Slave Agriculture and Financial Markets marks an important chapter in the study of Antebellum southern slavery and the credit system. Kilbourne analyzes the systems which credit intermediaries such as chartered banks and commercial partnerships used to finance slave agriculture, using the Mississippi branch of the Second Bank of the United States as a case study. He explains in detail how the Bank supported the government's and the nation's credit abroad by providing apparently limitless credit facilities to southern planters along the Mississippi river. This ground-breaking new book draws heavily on the only extant full collection of records from the Second Bank of the United States. It is the first major scholarly undertaking to exploit this archive.
