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  • Warranted Speculations
  • Brian P. Luskey (bio)
Jane Kamensky. The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse. New York: Viking, 2008. xvii + 442 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $29.95.

On a dark night in November 1818, speculation became spectacle for the citizens of Boston, Massachusetts. A catastrophic fire at the Exchange Coffee House, the massive seven-story structure that had shaded “the mercantile heart” of the city for the preceding decade, lit up the sky for awe-struck observers and overpowered the volunteers who struggled to contain it (p. 126). The Exchange had been the brainchild of lawyer and speculator Andrew Dexter, Jr., whose sincere hope was that merchants would put the facility’s meeting spaces to his and their profitable use. The house had doubly suspect structural foundations. Met with rising costs during the process of construction, Dexter had the building’s roof finished on the cheap, with flammable materials. Revenue was not forthcoming: commercial men preferred to dicker in the often chilly and damp open-air Exchange on State Street rather than pay for the privilege to use the warm, dry, comfortably appointed booths Dexter had commissioned on their behalf. But by the time his misreading of the city’s elite had become clear, Dexter was long gone, for he had built the flimsy financial scaffolding for his enterprise on the cheat. The Exchange was the ace in a pack of frauds: Dexter dealt empty promises in the guise of worthless bank bills to investors and laborers who were unable to determine if trusting Dexter was a safe bet. Most discovered the answer too late.

Jane Kamensky uses Dexter and the spectacular collapse of his bricks-and-paper scheme to make sense of the contradictions, anxieties, and strains that accompanied the expansion of the boom-and-bust economy across the new nation between Jefferson’s 1807 Embargo and the Panic of 1837. She mines the cultural meanings of capitalism in the Early Republic, expertly assessing the debates among Americans about what constituted value in a “paper economy” that made and broke “paper men,” and the values that were supposed to govern economic activity as commercial actors sought to convert “soaring ambitions” into “liquid” cash and credit flows and “concrete” fortunes (p. 48). Her book’s historiographical significance must also be weighed alongside its [End Page 357] clear literary merit. While Kamensky has traveled extensively to rescue “fragments in . . . archives”—from Detroit, Michigan, to Providence, Rhode Island, and Boston, Massachusetts, to Montgomery, Alabama—it is her willingness to take risks when she encounters gaps in the evidence that would have made the “speculating tribe” at the heart of this tale most proud (pp. 279, 33). Her brave experimentations with narrative and new types of sources will profit historians interested in thinking anew about how to craft a gripping story from a stingy archive.

Kamensky’s treatment of Dexter’s genealogy and apprenticeship in the paper economy sets the stage for his later speculations, and contributes to the scholarship of Joyce Appleby, J. M. Opal, and Scott Sandage by addressing the cultural tensions surrounding aspiration in the Early Republic. American men of business at once disavowed ambition and enshrined it as a defining national idiom.1 Andrew Dexter was bred to chase paper by family inclination and historical circumstance. His father Andrew Dexter, Sr., was a Boston shopkeeper whose advertisements during the Revolution invoked Calvinist and republican moral obligations between buyer and seller. After the war, however, he freed himself from these ideological constraints when he moved his family to Providence in order to push paper as a lottery promoter and bank director. His brother Samuel Dexter, a lawyer who served briefly as John Adams’s Secretary of the Treasury, was even more clearly ambition’s devotee, avidly speculating in the Yazoo land scheme hatched on former Indian possessions in Georgia during the 1790s. Samuel’s friends also made money closer to home by trading in confiscated Loyalist property and marrying judiciously. Young Andrew, a recent graduate of Rhode Island College who had damned excessive ambition in a commencement address to his classmates, fell into the orbit of his uncle, an apprentice...

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