Abstract

"Public and Private Bonds: Debt and Slavery in the Antebellum South "

Brittany Farr, New York University School of Law (bfarr@law.upenn.edu), Felipe Cole, Boston College Law School (ffcole@nlaw.northwestern.edu)

This paper revises histories of nineteenth century capitalism by attending to the continuities between public and private debt in antebellum Mississippi. The conceptual distinction between public and private debt has long reigned over the financial and legal history of the midcentury Antebellum south. To historians, public debt appears in this period as the brief and contentious subject of politics, enlivening the rise of the Democratic party and transformation of state constitutions. Private debt takes shape as the antecedent condition to the planter foreclosures that sharpened the reasoning for secession.
By contrast, our paper traverses the conceptual boundaries of public and private debt in this era. We begin with a series of public debts—issued in the form of state bonds to agricultural banks—that were used to support and expand the private credit of planters. When the Mississippi state government refused to repay these bonds during the economic depression of 1837-42, it forced many planters into insolvency, transforming them into delinquent debtors to the state. In the ensuing foreclosures, creditor banks auctioned off many enslaved women, men, and children, causing enslaved families to be torn apart and scattered to satisfy debts.
The history that we trace points toward a direct connection between debt and racial harm. Mississippi’s mismanaged public debt exacted the greatest cost from enslaved Black families, who were separated to satisfy private debts to state creditors. The violence of this family separation benefitted enslavers by reducing morale and discouraging resistance, which in turn benefitted a state whose economy relied upon slave labor. By drawing out the connection between Mississippi’s public and private debt, and between this debt and family separation, we show one of the ways in which debt and racial violence are intimately intertwined, a relationship that we contend is central to racial capitalism.