Devon Bull

ECON 765

Rosenbloom

Racism and Agriculture in the Late 18th Century

One Kind of Freedom: Reconsidered is a reexamination by economic historians Ransom

and Sutch of their earlier work published in the late seventies on race and agricultural

development in the postbellum American South. Specifically they look at the challenges facing

African Americans after emancipation. Their work leads them to examining the declining

production of staple crops such as corn, and the impact of racism in farm ownership and crop

sharing. They also use econometrics to demonstrate the impact race had upon the opportunities

available for African Americans. Using “new” analytical methods, significantly improved

computing power, and new data Ransom and Sutch seek to explore their old work and test how it

holds up under scrutiny twenty-five years later.

With the the end of the Civil War many African Americans had limited resources,

minimal schooling, and lacked many basic job skills. They found it incredibly hard to purchase

land due to racism, difficulty in obtaining credit (which was sometimes related to racism), and

lack of capital. Just 6-8% of all farms from all 11 of the former Confederate states covered by

Ransom and Sutch were owned by African Americans (pg 13). Many were forced into

sharecropping because of these constraints. Furthermore, a significantly higher percentage of

African Americans worked as farm laborers than whites and were simultaneously far less likely

to become farmers. Among African American families who owned a farm, family members were

also more likely to participate with work on the farm. These differences are significant and help

to highlight the difficulties facing African Americans in the post-war South.

Another major issue in the post bellum South was the dramatic decline in corn production

and other food crops. In fact, many farmers were continuing to grow cotton while their families

suffered food shortages. According to Ransom and Sutch: roughly 30.3% of all small-scale,

family operated farms in the Cotton South were “locked-in” to producing certain crops (pg. 28).

By “locked-in” Ransom and Sutch indicate that the farmer is unable to escape a vicious cycle of

debt and do as their creditors demand. Creditors appear to have possessed a large amount of

power through their high interest rates. This allowed creditors to dictate what was grown by

giving loans only to borrowers who planted what they (the creditors) demanded, which was

primarily cotton. The farmers would finish the year with an insufficient amount of food and lack

the funds to buy more. Thus, farmers were locked into “debt peonage” and forced to produce

cotton. According to Ransom and Sutch this means that a whopping 46.2% of farms were

operating inefficiently due to this “debt peonage” and its forced cottage production.

Alternatively, many farmers chose to avoid debt by only growing crops necessary to provide

food for their family before producing cash-crop goods like cotton. Essentially farmers were

either producing too much cotton and not enough food or a sufficient amount of food but little

cotton. This kind of setting isn’t beneficial to anyone, let alone recently emancipated African

Americans struggling to get ahead.

Ransom and Sutch draw their data from “manuscript schedules of the 1880 Census of

Agriculture and seek to pair demographic characteristics of farm operators in population

schedules” (pg. 8). They also found little difference across the South in terms of farming

capability, i.e. soil quality, crop choice, and geographic isolation (pg 8). This allows them to

examine different regions with the knowledge that a farm in a nearby region would experience

virtually the same results in similar conditions. However, I would argue that Ransom and Sutch

limit themselves by focusing only on the agricultural sector. They state that their research is

based on the “premise that post emancipation black economic history must be rooted in an

agriculture history of the South”. They go on to note that by 1880 nearly half of the African

American male laborers worked outside of the agricultural sector (pg. 17). So while you can

gather insights about the extent and economic effects of racism on African Americans in the

South, it will only be a partial examination of what truly occurred.

In addition to failing to account for a large portion of laborers outside of the agricultural

sector Ransom and Sutch don’t compare laborers in different regions. Instead they chose to focus

solely on the South instead of comparing it their findings against data of African Americans in

the North. How can we have a complete analysis of African American’s economic history as

they claim to be doing, when we are simply making comparisons within the same region?

Furthermore, why did Ransom and Sutch choose to gather their data primarily from small family

farms (pg. 12)? This approach leaves us with a number of questions. How did African American

farm ownership differ from in the North? Did Northern African American families work more or

less than their southern counterparts? Furthermore, what effect did racism have upon Northern

African American’s economic opportunities? How would that data compare to the South?

Ransom and Sutch clearly demonstrate that race was a major factor in Southern property

ownership. However, they don’t give data for important assertions they make. For example, what

was the estimated return on investment of owning one’s farm vs. sharecropping? They state that

sharecropping was “the least desirable form of tenure” but they never empirically prove that to

be true (pg. 13)? Clearly One Kind of Freedom is missing critical questions and worthwhile

alternative approaches in its research.

In sum, Ransom and Sutch do an excellent job of using the new tools at their disposal to

analyze the economic advancement of African Americans in the post-Civil War era. Their

analysis clearly shows the difficulties that many African Americans had to struggle to overcome.

However, some of their initial decisions on what they chose to study or ignore play a key role in

the final interpretation of their data. It would have arguably been more meaningful if they also

collected and compared similar data from the North. Regardless, it is quite clear that post-Civil

War racism had a significant and lasting impact on economic opportunities available for African

Americans in the former Confederacy.