Banks and Politics in America

Bray Hammond's Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War traces the long American argument over banking as a fight over democracy and power fully as much as over finance. Hammond follows the country's early experiments with a national bank, the political battles that killed and revived it, and the fight's most famous episode, Andrew Jackson's war against the Second Bank of the United States, which Hammond treats not simply as a popular crusade against elite privilege but as a genuinely complicated struggle in which sound banking policy and raw political calculation were difficult to fully separate. He carries the story from the Revolution's earliest currency problems through to the eve of the Civil War, when the country still had no coherent national banking system to show for decades of argument.

Hammond wrote from years spent inside the Federal Reserve System itself, and that practical experience gives the book an unusual authority when it comes to how banking actually worked, and how political rhetoric about banks often diverged from banking reality. He is particularly interested in showing that the fight over the Second Bank was never simply ordinary Americans against a distant monied elite, since state banks, private financiers, and rival regional interests all had their own reasons, not all of them democratic in spirit, for wanting the national bank gone. Where earlier accounts often treated banking history as background to more obviously dramatic political events, Hammond insists it was the main event, a genuine ongoing struggle over who controlled money and credit in a rapidly growing economy. The book suits a reader willing to follow technical financial history in service of a genuinely political argument about power.