$4.4 millions; the public deposits, $2.7 millions; credit of public officers, $1.5 millions; private deposits, $3.3 millions; loans, $30.7 millions; public stocks, $11 millions.
The Bank had petitioned Congress, in 1818,[1] for an amendment to the charter to allow some other person than the president and cashier of the parent Bank to sign the notes; but the petition had been refused. This labor was very great, the circulation then being over $8 millions. The reason for not letting any one but the president and cashier of the head bank sign the notes was that the variety of signatures would make the notes non-uniform, which was one of the evils the bank was intended to correct. The Senate authorized the appointment of special officers for this duty, but the House declined, chiefly, as it appears, on the ground that the big Bank would get too much power over the local banks. Smith of Maryland said that the officers could not sign more than fifteen hundred notes each day, in view of their other duties.[2] The same petition was renewed in 1820 and again in 1823. In the latter petition, which was made the subject of a report of a committee of the House of Representatives, it was prayed that the part of the charter might be changed which provided that no director, except the president, should be eligible for more than three years in four; that a law should be passed providing for the punishment of persons convicted of fraud on the Bank; that the Board might be authorized to appoint persons to sign notes of the smaller denominations at the parent bank; that the notes of the Bank might be made receivable by law in payments to the United States only at the bank or branch where they are made payable. The committee reported against the first point; in favor of the second and third. In regard to the fourth point, they say that the existing regulation operates as a practical prohibition to issue any notes in the western States and to a like prohibition to issue them to the South during six months in the year. They propose, therefore, that this request also be granted. The document is in fact an exposition of the difficulty in which the Bank found itself, with branches scattered all over the country, in each district of which there was a strictly local currency, while the notes of the national Bank were to be maintained at an equal value everywhere. This committee argue that if the notes of the branches also had only local circulation, specie would be drawn and transmitted when the exchanges so required, and that the expense of this would provide the required check and guarantee on the transactions. No action was taken.[3]
The liquidation had reached such a point, in 1823, that the currencies of the different States were all substantially equal on the Atlantic coast, having
- ↑ See page 96.
- ↑ Gouge, Journal of Banking, 287. Charles Biddle, who was one of the commissioners to sign the United States treasury notes during the second war, said that he signed his name sometimes fourteen hundred times in one day. His maximum was eighteen hundred. (Memoir, 340.) Hugh McCulloch says that he signed his name four thousand times a day, on bank notes, as a day's work; and that, kept up for weeks and months, it was a punishment too inhumane to be inflicted on the most guilty criminal. (Men and Measures, 130.)
- ↑ 4 Folio Finance, 285.
