as placing a partial fund in a distant bank to redeem their paper, and after the fact becomes generally known that their paper is at par in that quarter, issuing an emission of notes signed with ink of a different shade, at the same time giving secret orders to said bank not to pay the notes thus signed, and subjecting the owners of them to loss and disappointment." "Others * * * have issued a species of paper called 'facility notes,' purporting to be payable in either money, country produce, or anything else that has body or shape, and thereby rendering their name appropriate only by facilitating the ruin of those who are so unfortunate as to hold them." "A person this day paid us," says Niles, "a note which he received as having been issued in Philadelphia, and so it was; but unfortunately for him it was 'New Philadelphia' the 'New' printed very small and the 'Philadelphia' very large."[1] One of the commonest abuses in the banks was that the directors were supposed to have a right to large loans. In cases where the banks had been organized in the way which has been above described, this was a matter of course. The men who formed the bank, and gave their stock notes for the stock, borrowed the circulation as soon as it was printed, and had the advantage of holding it in the first hand; hence Niles says, apropos of the City Bank of Baltimore, in which all the officials, except one clerk and the porter, had taken out loans amounting to $426,083, and where, if the loans to the directors were included, the whole group had borrowed $100,000 more than the whole capital: "This is the great principle of modern banking; a cheat, a bubble, a machine for the exclusive benefit of a few scheming men."[2]
The bank which Niles was fond of using as a proverb was the Owl Creek Bank of Ohio, or, as he nicknamed it, the "Hoo Hoo Bank." This bank gave notice that, in order to counteract the injurious tendency of the United States branch banks in that State, it had thought proper to follow the example of other banks and suspend payment.[3]
The Bank of the State of North Carolina tendered an oath to all persons who demanded specie of it that the notes had not been exchanged or bought up for the purpose of making the demand. The Bank of Darien, Georgia, forced everybody demanding specie to take an oath before a justice of the peace in the Bank, to each and every note, that it was his own, that he was not an agent for any other person, and this oath must be taken in the presence of at least five directors and the cashier. If they could not be found together, the demand could not be made. The sum of $1.37 1-2 on each note must also be paid on the spot by the person making the demand.
A volume might be filled with facts and incidents of this kind from this period. They account for language like the following about the abuse
- ↑ 15 Niles, 261.
- ↑ 17 Niles, 138.
- ↑ 16 Niles, 131. In 1837, he reacalled a story of a mysterious individual who entered the Owl Creek Bank and demanded to have some notes redeemed in specie. He was told that the bank had neither. He then demanded Eastern funds. "No Eastern funds on hand," was the brief reply. "Can you," says the mysterious person, "give me tolerably well-executed counterfeited notes on solvent banks? I would prefer them to this trash." They stared to expel him, when he threw down a hoot owl, saying that he had just killed their president. (52 Niles, 85.)
