Stephen Mihm

The Alchemy of the Self: Stephen Burroughs and the Counterfeit Economy of the Early Republic

Trois Rivières, Quebec, was nothing more than a tiny colonial outpost on the banks of the St. Lawrence when Isaac Redfield, the famous legal scholar and chief justice of Vermont, paid a visit in the winter of 1839. Whatever his reason for stopping at the sleepy hamlet, Redfield spent most of his time chatting with Stephen Burroughs, an elderly American living out his last days in self-imposed exile. ‘‘Few men possessed such extraordinary powers of conversation,’’ the judge later recalled. ‘‘His manners were courteous and dignified, without being distant or affected.’’ Redfield reported that Burroughs, a devout Catholic, spent his days reading in a room ‘‘hung round with copies, or originals, of the master-pieces of some of the distinguished painters of Christian life and suffering.’’ According to Redfield, Burroughs ‘‘never, save once, referred to his former course of life.’’ Anyone who knew of Burroughs’s past must have greeted this news with considerable skepticism. Only a generation earlier, he had been one of the more notorious confidence men and criminals in the United States. His reputation for imposture, not to mention self-aggrandizement (he penned a bestselling memoir detailing his exploits after his release from prison) was nothing short of legendary. So infamous had he become that he fled the country,

Clerks, Classes, and Conflicts: A Response to Michael Zakim's "The Business Clerk as Social Revolutionary"

‘‘I would prefer not to,’’ intones Bartleby the Scrivener in Melville’s tale of the same name. Bartleby is the antithesis of the figures that populate Michael Zakim’s splendid panorama of the ‘‘clerking class’’—that amorphous, ambiguous stratum of society that emerged in the early republic. Zakim’s clerks are striving, peripatetic, ‘‘homeless,’’ and no longer attached to the land—or even to a particular place. They are, he says with characteristic eloquence, the living embodiment of ‘‘the perpetuum mobile of the commodity exchange.’’ As the clerk Edward Tailer (whom Zakim quotes) once wrote, ‘‘There is no such thing as a stationary point in human endeavor.’’ It’s a rather different sentiment than that voiced by Bartleby when he elaborates on his motives at the request of his baffled employer: ‘‘I like to be stationary.’’1 But most clerks weren’t stationary—or the very least, didn’t want to stay in one place. Historians have a similar disposition, even if our movements are measured in years and decades rather than hours and days. And so, after a longstanding focus on the working class, our profession has embraced the study of the less celebrated, seemingly more bland white-collar workers, investigating how these ordinary men and women worked and played, what they produced and consumed, and perhaps most important of all, what they thought. Foremost among the scholars

Follow the Money: The Return of Finance in the Early Republic

The recent resurgence of interest in economic and business history -- popularly known as the new “history of capitalism” -- has prompted many American historians to revisit subjects long neglected in their particular subfields. Much of this new work has focused on a particular dimension of capitalism: finance. For historians of the early American republic, the history of finance has been especially neglected. This article examines why these subjects have generally escaped attention, and offers a theoretical framework for understanding finance during this period. Finally, it offers a detailed roadmap to new avenues for research into a range of promising, if little-studied, topics.