Hanging nearby, framed tax receipts from Mississippi and Virginia record revenues gained between 1848 and 1860, when states taxed plantation assets — land, livestock, clocks, human beings held as property and worked to death — to fund their governments’ operations. When South Carolina lighted the Civil War fuse in 1860, the economic value of slaves in the United States exceeded the invested value of all of the nation’s railroads, factories and banks combined.
Source: L.A. Times – Entertainment News