Not Like a Rolling Stone

Edward J. Balleisen. Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xv + 322 pp. Illustrations, table, figure, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?
People'd call, say, "Beware doll, you're bound to fall"
You thought they were all kiddin' you . . .

In the Bob Dylan lyric, the insistent and repeated "How does it feel" is an indictment of middle-class hubris. In Edward J. Balleisen's new study of bankruptcy court records from the 1840s, it is a genuine question. How did it feel to go bankrupt in antebellum America?

The short answer is that it felt bad. Despite a legal system European visitors, such as Tocqueville, considered amazingly lenient toward insolvent debtors, "moving down in the world" via bankruptcy, Balleisen reports, "could exact a substantial psychological toll" (p. 14). It could threaten manhood, break up families (when unsympathetic wives left their insolvent husbands), lead men "to the whiskey bottle or the insane asylum" (p. 14), and, most importantly, undermine the "independence" that white men valued because American society was "so dominated by the realities of slavery and the ideals of republican liberty" (p. 49). Bankruptcy also reduced standards of living. During the depression of the late 1830s and early 1840s, businessmen who necessarily were involved in intricate and unstable webs of credit relationships--many of whom also had made naively optimistic and otherwise speculative financial commitments in the earlier boom years--fought hard to avoid filing for bankruptcy. If they could not stave off this disaster, they had to compose "autobiographies" that explained how they had come to fail in business. A sample of 503 of these documents, filed in the bankruptcy court of the southern judicial district of New York State under the short-lived federal Bankruptcy Act of 1841 (they were all filed in 1842 and 1843), forms the empirical core of Balleisen's study. Over the thirteen months during which the 1841 act remained in force, well over 41,000 people applied for protection by writing such "autobiographies" (p. 2).

Balleisen has found a rich archive. As a snapshot view of how a sizable group of unlucky businessmen "narrated" their careers, this archive offers an excellent source from which to derive a cultural history of antebellum business life and middle-class ideas about capitalism generally. The fact that the culture revealed in this archive contains few surprises may be taken to ratify the findings of the cultural historians who have dominated the profession for the last twenty years or so. Paradoxically perhaps, most of us now have a firmer sense of how Americans felt in the past than of what they did. Thus, at the same time that Balleisen's observations about the culture of antebellum capitalism are both persuasive and familiar, a question that might once have seemed the most obvious one to ask--why did Congress pass a federal bankruptcy statute in 1841--gets remarkably short shrift in this book. It is obviously an old-fashioned question, having more to do with institutional structures and partisan politics than with the "conventional plots" available for beleaguered "narrators" to employ, but Balleisen might have taken it a bit more seriously than he has--unless, concerned about writing a book that might interest the cultural history audience, he decided that a vulgar positivism of this sort would only detract from his goal.

If this is true, Navigating Failure can be read as a cleverly framed effort to tempt cultural historians into a renewed interest in institutions. Balleisen has done a great job in explicating the complex rules of the debtor-creditor game (before and after 1841), and the even more complex strategic behaviors through which individuals "navigated" the rules of this game. This book, in other words, might be read as a business...