Ann Daly, Mississippi State University. Slavery, Dispossession, and Hard Money in the Southern Gold Rush, 1828-1860
In the 1830s United States, hard money Democrats tried to remake money by waging a war against the national bank, the Second Bank of the United States. Georgia and the US Army dispossessed the Cherokee Nation of their lands east of the Mississippi River. And, the country’s first gold rush began in the Appalachian South. This paper argues for the convergence of these events, claiming that groups of highly skilled enslaved men and women mined gold in North Carolina and the Cherokee Nation. Domestic gold production by enslaved miners on indigenous land made it possible for hard money Democrats to imagine a new gold and silver-based federal currency system that would liberate the country from its dependence on banks and paper money. As such, federal officials and politicians brought material support to the mining industry in the name of economic reform. The result was a new financial system in which the federal government made money, in part, from southern gold.
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