Debt, investment, slaves

Richard Kilbourne has produced a comprehensive study of the credit system in one Louisiana parish in the antebellum and postbellum periods of the Civil War. East Feliciana Parish was important in terms of both population and the large number of slaves. This book's primary concern is the role of slave property in collateralizing credit relationships and planter perceptions regarding slaves as financial assets. A thorough survey of parish mortgage records and other manuscript collections led to the conclusion that most credit relationships, collateralized and uncollateralized, were grounded in slave property as opposed to land or other forms of wealth. Uncollateralized debt was directly dependent on the relative wealth of parish residents, and the bulk of most portfolios consisted of slaves. Emancipation and the Civil War occasioned a monumental credit implosion from which the local economy never recovered, at least for the remainder of the 19th century. Kilbourne makes an extensive examination of postwar debt distress and the evolution of sharecropping and tenancy. Even the wealthiest households were in the throes of debt distress as was evidenced by the numerous suits brought by wives for separations of property. A peculiar recording requirement for crop privileges and pledges in the years from 1870 to 1880 made it possible to determine the amount of credit available in the postwar decades. Kilbourne shows that credit facilities contracted by 90 percent in the two decades following the Civil War. The decline in credit facilities parallels the decline in household wealth levels.