Argument Structures around the Kirtland Safety Society

While historians want to be both educated and corrected by their sources, it is often difficult to pin down that that exactly means. In the following, I want to look at a few examples of how this plays out in the case of the economic history of the Kirtland Safety Society (this is Chapter 10 in my dissertation).

The backbone of course is the chronology. Many narratives already fall apart due to not aligning with the basic chronology of the matter. Of course the selection of what elements to include in the chronology brings us back to the problem of enplotment.

It is important to realize that a chronology is not a sequence of dates, but a sequence of dated events. The distinction is crucial, because dates are just chronometric units, while events have actors and properties and are enmeshed in a event sequence, as well as a geometric positioning. The chronometric units have a canonical order, but it is independent of all semantic contents---which is precisely what makes them units.

Perhaps it is best to first to tease apart the pieces that can go into a historical argument. For an intentional action, we have to presuppose some kind of script, that is, a codification of the "usual" way to do this. This would be the usual way from the point of view of the contemporaries, of course, not from the point of view of the historian. 

The "usual way" is typically distilled in some form from another event that has a similar structure. As Eduard Meyer pointed out (1912) [cited in the dissertation], it is this compare-and-contrast operation that is at the root of the historical research effort for distinguishing the common from the unusual. In the Kirtland case, I used the Owl Creek Bank, which did occur in Ohio about two decades before the Mormon arrival, as well as the Old Bank of Michigan, in which Joseph Smith~Jr's uncle Stephen Mack had participated. In the end it was the cross-comparison between these three instances that provided the fodder for the historical reconstruction.

These three elements were underpinned on the one hand by a history of banking in Ohio, mainly a sequence of state legislature actions and bank foundations (which had to be chartered by the legislature), and a history of the more global economic settings both in Ohio proper and in the US. This was the place for wealthy East Coast magnates and European importers, mainly from England, that had a strong influence on the money supply. This was also the place for Jacksonian interventionism at the national level and the ins and outs of the federal land sale that had such an impact on the monetary supply. All of these lines had their own event sequence with its own "arc" so to speak, mostly expressed as supporting or blocking specific aspirations on the legislative side and injecting or removing money on the financiers' side. 

The final element was the chronology of the creation and dissolution of the Kirtland safety (anti-)banking society itself. The comparison with the other banking charters in Ohio as well as with the Owl Creek Bank highlighted the inversion of the order of steps (charter last) as well as the enormous leverage that had been prototypical of other bank failures in the past and would eventually be outlawed in 1839 by the legislature, requiring 1:3 at the most.

For all of these elements, the observation of the overdetermined asymmetry of causation was in effect. For example, only a small fraction of the notes issued by the Kirtland society survived, supporting reconstructive efforts such as simulations how many bills of which type might have been issued. Also, the stock subscription book survived, allowing to determine which families of the Mormon elite had taken out the most stock and subscribed how much of their money. Some newspaper editorials and similar statements survived, but many other actions and their direct and indirect effects remain inaccessible, lost to time.