Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States By Sharon AnnMurphy, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2023. pp. 432. 18 figs. 8 tables. ISBN 9780226825137. Pbk $35)
本书研究了美国内战前南方银行体系如何通过创新业务（如以奴隶为抵押的长期贷款）支持奴隶制经济的扩张，并分析了银行与奴隶主之间的互动关系。
Sharon Ann Murphy's Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States is an impressive, important, and deeply researched study of slavery and the southern banking system. In her introduction, Murphy explains that the antebellum expansion of slavery coincided with the growth of southern commercial banking, ‘yet scholars have only recently begun examining the intersection of these two concurrent developments’ (p. 7). In Banking on Slavery, Murphy closely examines that intersection and concludes that ‘the ability and willingness of banks to alter traditional banking operations to meet the unique needs of a frontier economy was critical to the success and expansion of the slave economy by mid-century’ (p. 8). To prove this argument, Murphy explores, across three parts and nine chapters, the history of southern banks’ relationship to slavery from the earliest southern banks to the eve of the Civil War. In parts I and II, Murphy narrates how banks transformed from conservative institutions primarily meant to serve merchants to innovative ones that also served the needs of planters. While this shift began even before the Panic of 1819, the most crucial period of transformation was during the 1820s and 1830s when banks proliferated in the ‘Lower Frontier’ (Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida), and in response to planter pressure, increasingly made long-term loans secured by property, including enslaved people. At the same time, southern legislatures experimented with innovative forms of banking. These innovations largely came out of Louisiana where ‘the capital-intensive nature of sugar planting… required large, long-term loans…’ led to the chartering of plantation banks, a type of bank where the reserves were based on borrowed money and bank investors bought stock by mortgaging plantations and enslaved people to the bank and could take out large loans on the basis of their stock holdings (p. 141). Part III narrates the effects of the Panics of 1837 and 1839. Murphy argues that banks’ lenient practices towards debtors during this period helped enslavers weather the depression of the 1840s. However, many southerners blamed the banks for the depression, leading to an anti-bank backlash that ended many of the practices that had proliferated in the 1820s and 1830s. Finally, when banks did experience a resurgence in the 1850s, new banks were organized, as they had been in the early 1800s, along conservative lines that did not embrace long-term loans secured by property. Murphy concludes that ‘southerners were declaring the system of slavery no longer needed the support of banks’ (p. 313). Throughout the book Murphy wrestles with how to incorporate the enslaved into her narrative. As she points out, ‘it is the voices and experiences of the enslaved themselves that are most absent from this study’ because ‘the entire purpose of financialization is to erase stories’ (p. 14). Murphy attempts, with mixed success, to humanize the enslaved by giving what details she can about them, typically on the basis of how they appeared in financial and legal documents. More successful in achieving this goal is her inclusion of a section about the prevalence of ‘debt, bankruptcy, and the sale of enslaved men and women’ in slave narratives and William Wells Brown's Clotel (p. 102). While Banking on Slavery is an impressive and broadly convincing work of scholarship, the overall framing of the book seemed somewhat off the mark and perhaps overly broad. In discussing the effects of southern banking innovations, Murphy focuses on ‘the settlement of the frontier South’, a reference to the explosion of cotton across the southern interior (p. 7). However, many of the examples in the book come from the lower Mississippi valley, which already had a thriving slave society before the 1810s, and Mississippi River sugar plantations seem dramatically over-represented in her examples. Murphy also recognizes that the needs of sugar planters drove the creation of the plantation banking model in Louisiana, the model most deeply tied to slavery and plantations, and which only hesitantly spread into cotton regions. As Murphy does not really explore this overrepresentation, one is left wondering whether it is merely an artifact of the archives or points to a conclusion about the unique role of sugar in southern banking institutions and practices. Regardless, it does leave this reviewer wondering just how important banks were, at least directly, to the expansion of slavery in, for example, the Black Belt of Alabama, a state that did not embrace the plantation bank model but was crucial to the expansion of slavery during the Antebellum Period. Still, despite this criticism, Murphy's book is an important and necessary one that shows the strong connection between southern banks and slavery and how that connection developed over time in response to the demands of enslavers as well as larger economic events such as the Panics of 1837 and 1839. Certainly, this scholar of slavery learned a great deal from this book and will no longer ‘simply… assume that enslaved individuals functioned as financial assets without any understanding of how these contracts worked, how they changed over time, or how they impacted the slave system as a whole’ (p. 8).