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>From: Debra Jackson/Harold Forsythe [mailto:djackson23@nyc.rr.com] >In 1860, the deep South states were among the ten richest in the US. >=20 By 1870, they are among the ten poorest. Why? Well, for one thing >the >wealth ascribed to planters due to their ownership of slaves in >1860s,=20 is not calculated as assets for freedpeople in 1870; it >simply=20 disappears from wealth accounting. In part, the >justification for this >is that freedpeople can borrow against their labor value in a=20 >sharecropping contract, but they cannot assert: our family as >slaves=20 would have been worth $11,000, so as free labor we are worth >roughly=20 the same (or a third less, in Michael Furlan's calculation.) >Can we=20 borrow say $1,000 against our labor to buy 1,000 acres of land? While not disputing that much of the decline in wealth in these states was associated with the loss of the value of slaves, and the consequent decline in land values, I think we should remember that an awful lot of physical assets were destroyed as well, and especially in those areas where slavery was most economically important, the North had an interest in making sure that the wealthy planters largely responsible for the war felt the pain. I think in particular of a bridge near Nashville owned by the Zollicoffer family, destroyed as part of the effort to prevent the Union forces from occupying the city. There were many similar capital goods destroyed during the war--and I would expect all were exempt from insurance reimbursement. The loss in human capital, in both dead and disabled, was also enormous, and hard to quantify. > It may be true that freedpeople labor was accounted as worth 1/3 less >than slave labor, but that is also a problem in accounting. The=20 >withdrawal of children from field labor by freedmen and freedwomen, was >an investment in human capital, as most of these children were sent >to=20 the new tax-supported, segregated public schools. The withdrawal >of=20 women's labor from the fields did not mean that black women >worked=20 less--as many white southern observers claimed--but that >women's labor=20 was invested directly in the medly of women's home >industries called=20 archaically huswifery. One of the intangible values of "playing the lady" was that freedmen were able to regard their women as having the dignity of being a housewife, not a field laborer. You can't put a price tag on it, but it was clearly worth quite a bit to the freedmen, or they wouldn't have done it. > The loss of production on plantation-sized enterprises streamed to=20 >the benefit of freedpeople, increasing their standard of living. The destruction of capital goods, such as bridges, ships, commercial buildings, and the grand estates, however, streamed to the benefit of no one. > For all these reasons, standard economic and accounting analysis,=20 >can't quite penetrate nor evaluate the full economic consequences of=20 >emancipation. I would completely agree. I doubt that it is possible to separate out the economic consequences of emancipation from those of the war--and I would not expect that emancipation's effects were dramatically different in scale from those of the war. Clayton E. Cramer clayton@claytoncramer.com 2. From: tenstring@EARTHLINK.NET Greetings, I completely commiserate with Professor Reece's discomfort with the reference to human beings as commodities. However, I would argue that that's the way slaves and workers generally were, and continue to be, seen by the propertied. The acknowledgement of the humanity of the working class, slave or free, as well as illuminating the way they were/are seen by their "owners" -- as a commodity -- together work to illuminate the systemic core values being expressed in these behaviors, then and now. Thanks, Doug Harvey --------------------------------------------------- Doug Harvey Johnson County Community College Overland Park, KS, USA
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