In April of 1835, Edmund J Forstall in New Orleans wrote a letter to Thomas Baring in London. Over a long career, Forstall had a finger everywhere in commercial Louisiana — importer, banker, legislator and sugar planter with enslaved labour. For Baring, he was a correspondent, advising on opportunities in New Orleans.
The city was approaching what would turn out to be the top of a cycle of explosive export-driven growth, where flatboats carrying wheat and hogs for Havana and the Caribbean met steamboats packed with cotton for Liverpool and sugar for Philadelphia.
In his letter, Forstall pitched the bonds of the Citizens’ Bank, “bound upon the best property of the country”, he wrote, which “must ultimately succeed”. He made an argument for the bank — and for Louisiana — familiar to anyone urging the dollarisation of economies today. The banks of New Orleans had good loans, and the city’s exports guaranteed plentiful reserves of silver Mexican dollars, the hard global currency of the day. But they came to grief anyway after the Panic of 1837 — of 16 banks in the city before the panic, there were six left by 1843.