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.