Banking on slavery : financing Southern expansion in the antebellum United States /

"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 proj...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Murphy, Sharon Ann, 1974- (Author)
Format: Book
Language:English
Published: Chicago, IL ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2023.
Series:American beginnings, 1500-1900.
Subjects:
Table of Contents:
  • 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.