Arts and Charts

Summing Accounts

Many nineteenth-century Americans relied on account books to manage their economic lives. 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.

In reality, account books did little to explain the origins or the meaning of global events, from bank runs to crop failures, that intruded with increasing frequency in the nineteenth-century economy. Yet even in such periods of tumult, the promise of stability through balanced bookkeeping led some individuals to feel personally responsible for their failure. Warnings abounded in business manuals and prescriptive literature about the perils of failing to keep good accounts.
 

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