Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction Book of 2024
A leading historian exposes how the rise and tragic failure of the Freedman’s Bank has shaped economic inequality in America.
In the years immediately after the Civil War, tens of thousands of former slaves deposited millions of dollars into the Freedman’s Bank. African Americans envisioned this new bank as a launching pad for economic growth and self-determination. But only nine years after it opened, their trust was betrayed and the Freedman’s Bank collapsed.
Fully informed by new archival findings, historian Justene Hill Edwards unearths a major turning point in American history in this comprehensive account of the Freedman’s Bank and its depositors. She illuminates the hope with which the bank was first envisioned and demonstrates the significant setback that the sabotage of the bank caused in the fight for economic autonomy. Hill Edwards argues for a new interpretation of its tragic failure: the bank’s white financiers drove the bank into the ground, not Fredrick Douglass, its final president, or its Black depositors and cashiers. A page-turning story filled with both well-known figures like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Jay and Henry Cooke, and General O. O. Howard, and less well-known figures like Dr. Charles B. Purvis, John Mercer Langston, Congressman Robert Smalls, and Ellen Baptiste Lubin. Savings and Trust is necessary reading for those seeking to understand the roots of racial economic inequality in America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
America's racial wealth gap can be traced to the collapse of the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company in 1874, according to this ingenious work of financial sleuthing. Historian Hill Edwards (Unfree Markets) shows that the bank—which canvassed the post-war South to encourage freed people to deposit their money, and at its height held more than $75 million in deposits ($1.9 trillion in today's dollars)—underwent an "ideological change" within two years of its 1865 founding, when it moved in 1867 from New York to Washington D.C., and Henry D. Cooke, brother of industrialist Jay Cooke, joined the Board of Trustees. Cooke immediately set about "raid" Black depositors' money to make illegal loans to bank trustees and risky, influence-peddling investments, including extravagant loans to politicians. By 1870, whiffs of the bank's insolvency and corruption had reached the public. In a captivating narrative that reads like a slow-burn legal thriller, Hill Edwards proves how, in a particularly perfidious last-minute effort to salvage the faith of Black depositors, the bank's white trustees elected a "completely unprepared" Frederick Douglass to serve as president just three months before the bank's collapse, permanently scarring the orator's legacy. The result is a revelatory connecting-of-the-dots between the failure of Reconstruction and the birth of the Gilded Age.
