“A financial panic in the fall of 1857 brought on what turned out to be a short-lived but intense depression. Causes of the panic stemmed partly from the international economy and partly from domestic overexpansion…This speculative house of cards came crashing down in September 1857. The failure of one banking house sent a wave of panic through the financial community. Banks suspended specie payments, businesses failed, railroads went bankrupt, construction halted, factories shut down. Hundreds of thousands of workers were laid off, and others went on part-time schedules or took wage cuts, just as the cold winter months were arriving.”1
And
“3 B. Douglass & Co. pointed out that the panic had occurred during a prosperous harvest andattributed the "financial revulsion" to "terror inspired by a trifling cause or misapprehension of danger." The Banking Superintendent of New York, James Cook, described the panic as "without apparent reason derived from past experience." Some facts were consistent with the view that the crisis was an unnecessary product of mismanagement or fear.”2
Another theme those years was the fight of the South to keep slavery in place, which as we all know, was a precursor of the Civil War, since they wanted to secede from the Union. Observing Texas politics in 2023, among the sentiment in other southern states, there seems to be a separatist tendency, even openly declared by the Republican Party Conference meeting in Houston not long ago. Coincidentally here is what was going on between 1856 and 1858 while transiting Neptune was opposing US natal Neptune.
"March 4, 1857 - James Buchanan is sworn into office as the 15th President of the United States. His tenure as President would be marred by the question of slavery and a compromise stance that would neither alleviate nor eradicate the intractable question from American society.""March 6, 1857 - The United States Supreme Court rules in the Dred Scott decision, 6-3, that a slave did not become free when transported into a free state. It also ruled that slavery could not be banned by the U.S. Congress in a territory, and that blacks were not eligible to be awarded.""June 23, 1858 - With strife between pro-slavery and anti-slavery partisans escalating to dramatic chaos, the 2nd Infantry and 3rd Artillery regiments under the command of Captain Nathanial Lyon attempt to restore order during the "Bleeding Kansas" campaign."3
Still, a louder bell may ring when you read this.
“Historians such as James Huston have revealed additional causes of the panic. In his 1988 book The Panic of the 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War, Huston argued that the crisis was not only caused by the failure of Ohio Life, it was also a consequence of the ending of the Crimean War in 1856.”“Between 1854 and 1856, the Crimean War interrupted Russian grain exports to Europe and increased the demand for wheat from the American West. This increase in demand, in turn, increased wheat prices and facilitated the inflow of migration to the West. While this was not the sole cause of land speculation in the American West, the demand for American grain (along with the California gold rush) played an important part.”4
October 10, 2023 |
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