Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States by Sharon Ann Murphy

PART I
Financing Southwestern Expansion through the
1810s
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the United States was growing, and
Americans were on the move. The southern seaboard states of Delaware,
Maryland, Virginia, and North and South Carolina grew in population from
approximately 1.7 million people in 1790 to 2.6 million in 1820 (a
moderate growth rate of about 20 percent each decade) through a
combination of natural increase, immigration, and the continued Atlantic
slave trade (legal through 1809).
 Many more Americans pushed west. In
historian Ira Berlin’s summation, “During the last decades of the eighteenth
century, [the slave regime] breached the easternmost Blue Ridge range,
inundated the Shenandoah Valley, and spilled across the Cumberland
Plateau into Kentucky and Tennessee. At the same time, slave-owning
planters enlarged their base at the mouth of the Mississippi River. The
purchase of Louisiana from a beleaguered France . . . created . . . an empire
for slavery” (maps PI.1 and PI.2).

Georgia’s population doubled between 1790 and 1800, before doubling
again by 1820. Kentucky and Tennessee’s populations both tripled during
the 1790s; the latter then grew fourfold by 1820 while the former almost
tripled again. The new states of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana—
which had few non-indigenous inhabitants in 1800—ballooned to 75,000,
128,000, and 153,000 people, respectively. As historian Dan Dupre writes,
“Thousands traveled the wagon roads through mountain passes in the years
just before and after the War of 1812, leaving familiar communities in
Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee to carve out new homes on
the frontier.”
 With a total non-indigenous population of fewer than two
hundred thousand in 1790, these six frontier states claimed almost 1.7
million inhabitants by 1820; about one-third of them were enslaved men,
women, and children.
 “Before they reached their adulthood, most

Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States by Sharon Ann Murphy