South Carolina slave mortgage agreement between slave trader Ziba B. Oakes and Mrs. Mary Pyne, backed by eight enslaved people including 10-year-old Louisa, an infant, and the future "increase of the females"

A slave mortgage was a financial instrument used by financiers wherein money was lent on the basis of the value of enslaved people.[1] There are records of slave mortgages in the United States (Louisiana, South Carolina, and Virginia)[1] and in South Africa.[2] According to scholar Bonnie Martin, "the time lag between the recording of mortgages and foreclosures, when added to the dispersed nature of the mortgage recording process, made this financial engine relatively invisible, allowing potentially large economic and human consequences to remain unrecognized."[1] As historian Calvin Schermerhorn put it, slave mortgages "drew equity out of [slave] bodies to reinvest in [sugar] refinement technology and more enslaved workers".[3] Settlers fleeing a slave mortgage crisis was one of the precipitating factors of the American colonization of the Republic of Texas in the 1830s.[4]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 Martin, Bonnie (2010). "Slavery's Invisible Engine: Mortgaging Human Property". The Journal of Southern History. 76 (4): 817–866. ISSN 0022-4642.
  2. ↑ Ekama, Kate (2021-05-04). "Bondsmen: Slave Collateral in the 19th-Century Cape Colony". Journal of Southern African Studies. 47 (3): 437–453. doi:10.1080/03057070.2021.1900467. ISSN 0305-7070.
  3. ↑ Schermerhorn, Calvin (2015). The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. p. 94. doi:10.12987/9780300213898. ISBN 978-0-300-19200-1. JSTOR j.ctt1bh4d2w. LCCN 2014036403. OCLC 890614581.
  4. ↑ Schermerhorn, Calvin; Online, Pilot (2015-03-18). "Schermerhorn: Intertwined trades in sugar, slavery". The Virginian-Pilot. Retrieved 2023-11-12.

Further reading

  • Kilbourne, Richard Holcombe (1995). Debt, Investment, Slaves: Credit Relations in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, 1825-1885. University of Alabama Press. ISBN 9780817307301.
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