Not a Metaphor: Enslaved People as Literal Loan Collateral
This unit's second lesson examines a specific, precisely documented financial practice connecting directly to Baptist's broader argument examined in this unit's previous lesson: banks in the antebellum South regularly accepted enslaved people themselves as collateral for loans, meaning an enslaved person's body functioned, in strict legal and financial terms, as security for debt in exactly the same structural sense a house or piece of equipment might today. In December 2004, JPMorgan Chase, then the nation's second-largest bank, submitted a formal disclosure to the city of Chicago, required under a local ordinance, revealing that two of its own predecessor institutions, Citizens Bank and Canal Bank of Louisiana, had collectively accepted approximately 13,000 enslaved African Americans as loan collateral during the antebellum period, a number establishing this practice's genuine institutional scale rather than an isolated or marginal financial arrangement.
A Direct Corporate Lineage to Today's Largest Bank
The significance of this disclosure extends beyond its historical content into a genuinely direct corporate continuity worth stating precisely: Citizens Bank and Canal Bank of Louisiana are not simply historical institutions bearing incidental resemblance to a modern bank; they are documented direct corporate predecessors of JPMorgan Chase itself, meaning the institution operating today under that name carries a direct, traceable corporate lineage back to banks that accepted thousands of enslaved human beings as loan collateral. In January 2005, JPMorgan Chase's then-chairman and CEO William B. Harrison Jr., alongside future chairman and CEO James Dimon, issued a formal public apology, stating directly that the bank apologized "to the African-American community, particularly those who are descendants of slaves, and to the rest of the American public for the role that Citizens Bank and Canal Bank played" in this practice.
Georgetown's Own Direct Financial Connection
This unit's next lesson examines Georgetown University's own documented sale of 272 enslaved people in 1838, but it is worth noting directly here the specific financial mechanism connecting that sale to this lesson's broader material: according to Georgetown's own historical research, the 272 individuals sold in 1838 were subsequently held as collateral by Citizens Bank of New Orleans, the same institution this lesson has just examined as a direct JPMorgan Chase corporate predecessor, meaning this unit's banking and university material are not two separate case studies but two directly connected threads within the same specific financial and institutional history.
A 2002 Lawsuit That Named Elite Universities Directly
This financial architecture attracted direct legal challenge earlier in the twenty-first century than JPMorgan Chase's own 2005 apology suggests. In 2002, descendants of enslaved African Americans filed a class-action lawsuit naming FleetBoston, a bank whose own corporate lineage traced directly back to Providence Bank, founded in 1791 by the four Brown brothers, the same family whose name Brown University itself carries. While Brown University was not itself a named party in this specific legal action, the lawsuit's own narrative explicitly cited Brown, alongside Harvard, as examples of wealthy academic institutions holding assets substantially derived from slavery and the broader slave trade, a legal argument that helped catalyze Brown's own subsequent, extensive institutional self-examination, examined directly in this unit's closing lesson.
Why 'Wall Street Financiers' Alone Is an Incomplete Framing
This lesson closes by returning directly to this unit's opening lesson's central corrective: popular historical memory of slavery's financial infrastructure has often assumed, when it considers the question at all, that Southern enslavers and perhaps a narrow class of specifically identified Wall Street financiers were the primary financial beneficiaries of the institution. This lesson's specific, documented evidence, a 13,000-person collateral practice traced directly to a bank operating today as one of America's largest financial institutions, establishes something considerably broader and more structurally embedded: slavery's financial infrastructure extended into the ordinary, foundational mechanics of American banking itself, mortgage, collateral, and credit systems whose basic legal and financial logic, once developed to secure loans against enslaved human beings specifically, continued operating as part of the broader American financial system long after slavery's own formal abolition.
