post
featuring exclusive AmericanStudier predictions on the year ahead!]
On its 200th
anniversary, a short-term and a long-term legacy of America’s first
post-independence financial crisis.
I could pretend
to be an economic historian and get all technical here about the causes of the
Panic of 1819, the new nation’s first
economic disaster and the start of a
depression that lasted more than two years. But you’re my friends, and I
wouldn’t lie to y’all like that; I imagine many of you know at least as much
about such economic histories and factors as I do (and as ever, I’d welcome
responses and additions in comments!). Not to mention, and as usual with such
economic crises, the causes seem to have been multiple and spread across many
years: from the 1815
eruption of an Indonesian volcano and the worldwide Year
Without a Summer it produced; to the January 1817 creation of the
Second Bank of the United States and its subsequent neo-federalist economic
policies; to the January
1819 collapse of the cotton market, with the value of that staple crop
dropping more than 25% in a single day. That last event directly precipitated the
Panic, but the others (and many others as well) reveal that economic crisis had
been on its way for quite some time by that point.
The Panic and
the more than two years of depression that followed left a number of lasting
legacies in American society and culture, but none was more striking than the
move toward Jacksonian America. Andrew Jackson may not have been elected
president until 1828, but both his general emphasis on expanding
democracy to more (white) working and lower class Americans and his
specific opposition
to the Second Bank of the United States can be traced directly to the Panic’s
origins and effects. Moreover, Jackson’s opponent in both that 1828 and the controversial 1824 presidential election
(as well as the 1826
midterms in between), John Quincy Adams, was in many ways an embodiment of
neo-federalism and the elitist attitudes and policies that had helped
precipitated the Panic. I wrote in that last hyperlinked post about how the
1824 presidential election signaled the beginning of the end of the “Era of Good Feelings,” but
certainly the 1819-1821 depression had a role in play in the end of that
relatively calm and apolitical period as well. Out of that economic crisis,
among other factors such as racism
toward Native Americans, arose a democratizing movement led by one of the
most vitriolic and angry voices in American presidential and political history.
While Jackson
was perhaps its most immediate and overt legacy, the Panic also produced
broader social changes that have endured long beyond the administration or life
of Old Hickory. For one thing, the depression’s drastic and destructive effects
led to significant new public social programs: specifically, Congress passed
the 1820 Land
Act and the 1821 Relief for Public Land Debtors Act, to ease the burden on
existing landowners and allow for new ownership; and more broadly, for the
first time state and local governments created
classification systems (such as able-bodied vs. disabled) in order to better
assess who needed public support most urgently. Even more broadly, out of the depression
came the nation’s first significant moves toward public education, with
Massachusetts starting the first
public high school, English High School, in 1821. Whatever we say about
Jacksonian Democracy, or the democratization
of American Christianity, or any other such contemporary phenomenon,
perhaps the most widespread and genuine democratizing element in American
society and history has been public education, and it too began in earnest in
the 1820s, one more legacy of the Panic of 1819.
Last anniversary
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Anniversaries you’d highlight or predictions you’d share?
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