Banks and Politics in America

This is far more than just a history of banking. Rather, banking is used, in the author's words, "as a point of observation whence one looks over the landscape and spies out things not to be so clearly seen from any other angle." Because of the importance of credit to America's growth, banking is a useful vantage point. From it are seen the conflict between Hamilton's and Jefferson's concepts of America's economic future, the destruction of the second Bank of the United States, and the striving to bolster the government's finances as the nation was drawn into civil war. These and other developments are related and interpreted.