Library Company of Philadelphia McA MSS 013 BANK OF COLUMBIA RECORDS 1794‐1828 1.04 linear feet, 3 boxes Series I. Correspondence (1794‐1828) Series II. Documents (1794‐1822) December 2005 McA MSS 013 2 Descriptive Summary Repository Library Company of Philadelphia 1314 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107‐5698 Call Number McA MSS 013 Creator Bank of Columbia (Georgetown, Washington, D.C.) Title Bank of Columbia Records Inclusive Dates 1794‐1828 Quantity 1.04 linear feet (3 boxes) Language of Materials Materials are in English and French. Abstract The Bank of Columbia Records has correspondence and legal and financial papers that document the history of the bank and its depositors. The collection holds letters, predominantly single letters, from many prominent citizens of Georgetown and Washington in the early nineteenth century, as well as from Treasury Department officials and officers of the Bank of the United States. Administrative Information Restrictions to Access The collection is open to researchers. It is on deposit at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and should be accessed through the Society’s reading room at 1300 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA. Visit their website, http://www.hsp.org/, for reading room hours. Acquisition Information Gift of John A. McAllister; forms part of the McAllister Collection. Processing Information The Bank of Columbia Records were formerly filed within the large and chronologically‐arranged McAllister Manuscript Collection; the papers were reunited, arranged, and described as a single collection in 2005, under grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the William Penn Foundation. The collection was processed Edith Mulhern, a University of Pennsylvania Summer Research Intern, and Sandra Markham. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this finding aid do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Preferred Citation This collection should be cited as: [indicate specific item or series here], Bank of Columbia Records (McA MSS 013), McAllister Collection, The Library Company of McA MSS 013 3 Philadelphia. For permission to publish materials or images in this collection, contact the Coordinator of Rights and Reproductions, Library Company of Philadelphia, 1314 Locust St., Philadelphia, PA 19107‐5698. Please include complete citation(s) when making a request. See the Library Company’s website, http://www.librarycompany.org/, for further information. Online Catalog Headings Subject Names Astor, John Jacob, 1763‐1848 Brent, Robert, 1764‐1819 Crawford, William Harris, 1772‐1834 Key, Philip Barton, 1757‐1815 Latrobe, Benjamin Henry, 1764‐1820. McKenney, Thomas Loraine, 1785‐1859 Mason, John, 1766‐1849 Monroe, James, 1758‐1831 Nourse, Joseph, 1754‐1841 Ringgold, Tench Stoddert, Benjamin, 1751‐1813 Washington, William Augustine, 1752‐1810 Whann, William (d. 1822) Bank of Pennsylvania Bank of the United States (1816‐1836) United States. Dept. of the Treasury Subject Topics Banks and banking‐‐Washington (D.C.) Bank of Columbia‐‐Records and correspondence Document Types Powers of attorney Bank notes Related Collections The Kiplinger Research Library of the Historical Society of Washington, DC, and the Gunston Hall Plantation Library and Archives, in Mason Neck, VA, both hold John Mason papers, which include material related to the Bank of Columbia. James Monroe’s Bank of Columbia account book (1812‐1818) is held by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The Library Company of Philadelphia holds the Bank of the United States Records (McA 012), which are also part of the McAllister Collection; Bank of Columbia material can be found there in the files of Massachusetts senator James Lloyd (1769‐1831), the Bank of the United States Office of Discount and Deposit, and William Wirt (1772‐1834). McA MSS 013 4 A watercolor of the Bank of Columbia by Augustus Kollner, dated 1839, is in the Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Division, and can be viewed at http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/cph/3g00000/3g05000/3g05600/3g05634r.jpg (accessed November 2005). Biographical/Historical Notes The Bank of Columbia was chartered in 1793 in George Town, Maryland, and was at one time located in a building at what is now 3210 M Street NW in the Georgetown area of Washington, DC. The bank’s board of directors included many prominent figures, including financier William Marbury (1761 or 2‐1835), notable as plaintiff in the landmark Marbury v. Madison case (1803) before the Supreme Court, lawyer Francis Scott Key (1780‐1843), and John Threlkeld (1758‐1830), a wealthy landowner and Georgetown’s mayor. The bank’s first president was Benjamin Stoddert (1751‐1813), a Georgetown merchant who resigned to serve as the first secretary of the Navy (1798‐1801). The second president, from 1798, was John Mason (1766‐ 1849), son of George Mason (1725‐1792) of Gunston Hall. Mason was also a Georgetown merchant. Brigadier general of the District of Columbia militia, he owned at one time all of Analostan (now Theodore Roosevelt) Island in Washington. The bank’s chief administrative officer was its cashier. Samuel Hanson held the office through October 1801, followed by William Whann (d. 1822). Daniel Kurtz was appointed cashier in June 1821 when Whann resigned due to illness. The bank counted many noted citizens as clients, including New York merchant John Jacob Astor (1763‐1848), Washington architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764‐1820), and Swedish consul and aristocrat Richard Soderstrom (d. 1815). Notable political clients include United States President James Monroe (1758‐1831), and Robert Brent (1764‐1819), the first mayor of Washington, in addition to a fair number of congressmen. Ninian Edwards (1775‐1833), governor of the Illinois Territory, and Jonathan Jennings (1784‐1834), governor of Indiana, were bank clients in the Midwest. The collection holds letters from United States treasury secretaries Oliver Wolcott, Albert Gallatin, George W. Campbell, and Alexander J. Dallas, and from William Jones and Langdon Cheves, the first and second presidents of the Second Bank of the United States in Philadelphia. The Bank of Columbia’s lifetime was one of economic difficulty, exacerbated by the expiration of the First Bank of the United States (1791‐1811), the aftermath of the War of 1812, the mismanagement of the Second Bank of the United States (1816‐1836) and a land speculation boom, which culminated in the Panic of 1819. In April 1823, the Bank of Columbia made arrangements to pay its debt with the Treasury Department and the Bank of the United States, but did not fulfill its obligations. The circumstances surrounding the bank’s failure are not entirely clear, but may have been caused by mismanagement, or poorly planned investments in real estate. The bank failed in 1824. McA MSS 013 5 George Town, a prosperous river port in Frederick County, Maryland, was founded in 1751. In 1790 it was encompassed within the boundaries of the new federal District of Columbia, along with the likewise independent municipalities of the City of Washington and the City of Alexandria. It was formally annexed by the City of Washington in 1871. In this finding aid, the spelling of Georgetown is one word, as is Fredericktown, though most of the correspondents use the two‐word forms in their letters Collection Overview The Bank of Columbia Records spans the dates 1794 to 1828, and is arranged in two subseries: Correspondence, and Documents. The bank’s clients included businessmen, private individuals, and several women, primarily located along the east coast from New Hampshire to South Carolina, but concentrated in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC. Another prominent client was the United States government; the bank was involved with numerous financial transactions, primarily loans to the United States Treasury Department. Most of the correspondence in the collection is addressed to William Whann, the bank’s cashier, with many letters also addressed to bank directors John Mason, Benjamin Stoddert, Thomas L. McKenney, and John Threlkeld, and to Richard Smith (1784‐after 1860), who served as the bank’s agent in the Treasury Building, Washington. These papers were found in a collection of manuscripts assembled by an antiquarian whose aim was most likely to preserve documents signed by notable people (as an example, see McAllister’s annotations on the outside of John Jacob Astor’s letters in folder 2), and not necessarily to preserve a corporate archive. While not complete in breadth of depth, the papers present a detailed, though partial, picture of the functions of an early American bank. Series I. Correspondence (1796‐1828) contains letters from the bank’s clients and from the United States Treasury Department; it comprises the bulk of the collection. The correspondence is nearly all incoming, with the few examples of outgoing letters foldered at the end of the series, and generally concerns payment of notes and dividends as well as routine financial business such as overdrawn accounts and payment and stop payment requests. Other letters, from the Department of the Treasury and the Bank of the United States, provide a window on the bank’s operations, debt, and failure to fulfill its obligations. The Bank of Pennsylvania’s folder holds a four‐page letter addressing troubles with the Bank of Columbia in 1820, and the Bank of the United States’ folder holds material of a similar nature. There are several letters in the U.S. Department of the Treasury folder describing large financial transactions that the bank, through their agent in Washington, made with the government in 1815. Twenty other letters from the Louisiana Bank were tied together with deposit slips that document fund sent to New Orleans from 1812‐1813 to cover military payroll during the war. Some letters carry technical information relating to bank management: a letter from James Cox, cashier of the Bank of Baltimore, lists the salaries paid to officers and staff members of his McA MSS 013 6 institution in 1809, and one from Benjamin Dillehay, a porter at the Bank of Columbia, asks for a raise in 1810.