Arts and Charts

Summing Accounts

Nineteenth-century Americans were not completely without modern economic tools for interpreting their commercial lives. Many men and women relied on account books to manage the comings and goings of the business world. These ledgers, which began to be mass produced beginning in the antebellum period, featured rows and rows of sales and expenditures, each of which were tallied at the bottom of the page. Double-entry ledgers modified this basic model by recording each exchange as both a liability and an asset, lending the erratic rhythms of business life an aura of balance and consistency.

Note how the intersection of rows and columns conveys an understanding of economic life as a series of discrete transactions between individual economic actors. Account books told a story about people meeting in the market, agreeing to prices, and trying to keep their assets and liabilities in balance. This imagery reflected the ideals of a society that hoped to keep business nested within the broader bounds of family, partnership, and community. Indeed, to some, accounting a technology for actively achieving those ends. As historian Caitlin Rosenthal finds, many business counsellors of this era "imbued bookkeeping with justice and virtue, rhapsodizing that those communities that embraced it would become 'more fraternal and humane.'"

Yet account books could do little to explain the origins or meanings of global events, like bank runs and crop failures, that intruded with increasing frequency in the nineteenth-century economy. In such moments, many held themselves responsible, internalizing the warnings of business manuals that cast personal mismanagement as the primary source of commercial ruin. Others, however, turned to a vibrant sphere of visual culture, which offered different lessons about the ups and downs of economic life.
 

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