1. Devon Bull
ECON 765
Rosenbloom
Racism and Agriculture in the Late 18th Century
One Kind of Freedom: Reconsidered is a reexamination by economic historians Ransom
and Sutch of their earlier work published in the late seventies on race and agricultural
development in the postbellum American South. Specifically they look at the challenges facing
African Americans after emancipation. Their work leads them to examining the declining
production of staple crops such as corn, and the impact of racism in farm ownership and crop
sharing. They also use econometrics to demonstrate the impact race had upon the opportunities
available for African Americans. Using “new” analytical methods, significantly improved
computing power, and new data Ransom and Sutch seek to explore their old work and test how it
holds up under scrutiny twenty-five years later.
With the the end of the Civil War many African Americans had limited resources,
minimal schooling, and lacked many basic job skills. They found it incredibly hard to purchase
land due to racism, difficulty in obtaining credit (which was sometimes related to racism), and
lack of capital. Just 6-8% of all farms from all 11 of the former Confederate states covered by
Ransom and Sutch were owned by African Americans (pg 13). Many were forced into
sharecropping because of these constraints. Furthermore, a significantly higher percentage of
African Americans worked as farm laborers than whites and were simultaneously far less likely
to become farmers. Among African American families who owned a farm, family members were

2. also more likely to participate with work on the farm. These differences are significant and help
to highlight the difficulties facing African Americans in the post-war South.
Another major issue in the post bellum South was the dramatic decline in corn production
and other food crops. In fact, many farmers were continuing to grow cotton while their families
suffered food shortages. According to Ransom and Sutch: roughly 30.3% of all small-scale,
family operated farms in the Cotton South were “locked-in” to producing certain crops (pg. 28).
By “locked-in” Ransom and Sutch indicate that the farmer is unable to escape a vicious cycle of
debt and do as their creditors demand. Creditors appear to have possessed a large amount of
power through their high interest rates. This allowed creditors to dictate what was grown by
giving loans only to borrowers who planted what they (the creditors) demanded, which was
primarily cotton. The farmers would finish the year with an insufficient amount of food and lack
the funds to buy more. Thus, farmers were locked into “debt peonage” and forced to produce
cotton. According to Ransom and Sutch this means that a whopping 46.2% of farms were
operating inefficiently due to this “debt peonage” and its forced cottage production.
Alternatively, many farmers chose to avoid debt by only growing crops necessary to provide
food for their family before producing cash-crop goods like cotton. Essentially farmers were
either producing too much cotton and not enough food or a sufficient amount of food but little
cotton. This kind of setting isn’t beneficial to anyone, let alone recently emancipated African
Americans struggling to get ahead.
Ransom and Sutch draw their data from “manuscript schedules of the 1880 Census of
Agriculture and seek to pair demographic characteristics of farm operators in population
schedules” (pg. 8). They also found little difference across the South in terms of farming
capability, i.e. soil quality, crop choice, and geographic isolation (pg 8). This allows them to

3. examine different regions with the knowledge that a farm in a nearby region would experience
virtually the same results in similar conditions. However, I would argue that Ransom and Sutch
limit themselves by focusing only on the agricultural sector. They state that their research is
based on the “premise that post emancipation black economic history must be rooted in an
agriculture history of the South”. They go on to note that by 1880 nearly half of the African
American male laborers worked outside of the agricultural sector (pg. 17). So while you can
gather insights about the extent and economic effects of racism on African Americans in the
South, it will only be a partial examination of what truly occurred.
In addition to failing to account for a large portion of laborers outside of the agricultural
sector Ransom and Sutch don’t compare laborers in different regions. Instead they chose to focus
solely on the South instead of comparing it their findings against data of African Americans in
the North. How can we have a complete analysis of African American’s economic history as
they claim to be doing, when we are simply making comparisons within the same region?
Furthermore, why did Ransom and Sutch choose to gather their data primarily from small family
farms (pg. 12)? This approach leaves us with a number of questions. How did African American
farm ownership differ from in the North? Did Northern African American families work more or
less than their southern counterparts? Furthermore, what effect did racism have upon Northern
African American’s economic opportunities? How would that data compare to the South?
Ransom and Sutch clearly demonstrate that race was a major factor in Southern property
ownership. However, they don’t give data for important assertions they make. For example, what
was the estimated return on investment of owning one’s farm vs. sharecropping? They state that
sharecropping was “the least desirable form of tenure” but they never empirically prove that to

4. be true (pg. 13)? Clearly One Kind of Freedom is missing critical questions and worthwhile
alternative approaches in its research.
In sum, Ransom and Sutch do an excellent job of using the new tools at their disposal to
analyze the economic advancement of African Americans in the post-Civil War era. Their
analysis clearly shows the difficulties that many African Americans had to struggle to overcome.
However, some of their initial decisions on what they chose to study or ignore play a key role in
the final interpretation of their data. It would have arguably been more meaningful if they also
collected and compared similar data from the North. Regardless, it is quite clear that post-Civil
War racism had a significant and lasting impact on economic opportunities available for African
Americans in the former Confederacy.