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Post Bellum Southern Economy

The southern agrarian economy relied largely on free labor for its capital before the Civil War. After the Civil War, restoring agricultural productivity and social stability to the South was an arduous and often unsuccessful process. According to AUTHOR (93) “Characteristic features of the Southern rural economy, well established by 1880, persisted up to the First World War: most black farm operators rented land under share-rent or fixed-rent arrangements, while a smaller but more rapidly growing number acquired titles to farm land.” The abolition of slavery set in motion a clash of expectations between former slaves and former slaveholders, white and black non-slaveholders, and Northern soldiers, missionaries, politicians, and would-be planters. It was typically the diverse and opposing aspirations of different groups that rendered the southern economy inefficient.

The most significant impact on the post-bellum southern economy resulted from the transformation of the plantation. The downfall of plantations did not occur overnight nor uniformly in different regions, but as an economic and social institution it became ineffective nevertheless. Following emancipation, laborers and landowners fought over their respective rights and obligations. Need and federal regulation forced freed people to accept work growing the south’s main crops. Black workers and others worked under different terms and different forms of compensation were experimented with across the south. Many rented plantation plots as tenants or worked them as renters for cash payment or a portion of the harvested crop. Yet, most of these workers became wage-slaves barely able to survive, and most of these kinds of arrangements failed to bring the independence or autonomy that freed people had hoped they would. As AUTHOR (89) notes, there were basically two kinds of labor contracts during the years after the war: “(1) the ‘standing wage,’ in which t...

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Post Bellum Southern Economy. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 07:59, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1686145.html