How Choice Fueled Panic: Philadelphians, Consumption, and the Panic of 1837

This essay examines the role of working-class consumers in public debates over the public regulation of food and fuel markets in Philadelphia in the years leading up to the Panic of 1837. As price spikes in these necessities inflamed the cries for state authorities to insure fair prices for these goods and to put an end to the growing scale and scope of free market capitalism, these pleas went unfulfilled. Instead, urban residents saw many of the longstanding measures designed to protect less affluent Americans from devastating price swings—regulated marketplaces for meat, traditional fuel markets, and the bread assize, for example—had eroded as policymakers offered a vision of a free market economy that pushed aside longstanding assumptions about the role of public officials in the marketplace itself. As the debate moved from the idealistic realm of political economists to the more tangible theater of Philadelphia's working-class dinner tables and hearths, the futility of evoking a "moral economy" approach to the idea of consumption became clear. By the time of severe economic crisis in the winter of 1836-1837, the policymaker's preference for consumer choice helped fuel panic.