A Tuscaloosa scholar of antebellum literature reads about customers paying deposits for a flying Roadster with no price and finds Joseph Glover Baldwin describing the same faith in 1853
Monday, 19 October 2026. Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The reading room of the Hoole Special Collections Library on campus, white gloves on, a first edition of The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi on a foam cradle, 10.20am.
A Car With No Price
The London Prat has a report on how Elon Musk unveiled the flying Tesla Roadster, nine years after it was first promised. It lifts itself over other Teslas, drives upside down and reaches sixty in about a second. Production is targeted for 2028. Customers have paid deposits for a car that does not yet have a price. The report says the car escaped gravity but not the production schedule.
I read it on my phone in the special collections reading room, which is strictly forbidden, and the librarian gave me the look that Alabama librarians reserve for Swedes and other foreign troublemakers. Then she relented, because I had asked for Baldwin, and she loves Baldwin. Everybody who reads him loves him. He is the funniest writer about money the antebellum South produced.
A Lawyer On The Frontier
Joseph Glover Baldwin was a Virginian who moved to the Alabama frontier in 1836 and practised law in Gainesville and Livingston, in Sumter County, not far from here. He arrived in the middle of a speculative frenzy. Land taken from the Choctaw and Creek nations was being sold off, banks were printing money with abandon, and everybody was getting rich on paper. Baldwin’s book, published in 1853, looks back on those years, the flush times, with a mixture of nostalgia, horror and hilarity.
He describes a world where credit was infinite, signatures were currency and nobody asked what anything was actually worth. Men bought land they had never seen with money that did not exist, then borrowed against the land to buy more. Lawyers flourished because every deal eventually ended in court. Then came the Panic of 1837, and the whole structure collapsed. Fortunes vanished. Men fled to Texas. The phrase gone to Texas, scrawled on abandoned doors, became a byword for bankruptcy.
Deposits On Faith
The Roadster deposit is a flush-times transaction. You pay money now for something that does not exist yet, at a price nobody has told you, on a schedule nobody believes. Baldwin would have recognized the psychology at once. He wrote that in the flush times, the imagination was the only limit on value. A man with confidence and a good coat could buy a plantation on a promise. A man with a flying car and a press conference can raise deposits on a promise too.
I do not mean that the Roadster is a fraud. Baldwin did not think every speculator was a crook. Many were simply caught up in the general excitement, as one gets caught up at a football game. But he understood that excitement is not a business plan, and that the bill eventually arrives.
Baldwin also has a gift for character sketches that would serve any modern business magazine. His portrait of Ovid Bolus, a lawyer who lies not for profit but for the sheer artistic joy of it, is one of the great comic studies of a compulsive talker. Bolus lies about his ancestors, his horses, his travels, his friendships with famous men. He lies, Baldwin says, as naturally as other men breathe, and with more style. I think of Bolus whenever a product launch promises more than any factory could deliver. Bolus would have been an excellent keynote speaker.
The Uncomfortable Foundation
The flush times had a foundation that Baldwin mostly passes over, and I always make my students look at it directly. The land being sold was taken from Native nations through forced removal, including the Trail of Tears. The wealth was produced by enslaved people, whose bodies were themselves used as collateral for loans. Enslaved men, women and children were mortgaged, bought on credit and sold to pay debts. When the Panic came, families were broken apart at auction to settle accounts. Baldwin’s comedy is real, but so is what it leaves out. The speculation was built on stolen land and stolen lives.
That is why I cannot read Baldwin without a pencil in my hand and a knot in my stomach. He is brilliant. He is also complicit. The best Southern literature of the period is always both.
Alabama Still Loves A Big Promise
Modern Alabama has its own talent for headlines larger than reality. Bohiney ran a story recently in which Ella Langley out-headlines Trump, which delighted everyone in this state, because Ella Langley is an Alabama girl and Trump is a man who believes he is owed every headline in America. Baldwin would have enjoyed the contest. He spent his career watching big talkers compete for attention in courthouses across Sumter County.
Leaving The Reading Room
The librarian has asked me to put away my phone again, and to remove my elbow from the foam cradle. I apologized in two languages. She said Baldwin would have charged me a fee for the damage and then sued me for the remainder. She is right. He was a lawyer first and a humorist second, and the humor was usually about lawyers.
As I left, she asked whether I had ordered a Tesla. I said no, I drive a fourteen-year-old Volvo, which is the most Swedish thing about me. She said that was wise. The Volvo, she said, already exists. Baldwin could not have put it better. In the flush times, as in the Roadster times, the most radical financial decision available is to pay for something that is already there.