[Tax-chick]

“Panic of 1857” is something one vaguely recalls from high school American History, but without any notion of what it actually entailed.

[colorado tanker]

With all the mush the left has stuffed into high school history these days, I doubt the average student even learns the phrase anymore.

"Panic" hardly describes the emotions and economic damage our diarist is recording. And the fact the Panic hit the North hard and the South hardly at all seems to have divided the country even further.

[Jim W N]

The concept of Adam Smith’s free market economy being a relatively new concept, I wonder if there was or is a non-Leftist, knowledgeable analysis the cause of the “panic” and how it took its course.

For example, Milton Friedman has pretty irrefutably shown that while the stock market crash of 1929 was a serious but inherently short-lived cyclical economic lurch, the Great Depression was solely the cause of government as the FED responded by repeatedly tightening money causing massive bank failures.

It would appear that thankfully the federal government wasn’t able to screw things up too badly in 1857.