Description

1640. A clerk records a name. The machinery begins to turn.

In a Virginia courtroom, three servants stand trial for running away. Two are white. One is Black. The white men receive four additional years of service. The Black man—John Punch—receives a lifetime.

A clerk named Tobias Quill records the sentence. He does not know he has just written the first entry in a ledger that will grow for two hundred and twenty-five years, consuming four million lives, generating billions in stolen wealth, and adapting—always adapting—to survive abolition, reconstruction, and every reform designed to close it.

From the architects of the slave codes to the bankers who financed the cotton trade, from the authors of Jim Crow to the designers of redlining maps, The Ledger of Souls follows the paper trail through nine generations of American history. Until a historian named Maya Quill opens a crumbling book in a Richmond archive—and finds her own ancestors on both sides of the page.

The ledger tried to count them. But it could not contain them.

And what it could not contain, it could not destroy.