| dc.description.abstract | This dataset contains information related to the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Bank, which catered mainly to newly freed slaves from 1865 to 1874. The bank operated over 30 branches, with locations as far north as New York, Baltimore, and Washington D.C.; as far south as Jacksonville, New Orleans, and Mobile; and as far west as St. Louis, Little Rock, and Shreveport. The bank offered only savings accounts for its predominantly black customers. Although the bank’s mission was ostensibly to provide freedmen with a mechanism for savings, the white trustees made increasingly risky loans to white businesses in Washington D.C., where the bank was headquartered. That, along with questionable spending on its headquarters, pushed the bank to near insolvency following the Panic of 1873, which began in New York with the failure of Jay Cooke & Company. Following the Panic, the Freedman’s Bank never fully recovered. It failed nine months later, in July of 1874. In the aftermath of the failure, Congress appointed a committee to oversee the dissolution of the bank and return the associated funds to depositors. To receive a refund, depositors sent in their passbooks, which contained the ledgers to their accounts (much like a modern checkbook has a register for transactions). If the passbook matched with the bank’s records, then the depositor received a check for a portion of his or her outstanding balance at the time of the bank’s failure. Since only account holders who remained with the bank until failure were included in the efforts to return depositor funds, these records are only for depositors who did not close their accounts prior to the Freedman’s Bank closure in 1874. We collect data from two sources: the passbooks to new accounts (about 500 of which were preserved following the failure of the bank and the subsequent efforts to return funds to depositors), and the dividend repayment records, which tracked payment to about 40,000 account holders following the bank’s failure. When combined with the separate indices to new accounts records, available via FamilySearch.org, this dataset represents the available data on the Freedman’s Bank depositor base as it relates to account openings, operations, and closures. | |
