Finishing Justene Hill Edwards’ history of the Freedman’s Bank, Savings and Trust, made me think of the biblical story of David and Bathsheba. Robert Alter’s translation and commentary helped me connect the dots, using his expertise on the Hebrew text to show patterns of theft that look familiar.
My high school AP government teacher always told me: “Names, dates, and places change, but concepts always stay the same.”
The concept here is the view from the roof.
The text says it's "the turn of the year, at the time when kings sally forth to battle.” It's fighting season, and kings go to war.
But David stays home.
the roof
The collapse of the House of David begins with a guy who isn’t where he’s supposed to be. In the book of 2 Samuel 11, the text is unambiguous: the armies of Israel are out and about, fighting the Ammonites but David is “sitting in Jerusalem.” He’s staying put, right at home.
Robert Alter — whose commentary will be the anchor for this piece — notes that the king has “a dangerous amount of leisure,” which is a very polite way of saying that King David is bored out of his mind. On top of this boredom, he’s powerful and looking for trouble. He has stopped fighting wars and has pivoted out of his career as warrior — the man who once slayed Goliath — into a career in asset management: moving other people's bodies and money around as if they were just entries on a page.
Now, in her history of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company, Justene Hill Edwards sees this same move in American history. In March of 1865, right after the Civil War was ending, the United States government decided to stop fighting wars and start managing assets.
They chartered the Freedman’s Bank. Abraham Lincoln signed the bill, but he was shot dead weeks later.1 His successor, Andrew Johnson, immediately began rolling back the protections Lincoln had built. Johnson threw out the promise of land grants — gave the land back to former confederates — and vetoed civil rights measures, ensuring the formerly enslaved would remain a labor class unable to own land.2 The bank became the consolation prize: the only surviving path to economic security in a landscape that was quickly ramping back up its racial hostility.
Upon founding, they set up shop in New York City, the nation’s financial capital. But soon, they realized that they needed something a little more powerful than just Wall Street: they needed legitimacy. So, they decided to move the headquarters to Washington D.C., right in the shadow of the White House and Treasury.
The location was a prop, borrowing the glory of the federal government without the guarantee of federal backing. It signaled that the bank was not only a vault for saving money, but a pathway to full citizenship. This was the sacred center of American power.
The bank initially wasn't pitched solely as a financial institution, but as Black folks’ rite of passage. The recruiters evangelized a gospel of thrift and pointed to the nearby Treasury building as if it were a temple and told the newly freed people that the white trustees were the high priests who knew all of the secrets of capital.
The tale as old as time: if you put enough distance — and paperwork — in between the thief and the victim, looting looks like legislation.
From the roof of his palace, David looked down and saw a woman bathing. From the high windows of their headquarters, the white trustees of the Freedman’s Bank looked down and saw a newly emancipated people trying to wash themselves of the residue of slavery.
David saw Bathsheba and saw something he wanted. The bankers saw the freedmen and saw fresh capital. In both cases, the men on the roof treated exploitation as a perk of the job.
the middleman
The Hebrew word that keeps showing up in the David narrative is shalach (to send). As Robert Alter points out, it shows up eleven times in this one chapter alone.
David sends Joab.
David sends messengers to retrieve the woman.
David sends Uriah to the frontlines.
All of the action he takes is done through middlemen. He never has to be the one to smell the battlefield, and he doesn’t have to talk to the woman.
The white trustees of the Freedman’s Bank used the exact same playbook. They wanted money — eventually piling up over $57 million in total deposits3, a number Edwards cites in her book — but they couldn’t just march into Black communities, show their white faces, and demand trust. They needed an intercessor, someone like Joab.
So they sent the Black church.
Edwards shows us how recruiters went straight to the pulpits.4 They leveraged the moral reputation of Black clergy to vouch for the government. Simple logic: you trust God, you trust the pastor, so you can definitely trust this bank. The depositors brought their wages — money earned by the same bodies that had, until recently, been money themselves — and handed it over.
But when Black leaders asked for a role in the local branches? When they asked for a say in how that capital was used? The records show that their concerns were not taken seriously, and ultimately dismissed. Give us your resources, they basically said. Let us — the white thinkers, the experts — handle the math.
the taking
Alter points out something a little disturbing about the Hebrew grammar in 2 Samuel 11:4: “David sent messengers and fetched her and she came to him and he lay with her.” The text is completely silent on Bathsheba’s feelings. The grammar switches subjects in the middle of the sentence; she stops being a person and becomes a grammatical object.
That’s why I’m calling it rape.
The sentence records a chain of actions. “She came to him” is narrative bookkeeping, and refusal isn’t an option when the king sends for you. Furthermore, the moral accounting confirms it: the text treats the wrong as a property crime against Uriah.
She’s passive here — things are done to her — and she doesn’t get a say in the matter until the violation is over.
There is also another detail that makes the violation even worse. The text mentions that she had just “purified herself from her uncleanness,” bathing to fulfill a ritual obligation, Alter notes. She was a law-abiding citizen — bathing on the roof, as a woman menstruating — doing exactly what a faithful Israelite was supposed to do.
The depositors of the Freedman’s Bank were also doing the same. They weren’t a naive people, knowing how much a dollar really cost because they had once been priced in those same dollars. Edwards notes that white observers were often shocked by how much the recently freed folks understood about finance.
As Edwards argues, these depositors knew about mortgaging because they had once been the collateral. They watched white owners secure loans using Black bodies as security. They knew exactly what happens when you couldn’t make a payment, having seen many of their own families torn apart. They didn’t need a fancy education to understand this, they had the memory of the auction block.5
So, they were keeping their end of the covenant. They were saving and trusting, but the system was built to enforce passivity. The ledger is the ultimate tool of this same passive voice.
It records the loss without recording the scream, turning theft into “negative equity,” and plunder into “bad debt.”
This kind of theft is nothing new. In 2 Samuel 12, the prophet Nathan describes it to David in a story:
A rich guy has a bunch of sheep, while a poor guy has nothing but one little ewe lamb. The poor guy absolutely loves this lamb, takes care of it as if it were his own child. But when a traveler rolls into the town, the rich man doesn’t want to touch his own herd. Instead, he grabs the poor man’s lamb and slaughters it for their dinner.
The Freedman’s Bank was a play-by-play to this short story.
While some 92% of the depositors were Black, the board was exclusively white. And when the lending started, the money only went to white borrowers. Edwards notes that the bank’s charter was ignored, no longer providing the essential protection for the money nor its depositors.6 The board members began to gamble with money, pouring the deposits and capital of former slaves into railroad bonds and shady real estate schemes.
Easy bait and switch. The bank took money from Black labor and loaned it to white capital. Edwards estimates that the vast majority of loans — some 80% or so7 — went to white borrowers. The depositors provided the feast; the board members cooked the poor man’s lamb because they were too greedy to be bothered to touch their own herd.
the death note
The shocking moment in the David story isn’t necessarily the rape, but what unfolds after — the cover-up. It starts with a problem: Bathsheba sends word to the palace saying, “I am pregnant.”
David needs to hide the evidence. He calls Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah the Hittite, back from the war, hoping to get him to sleep with his wife and pass the child off as his own. But Uriah is a good man, and his name literally means “The LORD is my light.” He refuses to go home and sleep with his wife while his fellow soldiers are out at war, sleeping in open fields.
So, David writes a letter. He tells Joab to put Uriah in the frontlines of combat, then pull the soldiers back, leaving him to die.
The text also says that David sent that same letter by the hand of Uriah.
Uriah carried his own death note, holding the scroll that ordered his murder, and since he was a loyal soldier — as Alter notes, David was indeed counting on that loyalty — he did not open it.
The parallel to the Freedman’s Bank is a bit scary. The depositors carried their passbooks like Uriah carried his scroll. They held the physical proof of their trust, not knowing that the ledger on the other end had already marked them as wrecked. They funded their own destruction.
And the same way Joab knew that he couldn’t let Uriah die alone without it looking suspicious, neither could the bank’s collapse be an isolated event. In order to kill Uriah, Joab had to send an entire squad into the fray. In Alter’s commentary, he mentions how the circle of death keeps getting wider.
And for the bank, in order to cover their theft, the bank’s trustees had to sacrifice the financial future of an entire generation.
the fall guy
The thread began to unravel with the Panic of 1873 — started by major failures like First National Bank and Jay Cooke & Company — initiating a spark of nationwide terror about America’s financial future. By 1874, that panic had reached Freedman’s Bank, and the corruption inside was impossible to keep hidden. The trustees knew that the end was near, and they needed a face to put on the disaster — someone to calm everyone down, or maybe just someone to take the hit.
They called none other than Frederick Douglass.
Douglass, arguably the most famous Black man in America at the time8, was made president of the bank in March of 1874; he was the ultimate intercessor. The most trusted Black man in America was brought in precisely because his trust could be spent.
As Edwards points out, he wasn’t the only one being used this way. Black men had been shut out of jobs at the bank for years, but right as it was collapsing, they hired some seventeen Black men as cashiers — part of just twenty-one Black men employed across all branches.9
The bank got visibly Blacker just as it went broke.
Douglass, lending his personal branding and name, also put his money where his mouth was, going so far as lending the bank $10,000 of his own money. Edwards notes that while Douglass was doing well from his speaking engagements, he wasn’t a rich man — certainly not compared to the trustees.10
Quite ironic, no? You have a man who had once been property putting up his own hard-earned cash to save the institution. Meanwhile, the white trustees — men of capital and political connections — wouldn’t put up one cent to help stop the bleeding.
He was Uriah, sent to the frontlines just as the generals were running away.
Three months later, they lock the doors, the trustees walk away, and guess who was left holding the bag?
Douglass.
living widowhood
In the biblical narrative, that story about the ewe lamb serves as a “rhetorical trap,” as Alter calls it. When David hears it, his “compensatory zeal” to appear just takes over, and he shouts, “The man who has done this deserves to die!”
Then Nathan springs his trap — Alter calls it the “direct knife thrust” of the story: Atah ha’ish.
“You are the man.”
David repents. He says, “I have sinned against the Lord.” And while he doesn’t die, the consequences stick around, and the sword never leaves his house.
But here’s the point where the American story deviates. There was no Nathan for the Freedman’s Bank, and nobody walked into the boardroom at the shady trustees and pointed a finger and said, You are the man.
But be certain, it wasn’t for lack of evidence. As Edwards details, a government examiner named Charles Meigs audited the bank in 1873.11 He saw the rot — the shady loans and their missing collateral, the millions in liabilities — but his findings were kept quiet. There was no public confrontation, no “knife thrust” of truth. The report was filed away, the findings were locked up, and the bank kept taking deposits from the poor while the rich plotted to make their exit.
This was no accident, nor a feature flaw, but the design. The American system is built to make that kind of accusation impossible. The bank’s federal charter acted as a shield — making looting look like the law. It spread the blame across bylaws and committees and finance reports and a ledger.
The system ensured the crime could never be addressed in the second person. There was no repentance because there was no “you” left to accuse.
The biblical story has a “you.” But even there, look at what David is punished for: not the violation of Bathsheba, but the taking of Uriah’s wife.
It was a property crime.
Her body, his property.
Her autonomy never enters the ledger.
And the sentence? Well, God doesn’t restore, nor make whole.
God multiplies.
“I will take your wives before your eyes and give them to your fellow man,” God tells David.
Ten concubines for one Bathsheba.
God designed the punishment to land on bodies that committed no crime at all. Neither does their autonomy enter the ledger either. They’re not victims to be made whole, just instruments of David’s humiliation — currency in both the sin and the sentence.
God authored this.
We are told that David is a man after God’s own heart. If this narrative is the evidence, then we must accept a terrifying reality: God’s heart is willing to trade the bodies of women to teach a lesson to a man, where cruelty is the method of instruction.
The curse plays out in what the text calls "living widowhood." In 2 Samuel 16, David's son Absalom pitches a tent and rapes the king's ten concubines — on the exact same roof where David saw Bathsheba. When David returns to power in chapter 20, he does not restore them — no reparations. He locks them up in a house. And even though they get food and stay alive, Alter translates their fate as being "shut up till their dying day in living widowhood."
David gets to write his own psalm, to perform his grief, cleanse his conscience, get therapy, and be remembered as a hero of the faith. Meanwhile, the unnamed baby dies, and the ten concubines serve a life sentence of silence. In the economy of American grace, the powerful get a comeback tour while the victims just get consequences.
Essentially, the women become nothing more than statistics.
Numbered — ten — but unnamed.
The 61,144 depositors holding accounts12 when the bank crashed were cast into a similar living widowhood. Edwards calculates that they were left without access to over $3 million13 — an overwhelming sum for a community rising out of the depths of bondage. But the loss wasn’t just monetary, it also functioned as narrative.
For 150 years, people used the failure of the Freedman’s Bank as the prooftext of Black incompetence. The story became that the “freedmen” just couldn’t handle money nor adjust to their newly freed lives. The victims were blamed for theft, and kept alive only as a warning, stripped of their names and identity.
And even after the bank closed, the looting did not stop.
Edwards highlights the case of George Stickney, the bank’s actuary. In the midst of the ship sinking, he snuck one last loan of $33,366.66 to a friend with no collateral.14 Just one final cash grab on the way out the door.
But the depositors refused to accept this erasure lying down. For decades, they fought and organized, petitioned their representatives, pressured Congress, and demanded what was theirs. Some bills were introduced, hearings were held, but progress was put to a halt every single time.
The official story shifted blame to the low-level administrators, while the white trustees who authorized the gambling were washed clean. They scattered, blaming the finance committee the way David just blamed the sword of the Ammonites for Uriah's death.
The federal government, which had chartered the bank and used the Treasury’s reputation to get the money, said it had absolutely no obligation to fix it. They were absolved of the very “trust” they had incorporated.
This is what “living widowhood” looks like — containment. The depositors did everything the right way: they worked, saved, and when they were robbed, they fought within the system. But, in the end, they were locked out of the room where justice happens, confined to a history that remembers them only as victims to their own misfortune.
the sword
The biblical narrative is uncompromising. You cannot reap theft and sow peace. David’s sin was done in secret, but the punishment was done in public.
“You did it in secret,” God says, “but I will do this thing before all of Israel and before the sun.”
The Freedman’s Bank was a secret sin of the American financial establishment, but the curse has unfolded before the sun. The sword, still, has not departed from the house. The racial wealth gap — a literal direct descendant of institutions like the Freedman’s Bank — is a wound in the American body.
You can see the damage done in the bank accounts, but it’s also seen in the scaffold of trust. For generations, people didn’t talk much about the Freedman’s Bank in Black households — the betrayal was too much to speak of. Instead, it fortified into survival. Grandmothers taught their children to keep their money in mattresses, or to bury jars in the yard.
Modern banks like to call this “financial illiteracy” or “underbanking.” Honestly, it’s neither. As Edwards argues, it is a completely rational response to history. The mistrust was absolutely earned.15
The mattress was the only institution that never lied.
We like to read the story of David as a tragedy of passion, but it’s really just one of power. It’s about what happens when the guys on the roof stop seeing people and start seeing assets. It’s about how easy it is to send someone else to do your dirty work.
The ledger of the Freedman’s Bank is closed, but the balance is still unpaid. The depositors are gone and the trustees are dead. But the roof remains, and from the high windows of power, the view hasn’t changed much at all.
after the asterisk
I finished Edwards’ book a bit upset, the kind that sits in your stomach for a bit.
I grew up hearing about David the hero and the so-called inherent benevolence of the American project.
Work hard, save your money, you’ll be good.
American Dream.
It’s all a lie.
The most frustrating part isn’t necessarily the theft itself, but how it was done. They used the Church to do it, using the one place that was supposed to be safe — the pulpit — to funnel lambs into the slaughterhouse.
The trustees didn’t disguise themselves, nor wear masks. No need to break in at night when they were erecting branches in broad daylight. And when they were done, they blamed the victims.
They created the myth of incompetence to cover a reality of a heist.
And sadly, we are still living in its aftermath. Every time someone talks about “financial literacy” in marginalized communities without mentioning the Freedman’s Bank, they’re actively participating in the cover-up.
They blame the woman for bathing.
The king sits in his palace, counting his assets.
The ledger remembers who took what.
The mattress keeps our savings — and our trust.
sources
the historical narrative
Justene Hill Edwards, Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank (W.W. Norton, 2024, link).
Dr. Justene Hill Edwards is a historian of African-American history and the history of American capitalism. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University and serves as an Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia.
- Awards: Winner of the 2025 Frederick Douglass Book Prize; named a Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction Book of 2024.
- Honors: A 2022 Carnegie Fellow, she has previously authored Unfree Markets: The Slaves' Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina (link).
the biblical analysis
Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (W.W. Norton, 2018, link).
Professor Robert Alter is the Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967. A scholar of immense range, his translation of the Hebrew Bible is the capstone of a lifetime of distinguished work.
- Awards: Winner of the PEN Center Literary Award for Translation and the Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Los Angeles Times.
- Credentials: A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a two-time Guggenheim Fellow, and a former Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has written widely on the European novel, American fiction, and the literary aspects of the Bible.