By the end of the century, Britain was importing more than 20 million pounds of tobacco per year. As a result, enslaved people became a legal form of property that could be used as collateral in business transactions or to pay off outstanding debt. The end of the Civil War was accompanied by a large migration of new freed people to the cities. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Poverty was widespread, and many resented the many Northerners and Southerners who took advantage of the needy in the South as the war came to an end. In the conflict’s waning days, it is believed that Confederate officials stashed away millions of dollars’ worth of gold, most in Richmond, Virginia. In the 120 years that followed, they consistently saw lower pay and less upward mobility than similar white men, according to a separate 2017 working paper by economists Marianne Wanamaker of the University of Tennessee and William Collins of Vanderbilt University. The Post-Civil War Economy in the South By Thomas D. Clark* The Confederate soldier straggling home after Lee's surrender at Appomattox came home to ruin, Many Southern towns and all of the railroads were laid waste by the invading Union Army. There was an irony in all this. … For much of the 1600s, the American colonies operated as agricultural economies, driven largely by indentured servitude. The economists help confirm this by analyzing the swath of destruction left by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. A sort of sales tax was also levied on enslaved worker transactions. The typical American white family had 10 times as much wealth as the typical black one as of 2016, the most recent year of available data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances. Farmers were the only Southerners who still had money after the Civil War. By war’s end, the Confederacy had little usable capital to continue the fight. These linked data sets are historians’ version of the databases big tech companies use today to track and target users. The southern agrarian economy relied largely on free labor for its capital before the Civil War. It probably wasn’t just white privilege or that these wealthy lineages thrived based solely on their intelligence, talent or entrepreneurial instinct. King Cotton was a phrase coined in the years before the Civil War to refer to the economy of the American South. The Southern economy during during Reconstruction was in very bad shape because of the Civil War. Delegates agreed that each enslaved person would count as three-fifths of a person, giving the South more representation, and that the slave trade would be banned 20 years hence, in 1807, a concession to Northern states that had abolished slavery several years earlier. “The very first people I ever thought about linking over time were these slaveholders,” Boustan said. No matter how wide the gap between rich and poor, class tensions among whites were eased by the belief they all belonged to the “superior race.” Many convinced themselves they were actually doing God’s work taking care of what they believed was an inferior people. Most workers were poor, unemployed laborers from Europe who, like others, had traveled to North America for a new life. Unlike in much of the rest of the South, wealthy white families in Sherman’s path often had their land appropriated, seized or destroyed by Union forces. United States - United States - Reconstruction and the New South, 1865–1900: The original Northern objective in the Civil War was the preservation of the Union—a war aim with which virtually everybody in the free states agreed. The Civil War benefited the Northern economy, but it left the Southern economy in absolutely terrible condition. By 1863, after two years of warfare, the North was finally fully mobilizing its economy, while the Southern economy had peaked and was waning. It’s not as straightforward as going from plantations built on slavery to plantations built on sharecropping. What happened after that is disputed, the subject of many myths and legends. These white families seem to have drawn upon exceptional social connections, the economists find. The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning. And that’s just the beginning. The time: Spring 1865, at the end of the Civil War The place: The American South The problems: Destruction, hunger, lawlessness and violence More than a million African Americans were refugees, homeless, separated from family during years of slavery, wondering what to do now. When the topic of slavery arose during the deliberations over calculating political representation in Congress, the southern states of Georgia and the Carolinas demanded that each enslaved person be counted along with whites. Norway was once the kind of country Trump might’ve spit on. The whites with whom former slave owners are compared will have had similar stockpiles of land and property. Most notably, they married up. As the Union Army entered the Confederate capital in 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and millions of dollars of gold escaped to Georgia. But by 1880, the sons of slave owners were back atop the Southern socioeconomic hierarchy. Chapter 15: The South After the Civil War The Economy of the South After the Civil War Three reasons the economy of the South was not very strong before the Civil War 1. During this time, slavery had become a morally, legally and socially acceptable institution in the colonies. What guaranteed equal access to public facilities regardless of race? Slavery was so profitable, it sprouted more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi River valley than anywhere in the nation. However, the Southern economy received a large blow with a loss of cotton and other agricultural exports to the North. All Rights Reserved. 3. The cotton gin, which Whitney patented in 1794, could process 100 pounds in the same time. But less than two decades after the Civil War, Southern slave-owning dynasties were back on top of the economic ladder, according to an ambitious new analysis from … (Credit: Bettmann Archives/Getty Images). In time, the paper money lost 90 percent of its buying power. Building a commercial enterprise out of the wilderness required labor and lots of it. Methods evolve, and academics and genealogists unearth and digitize new data, such as the 1860 Census and federal records that help identify slaves and slave owners. These farmers were self-made and fiercely independent. Reconstruction refers to the period immediately after the Civil War from 1865 to 1877 when several United States administrations sought to reconstruct society in the former Confederate states in particular by establishing and protecting the legal rights of the newly freed black population. But those matches allowed the economists to estimate slave ownership in the larger population. “I’ve been working for probably 10 years on some of the proper matching technology,” Boustan said. And the invention of the cotton gin coincided with other developments that opened up large-scale global trade: Cargo ships were built bigger, better and easier to navigate. Enslaved workers leaving the fields with baskets of cotton. The findings by Boustan and her colleagues indicate generational inequality in the United States isn’t just about the money. The upshot: As cotton became the backbone of the Southern economy, slavery drove impressive profits. But even as tobacco waned in importance, another cash crop showed promise: cotton. The South, with its agricultural economy, … More than 1 in 5 white households owned slaves. The most difficult task confronting many Southerners during Reconstruction was devising a new system of labor to replace the shattered world of slavery. That kept sectional tensions high. Other industry was believed to be unneeded. Tariff taxes were passed to help Northern businesses fend off foreign competition but hurt Southern consumers. But in reality, the increased processing capacity accelerated demand. After the Civil War, the South's economy was hopelessly crippled. Now they’re looking north again. The Emancipation Proclamation both enraged the South with its promise of freedom for their slaves, and threatened the very existence of its primary labor source. Figure 1 plots the total value of all slaves in the United States from 1805 to 1860. By the start of the 19th century, slavery and cotton had become essential to the continued growth of America’s economy. The Civil War pensions shaped political life in America for the rest of the century. There are an estimated 40 million slaves in the world. But after the colonies won independence, Britain no longer favored American products and considered tobacco a competitor to crops produced elsewhere in the empire. But economists have developed increasingly inventive methods for linking data sets. Lastly, millions of … These open markets where humans were inspected like animals and bought and sold to the highest bidder proved an increasingly lucrative enterprise. Their fuel of choice? As more enslaved Africans were imported and an upsurge in fertility rates expanded the “inventory,” a new industry was born: the slave auction. FACT CHECK: We strive for accuracy and fairness. The Southern economy and farms had been destroyed during the Civil War.
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