Writing from Philadelphia to his ‘gentle affectionate dove’ for the second time that day, Massachusetts Senator Harrison Gray Otis begged his wife Sally to pay attention to Boston gossip. ‘Please to be particular in notifying me what you hear respecting Craigie’, he requested. Otis held Craigie's note of five thousand dollars, due in six months, and he feared the worst. Like many of Otis's friends and business partners, Craigie's finances teetered on the edge of disaster. Only three weeks prior he expressed to Sally his mortification at the imminent failure of another friend, ‘H’. ‘It is impossible for us not to feel a lively interest in the fate of such amiable friends’, he wrote to her, ‘especially reflecting upon the aggravations resulting from their high notions of life’. Indeed, he noted, Sally had been wise to remain in Boston. ‘To witness trouble in that quarter would be fatal to your pleasure & happiness here, without alleviating the misfortunes of others.’ ‘In short, such is the uncertainty of all men in business’, he plaintively concluded the Craigie letter, ‘that nothing can be called property which is not in one's own iron chest’.

Otis's anxiety with regard to the fleeting nature of contemporary property was well warranted. The business world Otis mastered was new and full of exciting possibilities; it was also a world fraught with financial peril. Pick up a newspaper in Boston in August 1807 and in the classifieds was a ‘Bank Thermometer!’ – a regular feature from 1807 to 1809 in a number of newspapers in Boston and across Massachusetts. The ‘Bank Thermometer!’ listed the constantly fluctuating relative value of the numerous bank notes then circulating in Boston. Unlike sponsored listings from exchange dealers like Cohen's Lottery and Note Exchange or Boston's Gilbert and Dean, Lottery and Commission Brokers, the Thermometer was disinterested and provided a candid, disdainful and often humorous appraisal of the values, or lack thereof, of banks' notes.