Planters leveraged enslaved people for returns triple their interest costs

Evidence

The math worked out. The owner of a cotton plantation in the first decade of the nineteenth century could leverage his enslaved workers at 8 percent interest and record a return three times that. So leverage they did, sometimes volunteering the same enslaved workers for multiple mortgages. Banks lent with little restraint. By 1833, Mississippi banks had issued twenty times as much paper money as they had gold in their coffers. In several Southern counties, mortgages taken out on enslaved workers injected more capital into the economy than sales from the crops harvested by workers themselves. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 562

Categorization

• XREF: The multiple-mortgaging of the same enslaved workers and Mississippi’s 20:1 paper-to-gold ratio directly support the reframing thesis that slavery was the credit infrastructure of American capitalism.
• ADDENDUM: Could feed into a follow-up on how capital formation and financial systems have historically been built on forms of captured or coerced labor.