The Panic of 1819: The First Great Depression by Andrew H. Browning

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Panic of 1819: The First Great Depression by Andrew H. Browning Robert E. Wright The Panic of 1819: The First Great Depression. By Andrew H. Browning. Studies in Constitutional Democracy. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2019. Pp. x, 439. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8262-2183-4.) Ten score and zero years ago, a financial panic precipitated a decrease in per capita economic output as well as a decrease in the overall price level that lasted several years. Ostensibly comparable to the output and price declines of the 1930s, the “First Great Depression,” as historian Andrew H. Browning terms the Panic of 1819 and its aftermath, was certainly the worst peacetime downturn in the American economy since the real estate bust of the early 1760s sparked the imperial crisis. The contribution of The Panic of 1819: The First Great Depression rests in its thick narrative descriptions of changing economic conditions in the young United States. The chapter on volcanic climatic disruptions brings the notion of supply shock to life, while other early chapters paint detailed portraits of the asset bubbles that formed in wheat and cotton lands, slaves, manufacturing, and banking. The bursting of those bubbles Browning also vividly describes in the second part of his tome. The third part pitches the profundity of the downturn’s political consequences, including increased sectional animosity and popular political participation. Like a biographer, Browning stresses the importance of his subject, placing the Panic of 1819 in the room during all the momentous congressional debates and U.S. Supreme Court decisions between 1819 and the Andrew Jackson administration. An experienced researcher, Browning seriously engages with the important scholarship on early U.S. economic development produced by economist historians over the last thirty years. Despite the book’s appearance in a press series on constitutional democracy, however, Browning only partially adopts the development framework laid out by financial history doyen Richard Sylla, who has shown how the governance revolution of the 1770s and 1780s led directly to the financial revolution of the early 1790s, which in turn enabled the creation of the markets and institutions that funded the agricultural, transportation, and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century. Browning, though, ignores America’s early governance reforms, leaning instead on the outdated concept of the market revolution, which he connects to increased transportation productivity via the corporation revolution, his truncated version of the much broader and more sophisticated Hamiltonian financial and entrepreneurial revolutions detailed by Sylla and others. [End Page 148] Moreover, while Browning can be excused for not explicitly discussing the Impossible Trinity or Trilemma, IS-LM, AD-AS, Heckscher-Ohlin, or other pertinent economic models, his narrative does not appear to be informed by them, which means the authoritative tone that the text often takes on complex issues of economic causation is unwarranted. In fact, Browning botches descriptions of several fundamental financial concepts, including the nature of money and the payments system in the early republic (confusing barter and book credit on pages 130–31 and page 222, for instance) and bank accounting (confusing, for example, liabilities with assets on page 164 and page 238). A close look at historian Sharon Ann Murphy’s Other People’s Money: How Banking Worked in the Early American Republic (Baltimore, 2017) might have helped Browning master such basics. While Browning’s account, the first book-length study of the downturn since Clyde A. Haulman’s Virginia and the Panic of 1819: The First Great Depression and the Commonwealth (London, 2008), may satisfy generalists seeking an engaging, mildly revisionist read, it leaves much to be desired as economic or financial history. Even as social history it remains far from comprehensive, missing, for example, Mordecai Manuel Noah’s important Essays of Howard, on Domestic Economy (New York, 1820). Ergo, a book about the socioeconomic causes and consequences of the Panic of 1819 remains on the bucket list of this intellectual progeny of Charles Sellers and Richard J. Ellis. Robert E. Wright Augustana University Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association