Actually, there are no national holidays for today. However, some important things that happened on this day in history can be found
here.
Did you know that potato chips were first prepared on this day in 1853?
The Panic of 1857
The catalyst for the Panic of 1857 was the failure on August 24, 1857 of the New York branch of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company. It was soon reported that the entire capital of the Trust's home office had been embezzled. What followed was one of the most severe economic crises in U.S. history.
New York bankers almost immediately put severe restrictions on even the most routine transactions. In turn, many people interpreted these restrictions as a sign of impending financial collapse and reacted with panic. Individual holders of stock and of commercial paper rushed to their brokers and eagerly made deals that "a week before they would have shunned as a ruinous sacrifice." As Harper's Weekly described the scene on the New York Stock Exchange, "…prominent stocks fell eight or ten per cent in a day, and fortunes were made and lost between ten o'clock in the morning and four of the afternoon."
The Report of the Clearinghouse Committee, produced in the years following the The Panic of 1857, found that "A financial panic has been likened to a malignant epidemic, which kills more by terror than by real disease." Yet behind the reaction of New York's bankers to the closing of a trust company lay a confluence of national and international events which heightened concern:
* The British withdrew capital from U.S. banks;
* Grain prices fell;
* Russia undersold U.S. cotton on the open market;
* Manufactured goods lay in surplus;
* Railroads overbuilt and some then defaulted on debts;
* Land schemes and projects, dependent on new rail routes, failed.
To compound the problem, the SS Central America, a sailing vessel transporting millions of dollars in gold from the new San Francisco Mint to create a reserve for eastern banks, was sunk in mid-September. As banking institutions of the day dealt in specie (gold and silver coins instead of paper money) the loss of some thirty thousand pounds of gold reverberated through the financial community. Howell Cobb, Secretary of Treasury, encouraged not only the placement of vast amounts of such government gold on the market, but also redemption of government bonds at a premium. At his suggestion President James Buchanan proposed to Congress that the Treasury be authorized to sell revenue bonds for the first time since the Mexican American War.
