What do you see as the socio-political impact of the "Panic

Much of the discussion concerned the procedure to best maintain confidence. The inflationists urged that new money would bolster confidence and induce money to leave idle hoards, thereby restoring prosperity. Their opponents, on the other hand, maintained that confidence could only be achieved by strict adherence to specie payment. Believing that excessive bank credit was primarily responsible for the depression, restrictionists generally advocated various controls over credit as a method of relieving the present depression and preventing future ones. Various plans were offered (in addition to insistence on strict adherence to specie payments): for example, banks should be allowed only in cities; prohibition of small denomination notes; and the prohibit ion of interbank borrowing. Hostility to banks was widespread throughout the nation, and many influential figures went so far as to advocate abolition of banking, or virtual abolition through imposing 100 percent reserves. In practice, however, they were often willing to accept more immediately attainable proposals for restricting bank credit. Leading Virginia statesmen were particularly prominent in the hard money ranks. Thus, America had quite a few exponents of the "Currency principle"-100 percent reserve banking and the idea that fiduciary bank credit causes a business cycle -several years before Thomas Joplin first gave it prominence in England. Perhaps one reason for this precedence was that Americans, while benefiting from the famous English bullionist discussions on problems of an inconvertible currency, were forced to grapple with inflation under a mostly convertible currency several years before the English-who did not complete their return to specie payments until 1821. Hostility was also engendered toward the Second Bank of the United States, which had touched off the monetary contraction at the onset of the panic. Legislatures passed resolutions urging the elimination of the bank, and some states levied taxes on it or sanctioned suspension of specie payment to the bank only.