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. The brothers were Confederate Army volunteers who grew their wealth profiteering during the Civil War, subverting the cotton blockade, buying cotton at a
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