Panic Fiction: Women and Antebellum Economic Crisis

One. Speculation and Failure: Panic Fiction’s Common Ground

one Speculation and Failure Panic Fiction’s Common Ground At the beginning of Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee’s novel Rich Enough, published in 1837, two brothers, Howard and James Draper, discuss their divergent investment philosophies. Howard, a thriving farmer, has come to James, a wealthy Boston merchant, with a small surplus of money that he would like his brother to invest for him. He is not interested in becoming wealthy but merely wants a safe investment that will “secure something for my family in case of accident” (4). James, on the other hand, scorns Howard’s caution, proclaiming his own philosophy of taking risks in order to make a fortune. The remainder of the story develops this contrast between Howard, whose agricultural life and satisfaction with “moderate gains” bring him and his family health and contentment, and James, whose “feverish pursuit of wealth” brings misery to his wife and children without ever seeming to make him “RICH ENOUGH” (18). Already wealthy as the story begins, James is never satisfied with what he has or with what exists. He sees his property and the landscape around him only in terms of its potential resale or development value. He is impatient, for instance, with his wife’s love of their large city estate with its beautiful gardens and extensive grounds; he is unable to measure the aesthetic or emotional value it holds for her and can only gauge its worth by the amount of money it would yield if sold to developers. When he comes to visit his family at the farm that he bought for them as a summer place—a pastoral spot of meadows, woods, a lake, and waterfalls described by the narrator in idyllic terms—he sees potential waterpower and the perfect site for a textile mill. As each plan comes to fruition, James becomes more and more ambitious. The “spirit and enterprise” that Howard noted in him early on aid him in establishing a full-scale manufacturing complex on the site of Clyde Farm, complete with its own railroad line. When his wife, Frances, complains that he is not only ruining the view but also “injuring the cause of the country” by helping to convert an agricultural society into an industrial one, and Speculation and Failure 23 farmers into “speculators,” James defends his capitalist efforts as good for the nation . He is creating wealth through his business enterprises, he says. Leveling their former home for the development of smaller city lots and building the mills and railroad have helped others, as well as himself, to realize enormous gains, thus contributing to the “public benefit” (55). But James’s dreams of wealth, the narrator suggests, are like El Dorado, the city of gold that is perpetually sought but never found. Unable or unwilling to honor his promise to retire when he reaches a certain predetermined sum of money, he risks more and more to achieve some imagined pinnacle, even as his wife’s health begins to suffer. Although Frances needs a change of climate, the excitement of a booming economy has James transfixed. He cannot leave town “when Eastern lands and Western lands, rail-roads and steam-boats, cotton, and manufactories, were in all their glory; when his own Clyde Mills were just going into operation! . . . Never had there been a season of such profits, such glorious speculations!” (48). Even the possibility of economic collapse does not deter James: “Some croakers said it could not last; and some of our gifted statesmen predicted that an overwhelming blow must inevitably come. But all this was nothing to speculators; it certainly would not arrive till after they had made their millions” (49). The increasingly frantic pace of James’s speculations is mirrored by his wife’s and daughter’s worsening health. The family finally leaves New England in search of a better climate, but even the weather is unstable and seems to foreshadow a coming state of uncertainty—a snowstorm in New York, sunshine in Philadelphia, rain in Baltimore, storms in Charleston (50). The daughter dies, but James still does not heed the warning. Finally, James’s world comes crashing down. Frances dies of consumption, and almost simultaneously, the nation’s economy collapses, leaving James financially ruined. Although he is not alone in his plight—the narrator describes widespread destruction, a “desolation upon the community” that struck high and low alike—he is clearly held to be culpable for his part in this economic disaster, namely, his obsessive speculations and single...