This page is referenced by:

• 1 2017-03-23T14:46:08-07:00 Picturing Providence, Illustrating Illness 6 First half - explosion plain 2017-07-10T14:39:20-07:00

  “In one word, excitement, anxiety, terror, panic, pervades all classes and ranks.”

  Thus did one observer describe conditions in New Orleans, the financial capital of the South, at the onset of the Panic of 1837. Americans who confronted dramatic economic changes in the nineteenth century lacked many of the analytical resources that we take for granted today. Economic science was not a distinct or refined academic discipline, and basic economic data was scarce and unreliable. Indicators of national economic vitality like GDP or growth rate had not been invented, and the very notion of “the economy” – a self-contained circuitry of complex commercial connections – did not yet exist. When painters, lithographers, and cartoonists tried to convey what was happening in the economic realm to an unsettled and fearful public, they often turned to idioms with a more familiar history. Among the most popular in the period bounded by the Panics of 1837 and 1893 were divinity and illness.
   

  “The Explosion,” a lithograph that appeared in Junius Jr.’s “Vision of Judgment, Or a Present for the Whigs of ’76 and ‘37” depicted four spirits racing out “from the tabled box of Pandora,” bringing with them “Poverty, Distress, and Famine.” The accompanying text blamed the release of these phantoms on the hard-money politics of the Democrats, but the image suggested that the precise link between cause and effect was murky, with panic more of an other-worldly punishment for immoral behavior than a clear consequence of unsound policies.