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Q.
Why did you write The Exchange Artist?
A. Almost by accident. In early 2001, I was working on
what I thought would be a different book: a history of
American coffee culture from the 1690s through the late
age of Starbucks. In the course of that research, I
stumbled across old images of the Exchange Coffee House,
perhaps the world’s largest building of its type. Though
it stood for only nine years, the building was famous
into the early 20th century, and many drawings of it
survived. I thought they’d make fun illustrations for my
coffee book.
But then I wandered into the building’s back rooms, and
its back-story, where I met up with Andrew Dexter. I
was fascinated by his life and, perhaps even more, by
the loss of his biography. In 1810, nearly everyone in
the eastern United States would have known his name. For
a time, he was an archetypal villain, reviled in scores
of newspapers from Massachusetts to Kentucky to Alabama.
“The man behind the curtain,” one editorialist called
him. Yet by the early twenty-first century he had
become, at best, a footnote to the history of finance.
The more I delved into the archives, the more convinced
I became that his compatriots had it right. Dexter’s
story was emblematic, and important. His was a life for
its times, full of the reckless daring and dreadful
comeuppances that built the United States. To really understand the beginnings of our
speculation nation—indeed, to understand where we are
today—we need to reckon with both our ambition and our
failures. Andrew Dexter’s biography promised plenty of
both.
Q.
How did you research the book?
A. It’s often said that the victors write the history,
and in a way, that’s true. Winners tend to leave more
and better documents of their lives. And though Andrew
Dexter was an educated white man, one of the “middling
sort,” as people said in the nineteenth century, he came
out a loser, and he left behind a pretty fragmentary
record. So piecing together his story was a bit like
sifting through the ruins of the Exchange Coffee House.
A lot of the documents from which Exchange Artist
emerged were generated by Dexter’s enemies. His nemesis,
the Boston merchant Nathan Appleton, kept voluminous
personal papers, and his descendants carefully
safeguarded that archive before turning it over to the
Massachusetts Historical Society. Dexter’s creditors
left their traces, too. Court records showed some of the
devastation he left behind. The Rhode Island officials
who investigated the Farmer’s Exchange Bank in the
spring of 1809 discovered in its vault a treasure trove
of incriminating letters that they preserved for
posterity in pamphlet form.
And as in every historical project, there were happy
accidents. Early American newspapers offered some
tantalizing fragments of the daily lives of builders and
other laborers. A complete set of floor plans for the
Exchange Coffee House—huge, fragile folios, probably
made for insurance purposes—survived, almost
miraculously, in the archives of the
Bostonian Society.
When combined with the narrative record of the building,
those remarkable documents helped me to “read” the
space. Two insightful architecture students made
interactive, three-dimensional CAD drawings from those
plans, which allowed me more fully to
visualize the
Coffee House.
Other serendipities followed. The portrait that Dexter
commissioned from Gilbert Stuart in 1808 – in the flush
times right before the fall—turned up, after a lengthy
search, in the home of a collateral descendant. In the
Detroit Public Library, I chanced on a folder of letters
written by the humble clerk who had served as cashier
for two of Dexter’s pet banks, and wandered the streets
of Boston, all but starving, in the summer of 1809
hunting for the boss he called “Mr. D.” And yes, various
bits of Dexteriana—old money, a teacup commemorating
the Coffee House—even came to me through the miracle
of the Worldwide Web.
Q.
You sound as if you quite liked searching for this
elusive Dexter. But is he a hero or a villain in The
Exchange Artist?
A. Both, I guess. Or neither. Historians deliver
autopsies, not funeral sermons. That said, I confess to
a certain amount of empathy for my title character.
“Come on, Jane, wasn’t he really just a crook?” a good
friend asked me once, early in the writing of the book.
And in the end, Dexter was a crook, for sure. But he was
also something more complex, more resonant – and yes,
more American: a fallen dreamer. I’m not sure how well
he knew his own heart, for he didn’t leave much evidence
of his inner life. But I’m pretty sure he never believed
he would hurt anybody. To the contrary: he had
confidence in his own confidence game. To the very last.
Prosperity, freedom, everything right and good lay just
out of sight, at the end of the dock, like the green
light that lured F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby.
Q.
Are today’s smoke-and-mirrors tycoons—Kenneth Lay or
Donald Trump, for examples—the spiritual descendants of Andrew
Dexter?
A. Again, yes and no. The breadth—or, rather, the
height—of Dexter's vision calls to mind a lot of American
dreamers before and since. But Dexter wasn’t greedy. He
wanted to build something solid: a public building, not
a personal fortune, or a private mansion. After all, he
didn’t put his name on the building.
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