Slave Agriculture and Financial Markets, by Richard Holcombe Kilbourne, is an economic and legal history of credit markets in the Lower Mississippi Valley between 1831 and 1848. The story is centered around the Second Bank of the United States, which financed the exports of plantation agriculture through its branch in Natchez between 1831 and 1836, then, until 1841, through banks and agencies affiliated with the Pennsylvania-chartered Bank of the United States (BUS).

In the first three chapters Kilbourne discusses the role of the Second Bank, and then the BUS, in the unfolding of the Panic of 1837 and subsequent depression. After the Second Bank lost its charter, it stopped buying bills of exchange on western and southern cities in an unrealistic effort to transfer assets to Philadelphia quickly. The result was a liquidity crunch in the Lower Mississippi (some months before the Bank of England stopped the flow of credit to Anglo-American merchant bankers), followed shortly by the suspension of specie payments in 1837. The BUS showed forbearance in settling claims against Lower Mississippi banks to assist them in restoring the flow of credit, but instead they retrenched. Without new credit and money issuance, the BUS's efforts to liquidate its assets in Mississippi and Louisiana were hopeless, and in 1841 it failed.

The final two chapters deal with the aftermath of the BUS's failure. Shareholders charged a committee of trustees, the so-called Bacon Trust, with collecting the bank's most valuable assets (many of them in the Lower Mississippi Valley). Kilbourne shows how the state of Mississippi responded to the Trust's efforts with protective state legislation, which led to Trust-funded litigation that went all the way to the Supreme Court. The effort to collect assets on behalf of the BUS continued until the end of the decade, was accomplished without local banking facilities, and involved the transfer of land, slaves, and railroad assets to BUS shareholders.

Kilbourne has constructed a dense narrative history from a deep well of historical material, most notably the records of the Natchez branch of the Second Bank and Louisiana court records. Economists and historians will learn much from Kilbourne's keen understanding of the intricacies of credit extended in the form of exchange. It took me more than one pass to track down the argument, but I recommend the effort to those interested in a nuanced qualitative history of credit relations in the antebellum South.