Books by Stephen Campbell
University Press of Kansas, 2019
President Andrew Jackson’s conflict with the Second Bank of the United States was one of the most... more President Andrew Jackson’s conflict with the Second Bank of the United States was one of the most consequential political struggles in the early 19th century. A fight over the Bank's reauthorization, the “Bank War,” provoked fundamental disagreements over the role of money in politics, competing constitutional interpretations, equal opportunity in the face of a state-sanctioned monopoly, and the importance of financial regulation—all of which cemented emerging differences between Jacksonian Democrats and Whigs. As Stephen W. Campbell argues here, both sides in the Bank War engaged interregional communications networks funded by public and private money. The first reappraisal of this political turning point in American history in almost 50 years, The Bank War and the Partisan Press advances a new interpretation by focusing on the funding and dissemination of the party press.
Drawing on insights from the fields of political history, the history of journalism, and financial history, The Bank War and the Partisan Press brings to light a revolving cast of newspaper editors, financiers, and postal workers who appropriated the financial resources of pre-existing political institutions, and even created new ones, to enrich themselves and further their careers. The Bank propagated favorable media and tracked public opinion through its system of branch offices, while the Jacksonians did the same by harnessing the patronage networks of the Post Office.
Campbell’s work contextualizes the Bank War within larger political and economic developments at the national and international levels. Its focus on the newspaper business documents the transition from a seemingly simple question of renewing the Bank’s charter to a multi-sided, nationwide sensation that sorted the American public into ideologically polarized political parties. In doing so, The Bank War and the Partisan Press shows how the conflict played out on the ground level in various states--in riots, duels, raucous public meetings, politically orchestrated bank runs, arson, and assassination attempts. The resulting narrative moves beyond the traditional boxing match between Jackson and Bank president Nicholas Biddle, balancing political institutions with individual actors, and business practices with party attitudes.
Peer Reviewed Articles and Book Chapters by Stephen Campbell
The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 2021
This article explores the ways in which Philadelphia banker Nicholas Biddle financed the politica... more This article explores the ways in which Philadelphia banker Nicholas Biddle financed the political economy of cotton and slavery. Most historians have focused on Biddle's political interactions with President Andrew Jackson during the Bank War, either ignoring or minimizing the banker's southern investments in the late 1830s. By examining the complexities of the antebellum era credit system, we can see how Biddle and his business partners provided financing for, functioned within, and extracted profits from a region that depended to a significant extent on the commodification of land, cotton, and slaves. Biddle invested in the South because he saw the expansion of the Cotton Kingdom in lands once occupied by Native Americans and that would soon be worked by enslaved African Americans as consistent with his own nationalistic assumptions and as crucial to the recovery from the Panic of 1837, the bank's profits, and the restoration of American credit abroad.
William Beezley, ed., The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, 2017
The Transatlantic Financial Crisis of 1837 produced a global depression that lasted until the mid... more The Transatlantic Financial Crisis of 1837 produced a global depression that lasted until the mid-1840s. Falling cotton prices, a collapsing land bubble, and fiscal and monetary policies pursued by individual actors and financial institutions in the United States and Great Britain were all responsible. A comprehensive understanding of the panic must take into account the global movements of gold and silver that linked Mexico, China, the United States, and Great Britain in complex networks of credit and debt. In the United States, businesses, banks, and individuals declared bankruptcy; states defaulted on their debts; commodity prices dropped; credit instruments lost their value; and unemployment rose amid a general atmosphere of pessimism and an erosion of confidence. The severity of the panic prompted politicians and financial theorists to reevaluate their ideological assumptions regarding the proper role of governmental regulation in an economy. In a larger sense, the panic demonstrated how the expansion of slavery in the United States, British imperialism, financial speculation, and recurring cycles of boom and bust were emerging as defining features of modern capitalism.
American Nineteenth Century History, 2016
President Andrew Jackson’s protracted conflict with Nicholas Biddle, known colloquially as the “B... more President Andrew Jackson’s protracted conflict with Nicholas Biddle, known colloquially as the “Bank War,” endures as a seminal chapter in the nation’s political and economic history. This article analyzes Biddle’s interactions with lawmakers, financiers, newspaper editors, and intellectuals during the Second Bank’s campaign for recharter from early 1830 to mid-1832. It brings together research from numerous manuscript collections, bank balance sheets, newspapers, and legislative debates to show how Biddle orchestrated one of the earliest business lobbies and public relations campaigns conducted on a nationwide scale. Biddle developed a nationwide lobby primarily because of the Bank’s branch structure and vast financial holdings, because he mobilized a large army of campaign surrogates, because he targeted voters with a standardized campaign message, and because recent advancements in transportation and communication enabled him to correspond with scores of subordinates separated by hundreds of miles of distance. Pursuing this analysis sheds light on one of the nation’s most powerful businesses and contains valuable insights for scholars interested in the burgeoning history of capitalism.
A Companion to the Era of Andrew Jackson, 2013
Web-Based Publications by Stephen Campbell
Tropics of Meta: Historiography for the Masses, 2019
Are you interested in the question of objectivity as it relates to research and teaching in the h... more Are you interested in the question of objectivity as it relates to research and teaching in the history profession? Maybe you've thought about the liberal bias of history professors, postmodernism, and whether history is more of an art form than science? Then check out this long-form piece I've written for Tropics of Meta, courtesy of Professor Alex Sayf Cummings. I cover a lot of material here from the Enlightenment, loyalty oaths and McCarthyism, the values associated with the professionalization of history in the mid-19th century, the constructed nature of history, false objectivity in politics and media, and how the customer-based model of education induces professors, the majority of whom are part-time and lack tenure status, to compromise their ethics in teaching.
The Economic Historian, 2019
A COMMON refrain among astute observers holds that the United States has in recent decades descen... more A COMMON refrain among astute observers holds that the United States has in recent decades descended into a “New Gilded Age” that explicitly recalls the income inequality, class conflict, monopolization, and corporate malfeasance of the late-19th century epoch dominated by unscrupulous robber barons. Yet, as this article shows, fears of corporate money corrupting democratic elections predate the Civil War and may even go back to the country’s founding.
My book, The Bank War and the Partisan Press: Newspapers, Financial Institutions, and the Post Office in Jacksonian America, recently published by the University Press of Kansas, offers an updated and more detailed response to this question while characterizing Biddle’s efforts as one of the earliest interregional corporate lobbies in the nation’s history. Evidence from numerous manuscript collections, bank balance sheets, newspaper editorials, minutes of BUS board meetings, internal memoranda between bank officers, and records of legislative debates, sheds light on the ways in which the Second Bank propagated a positive message through space and time.
We're History: America Then for Americans Now, 2018
The story of President Andrew Jackson’s conflict with the Second Bank of the United States (BUS) ... more The story of President Andrew Jackson’s conflict with the Second Bank of the United States (BUS) is usually framed as one between two contending forces. On one side of this epic “Bank War” was Jackson, who hated paper money and regarded the BUS as an unconstitutional monopoly that favored the wealthy, violated states’ rights, bribed the press, and subverted democracy. On the other side stood Jackson’s enemies, the Whigs, who praised the BUS for stabilizing the economy and providing the nation with a sound currency. But there is another, often forgotten story behind the Bank War: Jackson’s ability to shape public opinion and undermine his critics by wielding the tools of the federal bureaucracy.
History News Network, 2016
Available at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/163049 This article provides a detailed persp... more Available at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/163049 This article provides a detailed perspective on the white, working-class, and its historical relationship with racial resentment, anti-intellectualism, economic mobility, and government policy. Through numerous examples dating back to the Virginia slave codes, Indian Removal, the development of mass political parties, and the American Civil war, I show how wealthier whites successfully employed a “divide and conquer” strategy that brought together whites of all social classes under a common racial identity. The consequences, which prevented the formation of interracial class-based alliances, were profound. Poor whites benefited from government policy in multiple ways that accumulated over time, contributing to the long-standing paradigm that freedom for some segments of the population came at the expense of others. As the Democratic Party began to embrace the modern civil rights movement in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Republican Party capitalized on the racial anxieties of the white, working-class. But whereas racial resentment may have been subtle under the Nixon and Reagan presidencies, it has become painfully and irredeemably toxic under the bombastic authoritarian, Donald Trump. Meanwhile, neoliberal policies supported by Republicans and corporate Democrats have left today’s working-class with many legitimate grievances, but a comprehensive understanding of American history suggests that they have more often been beneficiaries of the state, and not victims. In addition to citing multiple academic studies, this article engages the recent work of many prominent commentators, including Thomas Frank, Emmett Rensin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Amanda Taub. Deeply researched, trenchant, and clearly written, this article contains important implications and context for the upcoming November elections and promises to be an enriching story .
History News Network, 2015
Perspectives on History: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association, 2014
Blog Posts by Stephen Campbell
The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History , 2017
Book Reviews by Stephen Campbell
H-net, 2024
I have reviewed Allison M. Stagg's Prints of a New Kind, published by Penn State University Press... more I have reviewed Allison M. Stagg's Prints of a New Kind, published by Penn State University Press. A PDF version of the review is included. You can find the review electronically here: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=59595
Eh.net, 2022
Review of Jonathan Levy's Ages of American Capitalism
Common-place: the Journal of Early American Life, 2017
Economic concepts are explored in this book, but without the intimidating formulas and regression... more Economic concepts are explored in this book, but without the intimidating formulas and regressions that would normally send students accustomed to a predominantly narrativedriven discipline running for the hills. Few in the history profession, at least in the academy, can confidently assert that brighter days lie just around the corner. Economic historians in particular have had much to lament. In a recent essay, Sven Beckert observes that economic historians now reside almost exclusively in economics departments. Others have documented the decline of economic history relative to other sub-fields in the last forty years as shown in a survey of U.S. history faculty listings in the AHA's Directory of History Departments, Historical Organizations, and Historians. Amid this wholly justifiable sense of malaise and decline, there are a few signs of promise. The history of capitalism sub-field, which burst onto the scene in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent Great Recession, has brought renewed vigor to the study of all things economic. The latest publication from historian Sharon Ann Murphy, Other People's Money, affirms the import of financial history through a survey of money and banking from colonial beginnings to the Civil War era. Murphy writes, " money and banking played a critical role in the lives of everyday Americans in the nineteenth century, shaping the society in which they lived and worked, " adding that understanding the financial history of this period " broadens and deepens our knowledge of the Early American Republic " (7). For Murphy, capturing Americans' long-standing and complicated love-hate relationship with banks requires us to look back to the formative years of the early nineteenth century and Civil War period, years that presaged our modern financial system. Chapter 1 introduces the reader to basic economic concepts like barter, inflation, taxation, and public debt, showing how debates over these issues informed many of the most important episodes in the colonial and revolutionary eras. In chapter 2, Murphy uncovers some of the unresolved issues involving charters of incorporation that stemmed from the Constitution's ambiguous language. It is in chapter 3, entitled " How Panics Worked: The Era of the Bank War, " that the author finds her groove, buttressing and enriching her analysis with salient primary sources. Consistent with recent scholarship emphasizing the global dimensions of the history of early modern capitalism, Murphy explains that the movements of specie and credit overseas, combined with peculiar domestic factors, produced disruptive financial panics in 1819 and 1837. The tipping points occurred when confidence and predictability, those elusive and intangible characteristics that greased the wheels of finance both then and today, suddenly evaporated. Murphy shows us in chapter 4 that early Americans fiercely debated the wisdom of fractional reserve banking, activist monetary policy, and the mixing of for-profit, commercial lending alongside the storage of public revenue in one financial institution. This was a notable feature of the nation's early central banks, the First and Second Banks of the United States. Chapter 5 offers an overview of the struggles faced by both Union and Confederate governments in raising revenue during the Civil War, including the printing of greenbacks and establishment of a nationwide system of federally chartered banks. Other People's Money takes its name from the title of a book written by Progressive Era reformer, future Supreme Court justice, and intellectual godfather of the Federal Reserve, Louis Brandeis (165). Early twentieth-century reformers like Brandeis faulted the " money trust " for leveraging public money and depositors' savings into high-risk bets, too often making off with riches while the majority suffered. The Panic of 1907 was a case in point. For Murphy, there was a common thrust between those who lambasted the immense concentrations of wealth and power epitomized by robber baron J.P. Morgan and the impetus behind Andrew Jackson's Bank War. In both instances, average Americans knew that the game was rigged. The wealthy were picking winners and losers in violation of the principles of free market capitalism (167). Murphy is concerned less with the degree to which financial institutions contributed to, and were shaped by, the early stages of the industrial revolution—a historiographical debate explored by previous scholars—and more with how early Americans experimented with new financial mechanisms and institutions through a process of trial and error. Often it was a calamitous financial panic, such as the famous one of 1837 that bankrupted the South's plantation banks, or some other convulsive, watershed moment, such as the Civil War, that impelled financiers to rethink their assumptions and opt for a more efficient system. In other instances, important developments emerged gradually. Such was the case with investment banking—brokering and underwriting stocks and bonds, often to overseas investors— which capitalized much of the nation's transportation infrastructure, or the interbank cooperation and clearinghouse systems that made the Panic of 1857 less damaging than it would have been otherwise. One of Murphy's contentions is that historians have described the political dimensions of major conflicts like the Bank War without providing sufficient economic context. Political cartoons of the era, she notes, tended to focus on the political battle between Jackson and Nicholas Biddle while only a few raised broader concerns about the economic implications of Jackson's policies (96-97). One can agree with this claim in the main while at the same time holding that Murphy might be overstating the case. Even when biographies and histories of the antebellum era have maintained a predominantly political focus, they have, by necessity, delved into
Business History Review , 2013
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Books by Stephen Campbell
Drawing on insights from the fields of political history, the history of journalism, and financial history, The Bank War and the Partisan Press brings to light a revolving cast of newspaper editors, financiers, and postal workers who appropriated the financial resources of pre-existing political institutions, and even created new ones, to enrich themselves and further their careers. The Bank propagated favorable media and tracked public opinion through its system of branch offices, while the Jacksonians did the same by harnessing the patronage networks of the Post Office.
Campbell’s work contextualizes the Bank War within larger political and economic developments at the national and international levels. Its focus on the newspaper business documents the transition from a seemingly simple question of renewing the Bank’s charter to a multi-sided, nationwide sensation that sorted the American public into ideologically polarized political parties. In doing so, The Bank War and the Partisan Press shows how the conflict played out on the ground level in various states--in riots, duels, raucous public meetings, politically orchestrated bank runs, arson, and assassination attempts. The resulting narrative moves beyond the traditional boxing match between Jackson and Bank president Nicholas Biddle, balancing political institutions with individual actors, and business practices with party attitudes.
Peer Reviewed Articles and Book Chapters by Stephen Campbell
Web-Based Publications by Stephen Campbell
My book, The Bank War and the Partisan Press: Newspapers, Financial Institutions, and the Post Office in Jacksonian America, recently published by the University Press of Kansas, offers an updated and more detailed response to this question while characterizing Biddle’s efforts as one of the earliest interregional corporate lobbies in the nation’s history. Evidence from numerous manuscript collections, bank balance sheets, newspaper editorials, minutes of BUS board meetings, internal memoranda between bank officers, and records of legislative debates, sheds light on the ways in which the Second Bank propagated a positive message through space and time.
Blog Posts by Stephen Campbell
Book Reviews by Stephen Campbell
Drawing on insights from the fields of political history, the history of journalism, and financial history, The Bank War and the Partisan Press brings to light a revolving cast of newspaper editors, financiers, and postal workers who appropriated the financial resources of pre-existing political institutions, and even created new ones, to enrich themselves and further their careers. The Bank propagated favorable media and tracked public opinion through its system of branch offices, while the Jacksonians did the same by harnessing the patronage networks of the Post Office.
Campbell’s work contextualizes the Bank War within larger political and economic developments at the national and international levels. Its focus on the newspaper business documents the transition from a seemingly simple question of renewing the Bank’s charter to a multi-sided, nationwide sensation that sorted the American public into ideologically polarized political parties. In doing so, The Bank War and the Partisan Press shows how the conflict played out on the ground level in various states--in riots, duels, raucous public meetings, politically orchestrated bank runs, arson, and assassination attempts. The resulting narrative moves beyond the traditional boxing match between Jackson and Bank president Nicholas Biddle, balancing political institutions with individual actors, and business practices with party attitudes.
My book, The Bank War and the Partisan Press: Newspapers, Financial Institutions, and the Post Office in Jacksonian America, recently published by the University Press of Kansas, offers an updated and more detailed response to this question while characterizing Biddle’s efforts as one of the earliest interregional corporate lobbies in the nation’s history. Evidence from numerous manuscript collections, bank balance sheets, newspaper editorials, minutes of BUS board meetings, internal memoranda between bank officers, and records of legislative debates, sheds light on the ways in which the Second Bank propagated a positive message through space and time.