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How the Buttonwood Tree Grew: The Making of a New York Stock Exchange Legend

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

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On May 17, 1792, the story goes, twenty-four stockbrokers gathered beneath a buttonwood tree on Wall Street and signed an agreement that grew into the mighty New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). This traditional account of the founding of the NYSE is largely legendary; it distorts the reality behind the meeting of stockbrokers that long-ago day in May, and claims that the Buttonwood Agreement established the exchange are without any foundation. Yet for more than a century the Buttonwood legend has endured.

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Research Article
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

NOTES

1. Cassirer, Ernst, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Mythical Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), vol 2, p. 5Google Scholar; cited in Kammen, Michael, Mystic Chords of Memory: Transformations in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991), p. 30.Google Scholar

2. Much of the research for this essay was conducted at the New York Stock Exchange Archives. My debt to the archivist, Steven Wheeler, my friend and colleague, is profound. All opinions in this essay, especially any disparaging comments on the Buttonwood Agreement, are entirely my own.

The standard histories of the NYSE are Sobel, Robert's volumes The Big Board: A History of the New York Stock Market (New York: Free Press, 1965)Google Scholar and N.Y.S.E.: A History of the New York Stock Exchange 1935–1975 (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1976)Google Scholar, though they are not always scrupulous in factual matters. For the history of New York securities trading through 1840, Werner, Walter and Smith, Steven T., Wall Street (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991)Google Scholar, is authoritative.

3. For the early history of the London stock market see Dickson, P. G. M., The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 486520Google Scholar; Jobber, A [Daniel Defoe], The Anatomy of Exchange-Alley or, a System of Stock-Jobbing, Proving that Scandalous Trade, as is now carry'd on, to be knavish in its Private Practice, and Treason in its Publick (London: Printed for E. Smith, 1719), pp. 3, 41Google Scholar; and Mortimer, Thomas, Every Man his Own Broker, or a Guide to Exchange-Alley, 6th ed. (London: Printed for S. Hooper, 1765), p. 11.Google Scholar

4. For the development of the New York securities market, see Werner, and Smith, , Wall Street, pp. 1119Google Scholar; and Ferguson, E. James, The Power of the Purse (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961)Google Scholar. Davis, Joseph S., Essays in the Earlier History of American Corporations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1917, vol. 1, pp. 111342)Google Scholar remains indispensable.

5. London coffeehouses, a development of Restoration London, provided the sites for early stock trading. Even before the beginning of stock trading, coffeehouses were associated with the same practices later connected with stock trading. One late-17th-Century observer complained that they were a place where “the idle vulgar come and go / Carrying a thousand Rumors to and fro … a Phanatique Theatre” a place “for the Gonorrhea of the Tongue, or a refin'd Baudy House” (The Character of a Coffee-House, with the Symptomes of a Town-Wit [London: Printed for Jonathan Edwin, at Three Roses in Lud-Gate Street, 1673]).

6. On November 25, 1790, John Pintard, one of the leaders of the early New York stock market took an oath before the mayor of New York City to register as a broker (John Pintard Collection, New-York Historical Society). He announced himself as a sworn broker in the New-York Daily Advertiser (12 9, 1790)Google Scholar. As Pintard explained in his notice, the theory behind the institution of sworn brokers was that by not trading for their own account they were avoiding potential conflicts with customers. However, there is reason for questioning how assiduously sworn brokers either in London or New York refrained from self-dealing (see Dickson, , The Financial Revolution in England, p. 394Google Scholar; and Werner, and Smith, , Wall Street, p. 212).Google Scholar

7. At a Meeting of the Dealers in the Public Funds in the City of New-York held at the Coffee-House (New York, 1791)Google Scholar. It is reprinted in Werner, and Smith, , Wall Street, pp. 190–92.Google Scholar

8. See Davis, , Essays, 124–50, 213–54Google Scholar; Matson, Cathy, “Public Vices, Private Benefit: William Duer and His Circle, 1776–1792”, in New York and the Rise of American Capitaliam, ed. Pencak, William and Wright, Conrad Edick (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1989), pp. 72123.Google Scholar

9. The Glass; or Speculation (New York, 1791).Google Scholar

10. For the legal history of early stock trading, see Werner, and Smith, , Wall Street, pp. 97103, 198203Google Scholar. The bill passed on April 10, 1792, for the purpose of “regulating public auctions” modified an earlier version of the same bill that would have prohibited the sales of stock at public auction outright (Journal of the Senate of the State of New-York [Albany: Childs and Swaine, 1792], p. 77).Google Scholar

11. In early May, 1792 (before the Buttonwood Agreement), Hugh Smith advertised himself as having “commenced the business of broker and taken the oath prescribed by a resolution of the dealers in stock” (New-York Daily Advertiser, 05 2, 1792Google Scholar). Several signers of the Buttonwood Agreement advertised themselves as sworn brokers as late as February 14, 1793 (Werner, and Smith, , Wall Street, p. 213).Google Scholar

12. The Buttonwood Agreement is photographically reproduced in James Buck, ed., with Blodgett, Richard and Wheeler, Steven, The New York Stock Exchange: The First Two Hundred Years, ed. Buck, James E. (Essex, Conn. 1992), p. 19Google Scholar. The full text, containing only eighty-two words, is as follows: We the Subscribers, Brokers for the Purchase and Sale of Public Stock, do hereby pledge ourselves to each other, that we will not buy or sell from this day for any person whatsoever, any kind of Publick Stock at a less rate than one quarter per cent Commission on the Specie value, and that we will give a preference to each other in our Negotiations. In Testimony whereof we have set our hands this 17th day of May at New York. 1792.

13. The auctions envisioned under the September, 1791, broadside agreement, and other important meetings held by stockbrokers in 1791 and 1792 were held indoors (New-York Daily Advertiser, 02 15 and 03 21 and 24 1792Google Scholar; and Werner, and Smith, , Wall Street, p. 191).Google Scholar

14. For the revival of finance and commerce in New York City after the War of 1812, see Werner, and Smith, , Wall Street, pp. 2530Google Scholar; and Albion, Robert G., The Rise of New York Port, 1815–1860 (New York: Scribner's, 1939)Google Scholar, passim. It is very difficult to trace the status of stock trading after 1793. The relative lack of quotations in newspapers, advertisements for brokers, or other information about stock trading indicates that business was conducted with a much lower profile than the years 1790–92. Still, stock trading at least through the mid-1790s continued in some form, as can be seen in a 1794 travel diary: “The Tontine tavern and coffeehouse is a handsome large brick building; you ascend six or eight steps under a portico, into a large public room, which is the Stock Exchange of New York, where all bargains are made” (Wansey, Henry, Henry Wansey and His American Journal, ed. Jeremy, David John [Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1970], p. 75Google Scholar). In this and some other early references to stock trading, the term “stock exchange” refers not to an organization, but to a location where stock was exchanged (see the notice for the opening of a “Stock Exchange Office,” New York Daily Advertiser, 02 15, 1792).Google Scholar

15. Most early stock markets had a period of informal trading followed by the formation of an organized market. Elsewhere this process took far longer than the twenty-five years between 1792 and 1817 in New York City. The London stock market developed in the 1690s but had no organized stock exchange until, depending on one's reckoning, 1772 or 1801 (Morgan, E. Victor and Thomas, W. A., The London Stock Exchange [New York: St. Martin's, 1971], pp. 6972Google Scholar). A true stock exchange was not organized in Amsterdam until 1876, despite the presence on an active stock market from the 1620s onward (Spray, David E., ed., The Principal Stock Exchanges of the World [Washington: International Economic, 1964], p. 216).Google Scholar

16. “Memorial and Remonstrance of the Board of Stock and Exchange Brokers of the City of New-York,” in Documents of the Assembly of the State of New York, 59th Session, No. 291. 03 23, 1836 (Albany, 1836), p. 2Google Scholar; and NYS&EB Minute Book, August 23, 1843, NYSE Archives.

17. Werner, and Smith, , Wall Street, pp. 3034. 199203.Google Scholar

18. Werner, and Smith, , Wall Street, pp. 3334Google Scholar; and [Mead, G.] Wall Street; or Ten Minutes Before Three. A Farce, in Three Acts (New York, 1819).Google Scholar

19. A Reformed Stock Jobber [Armstrong, William], Stocks and Stock Jobbing in Wall Street (New York: New-York Publishing, 1848)Google Scholar. A similar subterfuge of allegedly exposing abuses can be seen in Mortimer, Thomas, Every Man his own Broker, 6th ed. (London, 1765).Google Scholar

20. Werner, and Smith, , Wall Street, pp. 3233.Google Scholar

21. Documents of the Assembly, pp. 3, 6.Google Scholar

22. Hamon, Henry, New York Stock Exchange Manual (New York: J. F. Trow, 1865), p. 7Google Scholar; and Lamb, Martha J., Wall Street in History (New York: Furk and Wagnalls, 1883), p. 72.Google Scholar

23. Outside observers of the exchange often described its business as an obscure and enigmatic ritual, such as in this account from around 1850: “the little group, consisting of some two score of the initiated, who understood the mysterious jargon on within the red-canopied sanctuary of the Exchange, and a few wondering outsiders, who know no more of it than the Epicurean of the mysteries of Isis … half phrases, broken sentences, mysterious gestures as signs — these form the staple of what is done here. If you have not the key, you might as well be an attendant upon the worship at a Chinese temple” (Foster, George, New York by Gas-Light, ed. Blumin, Stuart A. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990], pp. 220–27).Google Scholar

24. See the discussion of some of the peculiar rituals and initiation practices of the NYSE in the 1880s, such as the smashing of top hats, throwing of water balloons, and the placing of snowballs or hot pennies beneath the collars of unsuspecting members (Harper's Monthly, 11 1885Google Scholar; reprinted in Oppel, Frank, ed., Gaslight New York Revisited [Seacaucus, N.J.: Castle, 1989], pp. 178–80Google Scholar). Note the illustration of brokers dancing and roughhousing with one another during the Christmas Carnival. These practices were curtailed by early 20th Century.

25. See the interesting discussion of financial honor in Grant, James, Money of the Mind: Borrowing and Lending in America from the Civil War to Michael Milken (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1992), pp. 111–44.Google Scholar

26. Documents of the Assembly, p. 7.Google Scholar

27. John R. Dos Passos (the father of the novelist) in Stedman, E. C., ed., The New York Stock Exchange (New York: Stock Exchange Historical, 1905), pp. 511–18Google Scholar. For many decades (through the 1950s), NYSE member firms were not allowed to organize as corporations, in part because the exchange felt that the limited liability of corporate organization might lead to undue risk taking and irresponsibility.

28. Chernow, Ron, The House of Morgan (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1990), p. 154.Google Scholar

29. For the growth of the exchange during and after the 1860s, see Stedman, , New York Stock ExchangeGoogle Scholar; Mitchie, R. C., The London and New York Stock Exchanges, 1850–1914 (London: Allen Unwin, 1987)Google Scholar; and Bensel, Richard Franklin, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 260–67.Google Scholar

30. On the rediscovery of the 1817 Constitution, see Stedman, , New York Stock Exchange, p. 63.Google Scholar

31. NYS&EB Minute Books, NYSE Archives. Bernard Hart was grandfather to both the Buttonwood legend and the Western writer Bret Harte. In addition to Hart, three other persons — Leonard Bleecker, A. H. Lawrence, and Samuel Beebee — signed both the Buttonwood Agreement and the 1817 Constitution, which as Werner and Smith have argued, forms the most tangible link between the two documents (Werner, and Smith, , Wall Street, p. 218).Google Scholar

32. Medberry, James K., Men and Mysteries of Wall Street (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870), pp. 286–87Google Scholar; and Lamb, Martha J., Wall Street in History (New York, 1883), p. 72Google Scholar. See also “A New York Stock Broker,” Fraud and Fair Dealing in Stocks: An Expose! (New York, 1880), p. 72.Google Scholar

33. Palmer, William Pitt, “Monody on the “Lone Tree”, Journal of Commerce (06 21, 1865)Google Scholar. In addition to the “Monody,” Palmer was also the author of the equally pedestrian “Lines to the Loan Tree Near ‘Change’” in the same issue of the Journal of Commerce. The tree is identified as a sycamore, and “buttonwood” nowhere appears.

34. Lambert, John, Travels through Canada, and the United States of America in the years 1806, 1807, and 1808 (London: Printed for C. Craddock and W. Joy, 1814–186), vol. 2, p. 63Google Scholar. A similar account, written in the year of the founding of the NYS&EB, states, “in front of the [Tontine] Coffee-House, the public sales by auction are conducted, which renders this quarter extremely busy” (The Picture of New-York, or the Stranger's Guide to the Commercial Metropolis of the United States [New York: Mahlon Day, 1825; written in 1817]).Google Scholar

35. The Tontine Coffee House probably opened sometime between January and June of 1793 (see Stokes, I. N. Phelps, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909 (New York: R. H. Dodd, 19091926), vol. 5, p. 1288, and vol. 6, p. 618Google Scholar; and Bayles, W. Harrison, Old Taverns of New York (New York: Frank Allenben Geneological, 1915), pp. 356–57.Google Scholar

36. Cornwallis, Kinanhan, The Gold Room (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1879), p. 24Google Scholar. See also Fowler, William W., in Twenty Years of Inside Life in Wall Street (New York: O. Judd, 1880), p. 52.Google Scholar

37. Harper's Monthly Magazine 11 1885, p. 834Google Scholar; and Clews, Henry, Twenty-Eight Years in Wall Street (New York: J. S. Ogilvie, 1887), pp. 5859Google Scholar. Other early accounts of the Buttonwood legend include The New York Stock Exchange Historical Review (New York, 1886), p. 17Google Scholar; One Hundredth Anniversary of the New York Stock Exchange (New York, 1892)Google Scholar, n.p.; and Zeisloff, E. Idell, The New Metropolis (New York: D. Appleton, 1899), pp. 444–46.Google Scholar

38. New York Stock Exchange Historical Review (1886), p. 17Google Scholar. The “cottonwood tree” appears in King, Moses, King's Handbook of New York (Boston: Moses King, 1893), p. 790Google Scholar; and the “butternut tree” in Appleton's Dictionary of New York, 1901 (New York: D. Appleton, 1900), p. 284.Google Scholar

39. On October 28,1891, the NYSE appointed a committee of five to plan the centennial of the exchange. On January 27, 1892, they recommended having a reception and issuing a silver commemorative medallion. The governing committee initially approved the suggestion, though reversed this decision on February 10th after receiving a letter from a group of powerful members of the exchange (New York Stock Exchange Governing Committee Minutes, New York Stock Exchange Archives). The reason for this reversal is not clear. The New York Commercial Advertiser of 05 17, 1892Google Scholar, states the planned celebrations were abandoned because many members thought “it would be well to treat the occasion in a dignified manner.”

40. NYSE Governing Committee Minutes, October 28, 1891, NYSE Archives; and New York Commercial Advertiser, 05 17, 1892.Google Scholar

41. New York Herald 05 17, 1892Google Scholar; and New York Herald 05 18, 1892.Google Scholar

42. Gould, Stephen Jay, Bully for Brontosaurus (New York: Penguin, 1991), p. 57.Google Scholar

43. Lasch, Christopher, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (New York: Norton, 1991), pp. 131–32.Google Scholar

44. Eames, Francis L., The New York Stock Exchange (New York: T. G. Hall, 1894), p. 1Google Scholar. See also One Hundredth Anniversary, “The early history of the New York Stock Exchange has never been written,” n.p.

45. Kammen, , Mystic Chords, pp. 132–62Google Scholar. See also Kammen, Michael, A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1978), pp. 4975.Google Scholar

46. New York Commercial Advertiser, 05 17, 1792Google Scholar; and Harper's Monthly Magazine, 11 1885, p. 834.Google Scholar

47. Consider the comment of Martha J. Lamb, one of the leading late-19th-Century historians/antiquarians of New York City and the author of a significant book on Wall Street, Wall Street in History: “History shows us that we are better than the people that preceded us” (quoted in Kammen, , Mystic Chords, p. 268).Google Scholar

48. New York Commercial Advertiser, 05 17, 1892.Google Scholar

49. The account of the signing of the Buttonwood Agreement was perhaps a distorted reflection of another event in New York City's commercial history, the 1794 signing of the tontine agreement that completed the funding for the Tontine Coffee House. Two hundred and three shares were subscribed to the tontine agreement, pledging two hundred dollars each to sustain the building fund for the coffeehouse. The tontine was organized to allow the last seven surviving heirs named by the subscribers to split the Tontine investment (plus interest) many years in the future. In 1865, a knowledgeable historian of the early New York City business community praised the signers of the original tontine fulsomely, as “an aristocratic list. Those who have ancestors whose signatures grace the Declaration of Independence may point to them with pride, but not more so than the descendants of the Signers to the Tontine Shares.… They were the founders of our great commercial city, and their names should be honored as long as the city endures” (Barrett, Walter, The Old Merchants of New York City [New York: Carleton, 1865], vol. 3, p. 226Google Scholar. For the history of the Tontine subscription, which was only completed a year after the Tontine Coffee House was open for business, see The Constitution and Nomination of the Subscribers to the Tontine Coffee-House (New York, 1796)Google Scholar; and Peyster, Frederic De, History of the Tontine Building (New York, 1855)Google Scholar. For the conclusion of the “raffle of death,” see the New York Herald, 04 29, 1870.Google Scholar

50. The best history of New York City's outdoor securities markets is Sobel, Robert, The Curbstone Brokers: A History of the American Stock Exchange (New York: Macmillan, 1970).Google Scholar

51. Harper's Monthly, 11, 1885Google Scholar, reprinted in Oppel, , Gaslight, p. 169.Google Scholar

52. Margaret Myers argued that in the auctions before the Buttonwood Agreement one could only purchase and not sell securities, thereby making the market highly unstable (Myers, Margaret G., The New York Money Market: Origins and Development [New York: Columbia University Press, 1931], vol. 1, p. 16Google Scholar). There is no evidence for this claim, and it is flatly contradicted by the September, 1791, broadside (see also Shultz, Birl, Stock Exchange Procedure [New York: New York Stock Exchange Institute, 1936], p. 7).Google Scholar

53. George Pope Morris (1802–64) was a minor Knickerbocker poet. For Peter Stuyvesant's pear tree, see King, , King's Handbook, p. 45Google Scholar. On the Charter Oak, see Fletcher, William Isaac, The Story of the Charter Oak (Hartford, Conn.: Case, Lockwood, and Brainard, 1883).Google Scholar

54. Frazer, James G., The Golden Bough (London: Macmillan, 1911) vol. 1, part, p. 9Google Scholar. See also Barnes, Thomas, “Trees and Plants,” Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. Hastings, James (New York: Scribner's, 1910), vol. 12, pp. 450–56Google Scholar. For 19th-century tree veneration, see Harrison, Robert Pouge, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

55. See “The People Out-of-Doors,” in Wood, Gordon S., The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (New York: Norton, 1969), p. 319–28Google Scholar; Gomme, George Laurance, Primitive Folk-Moots: or Open-Air Assemblies in Britain (London: Marston, Searle, and Rivington 1880), p. 39Google Scholar; and Adams, Herbert Baxter, “The German Origin of New England Towns,” Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, 1st ser., no. 2 (1882)Google Scholar. However, given the large number of Jews who signed the Buttonwood Agreement — at least five: Benjamin Hart, Ephriam Hart, Alexander Zuntz, Benjamin Seixas, and Isaac Gomez — any emphasis on the “Aryanness” of the signers would have been misplaced.

56. On the Tree of Life, see Hardison, O. B. Jr., Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin, 1989), pp. 2931.Google Scholar

57. Eames, , New York Stock Exchange, pp. 1418Google Scholar; Stedman, , New York Stock Exchange, pp. 3537Google Scholar; Securities and Exchange Commission Registration Statement of the New York Stock Exchange September 11, 1934, vol. 1, p. 2Google Scholar. See similar accounts downplaying the Buttonwood Agreement by Passos, John R. Dos in A Treatise on the Law of Stock-Brokers and Stock-Exchanges (New York: Banks Law, 1905), pp. 1011Google Scholar; Van Antwerp, Willard C. (a former president of the NYSE), The Stock Exchange From Within (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1914), p. 306–7Google Scholar; and Pratt, Sereno S., The Work of Wall Street (New York: D. Appleton, 1902), p. 4.Google Scholar

58. Myers, , New York Money Market, col. 1, p. 16Google Scholar. The theory is definitely refuted in Werner, and Smith, , Wall Street, pp. 2026Google Scholar. See Werner, and Smith, (Wall Street)Google Scholar for the antecedents of Myers's theory.

59. Warshow, Robert I., The Story of Wall Street (New York: Blue Ribbon, 1929), pp. 3132.Google Scholar

60. See, for instance, Pomerantz, Sidney I., New York: An American City, 1783–1803 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), p. 138Google Scholar; and Federal Writers Project, The WPA Guide to New York City (1939; rept. New York: Pantheon, 1982), p. 85.Google Scholar

61. A Buttonwood Tree Grew Up There Then, and Under It They Drew Up This Agreement, drawing in Zeisloff, , New Metropolis, pp. 444–46Google Scholar. Another important image of the Buttonwood legend was on a 1922 a medallion struck by the Medallic Art Company for the NYSE, depicting a trio of brokers arranged in a pose resembling the Three Graces in front of the buttonwood tree above a large “1792.” It was a common image on official NYSE literature for several decades and is reprinted on the cover of Buck, New York Stock Exchange.

62. Ezra Winter (1886–1949), a native of Michigan, was educated at Olivet College and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, and had a successful career as a muralist in public and commercial buildings. The First Stock Exchange was part of a series of six murals depicting early commercial life in New York City, including images of the opening of the Bank of the Manhattan Company in 1799, and a view of the Tontine Coffee House from the same year. The Ezra Winter painting is reproduced as the cover of The Exchange 28, no. 6 (05 1967)Google Scholar. The painting has been in the possession of the Smithsonian Institute since 1965.

63. See the painting by Vincent Maragliotti in the NYSE Luncheon Club reproduced in Buck, , New York Stock Exchange p. 20Google Scholar. The Winter painting was also the model for the diorama of the Buttonwood Agreement erected at the Museum of the City of New York in 1938 (Museum of the City of New York Bulletin 2, no. 1 [11 1938]).Google Scholar

64. In the painting, the seated figure at the center of the table is Leonard Bleecker, Others depicted are Andrew Barclay, Charles McEvers, Augustine H. Lawrence, and David Reedy. The choice of persons by Winter seems largely arbitrary.

65. For an interesting negative view of the NYSE that relies on the Buttonwood legend, see Welles, Chris, The Last Days of the Club (New York: Dutton, 1975), pp. 910Google Scholar; cp. Flynn, John T., Security Speculation: Its Economic Effects (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934), pp. 2022Google Scholar. However, reading back from the middle of the 20th Century to the Buttonwood Agreement is misleading. The signers of the Buttonwood Agreement did not form a cartel — by no means had all of the leading participants in the securities market of 1792 signed the agreement — and off-board trading remained an important part of the business of NYS&EB brokers through the 1860s. And the minimum rate mentioned in the Buttonwood Agreement — not a fixed rate — probably did little more than codify common practice, since evidence from newspaper advertisements indicates that brokers usually charged commission rates higher than one-quarter of 1 percent for private sales (see the advertisement of Pintard, John, Gazette of the United States, 03 24, 1792).Google Scholar

66. Shultz, , Stock Exchange Procedure, p. 7Google Scholar; and Museum of the City of New York Bulletin.

67. New York Stock Exchange Press Release, May 17, 1956, New York Stock Exchange Archives. The ceremonies included a dramatic reenactment of the signing of the Buttonwood Agreement (Salute to a Marketplace: 175th Anniversary — Marketplace for the Nation's Progress (New York, 1967), p. 3).Google Scholar

68. For a skeptical appraisal, see the classic study by Davis, , Essays, vol. 1, p. 308.Google Scholar

69. Sobel, , The Big Board p. 34Google Scholar. For a representative sampler of Buttonwood legend references in books on the NYSE, see Cragg, Alison, Understanding the Stock Market (New York: Greenberg, 1929), p. 2Google Scholar; Neill, Humphrey B., The Inside Story of the Stock Exchange (New York: Forbes, 1950), pp. 913Google Scholar; and Levinson, Leonard, Wall Street: A Pictorial History (New York: Ziff-Davis, 1953), p. 67Google Scholar. The legend remains current in even the best recent histories (see Jaher, Frederic Cople, The Urban Establishment [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982] p. 191Google Scholar; and Elkins, Stanley and McKitrick, Eric, The Age of Federalism [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], p. 274.Google Scholar

70. Wall Street Journal, 05 13, 1992Google Scholar; and Buck, , New York Stock Exchange.Google Scholar