The story of transatlantic finance in the nineteenth century has often been one that fixates largely on a US-British binary. Capital flows between these two nations (increasingly centered around financial instruments pertaining to cotton) have been detailed at length in an array of monographs. While some historians have explored the power of Dutch financiers, especially as it pertained to American railroad stock, little attention has been paid to German financiers in the nineteenth century, specifically as it pertains to their increasing interest and interconnectedness with the United States. While this paucity of attention is partly down to a dearth of surviving primary source evidence, the importance of connections between German financiers and American counterparts helps to explain not only evolving notions of transatlantic finance, but also in part the respective rise of these two economies as they eclipsed the British by the early twentieth century. What began as two economies operating on the periphery of a dominant British financial network in the earlier part of the nineteenth century evolved by the century’s end. Finance played but one part in this narrative of American and German ascension, but the financing of debt is one window into this critical story of the nineteenth century.

American Civil War bonds in particular offer a window into domestic – but perhaps even more crucially – international ramifications of the conflict. While traditional Civil War diplomacy is a topic of much exploration, little has been said in regard to the financial dimensions of the war on the international stage. For Civil War bonds played a large role in reorienting transatlantic banking structures for United States’ banks in the nineteenth century, paving the way for a new era of American finance. Crucial to all of this were the emerging financial ties between the United States and the German states – two relative financial peripheries compared to London, Paris and Amsterdam – as the Civil War drastically expanded their financial footprints globally. The financial connections between the German states and the United States that grew and developed from 1848 onwards play a vital role in understanding the development of financial networks between these two nations.