all been brought to par. The Bank of the United States therefore yielded on the point about receiving branch notes; but it is a significant fact that those notes of large denominations were quoted at one-quarter of one per cent. discount at Philadelphia in 1824.[1] The usage of the Bank in 1830 was to redeem all its five's everywhere, and generally any small amount anywhere.
It was a trifling incident, but an unpopular one, that the Bank of the United States, in 1823, reduced the rating of pistareens from twenty cents to seventeen cents; It was a necessary consequence of the restoration of the currency to specie value.
The directors of the Bank resolved, December 2, 1823, to "operate in exchange." In the next two years, the active capital was increased by the sale of $3 millions or $4 millions worth of stock which had been forfeited in the stock jobbing operations of 1818. In the same years it took government loans of $10 millions. Gouge asserts that this proceeding brought it and all the other banks in the country, in 1825, to the verge of suspension.[2] It is certain that the crisis here preceded that in England and was not a direct consequence of it.
Raguet says that formerly the banks of the United States only discounted notes payable on the spot, and if for accommodation they discounted a bill payable at a distance, it was done on the same terms as if on the spot, no profit in the way of exchange being expected. The Bank of the United States began the business of dealing in inland bills of exchange, buying and selling bills on all points where it had branches upon terms which gave it a profit. He regards this dealing as mischievous for reasons which are connected with the expansions and contractions of the currency; that is, at different places the Bank makes money easy when it wants to sell bills and tight where it wants to buy them. He represents the Bank as trying to act as the arbiter of exchange. This had been claimed as a merit on its part by its friends. The suggestion is that the Bank creates and overrules the exchange and does not follow the market.[3]
April 9, 1825, seven expresses arrived at Philadelphia from New York in one day with news of a great rise of prices in the markets of Liverpool and London. All prices advanced, especially cotton. In July the price of cotton fell 3d. a pound at Liverpool. This produced a crisis in New York with many failures. "Many of the banks were in great difficulties. Several of them broke, and such were the straits of the United States Bank that one of the directors talked publicly on the exchange at Philadelphia of the expediency of suspending specie payments." Biddle wrote that the storm passed over this country a few weeks earlier than over England. He had never felt any uneasiness about the banks of this country except on that occasion. October 1st, the government paid off a loan of $7 millions, nearly half of which was payable at Philadelphia, whereby the United States Bank was brought in debt to the local banks of Pennsylvania and New York. It sold
