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Patterns of Cotton Agriculture in Post-Bellum Georgia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Peter Temin
Peter Temin
Affiliation:
Professor of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139.
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Abstract

This paper reexamines the well-known increase in cotton production in the postbellum American South, revealing a rather less well understood pattern. The shift to cotton was confined to the Piedmont area of Georgia and South Carolina; it was not a phenomenon of the entire South. The changes in cotton production between 1860 and 1880 followed patterns quite different from those shown in an analysis of 1880 alone. And the 1880 pattern is best explained by the racial composition of the inhabitants, as noted originally by DeCanio, not the tenure variables emphasized in much of the existing literature.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , September 1983 , pp. 661 - 674
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1983

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References

1 Ransom, Roger and Sutch, Richard, One Kind of Freedom (New York, 1977);Google ScholarWright, Gavin, The Political Economy of ihe Cotton South (New York, 1978).Google Scholar

2 U.S. Census Office, Tenth Census (1880), v. 3, Agriculture (Washington, D.C., 1883).Google Scholar

3 Wright, Gavin and Kunreuther, Howard, “Cotton, Corn and Risk in the Nineteenth Century,” this JOURNAL, 35 (09 1975), 526–51.Google Scholar

4 McGuire, Robert and Higgs, Robert, “Cotton, Corn and Risk: Another View,” Explorations in Economic History, 14 (04 1977), 167–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Ransom, and Sutch, , One Kind of Freedom, p. 154.Google Scholar

6 Wright, Gavin and Kunreuther, Howard, “Cotton, Corn and Risk in the Nineteenth Century: A Reply,” Explorations in Economic History, 14 (04 1977), 183–95;CrossRefGoogle ScholarWright, , The Political Economy of the Cotton South, p. 166.Google Scholar

7 Wright, and Kunreuther, , “Reply”, p. 183.Google Scholar

8 Ransom, and Sutch, , One Kind of Freedom, p. 159. Ransom and Sutch calculated the proportion of farms in each size class that had a food deficit, while Gallman calculated averages for each size class.Google Scholar See Gallman, Robert, “Self-Sufficiency in the Cotton Economy of the Antebellum South”, in Parker, William N., ed., The Structure of the Cotton Economy of the Antebellum South (Baltimore, 1970).Google Scholar

9 The soil qualities were identified from the report on cotton in the 1880 Census. U.S. Census Office, Tenth Census (1880), V. 5, 6, Report on Cotton Production in the United States (Washington, D.C., 1884).Google Scholar The counties are identified by these soil qualities also in Sutch, Richard and Ransom, Roger L., “Economic Regions of the South.” Southern Economic History Project Working Paper No. 3 (Berkeley, 1971).Google Scholar

10 Temin, Peter, “The Causes of Cotton-Price Fluctuations in the 1830's,” The Review of Economics and Statistics, 49 (11 1967), 463–70;CrossRefGoogle ScholarWright, Gavin, “An Econometric Study of Cotton Production and Trade, 1830–1860”, Review of Economics and Statistics, 53 (05 1971), 111–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 DeCanio, Stephen J., Agriculture in the Postbellum South: The Economics of Production and Supply (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1974), p. 260.Google Scholar

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14 Ransom, Roger and Sutch, Richard, “The ‘Lock-in’ Mechanism and Overproduction of Cotton in the Post-Bellum South,” Agricultural History, 49 (04 1975), 405–25.Google Scholar

15 For different approaches to these arguments, see Temin, Peter, “Freedom and Coercion: Notes on the Analysis of Debt Peonage in One Kind of Freedom,” Explorations in Economic History, 16 (1979), 56–63;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and McGuire, Robert A., “A Portfolio Analysis of Crop Diversification and Risk in the Cotton South,” Explorations in Economic History, 17 (10 1980), 342–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 The sample consists of 73 counties classified by the 1880 Census as either in the Piedmont or in the Centraj Cotton Belt. Following Ransom and Sutch, urban counties were eliminated to get the counties in their regions 13 (Census soil quality I) and 9 (soil quality 23). A few additional adjustments were needed when comparisons with 1860 were done to adjust for changes in county boundaries: Rockdale was taken from Newton; Douglas, from Campbell; and McDuffie, from Warren.Google Scholar

17 Sutch, and Ransom, , “Economic Regions,” pp. 50, 66–69.Google Scholar

18 Regressing CHCT on CBDUM gives: CHCT = 198 - 198 CBDUM R2 = .16 (-3.6) The coefficients imply a tripling of the quantity of cotton grown in the Piedmont and stability in the cotton belt. These are close to the estimates in Table 3, although the difference between the two estimates for CHCT in the Piedmont should be a reminder that the sample used in Tables 4 through 6 is a subset of those in Table 3, and the Piedmont counties of Georgia in that sample are only a subset of the Piedmont counties in Table 3.Google Scholar

19 Alston, Lee J. and Higgs, Robert, “Contractual Mix in Southern Agriculture since the Civil War: Facts, Hypotheses, and Tests,” this Journal, 42 (06 1982), 327–54, have noted that the Census distinction between renters (for “fixed money rental”) and share croppers ignores many contractual subleties in post-bellum Georgia, but it still provides the best index of farm tenure that is generally available.Google Scholar

20 Wiener, Jonathan, Social Origins of the New South (New Orleans, 1978);Google ScholarHahn, Stephen H., “The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeomen Farmers and the Transformation of Georgia's Upper Piedmont, 1850–1890.” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University, 12 1979).Google Scholar

21 Since CHCT was negatively correlated with the share of cotton both in 1860 and 1880, a larger white population per acre was associated with a larger change in cotton grown while a larger black population per acre was associated with a larger share of cotton.Google Scholar

22 DeCanio, Agriculture in the Posibellum South;Google ScholarFogel, R. W. and Engerman, S. L., “Explaining the Relative Efficiency of Slave Agriculture in the Ante-Bellum South: Reply,” American Economic Review, 70 (09 1980), 672–90;Google ScholarRansom and Sutch, “The ‘Lock-in' Mechanism.”Google Scholar

23 Gallman, , “Self-Sufficiency in the Cotton Economy of the Antebellum South”.Google Scholar

24 Wright, , The Political Economy of the Cotton South.Google Scholar

25 Ransom, and Sutch, , One Kind of Freedom, p. 166.Google Scholar

26 Peter Temin, “Freedom and Coercion.” In fact, B was the profit maximizing point even at prices cited by Ransom and Sutch. That is because the land constraint has half the slope of the labor constraint, while the price line would have two-thirds its slope. (The price mark-up was 30 percent).Google Scholar

27 For an example of the written tradition, see Agelasto, A. M., The Cotton Situation (U.S.D.A. Yearbook, Washington, D.C., 1921). I am indebted to Rondo Cameron for access to the oral tradition.Google Scholar

28 DeCanio, , Agriculture in the Postbellum South, pp. 181, 211, 220–40.Google Scholar