The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward Baptist

Author:Edward Baptist [Baptist, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, General, Social History, Social Science, Slavery
ISBN: 9780465044702
Google: pj_RAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2014-09-08T16:00:00+00:00

Image 7.4. An elderly but still pugnacious Andrew Jackson as President, slaying the many-headed Hydra of the nefarious Second Bank of the United States. The head with the top hat is Nicholas Biddle. “General Jackson slaying the many headed monster,” Henry B. Robinson, 1836. Library of Congress.

Although some of the banks were ostensibly chartered to create investment in the state’s infrastructure—including railroads, or, in the case of the New Orleans Gas Light and Banking Company, modern municipal utilities—the major purpose of the splurge was to rush seeds of growth into the fields of southwestern entrepreneurs’ dreams. In the course of a mere four years, from 1833 through 1836, 150,000 enslaved people were moved from the old states to the new. They cleared and planted and harvested millions of new acres, and the US cotton crop doubled in size. Meanwhile, the bonds created by southwestern states—each one a guarantee of an income stream from the labor of mortgaged hands—found buyers in all of the major financial centers of the Western world—London, New York, Philadelphia, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Bremen, and Paris. Investors around the world voted their confidence in slavery’s expansion. And rising London prices for southwestern securities, statistics demonstrate, pushed up slave prices in New Orleans.80

The irony is obvious, in hindsight. Andrew Jackson had mobilized common white male anger at arrogant, antidemocratic supporters of the B.U.S. and its allies. He and his followers, from the lowliest voter to loyal congressmen, metaphorically Potterized Biddle and George Poindexter and all the members of the old southwestern bank-vault factions that had monopolized frontier opportunity and tried to tell ordinary citizens to keep quiet. In fact, cartoons of the day even depicted Jackson chopping off the penile snakeheads of a hydra-headed Monster Bank.

Yet the destruction of the B.U.S. and the ensuing deployment of banking innovations didn’t make the southern financial environment more democratic. For instance, when Franklin Plummer, the champion of the people of southeastern Mississippi, visited Natchez before the 1835 state elections, men who ran the new banks bought him a fancy carriage. Plummer then reversed his rhetoric against the use of state power to deliver bank goodies to insiders and campaigned for a slate of pro-bank candidates. When elected, these pro-bank state legislators sent Robert Walker to Washington as senator, deposing George Poindexter from office. Walker had depicted Poindexter as the servant of the Monster Bank, an arrogant opponent of white male equality. Now he and Plummer encouraged the Mississippi legislature as it chartered so many banks that by 1839 the state’s total on-paper bank capitalization was $63 million—more than the national B.U.S. at its largest. And old insiders managed to remain insiders. Stephen Duncan, leader of the old Natchez-based Planters’ Bank, launched a new bank, which the state legislature chartered. Henry Clay wrote his Mississippi allies in 1834, asking a Duncan ally to give his son a loan so that he could buy a Mississippi cotton plantation: “I have a number of surplus slaves here, principally young and well adapted to a cotton plantation.

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