A sobering excavation of how deeply nineteenth-century American banks
were entwined with the institution of slavery.
It's now widely understood that the fullest expression of
nineteenth-century American capitalism was found in the structures of
chattel slavery. It's also understood that almost every other
institution and aspect of life then was at least entangled with--and
often profited from--slavery's perpetuation. Yet as Sharon Ann Murphy
shows in her powerful and unprecedented book, the centrality of enslaved
labor to banking in the antebellum United States is far greater than
previously thought.
Banking on Slavery sheds light on precisely how the financial
relationships between banks and slaveholders worked across the
nineteenth-century South. Murphy argues that the rapid spread of slavery
in the South during the 1820s and '30s depended significantly upon
southern banks' willingness to financialize enslaved lives, with the use
of enslaved individuals as loan collateral proving central to these
financial relationships. She makes clear how southern banks were
ready--and, in some cases, even eager--to alter time-honored banking
practices to meet the needs of slaveholders. In the end, many of these
banks sacrificed themselves in their efforts to stabilize the slave
economy. Murphy also details how banks and slaveholders transformed
enslaved lives from physical bodies into abstract capital assets. Her
book provides an essential examination of how our nation's financial
history is more intimately intertwined with the dehumanizing institution
of slavery than scholars have previously thought.
