Born into the Biddle family of Philadelphia, young Nicholas worked for a number of prominent officials, including John Armstrong Jr. and James Monroe.

From 1823 to 1836, Biddle served as president of the Second Bank, during which time he exercised power over the nation's money supply and interest rates, seeking to prevent economic crises.

[8] Young Nicholas's preparatory education was received at an academy in Philadelphia, where his progress was so rapid that he entered the class of 1799 at the University of Pennsylvania.

As secretary to former Revolutionary War officer and delegate to the Continental Congress, John Armstrong Jr., he went abroad in 1804 and was in Paris when Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned as emperor of the new French Empire.

[13] But because he had been elected to the Pennsylvania state legislature, Biddle was compelled to hand over editorial responsibilities to Paul Allen (1775–1826), who supervised the project until its completion and appeared in print as the book's official editor.

[18] It was on this subject that he made his first major speech, which attracted general attention at the time, and was warmly commended by Chief Justice John Marshall and other leaders of public opinion.

After economic hardships, monetary pressures, and problems financing the federal government during the War of 1812, Congress and the president granted a new twenty-year charter to the Second Bank of the United States in 1816.

[19] During his association with the Bank, President Monroe, under authority from Congress, directed him to prepare a "Commercial Digest" of the laws and trade regulations of the world and the various nations.

[6] In late 1818, $4 million of interest payments on the bonds previously sold in 1803 to pay for the Louisiana Purchase were due, in either gold or silver, to European investors.

[22] Biddle occasionally engaged in the relatively new techniques of central banking–-controlling the nation's money supply, regulating interest rates, lending to state banks, and acting as the Treasury Department's chief fiscal agent.

[23] In 1823, Biddle started concentrating the Bank's facilities in the West, Southwest, and South to meet the demands for credit generated by the expansion of land, cotton, and slavery.

Using its interregional network of branch offices and the transportation improvements then under way, the Bank would ship these bills to the Northeast where merchants could use them to pay for imported manufactured goods arriving from Great Britain in the summer and fall.

[26] The result was that Biddle helped provide an economic infrastructure that facilitated long-distance trade, propagated a relatively stable and uniform currency, and played a major role in integrating and consolidating fiscal operations at the federal level.

[27] Indeed, Biddle won praise for the Bank by making steady payments to reduce the country's public debt, by preventing a potentially harmful recession in the winter of 1825–1826, and more generally, by smoothing out variations in prices and trade.

This was a continuation of a strategy that one historian has referred to as one of the earliest examples in the country's history of an interregional corporate lobby and public relations campaign.

[34] Articles, stockholders' reports, editorials, essays, philosophical treatises, petitions, pamphlets, and copies of congressional speeches were among the diverse forms of media that Biddle transmitted to various sections of the country through loans and Bank expenditures.

[35][36] Biddle was told that such vigorous campaign spending would only give credence to Jackson's theory that the Bank interfered in the American political process, but chose to dismiss the warning.

[38] In early 1833, Jackson, despite opposition from some members of his cabinet, decided to withdraw the Treasury Department's public (or federal) deposits from the Bank.

After waiting four months, President Jackson summarily dismissed Duane, replacing him with Attorney General Roger B. Taney as a recess appointment when Congress was out of session.

[44] It was in the later years of his career that Biddle began to invest significant financial resources not only in internal improvement projects,[45] but also in the booming expansion of land, cotton, and slavery in the Old Southwest.

[46][47] In 1837 and 1838, Biddle secretively dispatched agents into the South to buy up several million dollars worth of cotton with the notes of state-chartered banks, all in an effort to restore the nation's credit and pay off foreign debts owed to British merchant bankers.

[48] Critics called this an example of illegal cotton speculation and noted that the Bank's charter forbid the institution from purchasing commodities.

[44][57] Nicholas's father, Charles, was noteworthy for his devotion to the cause of American independence and served alongside Benjamin Franklin on the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania.

[61] Nicholas had a younger brother, Thomas Biddle, a War of 1812 veteran who became a federal pension agent and director at the Second Bank's branch office in St. Louis, Missouri.