Understanding Antebellum Financial Security During the first half of the nineteenth century, large-scale business enterprises began to emerge across the United States. To be sure, agricultural enterprises of significant size--slave plantations--were common in the South even in the colonial period, but before the early nineteenth century there were few other sizable business units in the U.S. This situation changed dramatically in the early national and antebellum periods as increased market

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... and integration allowed, and in some cases forced, American businesses in other sectors to scale up in order effectively to compete. This was particularly so in capital -intensive industries, wherein the growth in size and the adoption of the economically advantageous corporate form of organization often went hand-in-hand. Thus, we increasingly find relatively large enterprises, organized as corporations rather than as sole proprietorships or partnerships, becoming common in industries such as banking, manufacturing, internal improvements, and insurance in order to reap benefits associated solely with the corporate form. These benefits--fictitious legal personhood, divisibility of capital stock into individual shares, and limits on (if not outright limited) liability-were unattainable via the two other common forms of business organization.