,
4 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
A good example of a common historical phenomenon that too many non-historians don't know about: the mortgaging of enslaved people to secure credit for their owners. As "people with a price," they were exploited as capital assets, not only as laborers.
For more on this subject, see the important work of Bonnie Martin in @JourSouHist jstor.org/stable/27919281
Here's another example of an antebellum Southerner negotiating a loan of money & hoping to use enslaved people as collateral. From Texas in January 1861. texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/met… 
Another example of how the "mortgaging" of enslaved people allowed slaveholders to secure loans. This one, from 1817, can be found on in @wgthomas3's amazing archive about slavery in Washington, D.C. earlywashingtondc.org/doc/oscys.case…
