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Still Seeking Rents, After all these Years? Testing a Neo-Beardian Account of the Birth of the Bank of the United States

Charles Beard's Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915), though less renowned than his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913), proffers a similar thesis: The voting behavior of members of the first federal Congress (1789-1791), especially on core features of Hamilton's program for reviving public credit, is well-explained by the economic interests of the actors. Beard offered some data on securities ownership among MCs, as federal bonds were expected to appreciate upon passage of the debt funding and national bank bills. Writing on central bank origins over eighty years later, Lawrence Broz (1997) claimed that the rent-seeking interests of individual actors were sufficient to explain the creation of the Bank of the United States. Broz offered no data in support of this neo-Beardian hypothesis. This paper is designed to review the 1791 debate over the national bank bill and test Broz's hypothesis using new data sources. An extensive database of antebellum securities transactions produced by Robert Wright of NYU's Stern School of Business represents one supplement to Beard's original figures, while hand examination of Treasury Department ledgers at the National Archives satellite location in College Park, Maryland offers additional evidence for evaluation. With these improved data, I test Broz's sufficiency claim in multiple ways. First, I examine securities ownership and voting patterns in the chamber as a whole; here Broz's hypothesis narrowly fails. However, when sufficiency is conceived in terms of attracting the support of critical voting blocs, Broz's hypothesis fares far better. Specifically, a regional test of Broz's hypothesis reveals that Northern securities holders broke overwhelmingly for the bank bill, and in numbers sufficient to cover the margin of victory. As such, I conclude that an actor-centered account of the Bank's origins has empirical support.