Collected Data and Records Information on the Freedman's Savings and Trust
This is the homepage for related projects to organize and document depositor data on the Freedman’s Savings and Trust, popularly known as the Freedman’s Bank. The Freedman’s Bank was a privately chartered U.S. savings bank, created in the aftermath of the Civil War to guide the development of newly emancipated slaves. During the height of its operations, the bank had over 30 branches stretching from New York to Louisiana, serving over 70,000 unique depositors. Though the bank achieved some early successes, it failed catasophically in 1874, destroying the savings of a broad swath of newly freed black citizens.
The resolution of the bank by the Comptroller of Currency preserved a large number of detailed records about the banking transactions of various account holders, and many of these records still exist in physical and digital archives. This website serves as a companion to the assocated paper on societal trust and financial market participation, and provides assorted documententation for the various data gathering efforts undertaken for the paper.
Passbooks were used by account holders to track their ongoing balances, much like a modern-day checkbook registers. The existing passbooks were collected as part of the effort to repay account holders following the bank’s failure. The physical passbooks are available at the National Archive in a four-box set. These records were photographed and transcribed as part of this project and both the high-resolution photos and the transcription are available here.
The registers of signatures of depositors contain a rich historical record of new account openings at the Freedman’s Bank. The original records are stored at the National Archives and have been photographed and transcribed by FamilySearch.org as a genealogical record. Details about working with these records as a validated data source are available here.
The dividend records consist of a series of ledger books. These ledgers record of the accounts existing after the failure of the bank for 21 different branches and the dividends paid to those accounts. Each available ledger represents a complete list of the accounts which were not closed at the time of the failure. The original scans are available through Fraser at the St. Louis Fed. Additional details about these records as well as a transcription of the account numbers and deposit amounts can be found on this site.
A number of additional historical records are available containing detailed financial information about the condition of the Freedman’s Bank at various points in it’s history. The congressional record in particular contains a wealth of information on detailed audits of the bank’s finances. These records are often cited in secondary sources, but their details are sometimes difficult to track down as a primary source. These original sources have been collected and made available here in their entirety.