A leading historian exposes how the rise and tragic failure of the Freedman’s Bank has shaped economic inequality in America. In the years immediately after the Civil War, tens of thousands of former slaves deposited millions of dollars into the Freedman’s Bank. African Americans envisioned this new bank as a launching pad for economic growth and self-determination. But only nine years after it opened, their trust was betrayed and the Freedman’s Bank collapsed. Fully informed by new archival findings, historian Justene Hill Edwards unearths a major turning point in American history in this comprehensive account of the Freedman’s Bank and its depositors. She illuminates the hope with which the bank was first envisioned and demonstrates the significant setback that the sabotage of the bank caused in the fight for economic autonomy. Hill Edwards argues for a new interpretation of its tragic failure: the bank’s white financiers drove the bank into the ground, not Fredrick Douglass, its final president, or its Black depositors and cashiers. A page-turning story filled with both well-known figures like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Jay and Henry Cooke, and General O. O. Howard, and less well-known figures like Dr. Charles B. Purvis, John Mercer Langston, Congressman Robert Smalls, and Ellen Baptiste Lubin. Savings and Trust is necessary reading for those seeking to understand the roots of racial economic inequality in America.

History of Freedman's Savings and Trust Company in Washington, D.C.

The author tells the history of the Freedman’s Savings Bank, how it grew much too quickly, why it failed and the impact on Black America. The end of slavery in the United States left thousands of enslaved people with the need to survive the transition to freedom, including food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. They would also need education, money and financial services. In 1865 Congress passed legislation to create the Freedman’s Bureau to provide those services. It also created the Freedman’s Savings Bank. Large numbers of the formerly enslaved people had been paid for service in the Union Army – the first time many had cash. And they had no safe depository. The Freedman’s Bank offered that, expanding quickly and gained millions in deposits – mostly ranging from $5 to $50. But inexperience and corruption doomed it to failure, costing many of the small depositors their savings. Some of the biggest issues facing Black consumers today may be able to trace their roots back to this debacle, from the historical distrust in banks to the racial wealth gap. Why publish now? On the heels of the social justice protests of 2020 and the Covid pandemic, some of the persistent and long-lasting problems facing Black Americans bubbled to the top. Black Americans suffered more than White Americans – they got sicker and died more frequently. In addition, they bore the brunt of the job losses economically and business failures. White Americans (and many Black Americans) learned about how vibrant Black communities like Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, were burned to the ground by angry White mobs, destroying generational Black wealth. The racial wealth gap was pushed to the forefront of the debates. Many of those issues in the wealth gap – including the distrust of Banks and the lack of generational wealth in the Black community can be traced back to the collapse of the Freedman’s Savings Bank and the resulting loss of wealth and generational wealth in Black America. This book will put the Freedman’s Savings Bank in the conversation with reparations, Baby Bonds and financial literacy.

The everyday lives of enslaved people were filled with the backbreaking tasks that their enslavers forced them to complete. But in spare moments, they found time in which to earn money and obtain goods for themselves. Enslaved people led vibrant economic lives, cultivating produce and raising livestock to trade and sell. They exchanged goods with nonslaveholding whites and even sold products to their enslavers. Did these pursuits represent a modicum of freedom in the interstices of slavery, or did they further shackle enslaved people by other means? Justene Hill Edwards illuminates the inner workings of the slaves’ economy and the strategies that enslaved people used to participate in the market. Focusing on South Carolina from the colonial period to the Civil War, she examines how the capitalist development of slavery influenced the economic lives of enslaved people. Hill Edwards demonstrates that as enslavers embraced increasingly capitalist principles, enslaved people slowly lost their economic autonomy. As slaveholders became more profit-oriented in the nineteenth century, they also sought to control enslaved people’s economic behavior and capture the gains. Despite enslaved people’s aptitude for enterprise, their market activities came to be one more part of the violent and exploitative regime that shaped their lives. Drawing on wide-ranging archival research to expand our understanding of racial capitalism, Unfree Markets shows the limits of the connection between economic activity and freedom.

How does one package and sell confidence in the stability of a nation riven by civil strife? This was the question that loomed before the Philadelphia financial house of Jay Cooke & Company,&8239;entrusted&8239;by the US government with an unprecedented sale of bonds to finance the Union war effort in the early days of the American Civil War.&8239;How the government and its agents marketed these bonds revealed a version of the war the public was willing to buy and buy into, based not just in the full faith and credit of the United States but also in the success of its armies and its long-term vision for open markets. From Maine to California, and in foreign halls of power and economic influence,&8239;thousands of agents were deployed to&8239;sell&8239;a clear message: Union victory was unleashing the American economy itself. This fascinating work of&8239;financial and political history&8239;during&8239;the Civil War&8239;era&8239;shows&8239;how the marketing and sale of bonds crossed the Atlantic to Europe and beyond, helping ensure foreign countries' vested interest in the Union's success. Indeed, David K. Thomson demonstrates how Europe, and ultimately all corners of the globe, grew deeply interdependent on American finance during, and in the immediate aftermath of, the American Civil War.&8239;

About Freedmen's Savings and Trust Company in Washington, D.C.

Incorporated in 1847 on the banks of the Merrimack River, Lawrence, Massachusetts, was the final and most ambitious of New Englands planned textile-manufacturing cities developed by the Boston-area entrepreneurs who helped launch the American Industrial Revolution. With a dam and canal system to generate power, by 1912 Lawrence led the world in the production of worsted wool cloth. The Pacific Cotton Mills alone had sales of nearly $10 million and had mechanical equipment capable of producing 800 miles of finished textile fabrics every working day. However, industrial growth was accompanied by worsening health, housing, and working conditions for most of the citys workers. These were the root causes that led to the long, sometimes violent struggle between people of diverse ethnic groups and languages and the citys mill owners and overseers. The 1912 strikeknown today as the Bread and Roses Strikebecame a landmark moment in history.