Slaves as Collateral & Slave-Backed Bonds

Slavery was not only a labor system, it was the era's dominant form of capital. Across the cotton South, planters mortgaged the people they claimed in order to raise cash. In the historian Bonnie Martin's study of thousands of such mortgages, enslaved people served as collateral for about 41% of the loans and 63% of the capital raised, more than land.

Finance then went a step further. Banks bundled slave-backed mortgages into bonds and sold them to investors in New York, London, and Amsterdam, so that a bondholder an ocean away earned interest on the bodies of people in Louisiana. When planters defaulted, states such as Louisiana and Mississippi pledged public credit behind the bonds, putting the taxpayer behind the slave economy. The historian Edward Baptist traces how this machinery made enslaved people the single largest financial asset in the United States on the eve of the Civil War, worth more than all the nation's railroads and factories combined. It is the clearest answer to "only a few people owned slaves": the whole financial system was invested in it. See who-benefited and greed.