Paper short abstract

This paper examines how planters moving deeper into the US South after the international slave trade ended used enslaved people as collateral in mortgage transactions with banks while living as bi-racial and multi-racial families to show how intimate relations complicated commercial aspirations.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines a series of violent contradictions that emerged after the slave trade to the US was abolished in 1808. Merchants moving to the Deep South used slaves as collateral in financial transactions and mortgage agreements that gave them access to land in places like rural Virginia and Louisiana. In this context, a merchant’s assets might include a woman he had purchased several years prior, and raped, as well as their bi-racial offspring. In other words, establishing families with enslaved people did not prevent planters from claiming them as financial assets. Wielding violence in the most intimate ways, these merchants capitalized on the commercial value of their children and intimate relations. Some of these planters would eventually draft wills that bequeathed assets to the women and children they simultaneously treated as family and held in bondage, fostering social and economic mobility for these newly freed people of color in a peculiar paradox. I examine the indeterminate boundaries concerning property and partnership for a an idea of slavery that is not merely defined by social death and an anthropological theory of economy that is not merely transactional.