The Panic of 1819 has been called “a traumatic awakening to the capitalist reality of boom-and-bust.”54 This was the first time that the American public had experienced collectively what would become a recurrent phenomenon, a sharp downward swing of the business cycle. Because it was the first time, people had no perspective from which to judge the events. Previous economic troubles had not been universal and had had more obvious causes in war, natural disaster, or the political paralysis of the Articles of Confederation. By 1819, economic relationships had become strongly interconnected; more
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