Origins of Offshore Banking: The Slave Trade

If you ever get a chance to read Margaret Mitchell’s classic, Gone with the Wind, I would encourage you to do so. Not only is Mitchell’s writing superb, but you will be transplanted to an historic period in American history and feel as though you were experiencing deja vu. The dynamics that unfolded in the United States over a century ago are replaying themselves today.

In Gone with the Wind, Mitchell depicts well born Confederates, with the institution of slavery intact, as they bask in the delights of American high society – the elegant balls, impeccable manners, gorgeous fashions, and heart-felt rivalries and affections.

While the institution of slavery cannot be defended, Mitchell depicts the kindness many slave owners demonstrated towards house slaves, reflecting that many were looked after, protected, and respected as family members.

Then, in a blinking of an eye, the status quo was swept away through a Civil War.

Families were torn apart, lives disrupted, society overturned, and the once joyous Southern high-society was transformed into a wasteland, with bodies returning from war mangled and bloodied, if they returned at all. Overnight fortunes were lost as despair and desperation settled in.

What happened next in Mitchell’s book is oddly prescient. It is not unexpected that some slaves, particularly those who had been well treated and provided room, board, and other support in exchange for their labor, remained loyal to their caretakers, rejecting opportunities to live as freed men and women. As unskilled, cheap labor who had known only the protection and care of their host families, many looked askance at entering the forbidding world of freedom, wondering how they would survive, and who would care for them. Most were uneducated and lacking in key skills.

Mitchell hints at the Rothschild shadow hand. Somehow freed slaves were directed to murder their white land owners and claim the estates of white plantation owners for themselves. If what the South had experienced was anything like the typical Rothschild-inspired war, the dispossessed were weaponized to attack the commercial rivals of the syndicate on behalf of the dynasty’s allies and familial interests.

Read the rest of the article on Susan’s Substack.

(c) 2024 Susan Bradford

www.susanbradford.org

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