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Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States

bySharon Ann Murphy

Sharon Ann Murphy examines how southern banks helped finance slavery's expansion during the early nineteenth century. Drawing on bank records, debt contracts, litigation, and individual cases, she explains how enslaved people were converted into collateral and abstract financial assets. Banks adjusted established practices to meet slaveholders' demands, then confronted foreclosure, fraud, bankruptcy, and failure when those arrangements collapsed. By tracing these transactions in detail, Murphy shows that banking was not merely adjacent to slavery but a crucial institution sustaining the plantation economy and its westward growth.

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Publication date

2023-04-05

Format

Paperback

Pages

432

ISBN

9780226825137