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.

成立于1837年大恐慌的前夕，南卡罗来纳州的内斯比特制造公司拥有并雇用被奴役的个人在铁厂工作，但他们还通过利用被奴役的财产的市值交换他们的股份并提供他们的股份。作为贷款合同的抵押。这些奴隶主积极地尝试了日益复杂的金融工具和机构，以促进奴隶制内的投资，市场交换和利润最大化。尽管历史学家研究了奴役劳工在工业问题中的作用，但他们在很大程度上忽略了他们在资助这些活动中的作用。了解南方人将奴役财产变成流动性的多种方式，灵活的金融资产对于了解奴役制度的深度和广度至关重要。通过这样做，我们可以超越奴隶制是否特别适合于工业化以及资本主义更广泛的问题，而可以理解奴隶制和资本主义如何在战前时期相互作用以促进南部经济发展。同时，内斯比特公司的经验揭示了奴役融资的局限性。1837年恐慌的余波表明，被奴役财产的市场价值比被奴役者关心的市场波动更大。尽管在被奴役的工人在种植园或工厂工作的情况下，南方人通常可以忍受这种动荡，但这使奴隶制的金融化成为新兴工业体制的更大风险。