Financing Dispossession: Stocks, Bonds, and the Deportation of Native Peoples in the Antebellum United States

Abstract

The cotton grown by Mississippi slaves, insured by New York and Boston financiers, and spun by Manchester wage laborers germinated in soil that had belonged, only a few months or years earlier, to Native Americans. For a brief five decades, the U.S. South dominated global cotton production, a result of the transformation of the region from indigenous farms to slave labor camps. Scholars have recently traced the network of financial capital that yoked mortgaged slaves and impoverished mill workers to planters, bankers, and consumers around the world. While it is evident that the global reach of the cotton empire-the millions of laborers and the vast sums of money at work-precipitated the dispossession of native peoples in the antebellum South, the precise link between financial capital and Indian expulsion has remained obscure. As a result, we speak in generalizations: Indian removal forced "60,000 of the cotton frontier's original inhabitants across the Mississippi," opening the land "for speculation and cotton production"; it "transformed territory into property," after which "capital flowed into the Lower Mississippi Valley"; and it belonged to "the project of continental consolidation," driven by the "insatiable demand of cotton planters." 1 Scholars of the new history of capitalism cannot be blamed for glossing over the transition from the native South to the slave South. Classic works on Indian removal, predating the renewed interest in capital, focus on the Indian agents and army officers who supervised the undertaking, while a newer generation of literature documents the experiences of the dispossessed and the designs of the settler colonists who expelled them. Although historians then and now have understood that economic forces lay at the heart of Indian removal, they have not recognized that dispossession was a financial as well as political