U.S. Government Bond Trading Database, 1776-1835: Description of the Data Set

Compiler:

Robert E. Wright, Stern School of Business, New York University, rwright@stern.nyu.edu

Abstract:

This document describes a large data set of U.S. government bond trades that took place between 1776 and 1835. This is the data used to create some of the figures and tables in Robert E. Wright, One Nation Under Debt: Hamilton, Jefferson, and the History of What We Owe (New York: McGraw Hill 2008).

Acknowledgments:

Some funding for the creation of this data set was provided by a Mellon/Betty Sams Christian Fellowship in Business History, Virginia Historical Society, 2006-2007, an Arthur H. Cole Research Grant, Economic History Association, 2004, and an Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. Travel Grant, Harvard Business School, 2001-2002. Most of the data collection was undertaken by Stephanie Vasta under the supervision of Wright, who entered approximately 10 percent of the data himself.

Table of Contents:

General Description of the Data

Central Treasury (11,110 records) [csv] [excel]

Connecticut (25,043) [csv] [excel]

Connecticut Revolution (20,413) [csv] [excel]

Delaware Revolution (1,834) [csv] [excel]

Georgia (68) [csv] [excel]

Maryland (6,930) [csv] [excel]

Maryland Revolution (8,354) [csv] [excel]

New Hampshire (2,086) [csv] [excel]

New Hampshire Revolution (2,127) [csv] [excel]

New Jersey Revolution (14,161) [csv] [excel]

New York (18,479) [csv] [excel]

New York Revolution (14,142) [csv] [excel]

North Carolina (174) [csv] [excel]

Pennsylvania (39,510) [csv] [excel]

Pennsylvania Revolution (55,835) [csv] [excel]

Rhode Island (18,520) [csv] [excel]

Rhode Island Revolution (1,526) [csv] [excel]

South Carolina (7,243) [csv] [excel]

Virginia (16,362) [csv] [excel]

Each name refers to the state loan office where trades and other transactions were recorded. “Revolution” files contain initial issuance records of bonds created during the American Revolution (1775-1783). Files without “revolution” in the title contain the details of bond trades that took place after the adoption of Alexander Hamilton’s funding plan. For additional details, see the text of Robert E. Wright, One Nation Under Debt: Hamilton, Jefferson, and the History of What We Owe (New York: McGraw Hill 2008).

Combined, the “Revolution” files contain information regarding 118,394 transactions while the post-Hamilton files document 147,729 trades. The number of records in each file are listed in parentheses above. The records are neither a sample nor a population but rather all of the legible entries found on the microfilm reels cited, all of which are available in Record Group 53, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland. Due to cost and time limitations, numerous additional U.S. government bondholder records available in RG 53 were not coded. It is hoped that any researchers who code one or more of the remaining Treasury transfer books will post their data here upon publication of their articles, books, or other research outlets.

Explanation of Data Fields

“Revolution” files contain the following fields:

Column	Field Heading	Explanation
A	First Name	Bondholder’s first name.
B	Last Name	Bondholder’s last name.
C	Occupation	Bondholder’s occupation, if given.
D	Date	Bond issuance date, provided in year.monthday format (e.g. 1776.1205 = 5 December 1776).
E	Scratched out	For reasons that remain unclear, some records (1) were scratched out while others (0) were not.
F	Amount	Face or par dollar value of the bond.
G	Notes	Free form notes of anything unusual about the record. Many such notes are directly transcribed from the original source.
H	Type	Type of bond.
I	Loan Office	Loan office that issued the bond.
J	Record No.	The National Archives’ record number for the source.
K	Roll	Microfilm roll number.

Post-Hamilton files contain the following fields:

Column	Field Heading	Explanation
A	First	Bondholder’s first name.
B	Last	Bondholder’s last name.
C	Abode	Bondholder’s place of residence, if given.
D	Occu.	Bondholder’s occupation, if given.
E	Date	Transaction date, in year.monthday format (e.g. 1796.1001 = 1 October 1796).
F	Amount	Par or face dollar value of the bond being traded.
G	Buy?	1 if the bondholder bought or otherwise acquired the bond.
H	Sell?	1 if the bondholder sold or otherwise divested the bond.
I	Type	Type of bond, including 3s, Sixes, Deferred, Convertibles, Exchanged, and others.
J	Notes	Free form note field used to record anything unusual about the record, including the transfer book clerk’s marginal notations.
K	Loan Office	Loan office in which the transaction was recorded.
L	Record No.	The National Archives’ record number for the source.
M	Roll No.	Microfilm roll number.
N*	Creation?	This was coded 1 if the bond appeared to have arisen from the subscription of Revolutionary War-era bonds.
O*	Transfer?	1 if the bond was transferred to or from another loan office.
P*	Redeem?	1 if the bond was redeemed by the government.

*Due to limitations in the primary sources, these three fields were inconsistently coded during the project and are best left out of any summary statistics.

Suggested Data Uses

The data provided in the files described herein can be used in a number of ways, including:

• ascertaining whether a specific individual owned U.S. government bonds. Researchers using the data for this purpose should check all files because sometimes people registered or traded their bonds in states other than their state of residence. Also, due to the partial nature of the data as described above, they should not categorically state that a particular person did not own U.S. government bonds if there name does not appear in any of the files.

• macroeconomic studies, especially if the trading volume data that can be generated from the data provided here is used in conjunction with the price data provided by Richard Sylla, Jack Wilson, and Robert E. Wright in their “Early U.S. Securities Prices” database at http://eh.net/databases/early-us-securities-prices.

• sociological studies addressing questions of race, gender, class, age, section, occupation, and rural vs. urban lifeways. Significant numbers of early bondholders were women, juveniles, rural farmers, etc.

• prospographic surveys of bondholders of a single state, city, occupation, and so forth.