Nothing builds suspense like a scandal involving a corpse. When Sophia Bricker opened the door to her brother’s bedroom on the morning of May 4, 1837, she thought the body in his bed looked a little too still. She called a doctor, but it was too late. John Flemming was already “quite dead.” The physician “attributed his death to apoplexy or nightmare.” Mrs. Bricker recalled that her brother had returned home at about half past ten on the night before his death and appeared “not more depressed than usual.” This was odd. By all accounts, Flemming should have been unusually depressed. That very afternoon, a growing scandal involving New York City’s Mechanics Bank prompted Flemming to resign his post as president. As Philip Hone recorded in his diary, “it was very naturally reported that he had committed suicide.”

The circumstances surrounding Flemming’s sudden demise demanded investigation. When the coroner presented his findings to a jury, it “returned a verdict of ‘death from mental excitement.’” Hone confessed to his diary that it was “the awful state of things which caused it.” Had Flemming killed himself because of his panic or had his panic killed him? The determination of whether Flemming had been the cause of his own destruction or the victim of a force beyond his control mirrored the question at the heart of the financial crisis: had the past two months of trouble been a result of human agency or an uncontrollable nightmare?