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Inequality in the Distribution of Slave Wealth: The Cotton South and Other Southern Agricultural Regions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Albert W. Niemi Jr.
Albert W. Niemi Jr.
Affiliation:
University of Georgia
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Abstract

There have recently been a number of studies concerned with the equality of wealth distribution in the nineteenth-century U.S. Collectively, these studies have arrived at the following conclusions: 1) the distribution of wealth was much more unequal in the South than in the North; 2) both the North and South were characterized by a high degree of inequality. Gavin Wright analyzed the degree of concentration in several measures of agricultural wealth (improved acreage, farm value, slaves, and cotton output) in the “cotton South” in 1850 and 1860; he found no evidence to reject the traditional view that antebellum southern agriculture was characterized by a highly unequal wealth distribution. Wright was careful to point out, however, that his conclusions only held for the “cotton South” and might not hold for the rest of the slave region. In this paper, I have calculated the degree of inequality in the distribution of slave wealth in five major agricultural regions (cotton, grain, tobacco, sugar, and rice) in the South in 1860, and I have found no evidence that the wealth distribution in the cotton region was substantially different from that in other southern agricultural regions.

Type
Notes and Discussion
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 37 , Issue 3 , September 1977 , pp. 747 - 754
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1977

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References

1 See the following: Wright, Gavin, “‘Economic Democracy’ and the Concentration of Agricultural Wealth in the Cotton South, 1850–1860, ” in Parker, William N., ed., The Structure of the Cotton Economy of the Antebellum South (Washington, D.C.: Agricultural History Society, 1970)Google Scholar; Soltow, Lee, “Economic Inequality in the United States in the Period from 1790 to 1860,” Journal of Economic History, 31 (December 1971), pp. 822–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Soltow, Lee, Men and Wealth in the United States, 1850–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Gallman, Robert E., “Trends in the Size Distribution of Wealth in the Nineteenth Century: Some Speculations,”in Six Papers on the Size Distribution of Wealth and Income, Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, Studies in Income and Wealth, National Bureau of Economic Research, volume 33 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969)Google Scholar.

2 Wright, “‘Economic Democracy’ and the Concentration of Agricultural Wealth. ”

3 Wright's 1860 cotton South economy consisted of the Parker-Gallman sample of 5,229 farms drawn from all farms in counties producing at least 1,000 bales of cotton in 1860 (crop year 1859); see Robert E. Gallman, “Self Sufficiency in the Cotton Economy of the Antebellum South,” in William N. Parker, ed., The Structure of the Cotton Economy of the Antebellum South.

4 See Soltow, “Economic Inequality in the United States,” p. 824, and Men and Wealth, pp. 133–40.

5 There were only nineteen important sugar producing counties; the Appendix shows the counties included in each commodity producing region. In cases where a county would have been included in more than one commodity producing region, it was excluded from both. Four counties were excluded by this procedure—Montgomery (Alabama), grain and cotton; Plaquemines (Louisiana), rice and sugar; Rapides (Louisiana), cotton and sugar; and St. Charles (Louisiana), rice and sugar.

6 In calculating the degree of inequality in slaveholdings in each of the commodity producing regions, we are concerned with the distribution of slaves among slaveholders and adult free males within that region, and regional differences in acreage and number of slaves have no influence on the calculations.

7 The adult free male population is defined here to include all free males twenty years of age and older.

8 The agricultural counties included the twenty leading counties in terms of improved acres of farm land. (See Appendix.)