Bank · est. 1818
Brown Brothers Harriman
The Wall Street merchant bank grew as a cotton financier, and after the Panic of 1837 foreclosed on Southern cotton plantations and the enslaved people on them.
← Follow the MoneyBrown Brothers was one of the great financiers of the slave-grown cotton trade, lending to planters and factoring their crops. When the Panic of 1837 wiped out its borrowers, the firm foreclosed on the collateral, cotton plantations and the enslaved people working them, and ran them until they could be sold. The historian Sven Beckert found the Browns of New York came to own at least thirteen Louisiana plantations with hundreds of enslaved people. Its own history now acknowledges the firm's role in the cotton trade as a matter of regret. Brown Brothers is a clean illustration of slave-backed-securities: a Northern bank whose capital was secured, literally, by human beings.
Documentation
The web
Connections to other moments, systems, and investigations, the links rarely drawn together.
- profited from·ThreadSlaves as Collateral & Slave-Backed Bonds
Its capital was secured by enslaved people pledged as collateral.
- profited from·ThreadChattel Slavery
The firm financed cotton and foreclosed on slave-worked plantations.