In the preface to the new edition of this book we said that, rather than addressing our critics on matters of detail, we feel it would be more useful to answer this question: What would we do today that we could not do twenty five years ago? Our answer is that we could deal with far more data than we could handle in the early 1970s, and we could examine some of the questions we posed in greater detail and with more sophisticated techniques than those available when we wrote the first edition of One Kind of Freedom. Would this produce a very different book? The answer, is “yes and no.” The scope would be broader in that it would cover the whole South; the details of the story would be more precisely laid out; and the analysis of issues such as the “lock-in” and tenure would be pushed further than they were in the first edition. Yet, as we hope to show in this epilogue, our overall assessment of the impact of emancipation would not be greatly altered.

Whole South, Cotton South

When we designed the Southern Economic History Project, we heaped all eleven Confederate States, the Whole South, onto our plate. It was a formidable meal, and we quickly realized we would have to reduce the scale of our project. The sample of farms described in Appendix G of this book encompassed 61 regions and 993 counties in the entire South.