Eager Hands: Labor for Southern Textiles, 1850–1860

1976 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom E. Terrell
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Textile Industry ◽  
County Level ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Unique Case ◽  
Free Labor ◽  
Level Data ◽  
Ample Supply ◽  
Southern Society

Was there an ample supply of low-skilled, free labor in the antebellum Southeast to develop a textile industry producing coarser goods? Using county-level data from the 1850 and 1860 manuscript censuses and other historical sources, we found there was a surplus of low-skilled, free (mostly white) labor in Edgefield County, South Carolina, where the textile industry was firmly established before the Civil War. If Edgefield County was not a unique case, then potential investors in southern textiles were probably not restrained by an inadequate labor force. Moreover, our Edgefield study reinforces other analyses which indicate that many whites hovered on the margins of southern society even in its most prosperous decade before the Civil War.

Social Transformation and Violence: Evidence from U.S. Reconstruction

2021 ◽  
pp. 001041402199716 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan A. Stewart ◽  
Karin E. Kitchens
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Direct Consequence ◽  
County Level ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Qualitative Evidence ◽  
Level Data ◽  
Social Orders ◽  
Over Time

How do political actors create and institutionalize revolutionary social transformation, and what are the consequences of their efforts? In this paper, we provide a framework for understanding the conditions under which revolutionary social transformation unfolds and becomes institutionalized over time. We argue that a direct consequence of social transformation and the institutionalization thereof, however, is violence against the revolution’s beneficiaries which can likewise endure over the long-term. We test our arguments using historical, county-level data on post-U.S. Civil War Reconstruction and we supply both quantitative and qualitative evidence for our mechanisms. We ultimately demonstrate that social transformation and violence are often causally linked, not mutually exclusive outcomes, thereby expanding our understanding of how social orders are created and maintained.

Rehearsing for Reconstruction: The Archipelagic Afterlives of the Port Royal Experiment

2020 ◽  
Vol 92 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-307
Author(s):  
Todd Carmody
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Social Study ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Social Experiment ◽  
Sea Islands ◽  
Free Labor ◽  
Port Royal ◽  
Cultural Legacy ◽  
Civil War Era

Abstract This essay traces the cultural legacy of the Port Royal Experiment, the Civil War–era social experiment in free labor conducted by Union forces on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. Whereas literary and cultural historians typically focus on the “discovery” of slave spirituals by Northern missionaries and educators at Port Royal, this essay tracks how later writers, performers, and sociologists returned to the Sea Islands to reimagine the promise of free labor. The archive thus assembled includes Civil War–era ethnographies, memoirs, and reports; the scholarly monographs in UNC Press’s Social Study Series; and DuBose Heyward’s popular “Negro novel” Porgy (1925). Across this interdisciplinary tradition, writers of various stripes seek by turns to celebrate and contain the threat of the free but noncapitalist black body. The latter figure, recalling the disability category’s historical role in sorting people into work-based or need-based systems of social distribution, is commonly represented as disabled. Ultimately, the essay documents a dual development in US political economy as the marginalization of contraband slaves as capitalist laborers on the Sea Islands—the “failure” of the Port Royal Experiment—gives way to the consolidation of “black culture,” a success of a different kind.

scholarly journals The Impact of Antebellum Slavery on Contemporary Income Inequality

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-92
Author(s):  
Javier E. Del Cid ◽  
Dominick Tanoh ◽  
Ian N. Sexton ◽  
Haruna Takeda ◽  
Paul Martin Sommers
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Income Inequality ◽  
Positive Relationship ◽  
Total Population ◽  
Antebellum South ◽  
County Level ◽  
Southern States ◽  
Strong Positive Relationship ◽  
Level Data ◽  
The Impact

The authors relate county-level data on the population of slaves in the antebellum South to present-day county-level Gini ratios on income inequality.  Outside the five Deep Southern states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, the intensity of slavery in 1860 is associated with a lower degree of income inequality.  Inside these same five states in counties where the population of slaves accounted for more than 71 percent of the county’s total population in 1860, there is evidence of a strong positive relationship between slavery and contemporary income inequality.

scholarly journals Timing of social distancing policies and COVID-19 mortality: county-level evidence from the U.S.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes ◽  
Neeraj Kaushal ◽  
Ashley N. Muchow
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Death Rate ◽  
The United States ◽  
County Level ◽  
Level Data ◽  
Level Information ◽  
Alternative Measures ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Pharmaceutical Interventions

AbstractUsing county-level data on COVID-19 mortality and infections, along with county-level information on the adoption of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), we examine how the speed of NPI adoption affected COVID-19 mortality in the United States. Our estimates suggest that adopting safer-at-home orders or non-essential business closures 1 day before infections double can curtail the COVID-19 death rate by 1.9%. This finding proves robust to alternative measures of NPI adoption speed, model specifications that control for testing, other NPIs, and mobility and across various samples (national, the Northeast, excluding New York, and excluding the Northeast). We also find that the adoption speed of NPIs is associated with lower infections and is unrelated to non-COVID deaths, suggesting these measures slowed contagion. Finally, NPI adoption speed appears to have been less effective in Republican counties, suggesting that political ideology might have compromised their efficacy.

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