The idea of attracting small investors for public debt was not unheard of at the time. The initial investments in the Erie Canal came from middling investors. See Larson.

The best account of the operation of the loan is still Oberholtzer, Jay Cooke, 1: 133-325, especially 151, 163-64, 187-88, 193, 229, 231.

John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 77.

Fisk and Hatch were part of Jay Cooke's organization and thus part of the creation of modern capital markets, Richard Eugene Sylla, The American Capital Market, 1846-1914: A Study of the Effects of Public Policy on Economic Development (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 146-61.

Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections, and Economic Development in Industrial New England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 90-91.

John A. James, Money and Capital Markets in Postbellum America (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1978), 74-75.

For Fisk and Hatch's marketing, see Fisk and Hatch, Memoranda Concerning Government Bonds for the Information of Investors . . . (New York, 1881).

Larson, Jay Cooke, 117.