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The Plantation States as a Sub-Region of the Post-Bellum South

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Jay R. Mandle
Jay R. Mandle
Affiliation:
Temple University
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Extract

Recent work by Reid, Higgs, Sutch and Ransom and others is an indication that increasing scholarly attention is being addressed to the post-bellum southern economy. The object of this note is to raise a word of caution with respect to work done on the South in which the latter is taken to mean a more or less homogeneous section of the nation. In particular I would suggest that (a) substantial and important variations exist within this region, differences which may even be obscured when the South is divided along the usual Bureau of the Census sub-regional borders, and (b) a disaggregation of the South into more functional units than that of the Census Bureau may provide insights into the relative poverty experienced in the region, particularly of the black population in this area in the years before 1910.

Type
Note
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , September 1974 , pp. 732 - 738
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1974

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References

I would like to thank the Editor of this JOURNAL, Professor Nathan Rosenberg, and an anonymous referee for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. They, of course, have no responsibility for its contents.

1 See for example, Ransom, Roger L. and Sutch, Richard, “Debt Peonage in the Cotton South After the Civil War,” The Journal Of Economic History, XXXII (September 1972)Google Scholar; Joseph D. Reid, “Sharecropping as An Understandable Market Response—The Post-Bellum South,” and Higgs, Robert, “Race Tenure and Resource Allocation in Southern Agriculture, 1910,” Journal Of Economic History, XXXIII (March 1973)Google Scholar, and DeCanio, Stephen, “Cotton ‘Overproduction’ in Late Nineteenth Century Southern Agriculture,” in The Journal of Economic History, XXXIII (September 1973).Google Scholar

2 United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Plantation Farming in the United States (Washington: U.S.G.P.O., 1916), p. 16.Google Scholar In this survey a plantation was defined as “… a continuous tract of land of considerable area under the general supervision or control of a single individual or firm, all or a part of such tract being divided into at least five smaller tracts, which are leased to tenants.”

3 The Negro population of the six states combined came to 5,087,364, or 51.8 percent of the total Negro population of the United States in 1910.

4 During these years the South as a whole grew about as rapidly as the rest of the country, with Easterlin estimating its relative per capita income as 51.0 percent of the rest of the country in both 1800 and 1900. See Easterlin, Richard A., “Regional Income Trends, 1840–1950,” in Fogel, Robert W. and Engerman, Stanley L., The Reinterpretation of American Economic History (New York: Harper & Row, Inc., 1971), p. 40.Google Scholar

5 In this regard, see Baldwin, Robert, “Patterns of Development in Newly Settled Regions,” Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies, May 1956Google Scholar; Beckford, George L., Persistent Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Mandle, Jay R., The Plantation Economy, Population and Economic Change in Guyana, 1838–1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973)Google Scholar; and Myint, Hla, The Economics of Developing Countries (New York: Praeger, 1965).Google Scholar