The purpose of our book is to chronicle and analyze Morgan’s interventions in financial crises, telling the story of how he learned the art of last resort lending by trial and error, and finding its relevance to issues that last resort lenders still face in the early twenty-first century. We classify Morgan’s last resort loans into three types.

Industrialists and enabling financial institutions accelerated America’s economic motion, operating organizations so colossal that they commanded economic influence and encroached upon the nation’s cultures and politics. These institutions altered the national face of business and wielded increasing quantities of money, laborers, technological innovations, and political power. Narratives increasingly portrayed businessmen as a new type of hero, “self-made” even if operating within potent networks. They and their advocates portrayed their influence and wealth as proof of their superiority and, by implication, everyone else’s shortcomings. The rhetoric of self-making acquired a new grandeur. The frequency of the term “self-made” reached its nineteenth-century peak in the press around 1890, by which time the concept was well embedded in mainstream culture, and a related term, “individualist,” was climbing rapidly, along with terms like “self-reliance” and “survival-of-the-fittest.” Elites defended their male offspring as “self-made” if they didn’t lose family fortunes. At the same time, laborers and other critics asked whether the rich were “Self-Made or Made for Self”?

This chapter examines an entirely new source – collections of bundles of loose receipts, notes, and bills in local record offices – to demonstrate how older forms of oral credit were augmented by the use of informal local forms of paper currency to add liquidity to local transactions. This is linked to the changing legal status of paper bills and notes. It looks at the continuing shortage of silver coins and how the increasing minting of guineas was used to make the circulation of local notes work by providing enough coins to make notes over one pound in value redeemable for cash amounts. This chapter also uses the evidence provided by the extraordinary Chronicles of John Cannon as a sort of micro-history within the argument. This is a 500,000 word set of memoirs, diary entries, and record of his scrivening activities over c.1720–1742. Finally, there is a section on the increasing use of inland bills of exchange and their relation to local notes of hand by examining the diary of the mid-eighteenth century Sussex shopkeeper Thomas Turner. The records of the Royal Mail are used to show just how developed the national bill market was by the early eighteenth century, as the transfer of such paper instruments was a major part of its growing business.

This chapter focuses on the change in the law known as the equity of redemption, which took form in the late seventeenth century, and made the title to mortgaged land more secure through the provision that rents could be sequestered to pay off a loan after the due date, to avoid the title to the property reverting to the lender. This legal change led to a rapid expansion of mortgaging and associated conveyancing. It also demonstrates how interest-bearing loans, based on the security of property, became a source of both income and, more importantly, stable abstract value that could be used to increase the money supply by underpinning the creation of local notes and bills. Mortgage income could also smooth credit flows by providing capital when outgoings were greater than incomings. In the past this would have triggered the need to litigate to increase income, but now money could be borrowed. This chapter will also examine savings held in the form of bonds.

This chapter examines the different trajectory Scotland adopted to the problems it faced in the 1690s. After suffering a terrible famine in the middle of that decade, which England avoided, Scotland’s leaders embarked on a plan to create a modern economy. Since Scotland suffered an even more acute shortage of specie than England, but did not need to bankroll foreign wars, it was decided to create the Bank of Scotland as an institution designed primarily to create specie-substitute paper currency. In addition to Scotland, many of the British Thirteen Colonies also issued paper currencies to meet demand for money in the face of even more acute specie shortage than Scotland. By doing so they were able to increase their consumption of British-produced goods. France also attempted to create a system of paper currency under the influence of the exiled Scot, John Law, who had previously written pamphlets arguing for the link between currency, liquidity, and economic growth. However for the French government the conversion of the huge debts it had built up fighting the war of Spanish Succession into currency was more important, and the result was over-issue, inflation, and collapse.

The term “self-made” was fully embedded in 1920s popular culture, intertwined with individualism. Master of positive thinking Dale Carnegie dominated armies of cultural entrepreneurs selling tales of success. The Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression turned many Americans against businessmen’s leadership, but business advocates militantly circulated the myth of self-made success to justify why the privileged still deserved esteem and power. They rejected efforts at systemic change. They used the myth of self-making to explain success and failure as individual matters, and explicitly upheld inequality as a valid outcome of merit alone. To resist the progressive state, conservatives invested enormous resources to attack reformers for threatening freedom and opportunities. Among their rhetorical tools were fantasies of self-made success that they often imagined came from Horatio Alger, distorting his legacy into an individualistic and often harsh “bootstraps” mythology. Into the 1950s, positive thinker Norman Vincent Peale and others magnified the faith that people could “make” their own lives regardless of what the world handed them.

Most stories of the Panic of 1907 end with activities in December 1907. To truly understand, however, what being a private lender of last resort must have meant to Morgan, we extend the story well into 1908. To close out the story, we track what he did to clean up his own firm and other firms after the crisis, revealing substantial losses well beyond any he had incurred in previous dealings.

Americans’ zeal for mobility intensified after the Civil War, and self-help recipes offered ways to achieve it. But “self-help” is not the same as “self-made,” as Frederick Douglass explained. Many argued that individuals and communities benefit through mutual assistance. People outside of the mainstream who engaged in collective self-help were often undermined by powerful authorities who attacked communal codes. In 1887, federal legislation further dispossessed Native Americans with the Dawes Severalty Act in the name of individualism. In 1892, Pittsburgh’s highly collaborative industrialists suppressed labor organization using their collective resources of law and armed force. Collective self-help was central to African Americans’ efforts to improve their lives despite the weight of discriminatory laws and social bigotry. The motto “Lifting as We Climb” reflected their sense of mutual obligation. Storytellers in the mainstream rebuffed others’ ethos of collective self-help while claiming self-made success for those they championed. "Positive thinkers" such as Dale Carnegie promised success for those who "believed" enough. "Self-made" success was deeply embedded in 1920s culture.

This chapter examines the development of an ideology of middle-class behaviour based on the ability to save and to maintain enough capital to prevent a cash flow crisis that would result in being arrested or imprisoned. This led to a new type of class-based thinking about society that was closely linked to the security that new forms of capital provided to successful savers. Such individuals were those who were able to accumulate large amounts of capital through entrepreneurship or inheritance, and not dissipate it though overspending. This was a small elite group who gradually came to be termed the middle class, to differentiate themselves from the middling sort of smaller traders. They also increasingly thought of their capital as a form of property created out of righteousness, and that the role of the law was to protect it from those who were less able.

US founders sought to build a republic of citizens who improved themselves and their nation, free of unearned aristocratic entitlements, but that fostered an unfamiliar mobility. Reactions against aristocratic idleness elevated the importance of self-improvement and work for winning cultural esteem as well as for material well-being. Benjamin Franklin led in promoting these values to nurture useful citizens; only after his death did a revised version of his autobiography portray him as having “raised myself.” Although mobility came to be expected of White men, legal and cultural presumptions marginalized most others, who were subject to harsh physical and social penalties if they attempted to claim self-agency or to seek self-improvement and work that brought respect. Georgia’s early history illustrates how self-serving stories about work and initiative both defended enslavement and closed off opportunities for poor White people. The elderly George Washington was among the rare citizens who took seriously Revolutionary-era rhetoric about equality, and he came to appreciate how the work of enslaved people made his self-improvement and prosperity possible.