Panic and Power: North Carolina's First Great Depression, 1819-1833
Public Deposited- Creator
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Richard, Robert Shepard
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of History
- Abstract
- Following the War of 1812, the people of North Carolina experienced the first major economic crisis and depression in American history, known in historical literature as the Panic of 1819. Like their counterparts throughout the early American republic, North Carolinians actively shaped the postwar speculative boom as well as the scope, severity and duration of “hard times” after the market crash in their state. Poor fiscal policies and political gridlock reinforced North Carolina’s natural commercial handicaps to produce a deflationary economy in the long 1820s, plagued by widespread indebtedness among white farmers and planters, chronic emigration to the Southwest and the tragic separation of thousands of enslaved black families. Although it is largely forgotten today, the Panic of 1819 was the beginning of a genuine “great depression” that forever altered the economic, social and political trajectories of North Carolina as well as large swathes of the American South. While doing little to alleviate the financial distress of their fellow citizens, public officials in North Carolina vigorously debated the implications of the great depression for their slave-based agricultural society. They wrestled with the moral hazards of debt within the context of a rapidly modernizing capitalist economy, one that was still tethered to a Southern honor culture rooted in personal reputation and manly independence. In their search for solutions to the crisis, progressive and populist leaders advocated a new politics of public finance based on state-owned commercial banking and state-sponsored internal improvements, both of which met fierce resistance from traditionalist slaveholders with a disproportionate influence over the General Assembly. The politics of public finance gained purchase among the electorate just as North Carolina’s political culture felt the transformative effects of Andrew Jackson’s ascendance and the popular movement for constitutional reform. The resulting phenomenon of Jacksonian fiscal populism pervaded the developmental policies of the Second Party System and spurred North Carolina’s rapid economic growth in the decades after 1835. Thanks to the Panic of 1819, the “Rip Van Winkle State” finally awoke from its slumber.
- Date of publication
- 2020
- Keyword
- DOI
- Resource type
- Advisor
- Watson, Harry L
- Barney, William L
- DuVal, Kathleen
- Huston, Reeve
- Waterhouse, Benjamin
- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Degree granting institution
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
- Graduation year
- 2020
- Language
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This work has no parents.
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