Papers presented by Mandy Cooper since 2019
2020 Charlotte, North Carolina
"'For No Other Reason Than That They Wished Me': Family Economic Strategies in the Antebellum United States"
Mandy Cooper, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
Abstract:
The scholarship on business and credit in the nineteenth-century United States has emphasized the importance of personal relationships for establishing credit, with familial relationships central to establishing personal and economic credit. Yet, the majority of the literature tends to focus on men’s economic relationships and actions, separating women in the family from their families’ economic work. This paper focuses on the economic strategies of the Coles family of Virginia in the antebellum period, analyzing the economic transactions within the family to reveal the dense webs of credit and debt that involved virtually every member of the family—both men and women—in multiple capacities. The paper shows that in order to navigate the reality of debt and the potential of failure, men and women relied on family ties, forged by affective labor in correspondence and strengthened with regular affirmations of respect and assurances of reciprocal favors. They then used these ties to establish and guarantee credit; obtain loans; purchase land, enslaved people, stocks, and other items; collect and deposit money; and handle daily economic transactions. As individual women and men in the family regularly loaned each other money and entered into different business arrangements together, they created complicated, multilayered webs of credit and debt that sustained their families. Considered together, the business activities of the women and men in the Coles family reveal both the centrality of family in determining credit and conducting business transactions but also the very real ways that women played a role in constituting familial business relationships. Ultimately, this paper argues that the business sides of such family networks can be understood as an integrated family enterprise that included all family members—both men and women—in a range of different roles.