With the development of new commercial credit reporting agencies in mid-nineteenth-century America came a struggle over control of individuals’ commercial reputations. Founded with the promise of reducing the risk entailed in extending commercial credit, R.G. Dun & Company was among the firms that gathered intelligence on merchants in local communities, then distributed it to company subscribers, wholesale firms seeking to judge the creditworthiness of retailers they sold to.
Critically, merchants were barred from receiving their own reports. Almost from the beginning, however, merchants found ways to access these reports, as other historians of the credit industry have recognized. Yet at least a few merchants went beyond merely accessing the intelligence circulating about them, and sought to shape that intelligence to their own advantage. Strategies included feeding intelligence to Dun correspondents, opening retailers’ books to Dun employees, and in a few extreme cases, mounting spurious wholesaler inquiries to suggest confidence in a merchant where none existed. Using the R.G. Dun ledgers for Charleston, South Carolina, this paper will explore these methods. It will focus on the activities of Edward W. Bancroft, a dry goods merchant and bank director, who positioned himself as a trusted source for Dun correspondents and used that position to burnish the reputations of businesses he was invested in, as well as businesses belonging to his family and close associates.
While networks of family and trusted associates have long been recognized as a source of capital, credit, and information for their members, historians have typically focused on such networks’ ability to concentrate resources in members’ hands. This study addresses how the same networks adapted to a modernizing business world by moving intelligence outwards to safeguard members’ business reputations. It reads across the grain of R.G. Dun’s ledgers, which were concerned with gathering and controlling access to information, to uncover ways that merchants themselves sought to shape the information circulating about them.