Start-up Nation? Slave Wealth and Entrepreneurship in Civil War Maryland∗ Felipe Gonzalez´ y Guillermo Marshallz Suresh Naidux Abstract Slave property rights yielded a source of collateral as well as a coerced labor force. Using data from Dun and Bradstreet linked to the 1860 census and slave schedules in Maryland, we find that slaveowners were more likely to start businesses prior to the uncompensated 1864 emancipation, even conditional on total wealth and human capital, and this advantage disappears after emancipation. We assess a number of po- tential explanations, and find suggestive evidence that this is due to the superiority of slave wealth as a source of collateral for credit rather than any advantage in produc- tion. The collateral dimension of slave property magnifies its importance to historical American economic development. JEL codes: D2, G2, J4, L2, M2, N21, N81 Keywords: slavery, civil war, abolition, entrepreneurship ∗This version: July 2016. We would like to thank seminar participants at the NBER, PUC-Chile, Stanford, and UC Berkeley for many helpful comments. Special thanks to Joseph Ferrie for support in the early stages of the project. John Clegg, Ellora Derenoncourt, Christopher Muller, and Stanley Engerman all provided valuable feedback. Jacob Moscona-Skolnik provided outstanding research assistance. yUniversity of California, Berkeley, Department of Economics. E-mail:
[email protected] zUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Economics. E-mail:
[email protected] xColumbia University, Department of Economics and SIPA. E-mail:
[email protected]. 1 Introduction Slave property rights were a key institution in American economic development. The 4 million enslaved people at the beginning of the Civil War were an unwilling work- force that made Southern agriculture the immensely lucrative and dynamic system that the Confederacy sacrificed much to defend.