Richard Hildreth

The History Of Banks Richard Hildreth

Hildreth's important study of banking, published the same year as the financial disaster of 1837, a highly influential work that "helped to promote the growth of the free banking system in America", scarce in original boards. Historian and journalist "Richard Hildreth is one of the more enigmatic figures in American intellectual history" . Following his studies at Harvard, Hildreth "was admitted to the bar in 1830, but he never practiced law. Instead, he turned to politics and journalism: first as a National Republican, then as a Whig" (ANB). A trip to the South prompted Hildreth to write his pioneering antislavery novel The Slave (1836), and in 1837 he published History of Banks, "which helped to promote the growth of the free banking system in America" (Encyclopaedia Britanica). Here Hildreth bluntly observes, "How does it happen that the banks get so much into debt How shall we limit the indebtedness of banks? Not by prohibitory statutes, which are always evaded when it is an object to evade them." To Hildreth, banking is best "controlled and guided, by its own necessary laws-the Laws of Trade" (126, 136). "Published about the time of the great financial disasters of 1837," History of Banks was early hailed as "an argument for the use of free banking with security to bill holders." At his death Hildreth was eulogized as "one of the profoundest thinkers and ablest writers of the age" (New York Times).