Bank Bonds and Bondspersons
This was a new kind of financial instrument with significant implications for the slave trade. If successful, his bank would permit slaveholders access to bank credit that would help buy thousands of enslaved people, hundreds of cotton and sugar plantations, and improvements such as refineries. It did so by leveraging plantations and bondspersons to raise investment capital. The volume of the interstate slave trade closely followed expansions and contractions of credit. In the late 1820s and early to mid–1830s, credit expansion and the financial integration of Britain and the United States helped rationalize the interstate slave trade that populated the canebrakes and cotton fields of the lower South with bound workers. Beyond merely expanding production, the Consolidated Association and banks like it gave the notoriously capital-intensive sugar industry the means to develop more efficient refining technologies and build a robust supply chain. Lavergne’s errand was a small part of an enormous expansion of credit.
Banks like the Consolidated Association of the Planters of Louisiana, the Union Bank, and the Citizens Bank issued mortgages on enslaved people, welling an interest in slavery in the North, Britain, and Europe. Those immortal promises bound bondspersons to the promise of future repayment.