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In his satiric “Chronology of Facts” in the National Gazette, Philip Freneau pronounced 1791 the “Reign of the Speculators.” He invented a mock plan for the creation of an American aristocracy whose meticulously graded and serried ranks mirrored rising levels of speculative practice from “the lower order of the Leech” to the middling “Their Huckstership” on to the sublime “Order of the Scrip.”
Jefferson inveighed against the sleaziness and injustice practiced by those who bought up worthless “continentals”: “Speculators had made a trade of cozening them from their holders. … Couriers and relay horses by land, and swift sailing pilot boats by sea, were flying in all directions,” buying up paper securities so that “immense sums were thus filched from the poor and ignorant.”
Madison worried that “the stock-jobbers will become the praetorian band of the Government, at once its tool and its tyrant; bribed by its largesse, and overawing it by clamorous combinations.”
John Adams, who often allied himself with Hamilton and shared with the treasury secretary a conservative conviction about the inevitability of social class distinctions, nonetheless observed that “paper wealth has been the source of aristocracy in this country, as well as landed wealth, with a vengeance.”
"Steve Fraser, Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace
