Mark McVay, Liberty University
Control of black labor in the Postbellum South is worthy of analysis because it served to support the continuation of the antebellum economy while at the same time, in the case of Georgia, provided a source of revenue to support a state institution that was not able to easily support itself due to the reduced tax base resulting from the Civil War. Davis noted, “The logical structure necessary to make historical reconstructions from the surviving debris of past economic life essentially involves ideas of history, economics, and statistics.”[1] Looking at three economic phenomena, black migration (and attempts to stop it) to the North, labor movement restrictions, and increased incarceration/prison labor of blacks in the South can give us a better understanding of how these related phenomena impacted our history.
Before the Civil War, whites comprised most inmates in the South. This is due to the practice of slave ownership under which most crimes committed by slaves resulted in the execution of punishment on the plantation rather than in a prison.[2] The use of convict labor to work plantations was at least partially the result of northern Republicans' failure to reassign landed property rights even while they eliminated actual ownership of other human beings.[3] According to Mandle, this left the basic structure of the Southern economy intact and this economy required low-cost labor to return to profitability. Mandle also noted that because the Southern economy was heavily dependent on capital-intensive crops such as cotton, blacks who had little access to capital were unable to gain land ownership.[4] This in turn led to an increasing exodus of black labor from the South as they sought opportunity elsewhere (See the chart below).
These numbers lead one to deduce that this lack of available cheap labor may have contributed to the tendency to rely on the incarcerated. This data demonstrates a problem with relying on below-market labor; the labor flows to a higher wage market when allowed to move freely.
Chart 1[5]
According to Naidu, one migration and job movement were countered by tampering laws. Naidu collected data on tampering laws, cotton prices and wage mobility. Anti-enticement laws restricted individuals and businesses from hiring or recruiting individuals employed or contracted elsewhere, effectively reducing many blacks back to the level of servitude. After compiling the data, Naidu found, as predicted, that both physical and wage mobility were negatively impacted by anti-enticement or tampering laws.[6]
Why did convict labor and specifically black convict labor become so prevalent in the South? The reasons are not difficult to locate. Schwartz noted that the penal system in the South was complicit in the rise of prison labor for one simple reason. Because of the war, prisons in the South lost their tax base and therefore lacked the resources to operate at anything but a significant loss. Farming out labor to local plantations solved the revenue shortfall for the cash-strapped institutions.[7] After the end of slavery, as stated earlier, the plantation-based penal system ceased to exist. This meant that blacks who broke the law, needed to enter the regular state penal systems of the South. Schwartz pointed out that not only did blacks quickly make up a vast majority of inmates, but the state prison system of Georgia also incarcerated 34.8% more people between 1866 and 1880 than it did in the 48 years before the Civil War combined.[8]
Chart 2[9]
Mandle, Naidu and Scwartz’s quantitative studies of migration, anti-recruiting, and black incarceration support the established view that white southerners created a “new state of slavery” in the postbellum South. Their research opened up several questions for me. For instance, did this forced labor society depress productivity because of its forced nature? Could the South have improved the lives of everyone by embracing incentives rather than oppression? Finally, I am very curious to know how Southern cotton production compared to other cotton-based economies such as Egypt’s Nile basin during this time.
Bibliography
Carson, Scott Alan. “Black and White Labor Market Outcomes in the Nineteenth Century American South.” Humanomics, 30 Aug 2010, Vol. 26, Issue 3, pages 164 – 177
Davis, Lance E., Jonathan R. T. Hughes, and Stanley Reiter. “Aspects of Quantitative Research in Economic History.” The Journal of Economic History 20, no. 4 (1960): 539–47. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2114392.
Mandle, Jay R. “Continuity and Change: The Use of Black Labor After the Civil War.” Journal of Black Studies 21, no. 4 (1991): 414–27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2784686.
Naidu, Suresh. “Recruitment Restrictions and Labor Markets: Evidence from the Postbellum U.S. South.” Journal of Labor Economics 28, no. 2 (2010): 413–45. https://doi.org/10.1086/651512.
Schwarz, Susanne. "“The Spawn of Slavery”? Race, State Capacity, and the Development of Carceral Institutions in the Postbellum South." Studies in American Political Development 37, no. 2 (2023): 181-98. doi:10.1017/S0898588X22000281.
[1] Lance Davis, Jonathan R. T. Hughes, and Stanley Reiter. “Aspects of Quantitative Research in Economic History.” The Journal of Economic History 20, no. 4 (1960): 540.
[2] Scott Carlson. “Black and White Labor Market Outcomes in the Nineteenth Century American South.” Humanomics, 30 Aug 2010, Vol. 26
[3] Jay Mandle. “Continuity and Change: The Use of Black Labor After the Civil War.” Journal of Black Studies 21, no. 4 (1991): 419
[4] Ibid., 421
[5] Jay Mandle. “Continuity and Change: The Use of Black Labor After the Civil War.” Journal of Black Studies 21, no. 4 (1991): 421
[6] Suresh Naidu. “Recruitment Restrictions and Labor Markets: Evidence from the Postbellum U.S. South.” Journal of Labor Economics 28, no. 2 (2010): 413–45
[7] Susanne Schwartz. "“The Spawn of Slavery”? Race, State Capacity, and the Development of Carceral Institutions in the Postbellum South." Studies in American Political Development 37, no. 2 (2023).
[8] Ibid., 190.
[9] Susanne Schwartz. "“The Spawn of Slavery”? Race, State Capacity, and the Development of Carceral Institutions in the Postbellum South." Studies in American Political Development 37, no. 2 (2023).
Comments