Item #45157 [Manuscript Signed] Inconsistencies Abound in Thomas Smith's Testimony Accounting for Loan Funds from the Merchants & Manufacturers Bank. Connecticut Banking. Fraud. Hartford, James S. Tryon.

[Manuscript Signed] Inconsistencies Abound in Thomas Smith's Testimony Accounting for Loan Funds from the Merchants & Manufacturers Bank.

[Hartford, CT]: 1859. [6] pp. 7.75 x 10 inches. Very good, folded, minor ink staining and soiling, contents clean; leaves attached by wax seal. Item #45157

March 15th, 1859, Memorandum from interview of Thomas W. Smith by James S. Tryon, cashier at Hartford's Merchants & Manufacturers Bank investigating fraudulent banking activities. The memorandum documents the conversation held between Tryon and Smith, in which the former hopes to track the funds borrowed by "John T." and determine Smith's knowledge of his own funds' insolvency concerning Kendrick Toney and Smith's purchase of the defunct and discredited Planters & Mechanics Bank of Dalton, Georgia, owned by Captain James Morris, which had lain dormant for two to three years. Tryon signs the report, but notes in the post script that the account is littered with inconsistencies.

Signed by James Tryon (1820-1895) a banker during the free banking era before the Civil War. He came to Hartford from Rochester, NY in 1857, and worked as a cashier at the Merchants & Manufacturers Bank, which later, through his efforts, was reorganized as the First National Bank of Hartford. His business correspondence at the Library of Congress relates many tales of bank runs, concerns with the security of various bank notes, and commercial activities in central New York, along the Erie Canal, Hartford, Connecticut, and New York City. (See Horsford-Tryon Families Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.).

Price: $375.00

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