Debt was omnipresent in the antebellum United States. The configuration of the agricultural economy in the slaveholding U.S. South, in particular, meant that few southerners could avoid indebtedness. Southerners could look to several places for an influx of cash. Neighbors counted on one another when times were tight; local and state banks offered generous loans; cotton factors provided advances on planters’ future yields; investors supplied capital; and merchants offered liberal lines of credit.
Out of this credit economy emerged a little-known figure: the Black creditor. In Mississippi and Louisiana, for instance, debt recovery litigation between free Black plaintiffs and white and Black defendants reveals that hundreds of Black men and women were creditors, and they lent considerable sums of money. But Black Americans did more than provide short-term liquidity. Some served as private bankers who backstopped cotton and sugar markets, financed real estate development, and underwrote the construction of a substantial section of New Orleans. Dry goods dealer Eulalie Mandeville, moreover, invested her profits by lending at interest and discounting notes. When she died in 1848, she controlled a $155,000 fortune (5 million today), making her the wealthiest Black businesswoman in the United States. These lending practices, however, remain obscure. Yet they evoke a complex and largely unknown history of the relationship between African Americans and property, credit, and prosperity. This paper examines the world of Black moneylenders in the nineteenth-century U.S. South in order to explore categories of property, commerce, citizenship, and rights. Rather than mere commodities who toiled and whose labor was ruthlessly extracted, Black people performed essential and varied roles in the antebellum economy, roles that provided them with some purchase on financial stability, legal personhood, and civic inclusion.