imagined wealth won overnight. The fever of speculation remained by no means confined to the public lands. The contagion spread irresistibly. The insane expansion of credit was general. The frenzy raged from the cotton fields of the South to the pineries of Maine. In some cities the speculation in real estate assumed absurd proportions. At Mobile, a chief cotton mart, the assessed value of city property rose between 1831 and 1837 from 1,294,810 to $27,482,961; in New York, between 1831 and 1836, from $139,280,314 to $309,500,000. In other towns, large and small, similar things were going on. The importation of merchandise increased enormously during the same period, and there was the most reckless gambling in all things that could be bought and sold. It was a universal carnival in which people seemed to vie with one another in madness of venture and expectation.
Two government measures adopted in 1836 interfered with this crazy round dance, measures which, indeed, did not cause the explosion, — for there were other causes making it eventually inevitable, — but which hastened it, and probably rendered it more destructive. One proceeded from Congress, — the distribution of the surplus funds among the states. The idea of distributing among the states surplus funds accumulated in the national treasury was not a new one. Jefferson had suggested it; also Jackson in his annual message of 1829, though he afterwards repented of it.
