The title of this book expresses its central theme: economic competition and racial coercion as joint determinants of the material condition of America's blacks during the first half century after their emancipation. Racial coercion has received extensive scholarly attention, but important competitive processes remain largely overlooked. I seek to redress the balance, to show that competitive forces profoundly influenced black economic life, indeed, that competition played an important part in protecting blacks from the racial coercion to which they were peculiarly vulnerable. Lest this be mistaken for economics run rampant I must warn the reader that my interpretation attaches fundamental importance to political and legal forces in the shaping of black economic development: the exclusion of blacks from effective participation in politics and from the equal protection of the law had both direct and indirect effects that retarded their economic progress. To say that their progress was retarded, however, is not to say that no progress occurred. I have devoted considerable attention to documenting and crudely quantifying the substantial economic gains realized by the black population during the half century after 1865.

My objectives are limited, and no one should mistake the present volume for a comprehensive economic history of black Americans in the post-Civil War era. For example, although I discuss the relation between the postbellum credit system of the South and black economic progress, I make no attempt to resolve the many open questions about the business methods of the merchant creditors, the extent of their monopoly power, or their role in the land tenure system of the rural South.