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Biddle Signed Bank of U.S. Stock Certificate-1837 [185873]

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Biddle Signed Bank of U.S. Stock Certificate-1837 [185873]
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The Bank of the United States stock certificate signed by Bank President Nicholas Biddle. This was just one of a few banks that Biddle lead, including the Second Bank of the United States. It was during his tenure at this bank, that Biddle gained an enemy in Andrew Jackson. When the 20 year charter ended, along with the bank, Biddle started The Bank of the United States, based in Pennsylvania. This was 1837, the year the "Bank War" began. Biddle, to gain financing, sent agents to Europe and the British Isles to get financing. Thus the stock certificate being issued in pound sterling.
In 1837 and 1838, Biddle secretively dispatched agents into the South to buy up several million dollars worth of cotton with the notes of state-chartered banks, all in an effort to restore the nation's credit and pay off foreign debts owed to British merchant bankers. Critics called this an example of illegal cotton speculation and noted that the Bank's charter forbid the institution from purchasing commodities. Biddle also invested in and bailed out several state-chartered banks in the South whose capital was derived partially from slave mortgages. Some of these banks, including the Union Bank of Mississippi, financed the dispossession of Native Americans. Indeed, post-notes issued by the BUSP helped conclude one of the treaties that removed the Cherokee from their ancestral lands. In addition, Biddle purchased bonds in the Republic of Texas, opposed territorial expansion into Oregon, and denounced abolitionists.
Meanwhile, in the absence of any regulatory oversight provided by a central bank, state-chartered banks in the West and South relaxed their lending standards, took greater on risks, maintained unsafe reserve ratios, and contributed to a credit bubble that eventually burst with the Panic of 1837. In 1839, after seeing his investment in cotton speculation backfire, Biddle resigned from his post as bank president, and in 1841, with the nation still reeling from depression, the Bank finally collapsed. Because the BUSP had issued loans to financial institutions and individual actors who pledged slave mortgages as collateral, the BUSP tragically became one of the largest owners of plantations, slaves, and slave-grown products in Mississippi as debtors rushed to repay creditors during the economic downturn of the early 1840s.
Biddle and a few of his colleagues had borrowed tens of thousands of dollars of cash from the BUSP on their own account without going through the normal lending process and without informing the Bank's board, and as a result, a grand jury indicted Biddle on charges of fraud in December 1841. Biddle was arrested and forced to pay compensation to creditors using the remainder of his personal fortune. The charges were later dismissed.
On February 27, 1844, at the age of fifty-eight, Biddle died at the Andalusia estate from complications related to bronchitis and edema. Funds from his wife's family supported the ongoing civil lawsuits that plagued Biddle toward the end of his life. [ Philadelphia Pennsylvania