Book Review: Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank

Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank. By Justene Hill Edwards. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2024. Hardcover, 310 pp. $29.99.

Reviewed by Al Mackey

In this book, Professor Justene Hill Edwards gives us the story of the Freedman’s Bank, which came into being in the waning days of the Civil War and served as a place for formerly enslaved men and women to deposit their money and to hopefully see their nest eggs grow. However, the story of hope and a bright future turned into a story of betrayal, greed, and tragedy. The bank’s trustees made risky loans to white people who the trustees did not require to put up collateral, simply because they had connections to those trustees. Meanwhile, the African American depositors were kept from borrowing money from the bank for which their deposits provided the capital for lending.

Professor Edwards gives us this story in chronological order, beginning in the summer of 1864 when Brig. Gen. Rufus Saxton, military governor of the Department of the South, established, via the Circular Number 5 he issued from his headquarters in Beaufort, South Carolina, the South Carolina Freedman’s Savings Bank. He did this to give the Black soldiers under his command, whom Congress had just voted equal pay with white soldiers, a safe place to put their pay. The sordid tale ends with the trustees, knowing the bank was failing, persuading Frederick Douglass to take over the bank’s presidency and then watching as the depositors lost their combined life savings when the bank closed its doors in 1874. She tells us, “This book shows how a group of white Americans gambled with, plundered, and stole from Black people as they climbed out of slavery into a new era of freedom. It establishes how people at the highest levels of finance and government pillaged a bank filled with African Americans’ money and destroyed the economic foundations on which recently freed people were building their lives. Ultimately, Savings and Trust shows that one of the origins of America’s racial wealth gap can be found in the failure of the Freedman’s Bank in 1874.” [xvii]

Professor Edwards did prodigious research for this book. It’s solidly grounded in primary sources, leavened with scholarship by excellent, careful historians. The result fills a gaping hole in the historiography of Reconstruction. When we read histories of that time, we read the Freedman’s Bank existed, we read it failed, but we never read its full story or the reasons why it failed. Until now.

At its roots, history is a story. It is the story of human beings. Besides the encyclopedic research she performed, Professor Edwards gives us a compelling narrative sprinkled with the stories of the men and women involved with the bank, including several of the depositors, some of the trustees, and some of the men involved in setting up the bank. As far as this reader could tell, her work is comprehensive. Also useful is the Appendix, giving the locations of the various branches, their opening dates, and the total financial information from 1866 to 1874, including total deposits, balance due to the depositors, and the interest the bank paid.

The end notes provide us not only the sources for information but also lead us to further reading with recommendations on the best scholarship for subjects relating to the Freedman’s Bank. While this is something we have come to expect from professional historians, it’s always nice to see it, especially in books that are not published by academic presses.

Reading this book can make one angry at the men who took advantage of people who trusted them, angry at the men whose greed led them to cynically game the system to allow them to enrich themselves and their friends at the expense of the poorest, least powerful people in the country. Even so, this book is recommended for its explanation of what the Freedman’s Bank did and how it failed. It is a story all students of the time period need to know, and indeed it is a story all of us can find useful to learn.

Al Mackey is a retired US Air Force colonel currently contributing to his community by serving as a substitute teacher in Pennsylvania. A lifelong student of the American Civil War since taking an undergraduate course with Professor James I. “Bud” Robertson at Virginia Tech, Al blogs at Student of the American Civil War, where he posts reviews, videos, interviews, interesting articles he finds, and research results.