Scott's Historical Blog for School

The period following the Civil War (1865–1900) represented one of the most dramatic and uneven economic transformations in American history. While the North continued its accelerated industrialization and agricultural modernization, the South struggled to rebuild a shattered economy with fundamentally different labor and land-use conditions. The Civil War had damaged or destroyed many large plantations, displaced landowners, emptied stockyards, and depleted large areas of crops and stores. The agricultural sector serves as one of the clearest lenses through which this divergence of economic prosperity can be examined. Prosperous for the North that is, and regressive for the South.

The established standard of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) will be the methods of analysis. The TFP theory is most closely associated with the work of Robert Solow at MIT who first published the theory in 1957.[1] TFP measures output relative to all combined inputs — land, labor, and capital.[2] Other commonly utilized approaches include per-acre yields, farm income per capita, capital investment in farm machinery, and the rate of market integration, but these are more difficult to apply with validity due to the differences in the two regions. For this reason, TFP is utilized here because it captures efficiency, not merely volume, and allows meaningful comparison between regions with vastly different resource endowments and labor systems, such as the Northern and Southern states following the Civil War.

Based on information in the U.S. Census and U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics, based on TFP the northern states between 1869-1899 saw a ½ percent increase in growth annually.[3] While the same period, there was zero TFP growth and some indications showed that the TFP in 1880 was still below 1860 rates by as much as over thirty percent.[4] Constrained by institutional, financial, and labor market failures rather than any inherent resource disadvantage, Gavin Wright argued, that the south trailed well behind the North and Midwestern states based on TFP analysis.[5] Wright felt that these were the reasons for the lack of economic growth in the South during the postbellum period rather than a lack of resources.

An interesting analysis by Canaday and Jaremski, indicated that freed men grew more cotton in the south than white farmers in the postbellum period.[6] Farms with white owners averaged approximately 39.3 percent of cotton production, while farms with black owners reached 51.3 percent of the cotton production. Their study included 4428 farms in twenty-six counties and in eight states of cotton producing southern states. They argued that these newly freed black farmers were already concentrated in land areas where soils and climate were best for cotton growing and often assumed working lands that they were enslaved on when their white owners were displaced by war. Additionally, cotton is a very labor-intensive crop and on average white owners had 4.5 workers per tilled acers, while the larger black families averaged ten workers per acer tilled.[7]

The U.S. Census of Agriculture demonstrated that the rate of mechanization that occurred in the Norther states following the Civil War more than doubled that in the Southern States.[8] Erik Craft and James Monks argued that this was not primarily a result of the collapsed economy or availability of capital, but because the emancipation provided such a large labor force that the need for improved efficiency by the purchase of machinery was of no direct benefit.[9] In the Northern states, where labor was still at a premium, even after emancipation, the addition of mechanization was critical for farmers to increase production.

              Available capital in the southern states was also a limiting factor in postbellum period for agriculture. In addition to limited value of collateral, the financial institutions of the south limited their lending. Northern banking institutions were not highly motivated to invest capital in what was seen as a high-risk of loss region. Southern state governments lacked the fiscal capacity to support agricultural infrastructure investments.[10] As a result, the Agricultural reporting of the 1880 Census showed that the southern states showed evidence that the farm implements were one third to one half of the value in the northern states.[11] This demonstrates that the agricultural labor of the south was heavily manual labor and limited in the growth and spread of machinery and quantity of farming tools by comparison to the north.

              In summary, agricultural economic growth was stronger in the Northern States in postbellum American than in the Southern States.  Based on Total Factor Productivity (TFP) while Northern agricultural progress grew at approximately one-half a percent between 1869-1899, Southern states showed flat agricultural results. Some areas showed as much as thirty percent drop from antebellum agricultural economy in the postbellum era. The impact of the Civil War left the South in a crippled condition for decades and emancipation maintained the high availability of labor which delayed the industrial technological advancement in agriculture in the south.

 

Sources

Atack, Jeremy and Bateman, Fred. To Their Own Soil: Agriculture in the Antebellum North. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1987.

Ayers, Edward L. The Promis of the New South: Life After Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University press, 1992.

Canaday, Neil and Jaremski, Matthew. “Legacy, Location, and Labor: Accounting for Racial Differences in Postbellum Cotton Production” Explorations in Economic History. 49, no. 5 (May 2012). 291-302.

Carlton, David L. and Coclanis, Peter A. The South, the Nation, and the World: Perspectives on Southern Economic Development. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003.

Craft, Erik D. and James Monks. "The Postbellum Demand for Cotton Revisited." Explorations in Economic History 45, no. 2 (2008): 199-206.

Gallman, Robert E. "Changes in Total U.S. Agricultural Factor Productivity in the Nineteenth Century." Agricultural History, Vol. 46, No. 1, 1972

Njuki, Eric and Nehring, Richard. “Agricultural Productivity in the United States – Methods.” United States Department of Agriculture. Accessed on March 25, 2026. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/agricultural-productivity-in-the-united-states/methods

Ransom, Roger and Sutch, Richard. One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation New York; Cambridge University Press, 1977.

U.S. Department of Agriculture. Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture. 1880.

U.S. Bureau of the Census. Census of Agriculture, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1890, 1900.

Zymek, Robert. Total Factor Productivity. International Monetary Fund. Accessed on March 25, 2026. https://www.imf.org/en/publications/fandd/issues/2024/09/back-to-basics-total-factor-productivity-robert-zymek

 

[1] Robert Zymek. “Total Factor Productivity”.

[2] Eric Njuki and Richard Nehring. “Agricultural Productivity in the United States – Methods.”

[3] Jeremy Atack and Fred Bateman. To Their Own Soil.; U.S. Department of Agriculture.; U.S. Bureau of the Census.

[4] Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch. One Kind of Freedom.

[5] Edward L. Ayers. The Promis of the New South. 195-198.

[6] Neil Canaday and Matthew Jaremski. Legacy, Location, and Labor. 292.

[7] Ibid.

[8] U.S. Department of Agriculture. 66-69.

[9] Erik D. Craft and James Monks. “The Postbellum Demand for Cotton Revisited.” 200.

[10] Carlton and Coclanis. 78-79.

[11] U.S. Bureau of the Census. Census of Agriculture, 1880.