When we talk about enslaved labor, we often locate it exclusively in Southern cotton fields and tobacco plantations. That framing is not wrong, but it is incomplete in ways that fundamentally distort how we understand American wealth and American institutions. Enslaved labor was not a regional aberration — it was the material foundation of the early American economy, North and South, and its effects are embedded in institutions that still exist and still operate today.

The U.S. Capitol building was constructed between 1793 and 1800 using a workforce that included hundreds of enslaved people. The names of some are recorded; most are not. They quarried the sandstone, laid the brick, plastered the walls, and built the dome while their legal status as property was being debated inside the institution they were building. The White House was similarly constructed with enslaved labor, as were many of the federal buildings that formed the architectural core of Washington, D.C. Archaeologists working on federal building projects in recent decades have found material evidence of the enslaved workers' lives — tools, quarters, personal objects — buried beneath the grounds of American civic identity.

Northern institutions are equally implicated. Harvard University's 2022 report, 'Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery,' documented that the university received financial support from enslavers, allowed the enslavement of people on its campus, and enslaved people whose labor directly supported university operations. Yale, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Rutgers, William and Mary, and Georgetown all have similarly documented histories. Georgetown's 2016 investigation found that in 1838, the university sold 272 enslaved people to pay its debts — a transaction that saved the institution. The descendants of those 272 people, scattered to sugar plantations in Louisiana, were traced, and in 2019 Georgetown students voted to assess themselves a fee to fund reparations to those descendants. The university's administration declined to make it mandatory.

Beyond institutions, enslaved labor was the engine of the first American financial system. Cotton — produced primarily by enslaved labor — was the United States' largest export for most of the 19th century, driving the growth of Northern textile mills, insurance companies, and banks that financed the plantation system. Historian Edward Baptist, in The Half Has Never Been Told, documents how enslaved people's bodies were used as collateral for loans — mortgaged, insured, and traded as financial instruments. The Bank of New York, Chase Manhattan Bank (now JPMorgan Chase), and Aetna Insurance are among the institutions that have publicly acknowledged their financial ties to slavery. In 2002, the Hartford Courant documented that Aetna had written insurance policies on enslaved people's lives — payable to their enslavers.

At the peak of the slave economy in 1860, four million enslaved people lived in the United States. Their combined economic value — what they could be sold for as property — exceeded the combined value of all American railroads and manufacturing enterprises. They were the single largest category of financial wealth in the country. This was not wealth that disappeared with emancipation in 1865 — it was wealth that was converted. Enslavers received no compensation. Neither did the enslaved. The land, the buildings, the institutions, and the capital that enslaved labor had built remained in the hands of the people who had claimed ownership of other human beings. The reparations debate is, at its core, a question about whether that conversion — that transfer of accumulated wealth from one population to another at the moment of emancipation — created an obligation that has never been addressed.