The Bank War and the Partisan Press: Newspapers, Financial Institutions, and the Post Office in Jacksonian America by Stephen W. Campbell (review)

Stephen W. Campbell’s thorough history of the Bank War in Jacksonian America reframes and modernizes how historians understand an important moment in American history. Typically, the Bank War has been seen as a contest of wills between two titans of nineteenth-century America (Andrew Jackson and Nicholas Biddle) that led directly to the destruction of the Second Bank of the United States (BUS) and to a severe economic recession. But Campbell’s research emphasizes a more precise and equally important facet of that decade of banking controversies and crises. Instead of focusing solely on the economic aspects of banking, or even on the clash of Jackson and the so-called People with Biddle and the so-called Interests, Campbell’s text “advances a new political interpretation” of the Bank War and shows how the invention and propagation of a hot-button political issue (the Bank War) became a vehicle through which the American federal government recast the partisan and electoral landscape of the nation at that crucial moment when American democracy was rising to fuller strength (p. 6).

The major contribution of The Bank War and the Partisan Press: Newspapers, Financial Institutions, and the Post Office in Jacksonian America shows how the partisan press in the towns and cities across this vast land were both drawn into the Bank War and, in turn, propelled it by seeking to shape that conflict to partisan advantage. More precisely, Campbell shows the profound ways that the partisan press and the public conversation were enabled and shaped by funding from the federal government, on the one hand, and the BUS, on the other. Once Andrew Jackson saw the Second Bank of the United States as a political threat, Democrats in the nation and in Congress mobilized to smite it. To do so, Jackson and his allies arranged government contracts to fund supportive newspapers and their editors. In a short chapter near the end of the book, Campbell underscores how important the United States Post Office was in getting these friendly newspapers into the hands of an eager reading audience. Campbell also shows that pro-BUS voices were not without power and influence; Nicholas Biddle, who directed the BUS, offered loans to friendly editors of the partisan press. Biddle evidently did not use federal deposits to engage in this type of politicking, but his position as the head of an institution that had a very close relationship to the federal government did raise questions of conflict of interest. The upshot of Campbell’s research, then, is that the Bank War was much more than a personal difference of opinion. It was a national conversation about the shape of democracy and of the role of a centralized bank within that structure. And, crucially, Campbell’s emphasis is that such an important conversation was fueled and channeled by big money being poured into the debates, making serious, effective efforts to control the narrative of what constituted the public good.

This book, though specialized, deserves to be read by historians and students interested in American political development. The most striking findings in this text indicate not only that the American state was a player in the nation’s history (one of Campbell’s motifs), but also that even as long ago as the 1830s, the U.S. government and major corporations elided the line between honest debating and corrupt influence peddling. While The Bank War and the Partisan Press raises more questions than it answers about how the Bank War affected the South, it is well worth the time, especially in a nation that is currently being compelled to reexamine the relationship between the public good, partisan politics, and private power.