Freedom and the Southern Economy

Writing in 1857, Hinton Helper predicted that “three-quarters of a century hence, if slavery is abolished within the next ten years, as it ought to be, the South will, we believe, be as much greater than the North, as the North is now greater than the South.“’ To a Northern observer of the 1970s generous enough to allow Mr. Helper the leeway of a half-century or so, his prognosis seems uncomfortably accurate. But in the nineteenth century, it was the poverty and disappointment of freedom which seemed most striking, the weakness and apparent perversity of the South’s response to its own liberation. These are the central themes of One Kind of Freedom: the limited range of choices actually open to freedmen, the thwarted hopes for landownership, the stifling of progressive energies by exorbitant credit costs and racial barriers, the failure of the Southern economy to progress toward the national norm. As Helper’s example attests, one could attempt to diminish the indictment by taking a longer view of the matter, by asking for a longer “time for adjustment” as it were, or by placing the South and the freedmen in a worldwide rather than merely a national comparative contest. Since historical conditions are seldom permanent, and since there are innumerable choices of comparative standards, this strategy can hardly fail; relativities like these are the historians’ stock-in-trade. In this essay I too propose to examine One Kind of Freedom in a broader context, not to celebrate the long-run outcome of the developments deplored by Ransom and Sutch, but to show the elements of ambiguity and relativity in the economic issues under debate. Historians thrive on relativity and altered perspective, but we economists tend to carry on our debates as though our terms and categories were firm and immutable. We need to be reminded that the past contains multiple realities; a simplifying abstraction which successfully captures the essence of some historical situation for some purpose should not be confused with the history itself. Many of the analytical distinctions and