The other and more important new development was free banking. By action of the state legislatures of bank was held to be not a corporation, which then and for many years required a special charter from the state, but a voluntary association of individuals and thus, like blacksmithing or rope making, open to anyone.

More on the history of United States banking and currency here. This is a many part series on the history of United States currency, markets, banks, and industrialization.

It was an arrangement which reputable bankers and merchants in the East viewed with extreme distaste. Yet for them it was not intolerable. They had good money in which to do business with each other and with foreigners.

In the last century few things more consistently troubled the conservative mind than the fear of paper money. No doubt this was primarily a matter of pecuniary interest – the fear of the creditor that he would be paid off in