ABOUT THIS BOOK

This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Sharon Ann Murphy is professor of history at Providence College.

REVIEWS

“A tremendous accomplishment. We cannot fully understand the history of banking in the United States without reckoning with Murphy’s important findings. Banking on Slavery sets the stage for new understandings of the history of capitalism and its relation to slavery.”

— Claire Priest, author of Credit Nation: Property Laws and Institutions in Early America

"In a pathbreaking account of the way Americans financed slavery, Murphy connects the vast sweep of that tragedy to the banking that made it possible. Detail by dollar detail, she exposes the structures that transmuted enslaved people into assets and collateral, building white wealth all the while. A powerful--and chilling--book."

— Christine Desan, author of Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism

"More surprising has been the lack of historical analysis of the banking firms and financial practices that underwrote the expansion of slavery in the antebellum United States. In her groundbreaking new book, Banking on Slavery, historian Sharon Ann Murphy corrects this glaring omission."

— Sean Vanatta, Wharton Initiative on Financial Policy and Regulation

"Murphy’s meticulously researched and clearly written study examines the role of banks in what she terms the concomitant 'financialization' of human property and the southwestern expansion of plantation economies in the mid-19th-century South. . . . The lives of enslaved persons caught in the web of the capitalist marketplace haunt the pages of Murphy's excellent work."

— Choice

"This book is well worth reading for scholars of banking history, slavery, and antebellum institutions generally. The author has clearly done her homework in various archives, and the details associated with individual cases are often fascinating."

— EH.net

"Banking on Slavery fills an important need in our historical understanding. . . .This is one of the very few book-length studies of how banks in the South financed the expansion of slavery into the Old Southwest. Deeply researched and well-grounded in both primary sources and sound secondary scholarship, this excellent book is most welcome and should be read by anyone interested in the history of American slavery."

— Emerging Civil War

"Banking on Slavery evinces deep research in the surviving records of financial institutions, as well as in the documents produced by litigation over them and manuscript sources. Murphy also does yeoman’s work in highlighting the silences forced upon the people ensnared in these transactions, naming them wherever possible. . . The resulting work is exacting in its detail, precise in its accounting, and devastating in its depiction of the ties between slavery and finance in the antebellum South and will reward careful readers with a significantly deeper understanding of the evolution of American slavery."

— H-Early-America

"Sharon Ann Murphy’s richly detailed book, Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States, deepens our understanding on how slaveholders used banks to finance the development of the frontier South through a detailed analysis of debt contracts, legal cases, and banking policies. Murphy has provided scholars of U.S. slavery and of U.S. financial history with essential details on how banks achieved the financialization of enslaved people, how these banking practices contributed to the growth of the Southern economy, and where Southern frontier banks fit in the context of the nineteenth-century U.S. financial system. And, furthermore, the author adds to the literature on the history of capitalism by clearly showing that, while banking had a lasting affect on slavery, slavery did not have a lasting impact on U.S. commercial banking."

— Business History Review

TABLE OF CONTENTS