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Three phases roughly mark these days: First, the slough of despond following the war, when England forced her goods upon us at nominal prices to kill the new-sprung infant industries; secondly, the new protection from the competition of foreign goods from 1816 to 1857, rising high in the prohibitory schedules of 1828, and falling to the lower duties of the forties and the free trade of the fifties, and stimulating irregularly and spasmodically but tremendously the cotton, woolen and iron manufactories; and finally, the three whirlwinds of 1819, 1837–1839, and 1857, marking frightful maladjustments in the mushroom growth of our industrial life.

John Brown, coming to full industrial manhood in the buoyant prosperity of 1825, soon began to sense the new spirit. After ten years’ work in Pennsylvania, he again removed westward, nearer the projected transportation lines between East and West. He began to invest his surplus in land along the new canal routes, became a director in one of the rapidly multiplying banks and was currently rated to be worth $20,000 in 1835. But his prosperity, like that of his neighbors, and indeed, of the whole country, was partly fictitious, and built on a fast expanding credit which was far outstretching the rapid industrial development. Jackson’s blind tinkering with banking precipitated the crisis. The storm broke in 1837. Over six hundred banks failed, ten thousand employees were thrown out of work, money disappeared and prices went down to a specie level. John Brown, his tannery and his land speculations, were sucked into the maelstrom.