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Up, Down, and Off the Agricultural Ladder: New Evidence and Implications of Agricultural Mobility for Blacks in the Postbellum South

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Up, down, and off the Agricultural Ladder: New Evidence and Implications of Agricultural
Mobility for Blacks in the Postbellum South
Author(s): Lee J. Alston and Kyle D. Kauffman
Source:
Agricultural History,
Vol. 72, No. 2, African Americans in Southern Agriculture: 1877-
1945 (Spring, 1998), pp. 263-279
Published by: Agricultural History Society
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Up, Down, and Off the Agricultural Ladder:
New Evidence and Implications of Agricultural Mobility for
Blacks in the Postbellum South
LEE J. ALSTON
KYLED.KAUFFMAN
Upon emancipation from slavery most blacks remained employed in south?
ern agriculture. The legacy of slavery left most former slaves without the
capital or land necessary to become either a true tenant or a landowner.
This, coupled with the widespread racism in the South, left most blacks
perched on the lowest rungs of the agricultural ladder. Past interpretations
of black agricultural workers' welfare have been muddied by the fact that
until 1920 the census conflated several of the rungs of the agricultural lad?
der. Most importantly, it combined the very similar sounding, yet in prac?
tice extremely different, categories of share tenant and sharecropper. By in-
correctly classifying sharecroppers (commonly called croppers) as tenants,
the Census Bureau placed too many workers on that more affluent rung of
the ladder. Realizing its error, the bureau began enumerating sharecroppers
separately with the 1920 census.1
LEE J. ALST0N is a professor
of economics
and director of the Center for International
Business
Education and Research at the University
of lllinois and a research associate with the National
Bu?
reau
for Economic
Research.
He is also author of two forthcoming
books. KYLE D. KAUFFMAN
is assistant
professor
of economics at Wellesley College and
visiting fellow in the Department
of
Economic
History
ofthe London School of Economics.
Currently
both are
working
on a project
that
reexamines
a variety
of southern
agricultural tenancy
issues in the
postbellum period.
This work has
benefited
from discussions with Lee Craig,
Lou Ferleger,
Joe Ferrie,
Mary Gregson,
Robert
Higgs,
Larry
Neal, Morton
Schapiro,
Susan
Skeath,
participants
of workshops
at the University
of lllinois
and
Wellesley College and
participants
of the
Agricultural
History Society Symposium
on African
Americans in Southern
Agriculture,
1877-1945. Jennifer
Donathan
provided
able research assistance.
Kauffman
gratefully
acknowledges support
from
the Mildred McAfee Horton
Faculty
Research
Fund
of Wellesley
College and the
Arthur
H. Cole Fund of the Economic
History
Association.
1. Fourteenth
Census
ofthe United
States,
1920,
Agriculture.
The term
"agricultural
ladder" is
generally
used to refer to the hierarchy
of agricultural occupations,
which range
from
wageworker
(at the bottom) through cropper,
tenant, and,
for some, plantation
owner (at the top).
Agricultural History / Volume 72 / Number
2 / Spring
1998 ?Agricultural History Society
263
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264 / Agricultural History
Because of this census error and because many historians still do not
understand the real differences between share tenants and croppers, a com?
plete picture of the black occupational status has yet to be painted. An es?
timate of the number of black (and consequently white) croppers in 1900
and 1910 can produce a more detailed and accurate portrait of black agri?
cultural workers in terms of their movement up, down, and off the agricul?
tural ladder. From these relative movements, we can also begin the discus?
sion of the welfare implications of these movements over time.2
For instance, it is generally believed that blacks disproportionately con?
stituted the majority of the lowest rungs on the ladder (wageworkers and
sharecroppers). With these data we will be able to judge black involvement
in agriculture, and how it varied over time. One striking finding is that rel?
ative movements on the ladder were similar for blacks and whites, with the
exception of the 1910s, which seemed to have been worse for blacks.
Much misunderstanding of the postbellum southern agricultural system
resulted from the misinterpretations of the census definition of "tenant,"
specifically "share tenant." From 1920, when the United States Census
changed its "share tenant" category to exclude "sharecroppers," share ten?
ants and croppers were, in the eyes of the census, fundamentally different
types of farm operators. Although a cropper farmed a certain plot and re?
ceived a share of the harvest from that plot as income, he differed from
other tenants in important respects, especially when he worked on a plan?
tation. He was usually closely supervised; he made none ofthe major farm?
ing decisions; and he generally supplied no input besides labor services. In
most southern states he had no legal possession ofthe land except the right
of daily access at the landlord's pleasure. He resembled a wage laborer
2. For
a discussion of the real
and
practical
differences between
share tenants and
sharecrop?
pers, see Lee J. Alston and Kyle D. Kauffman,
"Agricultural
Chutes and Ladders:
New Estimates
of Sharecroppers
and
True
Tenants
in the South, 1900-1920,"
lournal
of Economic
History
51 (June
1997): 464-575; Harold
D. Woodman,
"Post-Civil War
Southern
Agriculture
and the Law,"
Agri?
cultural
History
53 (January
1979): 319-37; Harold D. Woodman,
New South,
New Law
(Baton
Rouge: Louisiana
State University
Press, 1995); and Harold D. Woodman, "Class, Race, Politics,
and the Modernization ofthe Postbellum
South,"
Journal
of Southern
History
63 (February 1997):
3-22. This clear distinction is not, however, a reinterpretation.
See for instance the distinction
made by W. E. B. DuBois, "The
Negro Farmer,"
in Contributions
by W.
E. B. DuBois in Govern?
ment
Publications
and Proceedings,
ed. Herbert
Aptheker (1906; reprint,
New York:
Kraus-Thomp-
son, 1980), 258.
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Up, Down, and Off the Agricultural Ladder / 265
more than a true tenant in every respect except his customary occupancy
of a fixed plot and his receipt of income in the form of a crop share from
that plot. The notion that croppers were not actually "tenants" in the cur?
rent sense of the term was set out clearly in a number of court cases. The
Georgia Supreme Court ruling in 1872 in the case of Appling v. Odum,
which later courts upheld, provides an example of the distinction made by
the courts:
There is an obvious distinction between a cropper and a tenant. One has
a possession of the premises exclusive of the landlord, the other has not.
The one has the right for a fixed time, the other has only a right to go on
the land to plant, work, and gather the crop.... The case of the cropper is
rather a mode of paying wages than a tenancy. The title to the crop sub?
ject to wages is in the owner of the land.3
In the agricultural censuses between 1920 and 1959, croppers were
counted separately, being defined as share tenants to whom the landlord
furnished work stock (or, from 1940 onward, tractor power). This count-
ing procedure provides an idea of the number of people involved, and
hence the seriousness, of misclassifying croppers as tenants. In fact, the
1920 census reports nearly 18 percent of southern farm operators as crop?
pers. When broken down by race, over 36 percent of black farm operators
were classified as croppers, whereas just under 10 percent of white farm
operators were given that designation. In addition, these enumerations
show that a large proportion of the tenant farms in the South were cropper
plots (e.g., 35 percent in 1920, 38 percent in 1950). Among black tenants,
the proportion was even higher (47 percent in 1920, 54 percent in 1950).4
3. Sixteenth Census
ofthe United States:
1940,
Agriculture, Appendix
Section
of Special Study?
Plantations;
Lee J. Alston and Robert
Higgs, "Contractual
Mix in Southern
Agriculture
Since the
Civil War:
Facts,
Hypotheses
and
Tests," Journal
of Economic
History
42 (June 1982):
327-53; Fred
A. Shannon, The Farmers Last Frontier:
Agriculture (New York:
Harper
and Row, 1945); Wood-
man, "Post-Civil
War";
Woodman,
New South.
On the issue of legal access to the land,
see Charles
S. Mangum
Jr., The
Legal
Status
of the Tenant Farmer
in the Southeast
(Chapel Hill: University
of
North Carolina
Press, 1952). Robert
P.
Brooks,
"The
Agrarian
Revolution in Georgia,
1865-1912,"
Bulletin
of University
of Wisconsin,
no. 639, History Series, vol. 3, no. 3 (Madison: University of
Wisconsin, 1914), 67.
4. Sixteenth Census
ofthe United
States,
Plantations Census
of
Agriculture,
1950,
vol. 2, General
Report,
"Color, Race, and Tenure of Farm
Operators,"
Table
4.
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266 / Agricultural History
Provided with this more clearly defined classification of southern farm-
workers, historians could, starting with the 1920 census returns, make more
precise inferences regarding locations on the agricultural ladder. For ex?
ample, had the census of 1920 continued to misclassify croppers as share
tenants, it would have reported 38 percent rather than 20 percent of the
population in the relatively more affluent category of share tenant.5
It is important therefore to understand the differences between the vari?
ous groups of agricultural workers in the South. Over the postbellum period,
agricultural contracting evolved into three principal categories: wage, share?
crop, and tenant. The different positions of labor have been characterized as
representing a hierarchical agricultural ladder. As the name implies there
were several "rungs," through which an agricultural worker could ascend
(or descend). With each successively higher rung came greater job respon?
sibility, increased control of work pace, and, on average, more pay. For ex?
ample, Louis Ferleger found that in 1913 sharecropper income was $333,
compared to $398 for share tenants and $478 for cash tenants.6
The lowest position was that of the wageworker. A wageworker was
typically a young man who had little human or physical capital. Because
reward (wages) was not linked to effort, there was no direct incentive for
these laborers to perform their jobs well, unless monitored carefully. Con-
5. Alston and Kauffman,
"Agricultural
Chutes and Ladders."
6. For
the economics of tenure
contracts
in the South,
see Alston
and Kauffman,
"Agricultural
Chutes
and Ladders";
Lee J. Alston and Kyle D. Kauffman,
"The Market for Paternalism: Racial
Differences in Cash
Tenancy
Rates Across the U.S. South"
(Wellesley College, Wellesley,
Mass.,
1997, mimeographed); Jeremy
Atack, "Tenants and Yeoman
in the Nineteenth
Century,"
Agricul?
tural
History
62 (Summer 1988): 6-32; Jeremy
Atack,
"The
Agricultural
Ladder
Revisited:
A New
look at an Old Question
with Some Data for 1860,"
Agricultural
History
63 (Winter 1989): 1-25;
Gavin Wright, Old South, New South (New York:
BasicBooks, 1986); Gerald David Jaynes,
Branches
Without
Roots
(New York:
Oxford
University
Press, 1986);
Alston and Higgs, "Contrac-
tural
Mix";
Lee J. Alston, "Tenure Choice in Southern
Agriculture,
1930-1960," Explorations
in
Economic
History
18 (July 1981): 211-32; Ralph
Shlomowitz, "The Origins
of Southern Share?
cropping,"
Agricultural
History
53 (July 1979): 557-75; Roger
L. Ransom
and Richard
Sutch, One
Kind
of Freedom:
The
Economic
Consequences
of Emancipation
(Cambridge:
Cambridge University
Press, 1977); Joseph
D. Reid, "Sharecropping
as an Understandable Market
Response:
The Post-
Bellum South," Journal
of Economic
History
33 (March 1973): 106-30; Joseph D. Reid, "Share?
cropping in History and Theory,"
Agricultural
History
49 (April 1975): 426-40; Robert
Higgs,
Competition
and Coercion: Blacks
in the American
Economy,
1865-1914
(New York:
Cambridge
Uni?
versity Press, 1974); Louis Ferleger,
"Sharecropping
Contracts
in the Late-Nineteenth-Century
South,"
Agricultural History
67 (Summer 1993): 34.
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Up, Down, and Off the Agricultural Ladder / 267
sequently, they usually worked the land closest to the main house for easy
supervision.7
Next was the sharecropper. This class of ?armworker existed only in the
South. Croppers, like wageworkers, had little physical capital though gen?
erally more work experience. Legally, a sharecropper was a wageworker
paid with a share of the crop. Because of the greater work incentives asso?
ciated with getting paid with a proportion of the output, sharecroppers were
supervised less than wageworkers. Sharecroppers were not enumerated by
the Census Bureau until 1920; however, Alston and Kauffman produced
state-level estimates of the total number of croppers for 1900 and 1910.8
Once croppers accumulated more agricultural know-how, physical cap?
ital (through savings), and the trust of the landlord, they might move up the
ladder to become "true tenants." Tenancy took two basic forms. Share ten?
ants paid their rent to the landlord in the form of a portion of the crop yield,
leaving the landlord open to moral hazard problems, but less so than with
croppers. For example, typically a share tenant received two-thirds of the
output. Under these conditions the tenant would have an incentive to stop
working even though the overall value of his labor effort is high. This is so
because he receives only a fraction of the value of that output as payments
(his share of the output), but he alone must outlay the entire cost of the
work effort. Two factors mitigated the stinting of labor: landlords moni-
tored labor and competition among prospective tenants for the next year's
contracts increased labor effort.9
7. Thomas
J. Woofter,
Landlord and Tenant on the Cotton Plantation
(Washington,
D.C: Works
Progress
Administration,
1936).
8. Woodman documents the existence of a few croppers
in northern
states in New South,
74.
See Woodman,
"Post-Civil War" and New South,
on the legal distinction between croppers
and
share
tenants. See Alston and Kauffman,
"Agricultural
Chutes and Ladders,"
for aggregate
state-
level estimates of croppers.
The federal Census of Agriculture
did not contain an enumeration of
wageworkers.
Their
approximate
number is given in the Census of Occupations,
but the accuracy
of this source
is questionable
regarding
the actual
number
of wageworkers
in agriculture.
The time
of year in which the census was conducted can cause enormous variation in the number of wage?
workers
reported.
The issue of part-time
versus full-time workers
poses another
difficult
problem,
thus
their numbers
are omitted
from tables 1 and
2. We included
full-time
workers
in figures
2 and
3 for illustrative
purposes.
9. In this case, by "moral hazard
problem"
economists refer
to the different incentives
faced
by the worker and
by the owner. The worker is interested in maximizing
his happiness,
which can
come at the expense of the owner's desire
to maximize
his profits.
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268 / Agricultural History
Cash tenants and standing renters paid the landlord a fixed amount of
cash, or crop in the case of standing renters, in order to farm a particular
plot of land and consequently received the full value of their marginal
product. This arrangement reduced the moral hazard problem for the land?
lord; the only real monitoring necessary was to safeguard the long-run up-
keep of the land. In the South, cash tenants made up over 22 percent of all
tenants and nearly 7 percent of all farmers. The use of cash tenancy varied
from state to state. For instance, in Alabama there was a high proportion of
cash tenants, whereas Texas had relatively few cash tenants. Overall, a
higher percentage of black farm operators were cash tenants than were
white farm operators.10
Finally, the top rungs of the agricultural ladder consisted of the owning
classes, both the small yeoman farmers and, at the very top, plantation
owners. After having accumulated capital in the lower rungs, it became
possible for some tenants to buy their own plots of land. Indeed by the end
of the nineteenth century, 25 percent of black farm operators (including
croppers) owned the land that they operated.11
Having described the differences, the first task in providing a more com?
plete account of black southern agricultural workers is to estimate the num?
ber of black croppers for the years 1900 and 1910. We do this by employ?
ing an estimation procedure developed by Alston and Kauffman in which
the total number of croppers (black and white combined) were estimated
for these years. Here the procedure is modified in order to separate black
and white croppers. The procedure is fairly straightforward.12
By assuming that no large structural changes?for example, mecha?
nization?occurred between 1900 and 1920, one can estimate the number
of croppers in 1900 and 1910 in each of the southern states based on esti-
mating equations using county data from 1920. The estimator used takes
the form of a regression equation in which the dependent variable is black
10. Alston and Kauffman,
"Agricultural
Chutes and Ladders";
Alston and Kauffman,
"The
Market for Paternalism."
11. Higgs, Competition
and Coercion,
121; Peggy G. Hargis,
"Up
From
Tenantry:
The
African-
American Landowner
in Georgia, 1880-1930," (paper presented
at the University of Leicester
Conference
on Land, Labor,
and Tenure:
The Institutional
Arrangements of Conflict
and Cooperation
in Comparative
Perspective,
21-24 August 1996).
12. Alston and Kauffman,
"Agricultural
Chutes and Ladders."
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Up, Down, and Off the Agricultural Ladder / 269
croppers as a percentage of all share tenants, including croppers. The in?
dependent variables are the percentage of all black farmers, the percentage
of mules, the percentage of all farms either less than nineteen acres or less
than forty-nine acres, the average acreage of farms, the value of land per
improved acreage, the percentage of improved acreage in cotton and the
number of bales of cotton per improved acre (where appropriate), the per?
centage of improved acreage in tobacco (where appropriate), population
per square mile, and the percentage of the population greater than ten years
of age that was illiterate.13
These independent variables were chosen as predictors ofthe number of
sharecroppers in a particular region because these factors have been found
by numerous scholars to be strongly associated with the existence of share?
croppers. It is well known that blacks were disproportionately sharecrop?
pers. Also, recent work has shown a strong positive correlation between
croppers and mule use in southern agriculture due to the inherent principal-
agent problem. To capture the variations in farm size, three variables are in?
cluded: percentage of farms under nineteen acres, percentage of farms be?
tween twenty and forty-nine acres, and average number of acres per farm.
Cropper plots tended to be relatively smaller than share tenant plots; there?
fore, an inverse relation between size of farm and the prevalence of share?
croppers is expected. The value of improved acres provides a measure of
how intensively an area is farmed; the higher the land value, the more in-
tensively it will be farmed, and hence a landlord would want to hire more
croppers. Next, the crop variables (percentage of acres in cotton, yield per
acre, and percentage of acres of tobacco) should be positively associated
with croppers. Because croppers were associated with the labor intensive
cash crops such as cotton and tobacco, there should be a positive correla?
tion between cotton and tobacco acreage and yields. The higher the popu-
13. World
War
I and the accompanying agricultural
boom had an impact
on southern
agricul?
tural labor markets.
Laborers
generally ascended the ladder,
but the bias of the relative ratio of
croppers
to tenants is not obvious. Croppers
increased
relative to wageworkers,
but other
relative
movements depended
on whether the flow from cropper
to tenant was larger
or smaller
than the
flow from tenant to owner.
The movement from cropper
to tenant exceeded the movement into
owners because the ownership move requires significantly more capital, thus the rungs are not
equally spaced. If this were the case, then the estimating equation
would produce
relatively too
few croppers
for 1900 and 1910.
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270 / Agricultural History
lation density in an area, the more valuable the land should be relative to la?
bor. As a result, a greater intensity of farming is expected, and (as with the
value of improved acres variable) a positive sign for this variable is pre?
dicted. Finally, a positive relationship between croppers and the percentage
ofthe population over ten who were illiterate is expected, illiteracy serving
as a proxy for human capital.14
The estimated coefficients from each state equation are used in conjunc-
tion with the values of the same independent variables in 1900 and 1910 to
produce for each state estimates of the percentage of black share tenants
who were croppers in those years, and hence of the absolute numbers of
croppers, because the census enumerated the number of share tenants in
those years. In 1920 the census enumerated croppers in sixteen states: Al?
abama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mary?
land, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee,
Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. In our earlier work we found the border
states of Delaware, Maryland, and West Virginia to have few croppers,
which makes the estimation difficult and potentially less accurate. Here we
focus on the other thirteen states where sharecropping was more pro-
nounced, thus thirteen equations were estimated. A random sample of the
larger of either one-fourth of the counties or twenty-five counties in each
state was selected. The estimation procedure was OLS (ordinary least
squares) and the specified functional form was linear.15
The "fits" of the equations, as measured by R2, ranged from a high of
14. For a discussion of the principal-agent problem and the resulting correlation
between
sharecroppers
and mule use, see Kyle D. Kauffman,
"Why
Was
the Mule Used in Southern
Agri?
culture?:
Empirical
Evidence of Principal-Agent
Solutions,"
Explorations
in Economic
History
30
(July 1993): 336-51; and "ANote on Technology
Choice in a Principal-Agent
Framework:
The
Use of Mules Over Horses in American Southern
Agriculture,"
Economics
Letters
38 (1992):
233-35.
15. As noted in our
earlier
work,
the regressions
with the lowest explanatory
power
were these
three states (Delaware and Maryland
were combined into one regression
because Delaware has
only three counties so this involves just two equations).
It is not surprising
that
these two equa?
tions could not explain the number
of croppers?these were essentially
the states with the fewest
croppers
to detect
in the first
place. If the reader
is interested
in estimating
the number of black and
white croppers
for these three
states,
it can easily be done using the technique
developed
here and
the structural
equations developed in Alston and Kauffman,
"Agricultural
Chutes
and Ladders."
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Up, Down, and Off the Agricultural Ladder / 271
0.82 in Georgia and South Carolina to a low of 0.48 in North Carolina. For-
tunately the fits in general for these thirteen states were quite good. Besides
North Carolina, the remaining twelve states all had an R2 of 0.60 or higher.
The coefficients of the structural equations are given in the Appendix.16
Table 1 presents the estimates of the number of black and white crop?
pers by state for 1900 and 1910. Figure 1 also presents the proportion of
black croppers to all croppers in these thirteen states for the years 1900-60.
One can see that the estimates are quite plausible and clearly fit the over?
all trend line for this period very well.17
With these estimates, we can better track the status of black agri?
cultural workers up, down, and off the agricultural ladder. Table 2
shows the absolute number of black agricultural workers. If we in?
clude wageworkers, the number of blacks engaged in agriculture is high-
16. In the estimation of the OLS regression
models, heteroskedasticity
was detected
in some
of the models using the likelihood ratio
test, as might be expected with such cross-sectional data
sets. The estimates given are
properly weighted
to account
for the heteroskedasticity.
In addition,
an F-test was conducted on each of the regressions
to verify the validity
of all of the independent
regressors
and in all regressions
the F-statistic was significant
at the 5 percent
level, thus suggest-
ing the importance
of including
all regressors
in the equations.
17. One way to test the validity of our 1900 and 1910 estimates
is to use the estimating
equa?
tions (in the Appendix)
to estimate the number
of croppers
in 1930, a year
that
the census actually
enumerated the number of croppers. Intuitively
this would seem to be a good test ofthe estimates,
however, because there was a structural break
in the form of extraordinarily high rates of farm
foreclosures
in the twenties, the estimates for 1930 may be off. In the 1920s, actual
earnings
rela?
tive to expected earnings
were low. This would imply that some tenants fell down a rung on the
ladder
and that some owners fell to the tenant
rung. However,
because there were more tenants
than owners, underestimation
of croppers
is to be expected.
Despite the bias, the estimates
are in the ballpark.
The 1930 census
enumerated
776,278 crop?
pers in the sixteen southern
states
and the model predicted
679,674; so the model underestimated
the number of croppers
by 12 percent,
just as supposed.
To test that
it was a structural break
(the
unusually high number
of farm foreclosures
during
the late 1920s) that caused the model to un-
derestimate the number of croppers
in 1930, the number
of underestimated
croppers
and the per?
centage of farm
foreclosures
during
the period 1926-29 in each state
were correlated
and showed
a positive correlation of 0.42. As an additional
test, a simple OLS regression
was run
for the per?
centage
of farm
foreclosures on the amount of croppers
that were underestimated. The results show
that a 1 percent
increase
in farm
foreclosures
in each state led to 13,257 additional
croppers
(the
variable is significant
at 10 percent
and the R-squared
is 0.17). Alston, "Farm
Foreclosures
in the
United States during the Interwar
Period,"
Journal
of Economic
History
43 (December 1983):
885-903.
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272 / Agricultural History
Table 1. Estimated Number of Croppers
Source: Number
of croppers
1900-10 estimated
as indicated
in the text. Data used in the esti-
mating equation on share tenants, share-cash tenants
(1920 only), sharecroppers (1920), black
farmers,
farm operators,
farms 3-10 acres, 10-19 acres, and 20-49 acres, improved
acres, aver?
age acreage
per farm,
value land
per improved
acre, cotton acreage,
bales of cotton, and tobacco
acreage contained
in the Fourteenth Census ofthe United States:
Agriculture,
1920, vol. 6, part
2, county
tables 1 and 4; Thirteenth
Census
ofthe United
States:
Agriculture,
1910, vol. 5, vari?
ous tables; Twelfth
Census ofthe United States:
Agriculture,
1900, vol. 5, various tables. Data
used in the estimating equation on population per square mile and percentage
of population
greater than ten years of age illiterate contained in Fourteenth Census of the United States:
Population,
1920; Thirteenth
Census
ofthe United
States: Population,
1910. Totals
for each year
are derived in Alston and Kauffman,
"Agricultural
Chutes and Ladders." The black and white
estimates are in some cases off by one because of rounding
error.
est in 1900, and then falls every decade except the 1920s. The more tradi?
tional story is found in table 2: the number of farmers peaked in 1930. This
is an important comparison to keep in mind because if the peak is 1900,
then the drop in the number of agricultural workers represents a step up or
off the ladder, which in either case is generally an improvement. Stepping
up the ladder to cropper is clearly a rise in status and wealth, and moving
off the ladder in the first two decades was for most a move to the urban sec?
tor. In table 2, the number of blacks employed in agriculture fell continu-
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Up, Down, and Off the Agricultural Ladder / 273
1900* 1910* 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960
Figure 1. Number
of Black
Croppers
as a Percentage of All
Croppers
Source: The number of croppers in 1900 and 1910 are estimates from table 1; see text
for
estimation method. The numbers of croppers
in 1920-60 are from the Eighteenth
Census of the United States: Agriculture,
1959.
ously after 1930, which in the 1930s resulted from government programs
and early tractorization. For 1940 onward, mechanization accounted for the
lion's share of the decline.
We now turn from the overall trends of blacks in agriculture to specific
Table 2. Total Number of Blacks on Each Rung of the Agricultural Ladder
1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960
Owner 176,154 213,545 213,273 178,324 170,199 190,535 128,612
Tenant 445,702 467,529 274,713 303,888 152,775 136,041 47,265
Cropper 103,566 175,212 333,026 392,217 298,496 197,496 73,052
TOTAL 725,422 856,285 821,012 874,429 621,470 524,072 248,929
Source: Number of croppers
and share tenants for 1900 and 1910 are from our estimates,
see
text. All other
information on owners, tenants,
and croppers
contained
in Eighteenth
Census of
the United
States:
Agriculture,
1959. For our purposes
we have added
the number of share ten?
ants and cash tenants into one tenant
category.
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274 / Agricultural History
decade-to-decade movements. The first decade of the twentieth century
brought an improvement for blacks: the number of wageworkers fell?
though the exact magnitude of the decline is uncertain; the number of crop?
pers increased, no doubt fueled by movement from the wage category; the
number of tenants increased; and the number of owners increased. This
represents economic progress and stands in contrast to the continued lack
of political freedoms. The period also witnessed relative gain for white
farmers. For whites, the number of owners declined by about 3,500. The
remaining movements for whites paralleled those of blacks.
The decade of the teens encompassed the war years. The tightening
of labor markets wrought by the war might be expected to cause more
ascension up the ladder than existed. Though the number of wageworkers
continued to decline, the most remarkable features of the decade were
the expansion in croppers and decline in tenants. The number of own?
ers stayed roughly constant. We have no ready explanation for the drop
down from tenancy to cropper. This also stands in contrast to the move?
ment of white farmers. For whites, the largest increase was in the owner
category.
The Roaring Twenties were a mixed bag for black farmers, but the
moves down the ladder undoubtedly outweighed the moves up the ladder.
The number of wageworkers increased by about 70,000, and the number
of croppers increased by another 60,000. On the higher rungs, owners de?
clined by about 35,000 while the number of tenants increased by approx?
imately 29,000. Two factors account for the downward trend. The end of
the war brought with it a relative increase in the supply of labor. This, cou-
pled with relatively high birth rates in the rural sector, most likely ac?
counts for expansion in the lower rungs. For the upper rungs, the un-
precedented number of farm failures in the twenties is the likely
explanation for the drop from owner to tenant. Many farmers were able to
purchase farms during the war years and in the continued boom that lasted
until 1920. Many black farmers who bought farms during the boom could
not meet mortgage payments in the twenties and consequently fell down
the ladder. Whites shared the same fate, though the movement was not
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Up, Down, and Off the Agricultural Ladder / 275
as dramatic.18
The thirties were not good years for black farmers. The total number of
farmers decreased, and the percentage of croppers and wageworkers in?
creased. The depressed state of the overall economy was largely responsi-
ble, though government agricultural programs exacerbated the downward
movements. Under the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 and its suc?
cessor the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936, farm
owners were encouraged to reduce planted acreage, shift into soil conserv?
ing and less labor-intensive crops, and demote tenants to croppers and
croppers to wageworkers. Some of the government support programs stip-
ulated that tenants were to receive the payments. In addition, subsidized
credit fostered some early tractor purchases, which increased the available
supply of labor as well as reduced monitoring costs. Both would prompt
a movement down the ladder. These incentives appear to have been race-
neutral as whites fell from the upper rungs as well as blacks.19
The forties brought a continued exit from agriculture fueled by a large
decline in the number of croppers and a smaller decline in the number of
tenants. Both ends of the ladder expanded. The overall decline had both
push and pull causes. The war years increased the demand for labor and
pulled farmers into the war sector and urban economy, and mechanization
and government-support programs pushed people off the farm. In the for?
ties government programs and pull factors account for the majority of the
movement on and off the ladder as cotton mechanization was still in its
infancy. To the extent that mechanization played a role, it came from the
use of tractors. Government programs?and relative prices?prompted a
decline in cotton acreage. Because cotton was a highly labor intensive crop
at the time, the demand for agricultural labor declined. This caused part of
the movement down the ladder because of its effect on monitoring costs.
Workers had an incentive to work harder for fear of being pushed into a
18. Alston, "Farm
Foreclosures."
19. Warren
Whatley,
"Labor for the Picking:
The New Deal in the South,"
Journal
of Economic
History
43 (December 1983): 905-29; Alston, "Tenure Choice."
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276 / Agricultural History
slack rural labor market and this prompted landowners to increase wage
contracts. Once again, the story for whites mirrored that of blacks.20
The story of the fifties is the mechanization of cotton, though pull fac?
tors and government programs continued to play a role. The number of
black workers on all of the rungs declined, though the drop was greatest in
the middle rungs. Complete mechanization?plowing, cultivating, and
picking?was largely responsible for the movement from cropper to wages
through reducing monitoring costs. Machines reduced the variance in the
marginal productivity of labor. Monitoring costs further declined by the
labor displacement effect of mechanization. Mechanization reduced the
tenant rung by fostering the consolidation of small tenant farms into larger
farms that employed wageworkers to run their tractors. The trend of whites
and blacks to share the same movements up and out of agriculture since the
1930s continued.
Estimates of the number of black sharecroppers in the thirteen impor?
tant sharecropping states in 1900 and 1910 allow us for the first time to
paint a complete picture of the black southern agricultural ladder from
1900-60. With this data we are now able to track movements up, down,
and off the complete agricultural ladder.
The data suggest that the conventional wisdom that blacks comprised a
disproportionate share of the lowest rungs of the agricultural ladder is in?
deed true. Given that, however, the data show that the relative movements
for blacks and whites were roughly similar. The decades of particular note
are the 1910s and 1920s, which were generally bad years for blacks, as these
were years of increases in the cropper rungs that seem to have been pulling
from the tenant rung, which fell during these periods. The step between
these rungs is large and should be viewed as a significant regression. The
decades of the 1900s and 1940s were, however, generally good years. The
1900s saw a decrease in wageworkers, and the 1940s witnessed an increase
in owners, which perhaps led to the decrease in croppers and tenants.
Clearly there is an enormous amount of work still to be done in this
20. Craig
W. Heinicke,
"Black
Migration
from the Rural American South and Mechanization
in Agriculture,
1940-1960" (Ph.D. diss., University
of Toronto,
1991).
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Up, Down, and Off the Agricultural Ladder / 277
area. The existence of the cropper estimates allows us to get a complete
picture of the number of workers, by race, on each rung of the agricultural
ladder for the period 1900-60. These estimates should go a long way to?
ward establishing the basic facts about black agricultural workers, and
hence the welfare of these individuals, during this period.
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Appendix A. Estimation Equations for Each State
Source: See text for description
of variables and data used. Numbers
in parentheses
are standard
errors.
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Appendix A. Estimation Equations for Each State (continued)
Source: See text for description
of variables and data used. Numbers
in parentheses
are standard
errors.
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Branches Without Roots
  • Gerald David
Gerald David Jaynes, Branches Without Roots (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986);