Enslaved people served as collateral in national and international debt markets

Evidence

Slavery’s tentacles reached far beyond the plantation to financial institutions across the country. Southern banks that financed the business of slavery made loans using black people as collateral. They raised capital by issuing debt backed by mortgages on enslaved workers. Bondholders included foreigners from abroad as well as Americans in cities like Boston and Philadelphia. When the price of cotton plummeted because of overplanting, among other things, investors and creditors called in their debts. That meant enslaved workers were taken and sold by courts. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 454

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The detail that courts sold enslaved workers to satisfy creditors adds a legal-instrument dimension to the argument that state institutions sustained slavery, relevant to the reparations-as-legal-brief framing.