Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T17:37:23.589Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Crop Choices in the Piedmont Before and After the Civil War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

J. William Harris
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of History, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824.

Abstract

Census and tax data for three counties in the Georgia Piedmont in 1860 and 1880 are used to analyze changes in crop-choice decisions after the Civil War. Although changes in the lower and upper Piedmont were similar, the explanations for these changes in the two areas differ in important respects. In the upper Piedmont the use of fertilizer is a very important explanator, whereas race and tenure are of little significance. Fertilizer is also an important explanator in the lower Piedmont, but so are race, tenure, and poverty of farm operators.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

DeCanio, Stephen, Agriculture in the Postbellum South: The Economics of Production and Supply (Cambridge, MA, 1974).Google Scholar
Gallman, Robert E., and Anderson, Ralph V., “Slaves as Fixed Capital: Slave Labor and Southern Economic Development,” Journal of American History, 64 (1977), pp. 2446.Google Scholar
Glascock County, Tax Digest 1880 (Microfilm, Georgia Department of Archives and History).Google Scholar
Hahn, Steven, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York, 1983).Google Scholar
Hammond, Mathew B., The Cotton Industry: An Essay in American Economic History (New York, 1897).Google Scholar
Harris, J. William, Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society: White Liberty and Black Slavery in Augusta's Hinterlands (Middletown, CT, 1985).Google Scholar
Higgs, Robert, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865–1914 (New York, 1977).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hilgard, Eugene, U.S. Census Office, Tenth Census, Report on Cotton Production in the United States, 2 vols. (Washington, DC, 1884).Google Scholar
Otken, Charles H., The Ills of the South or Related Causes Hostile to the General Prosperity of the Southern People (New York, 1894).Google Scholar
Ransom, Roger, and Sutch, Richard, “Debt Peonage in the Cotton South after the Civil War,” this Journal, 32 (09 1972), pp. 641–69.Google Scholar
Ransom, Roger, and Sutch, Richard, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (New York, 1977).Google Scholar
Reid, Joseph D. Jr., “White Land, Black Labor, and Agricultural Stagnation: The Causes and Effects of Sharecropping in the Postbellum South,” in Walton, Gary M. and Shepherd, James F., eds., Market Institutions and Economic Progress in the New South, 1865–1900: Essays Stimulated by One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (New York, 1981), pp. 3355.Google Scholar
Temin, Peter, “Patterns of Cotton Agriculture in Post-Bellum Georgia,” this Journal, 43 (09 1983), pp. 661–74.Google Scholar
U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census [1860], Agriculture of the United States in 1860 (Washington, DC, 1864).Google Scholar
U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census [1860], Population of the United States in 1860 (Washington, DC, 1864).Google Scholar
U.S. Census Office, Tenth Census [1880], Compendium of the Tenth Census (June 1, 1880). (Washington, DC, 1883).Google Scholar
Walton, Gary M., and Shepherd, James F., eds., Market Institutions and Economic Progress in the New South, 1865–1900: Essays Stimulated by One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (New York, 1981).Google Scholar
Weiman, David F., “The Economic Emancipation of the Non-Slaveholding Class: Upcountry Farmers in the Georgia Cotton Economy,” this Journal, 45 (03 1985), pp. 7193.Google Scholar
Weiman, David F., “Farmers and the Market in Antebellum America: A View from the Georgia Upcountry,” this Journal, 47 (09 1987), pp. 627–47.Google Scholar
Woodman, Harold, “Sequel to Slavery: The New History Views the Postbellum South,” Journal of Southern History, 43 (1977), pp. 3255.Google Scholar
Wright, Gavin, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1978).Google Scholar
Wright, Gavin, “Economic Freedom and Economic Progress in the New South,” in Walton, Gary M. and Shepherd, James F., eds., Market Institutions and Economic Progress in the New South, 1865–1900: Essays Stimulated by One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (New York, 1981), pp. 85102.Google Scholar
Wright, Gavin, “The Strange Career of the New Southern Economic History,” Reviews in American History, 10 (1982), pp. 164–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wright, Gavin, and Kunreuther, Howard, “Cotton, Corn, and Risk in the Nineteenth Century,” this Journal, 35 (09 1975), pp. 526–51.Google Scholar