The Public Debt and the National Banking System
The public debt of the Civil War brought into American financial history the important advent of one Jay Cooke.
The Ohio-born Cooke had joined the moderately successful Philadelphia investment banking firm of Clark and Dodge as a clerk at the age of 18.
In a few years, Cooke worked himself up to the status of junior partner,
And, in 1857, he left the firm to branch out on his own in canal and railroad promotion and other business ventures.
There he doubtless would have remained, except for the lucky fact that he and his brother Henry, editor of the leading Republican newspaper in Ohio, The Ohio State Journal, were close friends of U.S. Senator Salmon P. Chase.
Chase, a veteran leader of the anti-slavery movement, fought for and lost the Republican
presidential nomination in 1860 to Abraham Lincoln.
At that point, the Cooks determined to feather their nest by lobbying to make Salmon Chase
Secretary of the Treasury.
After heavy lobbying by the Cooks, the Chase appointment was secured, so Jay Cook quickly
set up his own investment banking house of Jay Cook and Company.
Everything was in place, it now remained to seize the opportunity.
As the Cooke's father wrote of Henry,
I took up my pen principally to say that H.S.'s, Henry's, plan in getting Chase into the
Cabinet and John Sherman into the Senate is accomplished, and that now is the time for
making money, by honest contracts out of the government.
Now indeed was their time for making money, and Cooke lost no time in doing so.
It did not take much persuasion, including wining and dining, for Cook to induce his
friend Chase to take an unprecedented step in the fall of 1862, granting the House of
Cook a monopoly on the underwriting of the public debt. With enormous energy, Cook hurled
himself into the task of persuading the mass of public to buy U.S. government bonds. In
doing so, Cook perhaps invented the art of public relations and mass propaganda. Certainly,
He did so in the realm of selling bonds.
As Kirkland writes,
Quote,
With characteristic optimism, he, Cooke, flung himself into a bond crusade.
He recruited a small army of 2,500 sub-agents among bankers, insurance men and community
leaders and kept them inspired and informed by mail and telegraph.
He taught the American people to buy bonds using lavish advertising in newspapers, broadsides
and Posters, God, Destiny, Duty, Courage, Patriotism, all summoned farmers, mechanics
and capitalists to invest in loans, loans which of course they had to purchase from
Jay Cooke, and purchase the loans they did, for Cooke's bond sales soon reached the
enormous figure of $1 million to $2 million a day.
Perhaps $2 billion in bonds were bought and underwritten by Jay Cooke during the war.
Cook lost his monopoly in 1864 under pressure of rival bankers, but a year later he was
reappointed to keep that highly lucrative post until the House of Cook crashed in the
panic of 1873.
In the Civil War, Jay Cook began as a moderately successful promoter.
He emerged at war's end a millionaire, a man who had spawned the popular motto, quote,
as rich as Jay Cook.
Surely he must have counted the $100,000 he had poured into Sam and Chase's political
and financial fortunes by 1864 as one of the most lucrative investments he had ever made.
It is not surprising that Jay Cooke acquired enormous political influence in the Republican
administration of the Civil War and after.
Hugh McCullough, Secretary of the Treasury from 1865 to 1869, was a close friend of Cooke's
and when McCullough left office, he assumed the post as head of Cooke's London office.
The Cooke brothers were also good friends of General Ulysses Grant, so they wielded
had great influence during the Grant administration.
No sooner had Cook secured the monopoly of government bond underwriting than he teamed
up with his associates, Secretary of the Treasury Chase and Ohio's Senator John Sherman to
drive through a measure which was destined to have far more fateful effects than greenbacks
on the American monetary system, the National Banking System.
The National Banking Acts destroyed the previously decentralized and fairly successful state
Banking System and substituted a new, centralized and far more inflationary banking system under
the aegis of Washington and a handful of Wall Street banks.
Whereas the effects of the greenbacks were finally eliminated by the resumption of specie
payments in 1879, the effects of the national banking system are still with us.
Not only was this system in place until 1913, but it paved the way for the Federal Reserve
Reserve System by instituting a quasi-central banking type of monetary system.
The quote, inner contradictions of the national banking system were such that the nation was
driven either to go onward to a frankly central bank or else to scrap centralized banking
altogether and go back to decentralized state banking.
Given the inner dynamic of state intervention to keep intensifying, coupled with the almost
universal adoption of statist ideology after the turn of the 20th century, which course
Chase and Sherman drove the new system through under the cover of war necessity, but it was
designed to alter the banking system permanently.
The wartime ground was to set up national banks, which were so structured as to necessarily
purchase large amounts of U.S. government bonds.
Patterned after the quote free banking systems, this tied the nation's banks with the federal
The Jacksonian embarrassment of the independent treasury was de facto swept away and the treasury would now keep its deposits in a new series of, quote, pets, the national banks, chartered directly by the federal government.
In this way, the Republican Party was able to use the wartime emergency to fulfill the Whig Republican dream of a federally controlled centralized banking system,
System, able to inflate the supply of money and credit in a uniform manner.
Meshing with this was a profound political goal.
As Sherman expressly pointed out, a vital object of the National Banking System was
to eradicate the embarrassing doctrine of states' rights and to nationalize American politics.
As established in the Bank Acts of 1863 and 1864, the National Banking System provided
for the Chartering of National Banks by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency
in Washington D.C.
The banks were quote, free, in that any institution meeting the requirements could obtain a charter,
but the requirements were so high, from $50,000 for rural banks to $200,000 in the bigger
cities, that small national banks were ruled out, particularly in the large cities.
The national banking system created three sets of national banks, Central Reserve City,
which was only New York, Reserve City, other cities with over 500,000 population, and Country,
which included all other national banks.
Central Reserve City Banks were required to keep 25% of their notes and deposits in reserve
of vault cash or quote, lawful money, which included gold, silver and greenbacks.
This provision incorporated the quote, reserve requirement concept that had been a feature
of the quote, free banking system.
Reserve City Banks, on the other hand, were allowed to keep one half of their required
reserves in vault cash, while the other half could be kept as demand deposits, checking
deposits, in Central Reserve City Banks.
Finally, country banks only had to keep a minimum ratio of 15% of their notes and deposits,
and only 40% of these reserves had to be in the form of vault cash.
The other 60% could be in the form of demand deposits either at Reserve City or Central
Reserve City Banks.
The upshot of this system was to replace the individualized structure of the pre-Civil
War state banking system by an inverted pyramid of country banks expanding on top of reserve
city banks, which in turn expanded on top of New York city banks.
Before the Civil War, every bank had to keep its own specie reserves, and any pyramiding
of notes and deposits on top of that was severely limited by calls for redemption in specie
by other competing banks as well as by the general public.
But now, reserve city banks could keep half of their reserves as deposits in New York
city banks, and country banks could keep most of theirs in one or the other, so that as
a result, all the national banks in the country could pyramid in two layers on top of the
relatively small base of reserves in the New York banks.
And furthermore, those reserves could consist of inflated greenbacks as well as specie.
Before the Civil War, every bank must stand or fall on its bottom.
It can pyramid notes and deposits on top of specie, but its room for such inflationary
expansion is limited because any bank's expansion will cause increased spending by
its clients on the goods or services of other banks.
Notes or checks on the expanding bank will go into the coffers of other banks, which
will call on the expanding bank for redemption.
This will put severe pressure on the expanding bank, which cannot redeem all of its liabilities
as it is, and whose reserve ratio has declined, so it will be forced to either contract its
loans and liabilities, or else go under.
Under the national banking system, New York City banks pyramid notes and deposits on top
of specie and greenbacks, reserve city banks pyramid their notes and deposits on top of
specie, greenbacks and deposits at New York City, and country banks pyramid on top of
both.
This means that, for example, if New York City banks inflate and expand their notes
and Deposits, they will not be checked by other banks calling upon them for redemption.
Instead, reserve city banks will be able to expand their own loans and liabilities by
pyramiding on top of their own increased deposits at New York City banks.
In turn, the country banks will be able to inflate their credit by pyramiding on top of
their increased deposits at both reserve city and New York banks.
The whole nation is able to inflate uniformly and relatively unchecked by pyramiding on
The National Banks were not compelled to keep part of their reserves as deposits in larger banks, but they tended to do so in the long run so that they could expand uniformly on top of the larger banks, and in the short run because of the advantages of having a line of credit with a larger, quote, correspondent bank, as well as earning interest on demand deposits at that bank.
Let us illustrate in another way how the national banking system pyramided by centralizing reserves.
Reserves
Let us consider the hypothetical balance sheet of the various banks.
Suppose that the country banks begin with $1 million in vault cash as their reserves.
With the national banking system in place, the country banks can now deposit three-fifths
or $600,000 of their cash in reserve city banks in return for interest-paying demand
deposits at those banks.
Total reserves for the two sets of banks have not changed, but now because the country banks
Reserve Banks can use as their reserves deposits in reserve city banks.
The same total reserves can be used by the banks to expand far more of their credit.
For now, $400,000 in cash supports the same total of notes and deposits that the country
banks had previously backed by $1 million.
And the reserve city banks can now expand $2.4 million on top of the new $600,000 in
and Cash, or rather $1.8 million in addition to the $600,000 due to the Citibanks.
In short, country bank reserves have remained the same, but reserve Citibank reserves have
increased by $600,000 and they can engage in 4 to 1 pyramiding of credit on top of that.
But that is not all.
The reserve Citibanks can deposit half of their reserves at the New York banks.
When they do that, since the reserve city banks are allowed to keep half of their reserves
in the central reserve city banks, the former can still pyramid $2.4 million on top of their
new $600,000 and yet deposit $300,000 in cash at the New York banks.
The latter, then, can expand another 4 to 1 on top of the new cash of $300,000 or increase
their total notes and deposits to $1.2 million.
In short, not only did the national banking system allow pyramiding of the entire banking
structure on top of a few large Wall Street banks, but the very initiating of the system
allowed a multiple expansion of all bank liabilities by centralizing a large part of the nation's
cash reserves from the individual state banks into the hands of the larger, and especially
the New York, banks.
For the expansion of $1.2 million on top of the new $300,000 at New York banks served
to expand the liabilities going to the smaller banks, which in turn could pyramid on top
of their increased deposits.
But even without that further expansion, $1 million of which, we will assume, originally
supported $6 million in notes and deposits, will now support, in addition to that $6 million,
$2.4 million issued by the Reserve City Banks, and $1.2 million by the New York banks.
To say nothing of further expansion by the latter two sets of banks, which will allow
country banks to pyramid more liabilities.
In June 1874, the fundamental structure of the national banking system was changed when
Congress, as part of an inflationist move after the Panic of 1873, eliminated all reserve
requirements on notes, keeping them only on deposits.
This released over $20 million of lawful money from bank reserves and allowed a further
Another Pyramid of Demand Liabilities In the long run, it severed the treatment of
notes from deposits, with notes tied rigidly to bank holdings of government debt, and demand
deposits pyramiding on top of reserve ratios in specie and greenbacks.
But this centralized inverse pyramid of bank credit was not all, for, in a way modeled
by the quote free banking system, every national bank's expansion of notes was tied intimately
to its ownership of U.S. government bonds. Every bank could only issue notes if it deposited
an equivalent of U.S. securities as collateral at the U.S. Treasury, so that national banks
could only expand their notes to the extent that they purchased U.S. government bonds.
This provision tied the national banking system intimately to the federal government, and
more particularly to its expansion of public debt. The federal government had an assured,
The World Bank was a built-in market for its debt, and the more the banks purchased that debt, the more the banking system could inflate.
Monetizing the public debt was not only inflationary per se, it provided the basis, when done by the larger city banks, of other banks pyramiding on top of their own monetary expansion.
The tie-in and the pyramiding process were cemented by several other provisions.
Every national bank was obliged to redeem the obligations of every other national bank at par.
Thus, the severe market limitation on the circulation of inflated notes and deposits,
depreciation as the distance from the bank increases, was abolished.
And while the Federal Government could not exactly make the notes of a private bank legal
tender, it conferred quasi-legal tender status on every national bank by agreeing to receive
all its notes and deposits at par for dues and taxes.
It is interesting and even heartening to discover that despite these enormous advantages conferred
by the Federal Government, national bank notes fell below par with greenbacks in the financial
crisis of 1867, and a number of national banks failed the next year.
Genuine redeemability, furthermore, was made very difficult under the national banking system.
Laxity was ensured by the fact that national banks were required to redeem the notes and
deposits of every other national bank at par, and yet it was made difficult for them to
actually redeem those liabilities in specie, for one of the problems with the pre-Civil
One might think that a national banking system would at least eliminate this problem, but on the contrary, branch banking continued to be prohibited, and interstate branch banking is illegal to this day.
Editors note, Congress eliminated federal restrictions on interstate banking and branching in September 1994, with the passage of the Regal Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act.
A bank would only have to redeem its notes at its own counter in its home office.
Furthermore, the redemption of notes was crippled by the fact that the federal government imposed a maximum limit of $3 million a month by which national bank notes could be contracted.
Reserve requirements are now considered a sound and precise way to limit bank credit expansion, but the precision can work two ways.
Just as government safety codes can decrease safety by setting a lower limit for safety measures and inducing private firms to reduce safety downward to that common level,
so reserve requirements can and ordinarily do serve as lowest common denominators for bank reserve ratios.
Ratios Pre-competition can and generally will result
in banks voluntarily keeping higher reserve ratios, but a uniform legal requirement will
tend to push all the banks down to that minimum ratio, and indeed we can see this now in the
universal propensity of all banks to be quote, fully loaned up, that is, to expand as much
as is legally possible up to the limits imposed by the legal reserve ratio.
Reserve requirements of less than 100% are more an inflationary than a restrictive monetary
device.
The national banking system was intended to replace the state banks, but many state banks
continued aloof and refused to join despite the special privileges accorded to the national
banks.
The reserve and capital requirements were more onerous and at that period national banks
were prohibited from making loans on real estate.
With the state banks refusing to come to heel voluntarily, Congress, in March 1865, completed
the Civil War Revolution of the banking system by placing a prohibitive 10% tax on all banknotes,
which had the desired effect of virtually outlawing all note issues by the state banks.
From 1865 on, the national banks had a legal monopoly on the issue of banknotes.
At first, the state banks contracted and disappeared under the shock, and it looked as if the United
States would only have national banks.
The number of state banks fell from 1,466 in 1863 to 297 in 1866, and total notes and
deposits in state banks fell from $733 million in 1863 to only $101 million in 1866.
After several years, however, the state banks readily took their place as an expanding element
in the banking system, albeit subordinated to the national banks.
In order to survive, the state banks had to keep deposit accounts at national banks, from
whom they could quote buy national banknotes in order to redeem their deposits.
In short, the state banks now became the fourth layer of the national pyramid of money and
credit.
On top of the country and other banks, for the reserves of the state banks became, in
addition to vault cash, demand deposits at national banks which they could redeem in
Cash.
The multi-layered structure of bank inflation under the national banking system was intensified.
In this new structure, the state banks began to flourish.
By 1873, the total number of state banks had increased to 1,330 and their total deposits
were $789 million.
The Cook-Chase connection with the new national banking system was simple.
As Secretary of the Treasury, Chase wanted an assured market for the government bonds
and as the monopoly underwriter of US government bonds for every year except one from 1862 to 1873, Jay Cooke was even more directly interested in an assured and expanding market for his bonds.
What better method for obtaining such a market than creating an entirely new banking system, the expansion of which was directly tied to the bank's purchases of government bonds, from Jay Cooke?
The Cook brothers played a major role in driving the National Banking Act of 1863 through a reluctant Congress.
The Democrats, devoted to hard money, opposed the legislation almost to a man.
Only a majority of Republicans could be induced to agree on the bill.
After John Sherman's decisive speech in the Senate for the measure, Henry Cook, now head of the Washington office of the House of Cook, wrote jubilantly to his brother,
It will be a great triumph, Jay, and one to which we have contributed more than any other living man.
The bank had been repudiated by the House, and was without a sponsor in the Senate, and was thus virtually dead and buried when I induced Sherman to take hold of it, and we went to work with the newspapers.
Going to work with the newspapers meant something more than mere persuasion for the Cook brothers.
Brothers.
As monopoly underwriter of government bonds, Cook was paying the newspapers large sums
for advertising, and so the Cooks thought, as it turned out correctly, that they could
induce the newspapers to grant them an enormous amount of free space, quote, in which to set
forth the merits of the new national banking system, end quote.
Such space meant not only publicity and articles, but even more important, the fervent editorial
support of most of the nation's press.
And so the press, implicitly bought for the occasion, kept up a drumfire of propaganda
for the new national banking system.
As Cook himself related, quote, For six weeks or more nearly all the newspapers in the country
were filled with our editorials, written by the Cook brothers, condemning the state bank
system and explaining the great benefits to be derived from the national banking system
now proposed, end quote.
And every day the indefatigable Cooks put on the desks of every member of Congress the
the relevant editorials from newspapers in their respective districts.
While many state bankers, especially the conservative old-line New York bankers, opposed the national
banking system, Jay Cook, once the system was in place, plunged in with a will.
Not only did he sell the national banks their required bonds, he also set up new national
banks which would have to buy his government securities.
His agents formed national banks in the smaller towns of the South and West.
Furthermore, he set up two large national banks, the First National Bank of Philadelphia
and the First National Bank of Washington DC.
But the national banking system was in great need of a mighty bank in New York City to
serve as the base of the inflationary pyramid for a host of country and reserve city banks.
Shortly after the inception of the system, three national banks had been organized in
New York, but none of them were large enough or prestigious enough to serve as the key
fulcrum of the new banking structure.
Jay Cooke, however, was happy to oblige, and he quickly established the 4th National Bank
of New York, capitalized at a huge $5 million.
After the war, Jay Cooke favored resumption of specie payments, but only if greenbacks
could be replaced one-to-one by new national banknotes.
In his unbounded enthusiasm for national banknotes and their dependence on the federal debt,
Cooke urged repeal of the $300 million legal limit on national banknote issue.
In 1865, he published a pamphlet proclaiming that in less than 20 years, national banknotes
circulation would total $1 billion.
The title of the pamphlet Cook published is revealing,
Our national debt may be a national blessing.
The debt is public wealth, political union, protection of industry, secure basis for national
currency.
By 1866, it was clear that the national banking system had replaced the state as the center
of the Monetary System of the United States Only a year earlier, in 1865, state banknotes
had totaled $142.9 million.
By 1866, they had collapsed to $20 million.
On the one hand, national banknotes grew from a mere $31.2 million in 1864, their first
year of existence, to $276 million in 1866.
Meanwhile, as we have seen, the number of state banks in existence was falling drastically
from 1,466 to 297.
The number of national banks grew in that same period from 66 in 1863 to 1,634 three
four years later.