Capital Built From Bondage: How Slavery Financed American Capitalism

A Question Rodney Asked About Africa, Answered About America

This project's companion African Political Thought curriculum examines Walter Rodney's core argument that European wealth and African poverty were not separate historical accidents but two sides of the same process, that Europe's development directly required Africa's underdevelopment. This unit asks the same structural question about the United States specifically: was American economic development, industrialization, banking, and the modern capitalist economy that emerged over the nineteenth century, something that happened separately from slavery, or was slavery itself one of the central engines that produced it?

A Historian Who Rejects the 'Premodern Relic' Framing

Historian Edward Baptist's 2014 book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism argues forcefully against what Baptist identifies as a long-standing, comfortable American historical assumption: that slavery represented a premodern, economically backward institution, isolated from and largely irrelevant to the nation's later industrial and financial success. Baptist argues instead that slavery's expansion "drove the evolution and modernization of the United States" directly, tracing how, within a single human lifetime, the American South transformed from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations into a continental cotton empire producing two billion pounds of cotton annually by 1861, a scale of production Baptist connects directly to the broader transformation of the United States into a modern, industrial, capitalist economy.

Not Just the South, and Not Just Enslavers

Baptist's specific historiographical intervention challenges a framing that predates him considerably: nineteenth-century Northern politicians, businessmen, and even some traveling observers, along with later historians working well into the twentieth century, had long described the South as an agricultural backwater relative to a supposedly separate, more genuinely capitalist industrializing North, a narrative that conveniently allowed the North to view slavery's economic benefits as someone else's problem, contained safely within the plantation system alone. Baptist's research instead traces how cotton profits flowed directly into Northern textile manufacturing, shipping, insurance, and, as this unit's next lesson examines in specific documented detail, banking and finance, meaning slavery's economic benefit was never confined to Southern enslavers alone but was woven, in Baptist's own phrase, "inextricably into the transnational fabric of early nineteenth-century capitalism" reaching considerably further than the plantation's own boundaries.

Financial Innovation Built on Human Collateral

Baptist's research pays specific attention to financial mechanisms this unit's next lesson will examine in greater documented detail: new financial instruments developed specifically to allow investors and lenders to profit from slavery even without directly owning or operating a plantation themselves, mechanisms that treated enslaved human beings as a genuine, liquid financial asset, one that could be mortgaged, insured, and traded as collateral within an expanding national and international capital market. This reframing matters directly for how the remainder of this unit should be read: the specific institutions this unit's remaining lessons examine, banks and universities among them, were not incidental beneficiaries of an economic system operating elsewhere, but active, direct participants in constructing the financial architecture slavery's expansion required and, in turn, helped generate.

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.

A Sale That Saved a University From Closing

In 1838, Jesuit priests who managed Georgetown University, then on the verge of financial collapse, sold 272 enslaved men, women, and children from Jesuit-owned plantations in Maryland for a total of $115,000, roughly $422 per person, a transaction worth an estimated $3.3 million in contemporary value. The university used this sale's proceeds specifically to remain financially solvent and open, meaning Georgetown's continued institutional existence through this specific crisis depended directly on the sale of these 272 specific, documented individuals, whose names, including Isaac Hawkins, listed first in the surviving 1838 sale documentation, survive in the historical record precisely because the transaction itself was so thoroughly documented.

Where the 272 Actually Went

Recall from this unit's previous lesson the specific financial detail connecting this sale directly to the broader banking history already examined: between 1838 and 1865, the enslaved people sold from Georgetown's Jesuit plantations were held, according to Georgetown's own historical research, as collateral by Citizens Bank of New Orleans, the same institution this unit's previous lesson traced as a direct corporate predecessor to JPMorgan Chase, meaning this specific university sale and this unit's broader banking material describe, in a precise and traceable sense, the very same underlying financial infrastructure operating across two different kinds of institution simultaneously.

A Reckoning That Took 178 Years

Georgetown's own institutional acknowledgment of this history arrived only in 2016, when university president John J. DeGioia issued a formal public apology, stating directly that "slavery remains the original evil of our Republic, an evil that our university was complicit in, a sin that tore apart families." The university renamed two campus buildings specifically to honor two of the 272 individuals sold, Isaac Hawkins Hall, named for the sale's first-listed individual, and Anne Marie Becraft Hall, honoring a free woman of color who had established a school for Black girls in the Georgetown neighborhood, and began offering admissions preference to documented descendants of the 272. In 2023, Georgetown and the Jesuit order jointly pledged $27 million toward a Reconciliation Fund benefiting descendant communities, providing roughly $400,000 annually toward community-based projects.

Comparable Reckonings, and a Recurring Pattern of Delay

Georgetown's case connects directly to comparable institutional self-examinations at other major American universities. Brown University's own 2002-2006 Slavery and Justice Report, examined in this unit's previous lesson as connected to the FleetBoston lawsuit, produced Brown's own detailed accounting of the Brown family's direct historical ties to Rhode Island's slave trade. Yale University launched its own Yale and Slavery Research Project in 2020, publishing its full findings and a formal institutional apology only in 2024, examining specifically the ties several of the university's early leaders held to the slave trade, and, in 2017, had already renamed its undergraduate Calhoun College, originally honoring nineteenth-century slavery advocate John C. Calhoun, in favor of Grace Murray Hopper, a Yale alumnus and pioneering computer scientist.

Naming Directly What This Pattern Represents

This unit closes by connecting its full arc directly to a pattern this entire project has now traced repeatedly across every one of its component curricula: formal institutional acknowledgment of slavery's role in building specific, named American financial and educational institutions has consistently arrived only after decades, in Georgetown's case nearly two centuries, of documented historical fact sitting available in institutional archives, and the specific reckoning that eventually followed, while genuine and, in Georgetown's case, backed by real financial commitment, remains a subject of continued, legitimate debate regarding whether it constitutes adequate material repair or, in the words some critics examined throughout this project's other curricula have used regarding comparable reckonings, primarily symbolic gesture. This unit's material, connecting Walter Rodney's structural argument about wealth extraction to specific, named American banks and universities whose modern corporate and institutional identity traces directly back to slavery's own financial architecture, establishes precisely the kind of concrete, documented economic case this project's companion African Political Thought curriculum's treatment of Rodney's broader thesis was built to introduce, now grounded in specific American institutions whose apologies, reconciliation funds, and building renamings can themselves be evaluated using the same recognition-versus-material-repair framework this project has applied consistently from Chile's Afro-descendant recognition law to CARICOM's reparations campaign to Ubuntu's application in South Africa's own Truth and Reconciliation Commission.