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The Panic of 1819 - Slater

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In 1819, Thomas Jefferson went broke. He had co-signed a friend’s loan, and when that friend slid into bankruptcy, he took Jefferson down with him. Jefferson never recovered, and left his family deeply in debt when he died in 1826. A few years later, his grandson quietly sold Monticello to pay off Jefferson’s estate, with Jefferson still buried there. There were thousands of stories like Jefferson’s in the 1820s. Andrew Browning calls the Panic of 1819 the “most important event in American history that nobody has heard of,” and I think he makes a good case. The Panic ranks amongst the worst financial disasters in US history, right up there with the Great Depression. Land prices collapsed by as much as 80%. Per-capita GDP fell from $130 in the 1810s to $70 in 1824, and took a full decade to recover. In cities, unemployment reached 50%. In towns, farms failed and the laid-off agricultural workers regressed to barter and subsistence agriculture. Ok, but — why should we care? There’s a maj

The Panic of 1819 This is a review of Andrew Browning's Book . In 1819, Thomas Jefferson went broke. He had co-signed a friend’s loan, and when that friend slid into bankruptcy, he took Jefferson down with him. Jefferson never recovered, and left his family deeply in debt when he died in 1826. A few years later, his grandson quietly sold Monticello to pay off Jefferson’s estate, with Jefferson still buried there. There were thousands of stories like Jefferson’s in the 1820s. Andrew Browning calls the Panic of 1819 the “most important event in American history that nobody has heard of,” and I t

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