Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Preface to the new edition
- Acknowledgments
- A note to the reader
- Chapter 1 What did freedom mean?
- Chapter 2 The legacy of slavery
- Chapter 3 The myth of the prostrate South
- Chapter 4 The demise of the plantation
- Chapter 5 Agricultural reconstruction
- Chapter 6 Financial reconstruction
- Chapter 7 The emergence of the merchants' territorial monopoly
- Chapter 8 The trap of debt peonage
- Chapter 9 The roots of southern poverty
- STATISTICAL APPENDIXES
- Appendix A Construction of income and welfare estimates: 1859–1899
- Appendix B Occupational distribution of southern blacks: 1860, 1870, 1890
- Appendix C Estimates of labor supplied by slave and free labor
- Appendix D Calculation of interest charged for credit implicit in the dual-price system
- Appendix E Calculation of food residuals on southern farms: 1880
- Appendix F Estimates of per capita gross crop output: 1859–1908
- DATA APPENDIX
- Epilogue
- A Bibliography of Literature on the South after 1977
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Appendix C - Estimates of labor supplied by slave and free labor
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Preface to the new edition
- Acknowledgments
- A note to the reader
- Chapter 1 What did freedom mean?
- Chapter 2 The legacy of slavery
- Chapter 3 The myth of the prostrate South
- Chapter 4 The demise of the plantation
- Chapter 5 Agricultural reconstruction
- Chapter 6 Financial reconstruction
- Chapter 7 The emergence of the merchants' territorial monopoly
- Chapter 8 The trap of debt peonage
- Chapter 9 The roots of southern poverty
- STATISTICAL APPENDIXES
- Appendix A Construction of income and welfare estimates: 1859–1899
- Appendix B Occupational distribution of southern blacks: 1860, 1870, 1890
- Appendix C Estimates of labor supplied by slave and free labor
- Appendix D Calculation of interest charged for credit implicit in the dual-price system
- Appendix E Calculation of food residuals on southern farms: 1880
- Appendix F Estimates of per capita gross crop output: 1859–1908
- DATA APPENDIX
- Epilogue
- A Bibliography of Literature on the South after 1977
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Our conclusion that the supply of labor offered by the black population after emancipation declined by something between one-fourth and one-third the level supplied under slavery is based on a comparison of the relative amounts of labor offered under each system. Obviously, such a comparison is a generalization of many diverse situations reported. Our estimates accordingly are presented as rather broad intervals rather than as precise point estimates. They are intended to illustrate the effects of emancipation by establishing the change in labor supply between the last decade of slavery and the first decade and a half of freedom.
The procedure we employed was to use contemporary sources to judge the relative change in three of the four basic parameters that govern the labor supplied by any population: the fraction of the population at work, the average number of days worked, and the average number of hours worked each day. We were unable to make any judgment of the decline in the fourth factor, the intensity of the work effort per hour. We do, however, account for the differences between men, women, and children in this regard. With the coercion of slavery removed, freed blacks sought to lower each of these four factors determining the supply of labor effort. Table C.1 presents the detailed estimates we have constructed for each of the three changes and calculates the cumulative effect freedom had on the supply of man-hours per capita.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- One Kind of FreedomThe Economic Consequences of Emancipation, pp. 232 - 236Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001