"Bank Lane Bohemians: Financial Culture and Sociability in the Early American Republic"

Since Tocqueville’s axiomatic observations almost two centuries ago, historians recognize that few social activities captured the spirit of Jacksonian America more than the proliferation of financial speculations and the popularity of clubs. Yet most historians of nineteenth-century sociability avoid questions of financial culture. Likewise, most business historians and scholars working in the new history of capitalism omit analyses of financial actors’ voluntary associations beyond formal business organizations. The few exceptions that focus on a nexus of sociability and finance only consider the later nineteenth or twentieth centuries.
Such a lacuna is surprising given the degree to which many histories emphasize the importance of social credit in the early nineteenth century. Generations of scholarship recognizes the social dimension of credit in familial, ethno-religious, gendered, and racial contexts. As opposed to the historical attention devoted to more recognized vectors of nineteenth-century credit, voluntary associations attract only surface explorations as potential nodes in networks of credit. Network analyses too often focus on the fact of club connections without also interrogating more probative sources such as meeting minutes, bylaws, and organizational correspondence, which better reflect the intra-organizational circulation of financial credit, knowledge, and culture.
This paper will explore how debating clubs, literary societies, and other organizations inculcated and incubated financial knowledge and culture from the 1790s to the 1840s. By showing how clubs from New York to Barbourville, Kentucky debated and discussed financial topics, this paper will suggest that clubs often provided an early sounding board for financial questions that sometimes only ripened in the political discourse decades later. Clubs also published materials for the public, including the Delphian Club, which met at a private residence on Bank Lane in Baltimore.