I'm in the midst of reading A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America's Financial Disasters by Scott Reynolds Nelson. It's a delightfully written book full of details from the grand to the small, just right for my subject.

I'm sure financial panics were covered in single sentences when I was first learning American History, "And then there was the financial Panic of 1819 when many people were thrown out of work."

Nelson instead describes how the end of the Napoleonic Wars brought about a surplus of manufactured goods in Great Britain e.g. unfinished blue jackets. British manufacturers saw America as a new market for these goods and began shipping them in bulk to the U.S.  to the "shivering farmers in Ohio." One of those shivering farmers was Jesse's father, Abel,  Credit was needed so local banks sprang up, issued their own money, farmers bought the goods on credit, paid it back when the harvests came in. Land was being sold by the US government through the Land Office which had first opened up in Chillicothe Ohio in 1803. Farmers bought that land on credit and paid back in the local banks' money. Everybody, it seems, got over-extended.

Then, in 1818 the US government, no doubt in response to the urgings of the new textile manufacturers in Massachusetts and the rest of New England, imposed tariffs on British textile imports. The British responded by closing off the ports in the British West Indies to American wheat. Under the Corn Laws, the British Isles ports had already been closed off to American food stuffs. The price of wheat, which had been riding high for years, dropped precipitously - in half within five years. When there's no market to sell, the price goes down.

Meanwhile, the Second US Bank, in all its wisdom, picked this time to start demanding that all its western branches keep its deposits in hard cash - not in those paper monies issued by the local banks. Naturally, the local banks failed, the US Bank foreclosed on them and then started foreclosing on all the local farmers who had bought mortgaged property through them. (Does this sound familiar in any way?)

So, the Panic of 1819. Prices dropped in half. The US Bank owned so much land that it took 40 years to sell it all off. Ohio towns were back to bartering.

The Panic hit TJ pretty hard because he had co-signed a loan for Wilson Cary Nichols, a friend of his, a former governor of Virginia and a US Bank Director. There wasn't much regulation in those days and Nichols was borrowing money from his own bank to speculate on the fast rising land prices out in Ohio. (Boy, this really sounds familiar.) The Panic came, Nichols went bankrupt and pulled TJ down with him. TJ spent the last years of his life, in the 1820s, trying to save his estate from what were going to be ruinous debts when he died. He failed. Six months after he died, his 130 slaves (with the exception of a few, some of them his own children by Sally Hemings) were sold at auction. His surviving white daughter never had her own home again - living with her children and money sent by TJ admirers.

In 1820, JB was two years old. His father, Abel, was 28, had been married to Nancy Brock for 7 years and the two of them had three little children. JB was the first boy. Abel was living on land adjacent to his father and two of his brothers.

Nancy and Abel had a fourth child in 1823, another boy, Curtis Jordan. There were no other living children after that and Nancy died in 1833. She might have been sick, she may have lost children.

Abel, from what I can tell so far, didn't suffer too much in the Panic. He seems to have owned land in the neighboring county, Tuscarawas (in what became Rush Township) which he had paid for with credit from the US Land Office in Zanesville and paid off in 1826. He owned three separate plots of 80 acres each - close to each other but not adjacent. He didn't live on this land as he was listed on his Patents as being from Harrison County and that's where the Census put him in both 1820 and 1830. Perhaps they were an investment for his sons, perhaps he was picking up land at the fire sale prices the US Land Office was selling it at after 1820.  Maybe he was just a thrifty Quaker farmer, maybe he held onto it for years. But he never lived on it.

Jesse Brock Pickering's Death

Jesse Brock Pickering, born on December 23, 1818, died on April 24, 1868. What I know about his death is that he was 49 years old. But Jesse came from a long line of long-lived men, his brothers were long-lived and his sons were long-lived. Here are the names and dates:

Fathers

• Father: Abel born 1792, lived to be 81 and he outlived Jesse,
• Grandfather: Jacob born 1756, lived to be 76,
• Great-grandfather: William born 1727, lived to be 69,
• Great-great-grandfather Samuel born 1684 lived to be 43, the only one younger than Jesse at his death.

Brothers

• Curtis Jordan born 1823 lived to be 80,
• Frank born 1835 lived to be 69,
• James born 1840 lived to be 64
• Jonathan W born 1843 death unknown

Sons

• Abel born 1837 lived to be 84,
• Joseph C. born 1839 lived to be 83,
• Isaac Orlando born 1842 lived to be 79,
• Vinson born 1850 lived to be 83,
• Charles S. born 1862 lived to be 75.

Yes, Jesse's death at 49 sticks out as an anomaly with the exception of his great-great-grandfather who lived 134 years earlier. 

Right now, I don't know much more than that. He was buried in the Quaker Cemetery - does that rule out suicide? He was a farmer - he could have suffered an unlucky accident. Perhaps it was illness. It does look like I can rule out hereditary illness.

One other thing I know. It destroyed the family. By the 1870 census, his widow was living with her newly married youngest daughter, his minor aged sons had been farmed out to family members and to non-family members. His older sons didn't take over the farm (perhaps he didn't own it) nor do they seem to have been able or interested in caring for their younger brothers. Jesse Brock didn't leave much in the way of material goods or prosperous family behind.

Thomas Jefferson, Jesse Brock and Me

On July 4, 1826, Thomas Jefferson died at his mountaintop home Monticello, near Charlottesville, in Albemarle County, Virginia. On April 26, 1858, Jesse Brock Pickering died at, or at least near, his home in Stranger, Leavenworth County, Kansas.

Thomas Jefferson was a "Founding Father" of the United States of America. Jesse Pickering was a pioneering Kansas farmer who was to become my great-great-grandfather. There are legions of historians who have dedicated their academic careers to studying Thomas Jefferson. There are, at most, a handful of family genealogists recording the bare facts of Jesse Brock Pickering's life. It's not surprising that I know or can discover more about just about any single day in the life of Thomas Jefferson than I'll ever know about my great-great-grandfather's entire life.

But in two similar set of circumstances - one in the life of each - there may be more known about Jesse Brock Pickering than Thomas Jefferson. Both cases involve extra-marital sex, out-of-wedlock children, public exposure and consequences (or, more accurately, the lack thereof.) Even DNA testing, more than a century later, has become part of both stories.

[By the way, from this point, on I'm referring to Thomas Jefferson as TJ and Jesse Brock Pickering as JB.]

Few are ever going to care about JB's story. TJ's, however, rocked the political world of his time, definitely rocked the present-day world of American historians, made the front page of the New York Times at about the same time that a modern-day President's extra-marital affairs were headline news, and will most likely be forever mentioned when TJ's life is discussed. I suspect that TJ's case may even be lurking behind the efforts of the Texas Board of Education's attempts to write him out of their history books.

TJ's case has been brilliantly used to open up historian's and biographer's understanding of the man. It challenged, and arguably has changed, how historians recognize, evaluate and incorporate historical evidence into their analyses.

I am going to attempt, through this blog, to try to evaluate JB's life and the life of my family using the same techniques used to open up the little understood TJ story. I believe these techniques will allow me to tell a more interesting story about a little known man, to explore how one part of my American family lived their lives and, in general, to weave interesting stories for the interested few. It's an experiment to flesh out genealogical story-telling beyond the making of trees with names, pictures and dates.

I have sixteen great-great-grandparents. Eight of those come from my Pickering father. All of those eight, and their parents, lived in America prior to the Civil War, were included in the American censuses and so appear in most family genealogical charts. This enables me to study American history from the Revolution to the Civil War with a personal perspective, asking two questions: 1) What was my family doing during some historically interesting period and 2) what was happening in American history when my somebody in my family pops up into the documentary evidence.

To complete the textile metaphor, I hope to weave a small quilt of stories about Jesse Brock Pickering and my family from the Revolution to shortly after the American Civil War and a large quilt of stories about American history during the same time.