Get Debt, investment, slaves: credit relations in East Feliciana PDF

By Richard Holcombe Kilbourne Jr., Gavin Wright

ISBN-10: 0817307303

ISBN-13: 9780817307301

Richard Kilbourne has produced a accomplished research of the credits procedure in a single Louisiana parish within the antebellum and postbellum classes of the Civil struggle. East Feliciana Parish was once very important when it comes to either inhabitants and the massive variety of slaves. This book’s basic difficulty is the function of slave estate in collateralizing credits relationships and planter perceptions concerning slaves as monetary assets. A thorough survey of parish personal loan documents and different manuscript collections resulted in the belief that the majority credits relationships, collateralized and uncollateralized, have been grounded in slave estate in preference to land or other kinds of wealth. Uncollateralized debt was once without delay depending on the relative wealth of parish citizens, and the majority of so much portfolios consisted of slaves. Emancipation and the Civil struggle occasioned a huge credits implosion from which the neighborhood financial system by no means recovered, no less than for the rest of the nineteenth century. Kilbourne makes an intensive exam of postwar debt misery and the evolution of sharecropping and tenancy. Even the wealthiest families have been within the throes of debt misery as used to be evidenced through the various fits by way of better halves for separations of property. A strange recoding requirement for crop privileges and pledges within the years from 1870 to 1880 made it attainable to figure out the quantity of credits on hand within the postwar a long time. Kilbourne exhibits that credits amenities shrunk by way of ninety percentage within the 20 years following the Civil struggle. The decline in credits amenities parallels the decline in family wealth levels. Kilbourne disagrees with previous students at the position of furnishing retailers in shaping the postbellum agricultural order. Furnishing retailers did turn into fairly extra vital in financing agriculture within the postwar decade, yet they weren't the successors of antebellum organizations. neighborhood retailers truly supplied much less credits than they'd supplied ahead of the Civil battle to small cotton farmers who had made up two-thirds of the growers within the parish in 1860. Slavery made for a special hard work marketplace, and this example prompted the evolution of the credits process within the sector. Emancipation used to be a innovative holiday with what had long past ahead of. the focal point of the credits approach shifted from slaves to cotton. Land did shape so much postbellum planter portfolios, however it didn't fill the void left by way of emancipation, and wealth degrees remained considerably less than antebellum ones. The credits approach turned hugely localized within the postwar many years, and this truth was once instrumental in shaping postbellum planting preparations.

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Additional info for Debt, investment, slaves: credit relations in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, 1825-1885

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Estimating default rates is difficult. Some borrowers probably defaulted but were able to settle such claims at a subsequent time. Other defaulters were never sued; either they died or left the area. Privileges filed in the mortgage records in the parish by furnishing merchants during the decade of the 1970s and collection suits prosecuted by those same merchants indicate that a 25 percent default rate was not uncommon. Were it possible to factor in uncollectible claims and claims ultimately settled, default rates might well be higher.

Consolidation of the credit system and wealth levels in antebellum agriculture had spread such risks across the entire region. The localization of credit was an inevitable result of the disintegration of plantation agriculture. Crop privileges and exorbitant interest rates were only symptomatic of the loss of wealth in the region and a radically changed configuration for producing staples for distant markets. Possible Implications In a recent article, Ransom and Sutch argue that a growing slave population and rising prices retarded economic growth in the South because they depressed savings rates, a possibility Wright raises in Old South, New South.

5 percent of the wealth. Per capita wealth was twice the state average and ten times the national average. Most households with wealth of fifty thousand dollars and above owned land elsewhere in Louisiana. Most of the richest households owned slave plantations in other Louisiana parishes. 25 Page 16 1 The Origins of the Antebellum Credit System: The Accommodation Endorser Banking in the antebellum South has received a rather thorough examination. Louisiana, in particular, was the subject of a monograph by George D.

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Debt, investment, slaves: credit relations in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, 1825-1885 by Richard Holcombe Kilbourne Jr., Gavin Wright


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