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6 CAPITALISTS ALL Investments and Capital Accumulation Outside theAgricultural Sector We are all here in the spirit of speculation in the land. ... I have as much business in the land way as I want and am kept constantly drained of all my funds I get some thing like one thousand dollars pr week and sometimes more. — G A I U S W H I T F I E L D , July30,1835 On the application of Cap". Eldridge, I have consented to take an interest of i /16 in a large ship now building at N.Y. for the Liverpool tour, provided my share does not exceed $5000. —WILLIAM NEWTON M E R c E R , December 17,1842 [H. A. Willard] is anxious to conclude a bargain at once for a lease of the Hotel [in Washington, D.C.]—with the privilege of buying, when able to do so, at $60,000. ... If I can secure $6000 a year, I would at once close with him. I may have to take less. — B E N J A M I N O. TAYLoE, December 15,1851 It was fortunate you found no Planters Bank bonds for sale. They would have been a bad purchase at 25cts on the dollar. The rascals have not only refused to redeem them by taxation—but have refused to apply the funds (80.000$) recd . from the Planters Bank especially for that purpose. This is not only dishonesty— but downright stealing. — STEPHEN DUNCAN, March 6,1846 I now think my Texas RR stock will be worth more to our children than the ballance of our property. . . . It will yeald [sic] me an annual interest of twenty eight thousand dollars. And possibly other advantages. — R I C H A R D T. ARCHER,January27,1856 For no man living, can be more indifferent to public opinion than I now am, 8c ever have been. I have never sought the good opinion of others—&. have never taken any extraordinary pains to avoid the bad. — S T E P H E N D U N C A N , April 18,1866 2l8 • M A S T E R S OF THE BIG H O U S E HE ELITE SLAVEHOLDERS of the antebellum South did not invest all of their capital in land and slaves, nor did they derive their profits exclusively from the sale of staple crops. As was noted earlier, a number of wealthy nabobs had acquired their initial funds by speculating in land or from banking and commercial enterprises. Many abandoned these activities after they began to erect their plantation empires, but a few retained their former ties and others explored these and other investment opportunities outside the agricultural sector . Indeed, as Table 4 indicates, at least one-fifth of the slaveholders included in this study were, or had been, associated with such clearly capitalistic enterprises as banking, commerce, railroading, manufacturing, and land speculation. A considerable number invested heavily in urban real estate and in various corporate , state, and federal stocks and bonds. Finally, a few, such as ironmasters Daniel Hillman of Kentucky and Montgomery Bell of Tennessee, employed all of their slaves as industrial laborers. Indeed, the largest slave force in the latter state during the decade of the 18505 was that of the Cumberland Iron Works in Stewart County.1 Of all the economic activities enumerated above, the one most closely related to plantation agriculture was land speculation. An earlier chapter described the carnival of speculation that accompanied the vast Chickasaw and Choctaw cessions in Alabama and Mississippi in the 18305 and the speculative purchases of Texas lands by a company of Natchez nabobs during the same decade . But there are other examples of speculation in land by established planters throughout the late antebellum period. Georgia planter Parish Carter, who had numerous financial interests outside the agricultural sector, participated in the speculative mania of the 18305, entering former Indian lands from Florida to Arkansas, but he also ranged as far north as Illinois in his quest for land investments .2 Other wealthy slaveholders acquired substantial amounts of real property in the Midwest. Among these were Wade Hampton II of South Carolina, 1. Harriette Simpson Arnow, Flowering of the Cumberland (New York, 1963), 295; Stanley}. Folmsbee, Robert E. Corlew, and Enoch L. Mitchell, History of Tennessee, 4 vols. (New York, 1960), I, 475, 478; MS Census, 1850 and 1860 (Schedule i), Trigg County, Ky., (Schedule 2), Caldwell, Lyon, and Trigg Counties, Ky.; MS Census, 1850...

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