which endeavored to make the hostility to the banks a political force, and to organize it for the purpose of a "reform of banking." In all these complaints and denunciations of banking the positive desire which is expressed is that the banks shall serve equality by their operations. A loco foco meeting at New York resolved that the banks ought to help poor men to emigrate and that Congress ought to give each one from eighty to two hundred acres.
In August, Biddle still hoped and believed that the Executive Department would find it necessary to return to the Bank of the United States.[1] In September Adams mentioned that he bought of the Bank in Philadelphia, with its own note, a draft on Washington. The draft was payable in current funds, which were depreciated eight per cent. or twelve per cent. He made no remark because he wanted to be unbiased about the Bank.
The method in which, at this time, the Bank operated the foreign exchange transactions of the country was as follows: "The cotton crop of the South beginning to come into market at New Orleans, Mobile, and other cities, in the month of October, and continuing to come until the following summer, a large share of the operations of the Bank of the United States, through its branches at those places, has been to purchase the bills of exchange drawn on Europe or the northern cities by the merchants who have shipped cotton. By the purchase of these bills, payable in the notes of the Bank, the merchants of the South have been enabled to pay the planters of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and other States, for their cotton; who in turn have been enabled to pay their debts to the country merchants; and these last again to the merchants in New York and Philadelphia. In performing this particular function, the notes of the Bank have in reality been nothing but duplicate bills of exchahge, absolutely representing a certain quantity of cotton, taking the place of the original bills which the shippers of the cotton had drawn, and possessing this advantage over the latter, that, being universal credit and negotiable without endorsement, they could be applied to the payment of every debt, great or small. They were therefore preferred to any other form of bills to which a sale of cotton could give rise; and if they did not get back to the Bank in Philadelphia as soon as the bills for the purchase of which they were issued, it was because they had to traverse a more circuitous route."[2]
Biddle was fully familiar with these operations. He had been practising them for ten or twelve years. It was with his mind on them that he made his contracts for the relief of New York. It was one of the dearest triumphs of his life to "save" New York, and he got, at the same time, a complete cover of magnanimity and glory for the things which he was most anxious to do, and which, if done upon his own motion, would not have looked well. In issuing his post-notes for the assistance of the New Yorkers, he found himself placed in far more complete control of the whole movement of com-
