The rural South has undergone a remarkable transformation in the last half century. The changes in the physical landscape are immediately apparent: the millions of tenants, sharecroppers, and wage laborers who once raised and picked the South's crops and lived in its tumbledown tarpaper shacks are gone, replaced by machines moving methodically across its fields. But the changes in the social landscape that accompanied these physical changes are no less striking: Gone, too, is the complex system of reciprocal duties and obligations that had bound agricultural employers and their workers, the elaborate but often unspoken protocol of paternalism that shaped much of day-to-day life in the rural South. In this book, we will show how paternalism emerged in the postbellum years to reduce the cost of obtaining, motivating, and retaining labor in cotton production following the abolition of slavery. We will also explore the economic and political transformations caused by the decline of paternalism, changes less visible but no less important than the mechanization of cotton production.

The cost of obtaining labor in Southern agriculture included making sure an adequate supply of laborers could be hired and making sure that the laborers who were hired worked hard at their tasks (reducing the cost of monitoring labor) and stayed on through the harvest (reducing turnover in the farm labor force). We will describe the circumstances that caused the emergence of paternalism as part of an implicit contract between employers and workers that helped solve these problems.