These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

As with so many financial crises, the story began with ambition and ended with corruption. Hamilton had been befriended by John Pintard, an importer with offices at 12 Wall Street. Pintard had been elected to the state legislature in 1790; the next year, he’d become a partner of Leonard Bleecker, who happened to be the secretary of New York’s Society for the Relief of Distressed Debtors: together, they auctioned stock. After Bleecker dissolved their partnership, Pintard began dealing with Hamilton’s assistant secretary of the Treasury, William Duer, a rogue who had the idea of cornering stock in the Bank of the United States. With Pintard acting as his agent, Duer borrowed the life savings of “shopkeepers, widows, orphans, Butchers, Carmen, Gardners, market women.” In 1792, when it became clear that over a million dollars’ worth of bank notes, signed by Pintard, weren’t worth the paper on which they were printed, Duer and Pintard’s insolvency triggered the nation’s first stock market crash. A mob attempted to stone Duer to death and then chased him to debtors’ prison. Pintard hid in his Manhattan town house. “Would it not be prudent for him to remove to a State where there is a Bankrupt Act?” one friend wondered.80 Pintard fled across the river to New Jersey, where he was eventually found, and sent to debtors’ prison.