How the South’s slave-owning dynasties regained their wealth after the Civil War
A plantation owner's house in Wallace, La. By Andrew Van Dam Andrew Van Dam Reporter focusing on economic data Email Bio Follow April 4 at 2:49 PM Emancipation should have laid waste to the Southern aristocracy. The economy was built on the forced labor of enslaved Africans, and almost half the Confederacy’s wealth was invested in owning humans. Once people could no longer be treated as chattel, that wealth evaporated.
The gulf in economic status between slave and owner is incalculably large, and slave ownership was widespread. More than 1 in 5 white households owned slaves. About 1 in 200 owned 50 or more enslaved people. But there also were income differences among whites in the prewar South. Boustan found that folks at the 90th percentile were about 14 times as wealthy as a typical white household.
“The very first people I ever thought about linking over time were these slaveholders,” Boustan said. “My whole career has been built on creating these large, linked data sets.” Consider records of slave ownership and wealth: They come from different data sets, and 20,000 of the records are clear matches. But those matches allowed the economists to estimate slave ownership in the larger population. One of the most effective data points for doing so was surnames.
Economic shock How does the loss of wealth effect elite dynasties? The answer is critical for wealth-tax advocates and others concerned about inequality, but it’s rare to find a wealth disruption that’s swift and deep enough to allow for large-scale analysis. The typical American white family had 10 times as much wealth as the typical black one as of 2016, the most recent year of available data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances.
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