Enslaved Financing of Southern Industry: The Nesbitt Manufacturing Company of South Carolina, 1836–1850

Incorporated on the eve of the Panic of 1837, the Nesbitt Manufacturing Company of South Carolina owned and hired enslaved individuals to labor in their ironworks, but they also leveraged the market value of this enslaved property by exchanging them for shares of company stock and offering them as collateral in loan contracts. These slaveholders actively experimented with increasingly sophisticated financial tools and institutions in order to facilitate investment, market exchange, and profit maximization within the system of enslavement. Although historians have examined the role of enslaved labor in industrial concerns, they have largely ignored their role in the financing of these operations. Understanding the multiple ways that southerners were turning enslaved property into liquid, flexible financial assets is essential to understanding the depth and breadth of the system of enslavement. In doing so, we can move beyond questions of whether slavery was compatible with industrialization specifically and capitalism more broadly, to an understanding of how slavery and capitalism interacted to promote southern economic development in the antebellum period. At the same time, the experience of the Nesbitt Company reveals the limits of enslaved financing. The aftermath of the Panic of 1837 demonstrated that the market value of enslaved property was much more volatile than enslavers cared to admit. Although southerners could often endure this volatility in the case of enslaved laborers working on plantations or in factories, it made the financialization of slavery a much riskier endeavor for an emerging industrial regime.

I Am Murdered

This chapter refers to Joel Behrend, Amelia Norman's employer in his household who testified on her attempted murder case, claiming that her actions before the attempted murder made her seem crazy. It analyses how Amelia's case brought temptation and danger to all who strolled down Broadway during the Panic of 1837, a financial depression that lingered into the first half of the 1840s. It also mentions Samuel Floyd and William Crummie, who stopped Amelia when she attacked her former lover, Henry Ballard, at the hotel entrance of the Astor House steps. The chapter discusses the cab ride when William took Amelia to the police himself, in which she revealed her murder weapon and her regret that she did not use a larger knife. It recounts the sentiment Amelia expressed when she saw Henry bleeding but alive near the Astor House bar.

Defending Amelia Norman

This chapter introduces Amelia Norman, a twenty-five-year-old woman that was born in New Jersey and known as a servant, seamstress, and sometime prostitute. It recounts how Amelia failed to kill thirty-one-year-old Henry Ballard, a prosperous merchant and her lover in the spring of 1841 during the depression that followed the economic collapse known as the Panic of 1837. It also describes Amelia's trial, which attracted the excited attention of the penny press, particularly Bennett's Herald, which thrived on sensation. The chapter explores what attracted the attention of the press, the public, and coterie of influential supporters to the would-be murderess. It mentions the American Female Moral Reform Society as one of Amelia's supporters, which had been working since the 1830s to criminalize “seduction.”

Internal Improvements (1838–41)

John left farming in the wake of the panic of 1837 and found work as a surveyor, eventually working on a series of canal projects around western Pennsylvania, where he met Charles Schlatter. Despite his evident ability and expertise, John was doing little more than grubbing around for piecemeal surveying work before linking up with Schlatter. In 1838, Pennsylvania placed Schlatter in charge of surveying three potential railroad routes across the state, and he immediately drafted John to help. While submitting his survey report to the state authorities in Harrisburg, John got embroiled with Charles Ellet in a competition to build the first long span suspension bridge in the United States, over the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. Ellet won the contract, instituting a rivalry that would last much of the next twenty years.

Off Stage

Returning to New York City in 1836, Afong Moy’s sales functions fully ended and her manager, Henry Hannington, employed her solely as an oriental object in his New York diorama and panorama entertainments. After the Panic of 1837, Hannington’s operations collapsed. Those who brought her to America, Nathaniel and Francis Carnes and Captain Benjamin Obear, appear to have abandoned her despite their promise of returning her to China. In 1838, as Chapter 9 relates, Afong Moy, without resources or financial support, entered a poorhouse in Monmouth, New Jersey. Yet, the public did not forget her. Rallying to her defense, newspapers across the nation ran articles decrying her treatment. Citizens forced her guardians to come forward and contribute to her support.

A Mass Sporting Industry

The political and financial potential of a commercialized sporting culture led to an explosion of sporting businesses in the antebellum period. Competition, along with a contraction caused by the Panic of 1837, led investors and professionals to reorganize the sporting industry yet again in the 1840s and 1850s. By re-establishing distinctively genteel, middling, and rough sporting spaces (after they had gotten muddled by the democratic accessibility introduced in the early national period), the backers and managers of sporting events specialized their enterprises and transformed sporting culture into the country’s earliest version of mass culture – a set of specialized, standardized, accessible, anonymous, commercial experiences intended to sell democracy to white men irrespective of their wealth or ethnicity.