Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States by Sharon Ann Murphy (review)

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• Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States by Sharon Ann Murphy
• Lindsay Schakenbach Regele

Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States. By Sharon Ann Murphy. American Beginnings, 1500–1900. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2023. Pp. x, 419. Paper, $35.00, ISBN 978-0-226-82513-7; cloth, $105.00, ISBN 978-0-226-82459-8.)

Until now, we have not understood in precise detail how southern banks made possible the spread and growth of slavery in the United States. Sharon Ann Murphy, a master at explaining and analyzing the nitty-gritty of how [End Page 613] financial institutions and practices worked, has completed yet another act of scholarly service by hunting down the extant records of obscure banking transactions. The sources she has cobbled together from at least fifteen states allow us to see the grotesque relationship among “southern banks, the slaveholders who were their customers, and the enslaved people used as collateral” (p. 11). Previous scholars have attempted to understand how white southerners financed the “rapid settlement of the Southwest,” but while they have focused on, for example, mortgages and investors, Murphy is the first to look at commercial banks (p. 7). The book moves from the turn of the nineteenth century up to the Civil War and then closes with an epilogue grappling with the long aftermath of the Thirteenth Amendment and the complicated “question of who should absorb the pecuniary loss of enslaved individuals” (p. 318). That query is one of the jarring questions this book seeks to answer regarding the violent subjugation of an individual’s humanity by mortgage and court negotiations.

Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States begins with a tour through New Orleans, whose slave auction “was the physical embodiment of the South’s full embrace and celebration of slavery as the engine behind its antebellum economic prosperity,” which sets the stage for Murphy to ask how banks managed to finance the movement of enslaved individuals from the auction to the frontier (p. 7). The book is divided into three parts, each of which offers stark details about how individual enslavers kept growing their wealth out of indebtedness. In response to the demands of white people moving into the frontier, the early conservative banking practice of providing short-term loans backed by business paper, banknotes, and a limited supply of silver and gold gave way to much riskier long-term loans secured directly by land and human property. Louisiana banks engaged in some of the riskiest practices; Alabama banks, the least. These riskier practices culminated in the Panics of 1837 and 1839, and in subsequent anti- banking sentiment—despite the fact, as Murphy points out, that banks had in some ways helped slaveholders withstand the panics.

In the aftermath of these panics, enslavers took various measures to shield their human capital from creditors’ possession, which included absconding to Texas. Some states passed Married Women’s Property Acts, which ultimately protected women who owned slaves from foreclosures incurred by their husbands. An “unintended consequence” was that creditors found enslaved individuals less advantageous as collateral (p. 207). By the 1840s and 1850s, white southerners seemed to forget that mortgaged human beings had been such a seemingly profitable and popular financial practice.

The stories Murphy tells—such as of a man selling the enslaved individuals whom he had leveraged as collateral to his sister, who was then sued by her brother’s creditor—and the individuals Murphy names—like “sixteen-year-old Séraphine, eighteen-year-old field slave Mélitte, and nineteen-year-old house slave Phélis,” who were the “most highly valued women, at $1,000 each,” in the financing of their enslaver’s plantation—help humanize what is otherwise a brutally dehumanizing account of southern financial practices (p. 153). Readers will gain new insight into the histories of southern life, slavery, and the nineteenth-century economy. These are unsettling rewards. [End Page 614]

Lindsay Schakenbach Regele Miami University Copyright © 2024 The Southern Historical Association ...