“American insecurities”: debt default and foreign banking intervention in antebellum Pennsylvania

This article examines Pennsylvania's 1840s debt crisis within the broader context of antebellum U.S. political economy and transatlantic finance. When Pennsylvania defaulted on millions in state bonds, mostly held by European investors, British and Dutch financiers mounted sustained lobbying campaigns, deploying petitions and press interventions to compel repayment. These efforts gained traction not only through political pressure but by engaging Pennsylvania's own moral landscape, including religious revivalism, traditions of probity, and appeals to conscience that rendered financial orthodoxy persuasive and enforceable in practice. By focusing on the state level, the article shows how the moral economy of debt operated in practice, tracing the ways abstract norms of credit and good faith were debated, contested, and ultimately embedded within the everyday workings of U.S. state government. In doing so, it suggests that antebellum corruption was neither a purely domestic pathology, but an early manifestation of the ways transnational capital interacted with the institutional vulnerabilities of U.S. democracy.