Documenting Bankrupted Slaves

Authors

Rafael I. Pardo, Washington University in St. Louis School of LawFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2018

Publication Title

Vanderbilt Law Review En Banc

Abstract

Bankrupted Slaves tells a story about institutional complicity in antebellum slavery — that is, the story of how the federal government in the 1840s and 1850s became the owner and seller of thousands of slaves belonging to financially distressed slaveowners who sought forgiveness of debt through the federal bankruptcy process. Relying on archival court records that have not been systematically analyzed by other scholars, Bankrupted Slaves analyzes how the Bankruptcy Act of 1841 and the domestic slave trade inevitably collided to create the bankruptcy slave trade, focusing the analysis through a case study of the Eastern District of Louisiana, which was home to New Orleans, antebellum America's largest slave market. This Article describes the methods used in Bankrupted Slaves to document the history of the Eastern District's bankruptcy slave trade and sets forth statistical tables documenting that trade.

Keywords

Bankruptcy, Antebellum Slavery, Bankruptcy Act Of 1841, Domestic Slave Trade, Bankruptcy Slave Trade, Eastern District Of Louisiana

Publication Citation

Rafael I. Pardo, Documenting Bankrupted Slaves, 71 Vand. L. Rev. En Banc. 73 (2018)

Repository Citation

Pardo, Rafael I., "Documenting Bankrupted Slaves" (2018). Scholarship@WashULaw. 368.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_scholarship/368