Insurance
X
Antebellum America’s
Other White Meat
By Robert E. Wright
If America’s financial system was a
buffet, commercial banks would be the
chicken. (And periodically the turkey, but
that is another story.) In the antebellum
period, now, and almost every “course” in
between, politicians, pundits and researchers gorged their brains on banks, banknotes, bankers, bank regulations, bank
architecture and just about everything
else bank-related. But there was another
white meat at the buffet — one much less
rhapsodized but almost as important to
Americans’ financial palates: insurers.
Table 1 tells the tale. Between the
founding of the republic and the Civil
War, America’s financial entrepreneurs
chartered more insurers than commercial banks. Banks enjoyed more authorized capital than insurers did, but they
also caused more economic and political
heartburn when they got into trouble.
Though outnumbered, specially chartered
Illustration depicting 19th century firefighters on the scene of a conflagration in downtown New York. Currier and Ives print, 1854.
www.MoAF.org | Spring/Summer 2011 | Financial History 45