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Patterns of Farm Rental in the Georgia Cotton Belt, 1880–1900

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Robert Higgs
Robert Higgs
Affiliation:
University of Washington and Hoover Institution, Stanford University
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Extract

The story of the post-bellum reorganization of southern agriculture has been told many times, and the main features of the transition from slave to free labor are well known. Throughout the cotton economy the initial experiments with wage labor gave way to share-rent tenancy; later fixed-rent tenancy became common as well. That these changes resulted from an adjustment process in which both landlords and laborers increasingly recognized different contractual arrangements as mutually beneficial seems clearly established. The existing literature is deficient, however, by failing to account for the continuing diversity of contractual arrangements in southern agriculture. By 1880 the organizational variety that would persist for more than a half century could be clearly discerned: some farms were cultivated by their owners, often with the assistance of wives and children; others by hired workers receiving a fixed wage; some by tenants paying a stipulated amount of products (standing rent) or money (cash rent) for the use of the land; still others by tenants paying a definite share of the crops as rent. The “mix” of these arrangements varied widely from place to place, even within a given state, and changes occurred over time. How can one explain the proportions in which these various arrangements were employed and account for differences over time and space? In particular, what determined the proportion of the farms rented? Of the rented farms, what determined the proportion rented under share contracts? Did the farmer's race influence the form of the rental contract he obtained? This article attempts to answer these questions with reference to the Georgia cotton belt in the late nineteenth century.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , June 1974 , pp. 468 - 482
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1974

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References

1 The literature on this subject is voluminous. Among the more useful discussions are Wharton, Vernon Lane, The Negro in Mississippi, 1865–1890 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947), pp 58–73;Google ScholarWilliamson, Joel, After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina during Reconstruction, 1861–1877 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), pp. 32–179Google Scholar; Enoch Marvin Banks, “The Economics of Land Tenure in Georgia,” Columbia University, Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, XXIII (1905),Google Scholarpassim; Robert Preston Brooks, “The Agrarian Revolution in Georgia, 1865–1912,” University of Wisconsin, Bulletin No. 639 (1914),Google Scholarpassim; and Reid, Joseph D. Jr, “Sharecropping As An Understandable Market Response: The Post-Bellum South,” Journal of Economic History, XXXIII (March 1973), 106–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Somers, Robert, The Southern States since the War, 1870–1871 (London and New York: Macmillan, 1871), p. 147Google Scholar. See also U. S. Commissioner of Agriculture, “Southern Agriculture,” Report for the Year 1867 (Washington: U.S.G.P.O., 1868), p. 416–17Google Scholar, 419; Southerner [pseud.], “Agricultural Labor at the South,” Galaxy, XII (Sept. 1871), 328–40Google Scholar; King, Edward, The Great South (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1875), pp. 298–99.Google Scholar

3 Dillingham, Pitt, “Land Tenure Among the Negroes,” Yale Review, V (Aug. 1896), 201.Google Scholar

4 Cheung, Steven N. S., “Transaction Costs, Risk Aversion, and the Choice of Contractual Arrangements,” Journal of Law and Economics, XII (April 1969), 26, n. 11.Google Scholar

5 Gray, L. C., Introduction to Agricultural Economics (New York: Macmillan, 1924), pp. 274Google Scholar, 277. See also Taylor, Henry C., Outlines of Agricultural Economics (New York: Macmillan, 1925), p. 312Google Scholar; Gray, L. C. and others, “Farm Ownership and Tenancy,” USDA Yearbook, 1923 (Washington: U.S.G.P.O., 1924), pp. 529–31.Google Scholar

6 Students of Georgia agriculture have come close to stating this hypothesis on various occasions. See, for example, Brooks, “Agrarian Revolution,” pp. 54, 105; Banks, “Economics of Land Tenure,” pp. 90–91; Range, Willard, A Century of Georgia Agriculture, 1850–1950 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1954), pp. 83–89;Google ScholarDixon, H. M. and Hawthorne, H. W., “An Economic Study of Farming in Sumter County, Georgia,” USDA Bulletin No. 492 (Feb. 10, 1917), 10.Google Scholar

7 Gray and others, “Farm Ownership and Tenancy,” pp. 515, 570, 573; Brannen, C. O., “Relation of Land Tenure to Plantation Organization,” USDA Bulletin No. 1269 (Oct. 18, 1924), 20–23.Google Scholar

8 Sources used in delineating the cotton belt include Brooks, “Agrarian Revolution,” passim, esp. p. 127; Loughridge, R. H., “Report on the Cotton Production of the State of Georgia,” U. S. Census Office, Report on Cotton Production in the United States (Washington: U.S.G.P.O., 1884), pp. 54–55;Google ScholarAgelasto, A. M. and others, “The Cotton Situation,” USDA Yearbook, 1921 (Washington: U.S.G.P.O., 1922), pp. 331–32;Google ScholarStine, O. C. and Baker, O. E., Atlas of American Agriculture: Pt. V, The Crops; Section A, Cotton (Washington: U.S.G.P.O., 1918), pp. 16–17Google Scholar. For a list of the 18 sample counties, see the Appendix. The numbers in Figure 1 correspond with the numbers in the Appendix Table, which makes possible the identification of each county on the map.

9 For the data and their sources, see the Appendix.

10 U.S. Industrial Commission, Report (Washington: U.S.G.P.O., 1901), X, pp. 455–56.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., p. 909.

12 Higgs, Robert, “Race, Tenure, and Resource Allocation in Southern Agriculture, 1910,” Joubnal of Economic History, XXXIII (March 1973), 151–59.Google Scholar

13 Loughridge, “Report on the Cotton Production,” passim.

14 Stone, Alfred Holt, “The Negro in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta,” American Economic Association, Publications, 3d Ser., III (Feb. 1902), 251.Google Scholar See also Cheung, Steven N. S., “Private Property Rights and Sharecropping,” Journal of Political Economy, LXXVI (Nov./Dec. 1968), 1107–22;Google Scholar Brooks, “Agrarian Revolution,” pp. 66–67, 79; Brannen, “Relation of Land Tenure to Plantation Organization,” pp. 37–38; Taylor, Outlines of Agricultural Economics, pp. 341, 343, 357; Gray, Introduction to Agricultural Economics, p. 288.

15 Higgs, “Race, Tenure, and Resource Allocation,” pp. 151–59; Gray and others, “Farm Ownership and Tenancy,” pp. 585,589.

16 U. S. Industrial Commission, Report, X, pp. 475, 479.

17 Brooks, “Agrarian Revolution,” pp. 75–101.

18 Banks, “Economics of Land Tenure,” p. 98.

19 See the studies cited in Higgs, “Race, Tenure, and Resource Allocation,” p. 152, n. 5.

20 The misapprehension was, reproduced in Henry Taylor's widely-read textbook, Outlines of Agricultural Economics, pp. 307, 357.

21 U.S. Industrial Commission, Report, X, p. 455. For other testimony indicating an absence of racial discrimination in the labor markets of the rural South, see Ibid., pp. 71, 120, 434. See also Nordhoff, Charles, The Cotton States in the Spring and Summer of 1875 (New York: Appleton, 1876), p. 39;Google Scholar Banks, “Economics of Land Tenure,” p. 86; Higgs, Robert, “Did Southern Farmers Discriminate?” Agricultural History, XLVI (April 1972), 325–28Google Scholar. Using unpublished census data on cash rentals in 1920, Chambers found that black tenants paid higher rents that whites. He argued that the difference was ascribable to a difference in supervision costs between the two races and presented evidence consistent with that contention. See Chambers, Clyde R., “Relation of Land Income to Land Value,” USDA Bulletin No. 1224 (June 11, 1924), pp. 55–57.Google Scholar One can only conjecture whether such differences in cash, rental amounts existed earlier. If Chambers' analysis is correct, they probably did.