This four-volume facsimile edition of twenty-five original books, pamphlets and reports provides contemporary opinions on the development of the US national debt between 1785 and 1900. The texts, too many to fully list here, are arranged chronologically. In the “The First National Debt” from 1785 to 1830, in Volumes 1, 2 and 3, Wright documents the establishment of the system. His texts include Philadelphus, A Plan for the Payment of the National Debt by Means of a National Bank (1785), which anticipated some aspects of Hamilton's plans; Philadelphia securities broker Mathew McConnell's detailed guide to the mare's tail of obligations inherited from the Revolution; Robert Aitken's View of the Principles, Operation and Probable Effects of the Funding System of Pennsylvania (1788), which advocated copying the British funding system; John Bordley's National Credit and Character (1790), which warned that since “sovereigns cannot be sued” national reputation was critical; and William Findley's prediction in 1794 that the debt would establish a new plutocracy. Hamilton so simplified the debt that an anonymous calculation in 1798 informed investors of the exact predicted value of 6 percent stock from 1796 to 1819, but the system was still controversial as indicated by Albert Gallatin's detailed 1801 analysis of Federal Treasury operations.

By the 1820s economic analysis had become far more sophisticated, as demonstrated in Oliver Wollcott's Remarks on the Present State of the Currency, Credit, Commerce and National Industry (1820) and Bernard Cohen's encyclopedic Compendium of Finance (1822). Wollcott, who had been Adams's treasury secretary, drew lessons from postwar economic history. Cohen, writing from London, surveyed the national debts of all the great and minor powers and places the US debt in international perspective. By 1835 high tariffs and low expenditure had shrunk the federal debt, but the states borrowed massively during the boom of the 1830s, and after the crises of 1837 and 1839 many failed. In “The Antebellum Debt,” in the remainder of Volume 3, Wright documents the response. The Democrats in Anon, Harrison's National Debt: Assumption of the State Debts (1840) opposed a federal rescue by the Whigs. The depression increased the federal debt, but the Democrats in Anon, The National Debt as It Was, and as It Is (1843) argued this was marginal before 1841. Finally, in 1844, Thomas Cary, a Boston banker, in The Americans Defended by an American … , confirmed the creditworthiness of the federal government and most of the states. Between 1840 and 1860, despite the Mexican War and the 1850s railroad boom, the federal debt remained minimal.

Civil War finance – in Volume 4 – soon necessitated a massive increase. Alexander Johnson, in The Advanced Value of Gold, Suspending Specie Payments, Legal Tender Notes, Taxation and National Debt Investigated Impartially (1862), argued that saving the Union justified a large debt, but warned that eventual repudiation would lead to poverty. Amos Stetson, on the other hand, in Is our Prosperity a Delusion? (1864), emphasized the high costs of transferring so many resources from peaceful production. Samuel Wilkeson and Jay Cooke in 1865, quoting Hamilton, plausibly explained How Our National Debt May Be a National Blessing … even for widows and orphans, and advocated taxing Britain and France by raising the tariff to poach their artisans. David Wells, in Our Financial Credit Abroad (1867), defended US bonds overseas against a scurrilous British attack in Blackwoods, but measured responses from the London Times demonstrated real fears – such as Reconstruction leading to repudiation.

The remaining essays in Volume 4 examine the globalization of US finance in the late nineteenth century, and the deflationary effects of the American return to gold. Chester Bowles, an American banker in Europe, in Cosmopolitan Views on American Finance (1870), celebrated the effects of the telegraph in connecting markets, and the central role of the US in the new world order. John Zachos, a radical professor, in Our Financial Revolution … (1878), opposed the deflationary effects of reimposing the gold standard and favoured a managed currency and full employment. Margaret Sullivan Burke, writing for the Woman's Republican Association in 1892, commended the return of high tariffs and the gold standard. John Sherman, treasury secretary from 1877 to 1881, as dour in finance as was his brother in war, in Refunding the National Debt (1880), discussed the technical trade-offs between refunding the debt and increasing taxes. Finally, A. J. Warner, in Our Debt Abroad: How It Has Grown, and How It Is Affected by the Appreciation of Gold (1895), lamented the enormous increase in US debts abroad, which compounded ominously. After 1900 of course the huge increase in US investment overseas, and the effects of the two world wars, put the US into formidable surplus until the rise of the present US foreign debt after 1980.

The origin and early development of the US national debt is an important topic. These instruments now finance a substantial part of the massive US trade deficit, and world trade. Wright provides a useful general introduction with analysis and charts, a short comment on each essay, notes and an index. The texts will be good sources for research and for student dissertations. The facsimile text is generally easy to read. The publisher's notes claim that the texts “form a broad selection of rare primary resource material”, but obviously the most important financial documents such as Hamilton's famous Reports are readily available elsewhere. The price, even for four volumes, is pretty high – especially supposing the material was already camera-ready. In theory one day some of these texts could be on the Web. Cohen, by far the longest text included, already is. In the meantime this is a useful collection for larger libraries to buy, which would be hard to duplicate elsewhere.