36 Facts About Nicholas Biddle

Nicholas Biddle was an American financier who served as the third and last president of the Second Bank of the United States.

Nicholas Biddle is best known as the chief opponent of Andrew Jackson in the Bank War.

From 1823 to 1836, Nicholas Biddle served as president of the Second Bank, during which time he exercised power over the nation's money supply and interest rates, seeking to prevent economic crises.

When Jackson transferred the federal government's deposits from the Second Bank to several state banks, Nicholas Biddle raised interest rates, causing a mild economic recession.

Ancestors of the Nicholas Biddle family had immigrated to the Pennsylvania colony along with the famous Quaker proprietor, William Penn, and subsequently fought in the pre-Revolutionary colonial struggles.

At thirteen years old, Nicholas Biddle had completed his coursework, but was not allowed to graduate due to his age.

Nicholas Biddle was offered an official position before he had even finished his law studies.

Nicholas Biddle traveled extensively through Europe as secretary for James Monroe, who was then serving as the United States minister to the Court of St James.

In Great Britain, Nicholas Biddle took part in a conversation with Cambridge University professors involving comparisons between the modern Greek dialect and that of Homer; a conversation that captured Monroe's attention.

Nicholas Biddle practiced law and wrote, contributing papers to different publications on various subjects, but chiefly in the fine arts.

Nicholas Biddle became associate editor of a literary magazine called Port-Folio, which was published from 1806 to 1823.

When editor Joseph Dennie died in 1812, Nicholas Biddle took over the magazine and lived on 7th Street, near Spruce Street.

That same year, Nicholas Biddle was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Nicholas Biddle edited the journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Nicholas Biddle encouraged President Thomas Jefferson to write an introductory memoir of his former aide and private secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis.

Nicholas Biddle was elected as a Republican member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in 1810, and then in the Pennsylvania State Senate for the 1st district from 1813 to 1815.

When Bank President Langdon Cheves resigned in 1822, Nicholas Biddle became the institution's new president.

Nicholas Biddle developed a lifelong hostility to all banks that were not completely backed by gold or silver deposits.

When state banks became excessive in their lending practices, Nicholas Biddle's Bank acted as a restraint.

In 1823, Nicholas Biddle started concentrating the Bank's facilities in the West, Southwest, and South to meet the demands for credit generated by the expansion of land, cotton, and slavery.

Nicholas Biddle did this by directing his branch officers to circulate large quantities of branch drafts and by buying and selling millions of dollars of bills of exchange.

The result was that Nicholas Biddle helped provide an economic infrastructure that facilitated long-distance trade, propagated a relatively stable and uniform currency, and played a major role in integrating and consolidating fiscal operations at the federal level.

Nicholas Biddle was important in the 1833 establishment of Girard College, an early free private school for poor orphaned boys in Philadelphia, under the provisions of the will of his friend and former legal client, Stephen Girard, one of the wealthiest men in America.

In January 1832, Nicholas Biddle submitted an application to Congress for a renewal of the Bank's twenty-year charter, four years before the current charter was due to expire.

Articles, stockholders' reports, editorials, essays, philosophical treatises, petitions, pamphlets, and copies of congressional speeches were among the diverse forms of media that Nicholas Biddle transmitted to various sections of the country through loans and Bank expenditures.

Nicholas Biddle was told that such vigorous campaign spending would only give credence to Jackson's theory that the Bank interfered in the American political process, but chose to dismiss the warning.

Nicholas Biddle therefore refused to withdraw the federal deposits directed by the president and would not resign, so Jackson then transferred him to the State Department.

The Second Bank's twenty-year charter expired in April 1836, but Nicholas Biddle worked with the Pennsylvania state legislature to prolong the institution as a state-chartered bank, the United States Bank of Pennsylvania.

In 1837 and 1838, Nicholas Biddle secretively dispatched agents into the South to buy up several million dollars worth of cotton with the notes of state-chartered banks, all in an effort to restore the nation's credit and pay off foreign debts owed to British merchant bankers.

Nicholas Biddle invested in and bailed out several state-chartered banks in the South whose capital was derived partially from slave mortgages.

In 1839, after seeing his investment in cotton speculation backfire, Nicholas Biddle resigned from his post as bank president, and in 1841, with the nation still reeling from depression, the Bank finally collapsed.

Nicholas Biddle was arrested and forced to pay compensation to creditors using the remainder of his personal fortune.

On February 27,1844, at the age of fifty-eight, Nicholas Biddle died at the Andalusia estate from complications related to bronchitis and edema.

Nicholas Biddle's paternal uncle and namesake, Nicholas Biddle, was a naval hero who died during the American Revolutionary War.

The couple had six children, including Charles John Biddle, who served in the US Army and in the US House of Representatives, and Edward C Biddle, with whom Nicholas worked in the international cotton trade during the late 1830s.

The Nicholas Biddle Estate in Bensalem Township, Pennsylvania, known as "Andalusia", is a National Historic Landmark, registered with the National Park Service of the US Department of the Interior.