The rapid ascendancy of the rural furnishing merchant and the importance of his economic role are dramatized by the fact that within several years of the war the merchant had come to dominate the territory in which he operated. His influence extended well beyond the strictly economic life of his corner of the country to all aspects of the rural culture. In fact, the storekeeper, according to Thomas Clark,

The economic success of these rural stores had at first seemed to augur well for the farmers of the South. The advantages of having a local supplier were considerable amid the tumultuous changes of the years following the Civil War. But as the merchant consolidated his economic power, he began to be viewed in a different light.

The estimates of food surpluses and deficits on farms in the Cotton South presented in Table 8.3 are based on new estimates of the seeding practices and feeding practices on small southern farms around 1880. We constructed new estimates because of problems with our own earlier estimates and the inapplicability of the estimates of other writers who have examined self-sufficiency in the antebellum period.

All the estimates in the earlier studies were deliberately biased against the hypotheses being tested. Such biases were introduced as a check against possible overstatement of the authors' cases. The antebellum studies attempted to establish the presence of self-sufficiency, and thus minimized food production and exaggerated consumption. Our earlier postbellum study attempted to demonstrate the absence of self-sufficiency, and therefore we deliberately understated the consumption requirements of the farm. Having demonstrated the absence of self-sufficiency employing extreme assumptions, we wished to construct more realistic estimates for the present study. Nevertheless, where doubt existed concerning actual practice, we have consciously attempted to make conservative judgments which, if they erred, would likely exaggerate food production and understate consumption.

Obviously, farm practices in any period vary a great deal from farm to farm and region to region. In our estimates we have tried to mirror what seem to be the normal habits of the southern cotton farmer who operated a one-family farm, since that class of farms is the focus of our analysis of the lock-in mechanism.

The elaborate financial and merchandising network developed to serve the antebellum cotton trade had to be completely rebuilt in the wake of the Civil War. With an institutional change as fundamental as the replacement of the slave plantation with family-operated tenant farms, it was inevitable that these financial institutions would have to be restructured and based upon an entirely new foundation. Unlike the reorganization of agriculture, which was discussed, debated, and deliberated, the evolution of the new financial and marketing institutions took place amid little contemporary notice, let alone debate. Although not as controversial as political reconstruction, or as dramatic as agricultural reconstruction, this financial reconstruction was to have even more far-reaching repercussions. In retrospect, we can see that the changes in this sector had a dominant influence upon the future course of southern agricultural development.

Our conclusion that the supply of labor offered by the black population after emancipation declined by something between one-fourth and one-third the level supplied under slavery is based on a comparison of the relative amounts of labor offered under each system. Obviously, such a comparison is a generalization of many diverse situations reported. Our estimates accordingly are presented as rather broad intervals rather than as precise point estimates. They are intended to illustrate the effects of emancipation by establishing the change in labor supply between the last decade of slavery and the first decade and a half of freedom.

The procedure we employed was to use contemporary sources to judge the relative change in three of the four basic parameters that govern the labor supplied by any population: the fraction of the population at work, the average number of days worked, and the average number of hours worked each day. We were unable to make any judgment of the decline in the fourth factor, the intensity of the work effort per hour. We do, however, account for the differences between men, women, and children in this regard. With the coercion of slavery removed, freed blacks sought to lower each of these four factors determining the supply of labor effort. Table C.1 presents the detailed estimates we have constructed for each of the three changes and calculates the cumulative effect freedom had on the supply of man-hours per capita.

No event was more significant to southern history than the Civil War. For generations southerners continually referred to The War, wrote of The War, even dated the events of their lives by the years elapsed since The War. It is easy, of course, to understand this preoccupation. The South's defeat in the Civil War destroyed much of the framework of antebellum southern society, and what replaced it was often designed on radically different lines. Gone was slavery. Gone were the plantations. Gone were the cotton factors. In their place were sharecroppers, tenant farms, and rural merchants.

One minor problem created by our frequent use of contemporary citations deserves a brief comment. Some of the quotations we have reproduced use expressions that reflect the racism of the times. They refer to individuals as “niggers” or “sambos.” Contemporary whites frequently ridiculed and exaggerated the black dialect or made light of the freedman's inexperience with (and presumed ignorance of) free society and the free economy. Moreover, the conclusion these contemporaries reached regarding black behavior were often based upon a blatantly racist outlook. In repeating these contemporary statements, we do not support either the style of presentation or the conclusions reached. However, we feel it is essential to quote these passages rather than to paraphrase them. Indeed, by presenting the quotations in their original form we hope to convey one of the ways in which racism permeated the outlook and thinking of nearly everyone at the time. We trust that modern readers will understand the importance of our point and not be offended by the passages in question.

At the conclusion of a long and bloody civil war, with their emancipation from slavery and involuntary servitude, over 4 million Americans were permitted a kind of political and economic freedom for the first time in their lives. Beyond doubt, this change in the status of black Americans was accompanied by an unambiguous and substantial improvement in their economic well-being. It is also probable that most blacks were emboldened and enheartened by emancipation. But whatever the ex-slave's initial reactions to freedom – with its opportunities, its responsibilities, and its uncertainties – the material gains were real and stimulated an optimistic view of the potential for further economic advancement. This optimism was further reinforced when black workers found that they possessed the power, not only to shape their own destinies within the society in which they found themselves, but also to change that society, at least in a limited way. For nearly two and one-half centuries, black slave labor had been an integral part of southern life. Emancipation had destroyed the foundations of the southern economy and southern society.

The only previous attempt of which we are aware to measure aggregate per capita agricultural income for the South in the late nineteenth century is Richard Easterlin's estimates of ”agricultural service income per worker” for 1880 and 1900. Easterlies calculations are based on Carol Brainerd and Ann Miller's estimates of the number of agricultural workers per state, on the census reports of the aggregate value of farm products produced in each state in 1879 and 1899, and on estimates of national agricultural service income for 1880 and 1900. The farm product figures from the census were used to partition and distribute to each state the estimate of the agricultural service income for the entire country. Agricultural service income for the United States was based upon Robert Martin's estimates.

Easterlin's estimates put average agricultural service income in the Five Cotton States at $254.35 in 1880 and $258.30 in 1900, both measured in 1929 dollars. This suggests that agricultural productivity in these states grew at a rate less than 0.08 percent per year during the last two decades of the century. Easterlin's estimates of per capita personal income in the Five Cotton States for 1880 and 1900 hardly present a more favorable view of southern development in this period. In 1929 dollars, per capita income increased from $156.06 to $185.25, representing a rate of growth of only 0.86 percent per annum, little more than one-half the national rate of growth.