Writing a Bill of Exchange: The Perils of Pearl Street, The Adventures of Harry Franco, and the Antebellum Credit System

This article examines representations of credit instruments in two popular antebellum fictions: Asa Greene’s The Perils of Pearl Street and Charles Frederick Briggs’s The Adventures of Harry Franco. Drawing on a range of business histories it describes the operation of promissory notes and bills of exchange in the cotton-for-credit system, focusing on the “principle of deferral” and the ways in which these instruments attempted to solve the problem of time in long-distance exchange. By establishing concrete connections between characters, times, and places these fictions demystify the antebellum financial system, revealing an economy based on new forms of social interdependence.