ABSTRACT
The years from 1870 to 1900 in the United States continued the pattern of financial market instability set in the antebellum period. Public esteem for bankers in the 19th century was not high in any section of the country, but the aversion of the Plains settler to bankers, which stemmed in part from his ethos of self-reliance within a tight-knit community, was particularly strong. Within individual states, legislatures responded to anti-bank sentiment by enacting strictures on banking activity, whether or not they were directed toward protecting the farmer as depositor from fraud and as borrower from usury or increasing the availability of loanable funds. In a similar period of material development, faced with many of the same capital market problems, American state governments passed a variety of measures affecting banking, but under an entirely different set of motivations. The only systematic investigative work on interest rates in the period was carried out by John Skelton Williams, Comptroller of the Currency.
