On September 15, 1873, Jay Cooke had President Grant as a guest at his estate outside Philadelphia. Three days later his bank shut its doors. Cooke was one of the most trusted bankers in America. He had sold the bonds that paid for the Union side of the Civil War. Then he put his bank behind the Northern Pacific, a railroad from Lake Superior to Puget Sound that wasn't finished and wasn't earning. Two weeks later Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper wrote that the Northern Pacific had already swallowed "at least $40,000,000." And this line, which I keep rereading: "Men who a few days ago were worth millions are to-day penniless." The New York Stock Exchange closed for ten days. It had never closed before. The same page has a drawing of Grant meeting the bankers at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. The caption: "The President refusing to use the U.S. Treasury." About 18,000 businesses went bankrupt. 121 railroads. Unemployment hit 14% nationally and around 25% in New York, and the depression lasted more than five years. Cooke himself came back. He made a new fortune in a Utah silver mine and died rich in 1905. That part bothers me more than the crash. The man who borrowed against an unfinished railroad got a second chance. The people queuing outside the Fourth National Bank on Nassau Street mostly didn't. Was Grant right to keep the Treasury shut?