The Counting House No. 10 — The Check Goes Home
On donating Aaron Burr’s 1796 bank order to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania — and what a year of research changed
Six weeks ago, I wrote here about a check.
(If you missed that piece, you can read it here.)
On July 27, 1796, Aaron Burr drew $5,000 on Alexander Hamilton’s bank — the New York branch of the First Bank of the United States — payable to “J.G. or Bearer.” The bearer was James Greenleaf, Burr’s partner in a 210,000-acre Adirondack land speculation. I bought the check from a New Hampshire dealer in 1992 for $245, and I have carried it for thirty-four years.
That earlier post laid out what I thought I knew about the check at the time. The broad outlines were correct: Burr was advancing money to a friend who was about to default on a much larger obligation. The check connects, by a documentable chain, through the lawsuit Hamilton later argued on Burr’s behalf, to the political enmity that produced the duel of July 11, 1804.
But broad outlines were the wrong shape for the document. What I didn’t yet know was the specific shape of what Burr was trying to rescue Greenleaf from — and where, exactly, the records that explain it have been kept for two and a quarter centuries.
I know now, because Leroy Arnold told me.
Mr. Arnold is Librarian Emeritus at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. He spent three hours, over two sessions this month, transcribing pages of the Greenleaf Agency Account Book — Volume 38 of the Society’s North American Land Company Records (Collection #1432) — at my request. What he found settled, with the precision that only primary sources can settle, what my check had been a fragment of.
On Page 40 of the volume, in a schedule of unsecured obligations, there is this entry:
J. J. Angerstein (Bond) | Philadelphia | 1 July 1796 | $26,666.66
The Angerstein bond. Twenty-six thousand six hundred sixty-six dollars and sixty-six cents, due on the first of July 1796. Greenleaf had borrowed against the land speculation from John Julius Angerstein in London. The bond came due. Greenleaf could not cover it. On July 27 — twenty-six days later — Burr drew the check that I would buy a hundred and ninety-six years afterward.
My five thousand dollars is exactly 18.75% of what Greenleaf owed.
This is what changed for me. The check I had carried around as a freestanding artifact — the Burr check, the document that connects to Hamilton, the fragment with a story — turned out to be the surviving negotiable instrument of a documented default cascade. There were three distinct Burr-Greenleaf debt instruments in the same HSP volume. Burr is listed twice as an unsecured creditor in Greenleaf’s bankruptcy — once on Schedule G, once at item 14 of 26 in the enumerated Debts list — both times with the amount blank, indicating claims that had not yet been quantified when the account book was compiled. A third Burr entry, for six hundred dollars, appears on Page 43 on a page that was later crossed out diagonally, the bankruptcy accounting being reworked through multiple organizational schemes as the lawyers struggled to make sense of what had collapsed.
Greenleaf’s total bonded debts at the time the volume was compiled: $1,939,989.19. Nearly two million dollars in 1796–1803 currency. One of the largest land-speculation collapses of the founding generation.
My check is one piece of paper out of that catastrophe. The rest of the paper has been in Philadelphia, in a leather-bound volume on a shelf at 1300 Locust Street, the whole time.
When I understood that — when Arnold’s transcriptions made it clear that the document I owned was the external instrument that referenced records the Society already held — I also understood, with a feeling that was equal parts inevitability and relief, that I did not actually own the document anymore. The document had a home. I had only ever been keeping it warm.
I wrote to the Society’s Director of Archives, Cary Hutto, and described what Arnold had found. She brought the matter to the Historical Society’s collections committee. The committee met on Monday. Their vote was unanimous: accept the document as a donation, on the basis of its strong relationship to the North American Land Company records.
Hutto’s email landed in my inbox on Tuesday afternoon. By the time I write this, my acceptance is in hers.
There is a particular satisfaction in this kind of outcome that I want to try to name, because it is not satisfaction at the financial value of what’s just happened. Donations to historical societies don’t produce financial returns; they produce other things. Some of what they produce is institutional permanence — the check will be in Philadelphia, in HSP’s accession records, available to scholars and students and the genuinely curious, for as long as the Society persists. Some of it is documentary completion — the records that explain the check and the check that the records describe will, finally, be in the same building. Some of it is the closing of a story that I had told myself for thirty-four years without quite knowing how it ended.
I want to name another part too, because I think it is the part worth dwelling on if you’ve read this far. The check has been mine — as in, legally and physically mine — since 1992. It will not be after the deed of gift clears. But it has never really been mine in the deeper sense; that I now think the deeper sense is what owning historical material is. The check has always been the United States Government Funding Office’s, then James Greenleaf’s, then Aaron Burr’s, then the holder named on the verso of the order; and then for two centuries it was wherever it was until I was lucky enough to find it at William Linehan’s autograph shop in Concord, New Hampshire, in July 1992. The thirty-four years that I had it were a kind of borrowing. Most private ownership of historical material is borrowing, when you look at it honestly. The check is going home now. I am very grateful that home exists, and that the people there — Leroy Arnold, Cary Hutto, the collections committee, Anthony DiGiovanni on the operational side — were the kind of careful, generous professionals who made the homecoming straightforward.
The practical mechanics from here belong to HSP — a deed of gift, a queue, a quarterly review by the library board, an acknowledgment from the Society’s CEO once accessioning completes. The check will not actually arrive at Locust Street for some weeks yet, and it will not be in the public catalog until the board approves the accession at its next meeting. But the path is now drawn, and the path was what I needed.
It is also worth saying what comes next, because the work doesn’t end at the donation.
The Carroll check — the other half of the 1796–1830 financial-history pair that anchored my research this year — has not yet found its home. I am exploring an institutional pathway for that one too, with a Maryland institution whose holdings would be the natural complement to the Burr check at HSP. That will be a separate story.
The broader research project continues. There is more to learn about Greenleaf’s bankruptcy specifically and the 1790s land-speculation collapse more broadly — Arnold’s transcriptions opened a door, but I have not yet walked all the way through it. The play I have been thinking about, set at Weehawken in the pre-dawn hours of July 11, 1804, with Burr and his second reckoning with how they got there — that may or may not get written. The novel forms of the same material remain on the table.
What I know now that I did not know in June, when I last wrote here, is that the most important valuation a historical document can receive is not the auction-house specialist’s estimate. It is the institutional curator who reads the description and says, “we have the records that explain this,” and means it.
That is what happened on Monday at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
The check goes home.
— Paul
Thank you for reading. If you’d like to follow this work as it continues — the Carroll check, the broader Greenleaf research, the Weehawken play if it ever gets written — you can subscribe below.