Black Troops and the Rise of Cotton Monoculture in the Postbellum U.S. South: 1865-1880

Hyunku Kwon, University of Chicago

This study studies how agricultural land use, and its social, tenurial, and property relations, reflects the constellations of state power within the context of transformations of American statehood in the postbellum US South. After the American Civil War, the American state attempted a fundamental restructuring of antebellum Southern agriculture and its underlying social structures—slavery plantation. However, limited manpower, financial resources, and bureaucratic capacity stymied geographically consistent state interventions; instead, much of the administration of federal statehood in the former Confederacy was in the hands of federal soldiers, many of whom lacked professional bureaucratic training and were locally mobilized citizen volunteers. Some troops utilized coercion and force to disrupt the existing social order whereas others tried to preserve it. African American troops tended to align with the former approach. This paper explores how such racial variations in statehood contributed to regional variations in the dissolution of slave plantations and the rise of new agricultural land use patterns in the postbellum South. By applying geostatistical and spatial econometric techniques (e.g., spatial microsimulations, synthetic population, and spatial regimes analysis) to newly digitized historical data, this paper provides detailed sub-county level mappings of agricultural land use and shows how such geographic variations in agricultural changes reflected racial variations in statehood.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 30. Natural Resource Economies