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Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, and the Birth of American Finance
University Of Chicago Press
December 2005
218 pages
ISBN: 0226910261
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction | Historical
When Americans think of investment and finance, they think
of Wall Street�though this was not always the case. During
the dawn of the Republic, Philadelphia was the center of
American finance. The first stock exchange in the nation was
founded there in 1790, and around it the bustling
thoroughfare known as Chestnut Street was home to the
nation's most powerful financial institutions. The First Wall Street recounts the fascinating history of
Chestnut Street and its forgotten role in the birth of
American finance. According to Robert E. Wright,
Philadelphia, known for its cultivation of liberty and
freedom, blossomed into a financial epicenter during the
nation's colonial period. The continent's most prodigious
minds and talented financiers flocked to Philly in droves,
and by the eve of the Revolution, the Quaker City was the
most financially sophisticated region in North America. The
First Wall Street reveals how the city played a leading role
in the financing of the American Revolution and emerged from
that titanic struggle with not just the wealth it forged in
the crucible of war, but an invaluable amount of human
capital as well. This capital helped make Philadelphia home to the Bank of
the United States, the U.S. Mint, an active securities
exchange, and several banks and insurance companies�all
clustered in or around Chestnut Street. But as the decades
passed, financial institutions were lured to New York, and
by the late 1820s only the powerful Second Bank of the
United States upheld Philadelphia's financial stature. But
when Andrew Jackson vetoed its charter, he sealed the fate
of Chestnut Street forever�and of Wall Street too. Finely nuanced and elegantly written, The First Wall Street
will appeal to anyone interested in the history of the
United States and the origins of its unrivaled economy.
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