Example research essay topic: Distribution Of Wealth Percent Of The Land - 1,797 words

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The paper analyzes the economic system of the South before the Civil War. The aim of the paper is to provide evidence that the slavery system of the South was practical and profitable. The paper provides research and arguments that slavery would not die out if the Civil War had not occurred. Outline Introduction Discussion Economic system of the South Profitability of cotton industry Slavery households compared to free labor households Pros and cons of slavery system Southern antebellum and post bellum economies Economic strength of the South Conclusion American Economic History This paper attempts to show how observed patterns of resource allocation, production, and economic change in the American South may be understood in terms of a few basic principles, which reflect the internal logic of various economic situations and institutions. Generally, economists have found the slave economy readily amenable to their approach; its main features are well explained by price theory, and slavery seems to have functioned flexibly and efficiently in response to economic incentives, even generating a rapid rate of economic progress until the Civil War. This paper shows the economic basis for plantation slavery, and explains how slavery affected the structure of Southern society.

In the South, slavery was never in serious danger, but what doubts there were dissipated with the appearance of cotton in the South in the 1790 s. The significance of the rise of cotton in the 1790 s was that it opened up a much broader area of the South to commercial agriculture and the profitable use of slaves. The emergence of cotton is typically dated from invention of the cotton gin in 1793, but it now seems clear that the appearance of the gin was only a dramatic episode in a process which had its origins in demand-side pressure. The high profitability of sea-island cotton during 1785 - 95 stimulated many attempts to grow this long-staple variety farther inland; however, only the short-staple green-seed cotton would grow in the upland areas. The efficiency of slavery was essentially an allocation efficiency; because the supply of slave labor was elastic to the individual farm, factors of production were combined efficiently according to their relative prices and marginal productivities; both the division of labor within the family and the choice of crops in the field were much more heavily weighted toward more profitable activities producing goods for the market.

Slavery retarded the mechanization of agriculture, the development of manufacturing, the emergence of cities, and immigration into the South; that the South was on the verge of economic crisis in 1860; that tenancy and associated credit systems caused overproduction of cotton after the war; and that the Civil War was fundamentally caused by the economics of slavery. The elementary economic logic of slavery in a setting of land abundance has been outlined many times: if land is available to all comers, and if cultivation may be practiced at any scale without major loss of efficiency, then there will be no way for an entrepreneur to achieve a large absolute profit except with not free labor. Under a free labor system, wages would rise to exhaust all land rents. For some time, the system of indentured servitude functioned effectively in this situation, as workers contracted to repay their transportation costs from Europe with a term of service. Most of the seventeenth-century development of tobacco culture in Virginia and Maryland was based on white indentured labor, in a system with many of the economic features of slavery -- men and women could be bought and sold at any time, families broken up, harsh punishments inflicted for running away or misbehavior, and some planters were able to expand their operations well beyond family scale. Indentured servitude was inherently transitional, however: as terms of service were completed, as free-labor wages rose and the cost of transport fell, only the full-fledged system of involuntary slavery-for-life survived.

Land-labor conditions were initially similar in all of the colonies, as were attitudes toward profit-making and slavery. What is missing from this story is the fact that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, North American colonies had to buy African slaves on a world market at prices which reflected the high profitability of slavery in the sugar colonies of the West Indies. For this reason, despite the underlying similarity in factor proportions, slavery expanded only in areas where profitable export staples were available. Though cotton was of no commercial importance before the 1780 s, the growth of North American slavery revolved primarily around the fortunes of tobacco and rice, with indigo playing a briefer and lesser part in the mid-eighteenth century.

In the North, according to a leading student of antislavery thought, the original and essential grievance of the colonists who cared about the matter was that they could not buy enough slaves at a reasonable price. (Starobin) On the supply side, the rise of cotton and slavery turned on two decisive geo-economic facts, which appear contradictory but which are nonetheless both true: first, cotton could be successfully cultivated with varying yields in almost all sections of the South below 37 north latitude; second, the particular combination of soils, temperature patterns, rainfall, and growing season found in the cotton belt was uniquely suited for production of the varieties of cotton most in demand during the nineteenth century. The first of these meant that cotton allowed slavery to escape its narrow geographical enclaves on the coast. But cotton could also be grown by small-scale free farmers; non-perish ability and high value in relation to weight made it commercially feasible quite far inland -- onto the Appalachian Piedmont, the lower Mississippi Valley, and even the interior of Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee. From the late 1860 s onward, many observers referred to the shift as the overproduction of cotton, which they blamed on unwise decisions by planters, thriftlessness and carelessness on the part of tenants, and the perverse influence of merchant creditors and the crop-lien system. Economists who have studied the post bellum South more recently have had great difficulty interpreting this argument. It is often unclear, for example, whether the critics are referring to aggregate or to microeconomic overproduction.

If it is the aggregate -- and the distress over falling prices in the 1870 s and low prices in the 1890 s suggests that the aggregate was a concern -- then why should overproduction be linked to improvidence in microeconomic decisions, which had never been based on considerations of regional economic benefit? If, on the other hand, cotton is said to be overproduced at the farm level, then the economist wants to know why a lender should impose an unprofitable crop-mix on his own borrower; and even if one can find a plausible reason, how can we get around the evidence that cotton was in fact a more profitable crop than the alternative? (Wright) The 1840 s brought an impressive burst of activity in cotton mill production, but this wave of expansion ebbed quickly. The plantation slavery system, cotton cultivation, and dearth of sufficient white labor for mill work resulted in formidable competition for resources. Relatively few post bellum mills had pre-Civil War beginnings. Nevertheless, industrial-minded Southerners such as William Gregg continued to proclaim the potential profitability of a southern cotton textile industry that would concentrate on the production of coarse goods. (Wright) Despite the convergence of views on the profitability and efficiency of slave agriculture, cliometricians remain divided about the effect of slavery on the development of the southern economy. Their investigations into this problem have turned on five issues: the effect of slavery on the distribution of wealth; the relative level and rate of growth of average (per capita) income in the South before the Civil War; the explanation for this growth rate; the explanation for the decline in southern per capita income after the Civil War; and the effect of slavery on the rate and pattern of southern industrialization and urbanization.

It is now clear that critics of the South were far off the mark when they said that the majority of those who sell the cotton crop were poorer than the majority of our day-laborers at the North. The average wealth among farmers of the cotton belt in 1860 was $ 13, 124). (Mitchell) On the other hand, the average wealth of urban laborers in the major northern cities was less than $ 150, while the average for laborers in the rural areas of the North was hardly $ 400. The ordinary laborer, North or South, was too poor to purchase a single adult slave, let alone the land and other capital employed on the average farm of the cotton belt. Indeed, a Southerner who owned two slaves and nothing else was as rich as the average man in the North.

In fact, the typical farmer of the cotton belt owned about eight slaves. However, slaves represented only about 50 percent of their total wealth. As one German settler in Alabama in 1855 reported to Robert Russell, nearly all his countrymen who emigrated with him were now slaveholders. They were poor on their arrival in the country; but no sooner did they realize a little money than they invested it in slaves. (Russell) That, Russell said, was generally the way that those who settle upon moderately fertile land in the Southern states, quickly come into a possession of considerable property. (Russell) When the yeoman class of the South is defined to include both non-slaveholding farmers and farmers with seven or fewer slaves, their average wealth is nearly identical with that of northern farmers, although the distribution of wealth is somewhat more concentrated among southern yeomen. On the other hand, the average wealth of gang-system farms exceeded $ 56, 000, which is more than 15 times the average either for southern yeomen or for northern farmers. Thus, the distribution of wealth among northern farmers had an upper limit which did not exist in the South. (Gallman) It was not the pauper ization of the small farmer but the existence of huge agribusinesses -- the gang-system plantations -- that made the rural wealth distribution of the South so much more unequal than that of the North. (Foust) Indeed, a more detailed analysis of the southern wealth distribution suggests that it is, in some respects, quite misleading to lump the wealth distributions of slave-owners and free farmers together.

In 1850, planters owning twenty or more slaves constituted 20 percent of all farmers and owned over 62 percent of the land in Houston County. On the eve of the Civil War, planters numbered roughly 30 percent of the farmers, owned 77 percent of the land, and averaged thirty-five slaves apiece. Over that same decade, the richest 10 percent of landowners (the upper crust of the planter class) prospered beyond their wildest dreams: ...

Research essay sample on Distribution Of Wealth Percent Of The Land