When American Banks Trafficked in Slaves and Why the Truth Was Buried Until 2005

The financial architecture of slavery and the corporations that inherited its profits

William Spivey
Dec 13, 2025

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In the antebellum United States, the most valuable asset in the nation was not land, cotton, or railroads. It was people — specifically, the 4 million enslaved African Americans whose bodies, labor, and children were legally defined as property. Their monetary value was so immense that by 1860, the total worth of enslaved people exceeded that of all the nation’s factories, railroads, and banks combined. And because they were property, they became collateral. They became loan guarantees. They became the backbone of a financial system that pretended to be modern while resting on the oldest form of theft.

This is the part of American financial history that banks spent more than a century avoiding, minimizing, or burying. It is the part that only came into public view when laws forced corporations to look into their own archives and confront what they had inherited. And nowhere is this clearer than in the story of JPMorgan Chase — the largest bank in the United States — which in 2005 admitted that two of its predecessor institutions had accepted enslaved people as collateral and, when borrowers defaulted, had taken ownership of more than a thousand human beings.

But JPMorgan Chase was not alone. Wachovia, Bank of America, Lehman Brothers, Aetna, New York Life, and others have all acknowledged ties to slavery. Their profits, their mergers, their corporate DNA — all of it is entangled with the buying, selling, mortgaging, and insuring of human lives.

This is the story of how American banks built wealth on bondage, how that history was hidden, and why it took until the 21st century for the truth to be brought to light.

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https://williamspivey.substack.com/p/when-american-banks-trafficked-in