Southern banks commonly used enslaved people as mortgage collateral

Evidence

As America’s cotton sector expanded, the value of enslaved workers soared. In New Orleans between 1804 and 1860, the average price of a male field hand aged twenty-one to thirty-eight grew from roughly 500 to over 1,500 (in 1830 dollars). Because they believed they couldn’t grow their cotton empires without more enslaved workers, ambitious planters needed to find a way to raise enough capital to purchase more hands. Enter the banks. People could be sold much more easily than land, and in multiple Southern states, more than eight in ten mortgage-secured loans used enslaved people as full or partial collateral. As the historian Bonnie Martin has written, “slave owners worked their slaves financially, as well as physically,” by mortgaging people to buy more people. Access to credit grew faster than Mississippi kudzu would after being imported at the end of the century, leading one 1836 observer to remark that in cotton country “money, or what passed for money, was the only cheap thing to be had.” Centuries before the home mortgage became the defining characteristic of Middle America, Southerners decided to use the people they owned as collateral for mortgages and took on immense amounts of debt to finance their operations. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 561

Categorization

• XREF: Provides concrete empirical grounding for the reframing thesis — slavery as credit infrastructure, connected to the reader’s task of distinguishing contested empirical claims from argument.
• QUESTION: Worth verifying the Bonnie Martin statistic that 8 in 10 mortgage-secured loans used enslaved people as collateral — a strong number that historians might contest.