Enslaved People Never Caught Up
What
Southern dynasties’ post-Civil War resurgence tell us about how wealth is really handed down
Andrew Van Dam, April 4, 2019, The Washington Post
Emancipation should have laid waste to the Southern aristocracy.
The economy was built on the forced labor of enslaved Africans, and
almost half the Confederacy’s wealth was invested in owning humans.
Once people could no longer be treated as chattel, that
wealth evaporated.
But less than two decades after the Civil War, Southern
slave-owning dynasties were back on top of the economic ladder,
according to an ambitious new analysis from Leah Boustan of Princeton
University, Katherine Eriksson of the University of California at Davis
and Philipp Ager of the University of Southern Denmark.
Their research upends the conventional wisdom that slave
owners struggled after they lost access to their wealth. Yes, some fell
behind economically in the war’s aftermath. But by 1880, the sons of
slave owners were better off than the sons of nearby Southern
whites who started with equal wealth but were not as invested in
enslaved people.
The sons of formerly enslaved people never caught up, of course. By 1880
more than 90 percent of them were still in the South, and most
still worked as farm laborers, tenant farmers or sharecroppers. In the
120 years that followed, they consistently saw lower
pay and less upward mobility than similar white men, according to
a separate 2017 working paper by economists Marianne Wanamaker of the
University of Tennessee and William Collins of Vanderbilt University.
continue
think
absolute power depends on absolute control over knowledge, which in turn necessitates absolute corruption
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