Nicholas Biddle in Greece

by Biddle, Nicholas

"Nicholas Biddle (1786-1844) was a noted politician and financier in early nineteenth-century America. At eighteen, he went to Europe as the secretary of the American minister to France. He also made the acquaintance of James Monroe when Monroe was the American ambassador to London. He was later elected to the state legislature and senate of Pennsylvania. Ultimately he became a director and then the president of the Bank of the United States."--BOOK JACKET. "In the course of a sojourn to Europe, Biddle sailed to Greece, then a part of the Ottoman Empire. Half of the journal he kept on the trip has only recently been discovered, and the other half is known to only a few people because it is still in private hands. Taken together, these two journals (plus the four extant letters that Biddle wrote to his family in Philadelphia) are a mine of information about the formative influences on his career, about the politics and personalities of Napoleon's Europe, about the condition of Greece an