From Joseph G. Baldwin. The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi, a series of sketches. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1854.

This country was just settling up. Marvellous accounts had gone fourth of the fertility of its virgin land; and the productions of the soil were commanding a price remunerating to slave labor as it had never been remunerated before. Emigrants came flocking in from all quarters of the Union, especially from the slaveholding States. The new country seemed to be a reservoir, and every road leading to it a vagrant stream of enterprise and adventure. Money, or what passed for money, was the only cheap thing to be had. Every cross-road and every avocation presented an opening,--through which a fortune was seen by the adventurer in near perspective. Credit was a thing of course. To refuse it--if the thing was ever done--were an insult for which a bowie-knife were not a too summary or exemplary a means of redress. The State banks were issuing their bills by the sheet, like a patent steam printing press its issues; and no other showing was asked of the applicant for the loan than an authentication of his great distress for money. Finance, even in its most exclusive quarter, had thus already got, in this wonderful revolution, to work upon the principles of the charity hospital. If an overseer grew tired of supervising a plantation and felt a call to the mercantile life, even if he omitted the compendious method of buying out a merchant wholesale, stock, house, and good will, and laying down, at once, his bull-whip for the yard-stick--all he had to do was to go on to New-York, and present himself in Pearl street with a letter avouching his citizenship, and a clean shirt, and he was regularly given a through ticket to speedy bankruptcy.

Under this stimulating process prices rose like smoke. Lots in obscure villages were held at city prices; lands, bought at the minimum cost of government, were sold at from thirty to forty dollars per acre, and considered dirt cheap at that. . . . Society was wholly unorganized: there was no restraining public opinion: the law was well-nigh powerless--and religion scarcely was heard of except as furnishing the oaths and technics of profanity. . .

Larceny grew not only respectable, but genteel, and ruffled it in all the pomp of purple and fine linen. Swindling was raised to the dignity of the fine arts. Felony came forth from its covert, put on more seemly habiliments, and took its seat with unabashed front in the upper places of the synagogue. . .

"Commerce was king"--and Rags, Tag, and Bobtail his cabinet council. Rags was treasurer. Banks, chartered on a specie basis, did a very flourishing business on the promissory notes of the individual stockholders ingeniously substituted in lieu of cash. They issued ten for one, the one being fictitious. They generously loaned all the directors could not use themselves, and were not choice whether Bardolph was the endorser for Falstaff, or Falstaff borrowed on his own proper credit, or the funds advanced him by Shallow. The stampede towards the golden temple became general: the delusion prevailed far and wide that this thing was not a burlesque on commerce and finance. . .

Paper fortunes still multiplied--houses and lands changed hands--real estate see-sawed up as morals went down on the other end of the plank--men of straw, corpulent with bank bills, strutted past them on 'Change. They began, too, to think there might be something in this new thing. Peeping cautiously, like hedge-hogs out of their holes, they saw the stream of wealth and adventurers passing by--then, looking carefully around, they inched themselves half way out--then, sallying forth asn snatching up a morsel, ran back, until, at last, grown more bold, they ran out too with their horded store, in full chase with the other unclean beasts of adventure. . .