Abstract

"Mistrust, Gilded Age Corruption, and the Failure of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company"

Justene Hill Edwards, University of Virginia (jgh7d@virginia.edu)

On October 8, 1937, an African American woman, Mrs. J.B. Metz from Clarksburg, West Virginia, penned a letter to then President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She wrote that she had in her possession a bank deposit book which tracked deposits made between May 2, 1871 to June 7, 1873. The deposit book was from the defunct Freedman’s Saving and Trust Company, founded in 1865 and forced to close in 1874. At the time of the bank’s closing, the account about which Metz was inquiring had a balance of $962.28. The account belonged to Susan and Katie Morphy, Metz’s mother and grandmother. Metz, in her letter, was inquiring about the possibility of receiving the monies that her ancestors had in their accounts when the bank closed. Surprisingly, Metz received a response on October 13, 1937, not from President Roosevelt, but from George R. Marble, a chief clerk with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). Marble conveyed that with the official closing of OCC inquiries into the bank’s demise, “there are no further assets to be collected.” There was nothing that Marble could do to help Metz recover the money that her mother and grandmother put into their Freedman’s Bank accounts.

A small group of historians have interrogated the history of the Freedman’s Saving and Trust Company, also known as the Freedman’s Bank. But there has been a dearth of scholarly analysis on the bank’s demise, and the economic failures of Reconstruction more generally, in terms of Gilded Age corruption and plunder. Issues of mistrust and corruption are at the heart of the not only the Freedman’s Bank failure, but African Americans’ mistrust of banking in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper asks: What happens when we look at the history of Gilded Age corruption through the lens of race? In this paper, I will use the history of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company to consider the relationship between financial corruption, mistrust, and the experiences of African Americans as they engaged with the American financial services industry during the early Gilded Age.