It wasn’t until years later that my research would reveal just how literally the country’s original economic sin was connected to the financial crisis of 2008. The first mortgages and collateralized debt instruments in the United States weren’t on houses, but on enslaved people, including the debt instruments that led to the speculative bubble in the slave trade of the 1820s. And the biggest bankruptcy in American history, in 2008, was the final chapter of a story that began in 1845 with the brothers Lehman, slave owners who opened a store to supply slave plantations near Montgomery, Alabama.
