Banking on slavery : financing Southern expansion in the antebellum United States
Sharon Ann Murphy (Author)
"Sharon Murphy's book is a powerful and unprecedented dive into the entangled history of banking and slavery in nineteenth-century America. Slaveholders developed credit and creditworthiness by using enslaved people as collateral, and this allowed them to undertake an endless array of projects. But Murphy further shows that this credit system grew and changed as banks sought new ways to realize their own profits and power. She demonstrates not merely how slavery was financed by banks but how banks were financed by slavery. By extension, everything banks enabled, not least the physical expansion of the United States itself, was also then literally indebted to that noxious institution"-- Provided by publisher
Print Book, English, 2023
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2023
History
419 pages : illustrations, maps ; 23 cm.
9780226824598, 9780226825137, 0226824594, 0226825132
1334895272
Introduction: Banking in the nation's largest slave market
Part I. Financing southwestern expansion through the 1810s. The limits of early bank financing of slavery ; Adapting slave financing to the needs of the frontier South during the nation's first boom and bust
Part II. Financing an empire of slavery in the 1820s and 1830s. Old South banks and frontier finance ; Pushing financial boundaries with traditional banks ; Reimagining banking for a slave economy
Part III. The collateral damage of the Panics of 1837 and 1839. Foreclosing (or not) on delinquent slaveholders ; Escaping debt : bankruptcy, fraud, and going to Texas ; When banks fail ; From commercial banking to private finance
Epilogue: Banks, debt, emancipation, reparations, and memory