Legal History Commons^™

Documenting Bankrupted Slaves, Rafael I. Pardo

Scholarship@WashULaw

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 …