Roger L. Ransom

The Labor of Older Americans: Retirement of Men On and Off the Job, 1870–1937

Labor force participation rates for American men sixty and over are estimated for the period 1870 through 1937. They suggest a higher frequency of retirement and quite different trends in the incidence of retirement than have usually been supposed. Evidence is also presented to establish that many older industrial workers changed to less renumerative and less demanding occupations late in their working life. This “on-the-job retirement” may have made the transition from employment to full retirement less sudden than today.

Debt Peonage in the Cotton South After the Civil War

This condition of affairs in the South introduced a vast credit system whose tremendous evils and exorbitant exactions have brought poverty and bankruptcy to thousands of families. As a policy, it is vindictive in its subtle sophistry; as a system, it has crushed out all independence and reduced its victims to a coarse species of servile slavery.…

Tontine Insurance and the Armstrong Investigation: A Case of Stifled Innovation, 1868–1905

Tontine insurance, introduced in 1868, combined the features of life insurance with an unusual old-age saving plan. A portion of the annual premium was accumulated in a fund that was divided among the surviving policyholders after twenty years. By 1905, two-thirds of all life insurance in force was of this type. Despite consumer appeal, sales of tontine policies were prohibited in 1906 after the Armstrong Investigation charged the tontine business with corruption and extravagance. We argue that tontine insurance was actuarially sound and an attractive life-cycle investment. Prohibition was probably unnecessary.

The impact of the Civil War and of emancipation on Southern agriculture

There is a widespread belief, which has been encouraged by historians’ treatment of the Reconstruction period, that the Civil War devastated the South; that the loss of human life, work animals and other livestock was enormous; that the destruction of houses, barns, fences, bridges, railroads, and levees paralyzed agriculture; that the burning of cities, factories, warehouses and wharves crippled the Southern economy. The well-known stories of Sherman’s march to the sea; the burning of Richmond, Atlanta, Columbia, and Charleston; the raids into northern Alabama; and other, less dramatic, incidents add to the popular image of widespread destruction. Every account of the Reconst~ction period comments on this devastation, and a number of historians and economists have asserted that the loss of Southern capital from the war severely affected the economic recovery of the South-l According to the best available estimates, the per capita income of the South fell dramatically during the War decade and then grew sluggishly thereafter. Richard Easterlin (1960), whose pioneering work on regional income trends remains the most authoritative, noted that: “[IIn every southern state, the 1880 level of per capita income o~ginat~g in commodity production and distribution was below, or at best only slightly above that

Credit merchandising in the post-emancipation south: Structure, conduct, and performance

The last three decades of the nineteenth century witnessed only a miniscule growth in the agricultural output of the Cotton South.’ By the beginning of the twentieth century, all dreams of a “New South” had been dashed and the region would be characterized by any reasonable criterion as economically backward. In One Kind of Freedom (Ransom and Sutch, 1977) we argued that this inability of the Southern economy to expand at the same pace as the rest of the nation stemmed from institutional flaws which stymied economic growth and development. We identified such flaws in the South’s educational institutions, in its patterns and

The Ex-Slave in the Post-Bellum South: A Study of the Economic Impact of Racism in a Market Environment

Immediately after the Civil War, southern landowners attempted to preserve the plantation system by offering to hire the newly freed ex-slaves on an annual contract for wages. However, serious problems soon developed. Foremost among these were difficulties engendered by views of white landlords and white overseers regarding the performance of the free black labor. Because they insisted that blacks were incapable of working productively without strict controls and corporal punishment, the landlords were convinced that only the workgang-overseer organization of the slave regime would be feasible. Many freedmen, quite naturally, were reluctant to work under conditions approximating those of slavery. Perhaps the landlord who would have preferred to hire wage labor might have succeeded had he been willing to offer higher wages. However, his views of black productivity inhibited him from doing so, and this approach was soon abandoned.

Growth and welfare in the American South of the nineteenth century

Abstract Economic history focuses on two main issues: one is the economic growth, stagnation, or decline of a society; the other is what happens to people within the society in the course of such growth, stagnation, or decline.

A Closer Look at Canals and Western Manufacturing

Recent explanations of American development before the Civil War have stressed the importance of interregional specialization.” Internal improvements, such as canals linking the West and the East, were supposed to have been a major impetus encoura~ng this development. As transportation costs fell dramatically, the West developed a highly specialized agriculture and the East was able to turn its efforts to manufacturing. This view has been supported by a considerable body of evidence showing significant flows of commodities between regions by 1840.2 That the West developed rapidly after the opening of new transportation facilities is clear. Recently, however, Albert Niemi has challenged the view that canals encouraged agricultural specialization in the West.3 Comparing occupational data from the 1820 Census with that from the 1840 Census, Niemi found that although the share of employment in manufacturing did rise markedly in the East, the same phenomenonon a lesser scale-also occurred in the West. Summarizing his conclusions about this rise in western manufacturing, Niemi asserted that:

The Economic Consequences of the American Civil War

The Economic impact of the Civil War on American history remains the focus of a lively debate among Civil War scholars. Did the Northern victory pave the way for changes so profound that, as Charles and Mary Beard claimed, the war was a “Second American Revolution?” Or was the war a tragic error of misguided statesmanship that killed 625,000 men without significantly altering the economic and social development of the United States? By the middle of the twentieth century the Beardian view, reinforced by numerous supporters, had become the dominant interpretation for the economic significance of the Civil War. At the heart of this analysis was an assertion that wartime changes – in particular a series of legislative actions taken in 1862–64 – had produced a rapid acceleration in economic growth during and after the war.1

The roots of southern poverty

Twenty-odd years ago … I fondly imagined a great era of prosperity for the South. Guided by history and by a knowledge of our people and our climatic and physicial advantages, I saw in anticipation all her tribulations ended, all her scars healed, and all the ravages of war forgotten, and I beheld the South greater, richer and mightier than when she molded the political policy of the whole country. But year by year these hopes, chastened by experience, have waned and faded, until now, instead of beholding the glorious South of my imagination, I see her sons poorer than when the war ceased his ravages, weaker than when rehabilitated with her original rights, and with the bitter memories of the past smouldering, if not rankling, in the bosoms of many. Lewis H. Blair, A Southern Prophecy: The Prosperity of the South Dependent upon the Elevation of the Negro , 1889. Reprinted (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1964), p. 15. No event was more significant to southern history than the Civil War. For generations southerners continually referred to The War, wrote of The War, even dated the events of their lives by the years elapsed since The War. It is easy, of course, to understand this preoccupation. The Souths defeat in the Civil War destroyed much of the framework of antebellum southern society, and what replaced it was often designed on radically different lines. Gone was slavery. Gone were the plantations. Gone were the cotton factors. In their place were sharecroppers, tenant farms, and rural merchants.