Institutional Philanthropy

Alabama slaveholders converted plantation wealth into religious, educational, transportation, and civic institutions. The thesis cites James B. Sellers's documentation: Jeremiah H. Brown's endowment of the Brown Chair of Theology at Howard College (now Samford University), and Abner McGehee's investment in railroad stock and benefactions to the Alabama Bible Society.

Money made from human bondage does not arrive at a seminary or a rail line with a label attached; it simply becomes a chair, a stock certificate, a line in a ledger of good works — while the people whose labor produced it disappear from the story the institution tells about its own founding.

Before plantation wealth could be laundered into respectability, it had to be created — and the scholarship this thesis draws on names the mechanism precisely. Historian Julia Ott argues that racialized chattel slavery was “the capital that made capitalism”: because enslavers owned not only people but their offspring in perpetuity, enslaved people were self-augmenting capital. After the cotton gin, surplus enslaved people from the Upper South became the capital stock for the cotton frontier — roughly one million Black Americans forced south between 1790 and the Civil War — while slave-backed bonds sold through Baring Brothers, Brown Brothers, and the Rothschilds channeled European and Northern investment into the Mississippi Valley. By the Civil War, planters held some two million enslaved people worth $2 billion — “a third of the wealth owned by all U.S. citizens,” in Ed Baptist's accounting. Documented (as scholarship).

Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman's Slavery's Capitalism (2016) places that mechanism inside American economic development: more than half of the nation's exports in the first six decades of the nineteenth century consisted of raw cotton, almost all of it grown by enslaved people — and plantation slavery, “far from being a retrograde system on its way to being ousted by industrial capitalism, saw a second flourishing in the 19th century in the wake of the industrial revolution.” Beckert's institutional lesson is pointed: “business leaders whose companies' history goes back into the antebellum era need to be proactively researching this history and confronting it.” Documented (as scholarship).

Matthew Desmond carries the argument to a public audience: “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.” Enslaved people were used as collateral for mortgages centuries before the home mortgage became defining; when the Panic of 1837 hit, Mississippi planters owed New Orleans banks $33 million in a year their crops yielded $10 million — and people bought for $2,000 sold for $60 after the crash. “Cotton slavery was too big to fail.” Documented (as scholarship).

This project's own records show the mechanism working in Madison County's courthouse: in Dearing v. Lightfoot (1844), the enslaved men Hercules and Solomon had each been mortgaged at $2,000 in 1840 — enslaved people as mortgage collateral, exactly as Desmond describes. And the 1825 Alabama Treasurer's report documents $3,698.16¼ in slave-trade revenue pooled with state funds, including the University Fund's vested capital — a documented line from trafficking revenue to the financial engine that capitalized Alabama higher education. Documented (see the history timeline).

Sources: Julia Ott, “Slaves: The Capital That Made Capitalism” (Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies, New School); Sven Beckert & Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Matthew Desmond, “American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation,” New York Times Magazine, August 14, 2019 (full text read via ProQuest; readable copy).

The thesis borrows Pierre Bourdieu's account of capital conversion to name the mechanism: economic capital accumulated through slavery was converted into symbolic capital — the durable legitimacy of a named chair, a Bible society benefaction, a railroad investment — while the origins of that wealth were laundered out of the institution's story about itself.

Philanthropy, in this frame, is not the opposite of extraction but its alibi: the moment at which tainted wealth is transmuted into honor, and the people whose labor produced it disappear from the ledger of good works.

The finding aid for the James Webb Smith Donnell Papers offers a concrete archival basis for studying this process up close. It identifies the Donnell and John Nelson Spotswood Jones families as large landowners and prosperous planters — and describes records concerning the purchase of enslaved people, land transactions, taxes, the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, and postwar contracts with freedpeople. Plantation property, transportation finance, family networks, and labor relations intersect in a single collection.

The evidence presently supports a documented connection between John Nelson Spotswood Jones, his daughter Maria Louisa Jones Donnell, James Webb Smith Donnell, and the plantation known as Seclusion near Jonesboro in Lawrence County. Druid Grove is where Maria Louisa Jones married Donnell in 1839.

A named enslaved man, Fortune, died at Seclusion in February 1859 — and was afterward memorialized with an inscribed granite grave marker erected by Donnell himself. It is one of the very few individually marked graves of an enslaved person identified anywhere in this project's records to date.

A single stone, cut and inscribed at an enslaver's order, does more to individuate one man's death than the entire probate apparatus does for the thousands of people it otherwise records only as line items.