I was watching a youtube lecture about the book "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward Baptist"
In the lecture and book it argued that what is commonly taught about slavery and its impact is wrong. It's argued though that slavery was a huge catalyst to American capitalism. This confronts what's taught in many schools that slavery was unprofitable and that's why it was ended.
Cited is a document by a New York Publication called The Old Guard in 1865. On page 455 there's an article named "Slavery and Bondocracy"
What is a bondocracy? What do they mean when they say 3 billions of property in slaves was converted to United States bond?
I should note this document is a northern pro-confederate publication. But it still speaks to the mindset of the north at the time. It was worth bringing up in the video and as such I'd like to understand it.
Thank you
Southerners often took banking loans out in order to buy their slaves. Those loans would be backed by bonds which could be sold to investors in, for example, New York City. According to Fredrick Law Olmsted, the loans were quite expensive, around 20% per annum interest rate. A bond which underlies such a loan could also pay quite well.
Think of it like a home mortgage. You want to buy a property, you go to the bank and take a loan out and agree to the terms. If you default, the bank gets to take your property. The bank doesn’t have all the cash they need to keep dishing out more and more loans just based on people’s savings accounts. So the way banks raise money is by selling a bond which is an basically an IOU with an agreed interest rate. They sell those bonds to investors, other banks or on the stock market. The same system was in place for slave property back then as is in place for house property these days. Aspiring plantation owners took out big loans to buy slaves. The whole slave system was powered by the financial system.
The book you referred to basically stated that it was hypocritical of Northerners to blame 600,000 slave owners of running a slaveocracy when 100,000 northern bond owners basically were the behind the scenes owners of many of those slaves. The bond holders were the investors who invested in the investors (I.e. the banks) who invested in the investor (I.e. a plantation owner who is buying slaves as an investment).