This study began as a consequence of a number of fortuitous events. I had only recently completed a manuscript on the role of slave property in the antebellum credit system. A necessary condition for understanding that subject was gaining a knowledge of local and regional credit markets, and the instruments antebellum planters and their agents had used to hedge their exposure to various risks inherent in producing staples for very distant markets. At a time when the institution of credit seems to have become detached from the underlying economy because of the mammoth role government plays in underwriting our fiat monetary regime, as well as sponsoring credit subsidies for various activities which are deemed to be worthwhile pursuits by society, such as encouraging home ownership, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the institution of credit initially evolved as a risk spreading mechanism. The institution of credit arose from the same economic environment which gave birth to the modern insurance industry.

I, like most financial historians, had focused initially on chartered banking corporations and like others had assumed that chartered banks played a role in the antebellum financial system which roughly corresponded to the role commercial banks play today. It was only after I began to unravel antebellum credit relations, a task greatly aided by the bankruptcy of antebellum slave agriculture and the consequent exposure of thousands of relationships in collection suit records, that I came to realize that chartered banks had functioned principally as ‘amplifiers’ in a complex network of slave planters and their commercial agents.

It was a disappointment to discover that nowhere had even a partial set of business records for one antebellum commercial agency survived into the late twentieth century.