The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

by Edward E. Baptist

For although coffles got no closer than Pennsylvania Avenue to the room in which John Marshall read out his 1810 decision in Fletcher v. Peck, their chained footprints walked all over the case file. The technical issue before the Court was whether the Georgia state legislature could overturn a contract of sale into which a previous session had entered. Marshall and the Court ruled that the people of Georgia could not overturn the sale. The contract might have been accomplished by bribery. It may have contravened the will of the majority of white Georgians. But the sale to the investors’ land companies was a sale of property all the same, and property rights, by the chief justice’s interpretation of the contract clause of the Constitution, were absolute. The people who invested in the company—mostly New England money-market types and bankers—should be repaid from the sale of the land, which was now held by the federal government.