How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

by Clint Smith

Two of Bank of America’s predecessors, Southern Bank of Saint Louis and Boatmen’s Savings Institution, listed enslaved people as potential collateral for a debt in 1863. Citibank also had ties to chattel slavery. Moses Taylor, a nineteenth-century banker who was the director of the City Bank of New York, Citibank’s predecessor, managed the capital coming from Southern sugar plantations and was intimately involved in illegally trafficking enslaved people into Cuba. The country’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase, was the most deeply entwined in the slave trade. A 2005 statement from the company read as follows: “JPMorgan Chase completed extensive research examining our company’s history for any links to slavery …we are reporting that this research found that between 1831 and 1865 two of our predecessor banks—Citizens Bank and Canal Bank in Louisiana—accepted approximately 13,000 enslaved individuals as collateral on loans and took ownership of approximately 1,250 of them when the plantation owners defaulted on the loans.” By the early nineteenth century, the New York financial industry became even more deeply entrenched in chattel slavery. Money from New York bankers went on to finance every facet of the slave trade: New York businessmen built the ships, shipped the cotton, and produced the clothes that enslaved people wore. The financial capital in the North allowed slavery in the South to flourish. As the cotton trade expanded, New York City became the central port for shipmen...