9780817387556_

A thorough survey of parish mortgage records and other manuscript collections led to the conclusion that most credit relationships, collateralized and uncollateralized, were grounded in slave property as opposed to land or other forms of wealth. Uncollateralized debt was directly dependent on the relative wealth of parish residents, and the bulk of most portfolios consisted of slaves.

Emancipation and the Civil War occasioned a monumental credit implosion from which the local economy never recovered, at least for the remainder of the 19th century. Kilbourne makes an extensive examination of postwar debt distress and the evolution of sharecropping and tenancy. Even the wealthiest households were in the throes of debt distress as was evidenced by the numerous suits by wives for separations of property.

A peculiar recoding requirement for crop privileges and pledges in the years from 1870 to 1880 made it possible to determine the amount of credit available in the postwar decades. Kilbourne shows that credit facilities contracted by 90 percent in the two decades following the Civil War. The decline in credit facilities parallels the decline in household wealth levels.

Kilbourne disagrees with earlier scholars on the role of furnishing merchants in shaping the postbellum agricultural order. Furnishing merchants did become relatively more important in financing agriculture in the postwar decade, but they were not the successors of antebellum firms. Local merchants actually provided less credit than they had furnished before the Civil War to small cotton farmers who had made up two-thirds of the growers in the parish in 1860.

Slavery made for a unique labor market, and this situation influenced the evolution of the credit system in the region. Emancipation was a revolutionary break with what had gone before. The focus of the credit system shifted from slaves to cotton. Land did form most postbellum planter portfolios, but it did not fill the void left by emancipation, and wealth levels remained substantially below antebellum ones. The credit system became highly localized in the postwar decades, and this fact was instrumental in shaping postbellum planting arrangements.

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" . . . the only book-length study documenting the use of human collateral in the nineteenth century." The Journal of Southern History

For his landmark Debt, Investment, Slaves, Louisiana attorney Richard Holcombe Kilbourne Jr. performed a thorough survey of parish mortgage records and other manuscripts to create a rich map of antebellum credit relationships in the region. He demonstrates that most credit relationships, collateralized and uncollateralized, were grounded in slave property and not, as a contemporary reader would assume, land or other forms of wealth. Antebellum slavery was thus not only an arrangement of labor, but also an arrangement of finance and economics that shaped all of Southern life and politics. For this reason, defeat in the Civil War and emancipation not only freed enslaved people to work and earn wages, it occasioned a monumental credit implosion from which the Southern economy did not recover for the remainder of the nineteenth century.

To understand the antebellum South, it is necessary to set aside assumptions shared by modern Americans about the nature of borrowing, lending, banking, and investing. Kilbournes seminal work reminds readers of the absence of banks outside of major cities like Charleston, New Orleans, and Mobile. He explains the defined and ad hoc roles that regional banks, intermediary lenders, and flexible agents ("factors") played in the absence of a robust banking system. He persuasively shows that this network of borrowers and lenders was based to an extent not well understood today on bondage. He then demonstrates how this fragile and improvised financial system had no ability to respond to the shocks and disruptions of war.

Setting out to write a book of local history, Kilbourne achieved an enduring work that illuminated aspects of Southern life that are indispensable to understanding American history.

...(*_*)9780817387556_

" . . . the only book-length study documenting the use of human collateral in the nineteenth century." —The Journal of Southern History

To understand the antebellum South, it is necessary to set aside assumptions shared by modern Americans about the nature of borrowing, lending, banking, and investing. Kilbourne's seminal work reminds readers of the absence of banks outside of major cities like Charleston, New Orleans, and Mobile. He explains the defined and ad hoc roles that regional banks, intermediary lenders, and flexible agents ("factors") played in the absence of a robust banking system. He persuasively shows that this network of borrowers and lenders was based to an extent not well understood today on bondage. He then demonstrates how this fragile and improvised financial system had no ability to respond to the shocks and disruptions of war.

Setting out to write a book of local history, Kilbourne achieved an enduring work that illuminated aspects of Southern life that are indispensable to understanding American history.

Debt, Investment, Slaves

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