Southern ante-bellum income reconsidered

Explorations in Economic History i&89-99

Southern

(1975)

Ante43ellum ROBERT

Income

Reconsidered

E. GALLMAN

University of North Carolina

I In a recent issue of this journal Gerald Gunderson argues that Richard Easterlin’s (1960) estimates of Southern income in 1840 contain serious errors, occasioned by important defects in the Census of 1840, one of Easterlin’s chief sources. Gunderson goes on to say that these errors have produced misinterpretations of the course of Southern antebellum economic history and that the matter is of some consequence. Those who have worked in early quantitative history will agree that Easterlin’s estimates occupy a key position in the record. They bear on a series of large questions of lasting interest, questions that have engaged scholarly attention for many decades and to which it had begun to appear that answers were being found. If Gunderson’s appraisal of these estimates is correct, then certainly he has made an important discovery, one that could disperse the growing concensus of opinion concerning the nature and course of change of the prewar Southern economy. These considerations should prompt a careful scrutiny of Gunderson’s work and this paper reports the results of my own efforts toward that end. In it I will maintain that Gunderson’s tests do not provide a sufficient basis for his conclusions and that other evidence suggests that his conclusions are, in fact, in error. That is, I will contend that Easterlin’s estimates are undamaged by Gunderson’s critique, that they appear to give a good account of regional income disparities in the early 1840’s, and that the chief source utilized by Easterlin, the census of 1840, is a good deal stronger than Gunderson believes. It should be said at the outset that neither Easterlin’s estimates nor the census data on which they rest are entirely free of error, points freely granted by Easterlin. The census was imperfect and incomplete.’ While ‘But Gunderson’s brief notes on the organization of the census and contemporary opinions as to its quality (pp. 162-63) are neither altogether accurate nor properly balanced. The census was not quite so novel as Gunderson suggests (e.g., previous federal censuses had gathered substantial economic information and a remarkably valuable Massachusetts census had been conducted in 1837). it was not so far different from subsequent U.S. censuses as he asserts (e.g., Gunderson errs in supposing that the U.S. marshalls were not part of the census machinery after 1840). and in-so-far as it was different, the differences were not altogether marks of inferiority (e.g., in no subsequent 19th century U.S. census were equivalent efforts made to

89 Copyright @1975 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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Easterlin’s tests, corrections and estimating procedures were judiciously designed and carried out, they clearly could not eliminate all error. The final results reveal a per capita income level for the West South Central that is perhaps suspiciously high, as compared with the levels for the other Southern regions. But these matters are all well known. Gunderson’s point is that the estimates are so far in error that they have led to serious misinterpretations of ante-bellum U.S. history. It is this point that I wish to contest. In what follows I will argue that the evidence Gunderson brings forward to test Easterlin’s estimates is insufficiently rich and strong for the purpose, that the form of test adopted cannot, by its nature, yield easily interpreted results, and that other evidence tends to show that Easterlin’s findings have a strong basis in fact. II Gunderson tests Easterlin’s estimates, and the underlying census data, in an indirect way. He builds state and county income estimates from data taken from Easterlin and from the census, following procedures derived from Easterlin’s work. (I will contend, below, that he places unduly heavy demands on the data and the estimating procedures, but this is a matter of lesser importance than are other aspects of his testing procedure and can be set aside for the moment.) Gunderson then takes the position that Easterlin’s procedures are adequate and that, therefore, if the estimates themselves prove inadequate, the fault must lie with the underlying census data. Gunderson next identifies an important component of income (income earned by slaves) and prepares estimates of it, based on data that are independent of the census. He subtracts his slave earnings figures from the state (county) income estimates and then appraises the residuals, which are expressed as ratios to free population. He finds that the residuals vary widely, collect information on the trade sector). Unfortunately, the census results figured in the abolitionist controversy; they showed a higher incidence of insanity among Northern free blacks than among slaves. These specific results were discredited by a committee of the American Statistical Association (U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Select Committee on Statistics, Errors in the Sixth Census, House of Representatives Report 580, Twenty-eighth Congress, First Session) and the conclusions of the committee, which were widely discussed, in view of the nature of the topic, have tainted the entire census. But the inference that the census was entirely defective, because responses to certain sensitive questions were suspect (an inference apparently widely made) is not proper. The committee of the A.S.A. did not test the census returns with which Gunderson is dissatisfied, the returns of output. But Ezra Seaman did. He examined and corrected the data down to the county level, ran quite sophisticated consistency tests and tested against independent data, finally concluding that the census holds up (1847, p. 157).

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from state to state (county to county) and that many of the residuals are extremely low. On this basis he judges the census-based income estimates in error, and maintains that the error resides in the census returns of the states (counties) in which low residuals are observed. Now it will be evident that if we are to accept his conclusions we must, first of all, have considerable confidence in Gunderson’s estimates of slave earnings. Only then can we take the first step toward accepting the residuals as meaningful testing measures. One should bear in mind that while the general form of Gunderson’s test is a common one, he requires much more from it than is usual. Typically, when a test of this form is used the investigator is interested in the signs of the residuals or, possibly, the general order of magnitude of the residuals and it is possible to give whatever hypothesis is under investigation a strong test, by biasing the calculations against the hypothesis. Gunderson, however, is interested chiefly in the range of deviations of the residuals. There is no clear, simple, meaningful way in which he can bias his calculations against his hypothesis that the residuals will vary widely. Therefore, he must be very sure that his subtrahends are accurate. But an examination of his sources does not given one confidence that this is the case. Gunderson begins by estimating average annual slave wage rates for

Yearlv Yearlvrate

1836

Slave Hires.

1837

1838

TABLE 1 Number of Observations.

1839

1840

1841

$184 150 144 140 133 130 125 120 116 110 107 100 85 80 75 72 60 Totals

1836-45’

1842

1843

1844

1845

Totals 3

(3) (4) I

(1)

(1)

(1)

5

(1)

: 4 3 2 3 1 I 45 8

4 (3) 1

(1) 3 (1) 1 45 2

(3)

(1)

(1)

(1)

1 1 1 1

1

3

56

I 2

1

1 11 2 1 2

4

96

10

Note. Items in parentheses refer South. “Source: Evans, pp. 228,232,283.

6

2

to the “Lower”

2

8 South;

11 all others

2 refer

to the “Upper”

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1840, on evidence of hire rates, drawn from Evans. Gunderson’s precise estimating procedure is not given, hut we do have the relevant hire rate observations made by Evans for the decade surrounding the year 1840, presumably the principal evidence Gunderson used (see Table 1). The reader will observe that there are 96 observations for the entire decade, only two of which refer to 1840. Furthermore, a glance at Table 1 will show that of the 96 observations, 45 are for one wage rate in one year, suggesting that they refer to one transaction. Thus the table probably reflects a maximum of 52 independent observations for the entire decade. In no single year are there more than eleven observations and the scatters of the observations for both Upper and Lower South reveal extremely wide variations. This body of evidence seems very light to be placed in the balance against the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of observations underlying Easterlin’s estimates. It is difficult to see how one could make from the Evans data a meaningful average wage rate estimate for 1840 that was not subject to a very wide margin for error. Yet for the purposes of his test Gunderson must produce not one estimate, but slave earnings estimates for each of 11 states and for each county within these states, and all of these estimates must refer to the year 1840.2 I cannot emphasize too strongly that the earnings estimates must be made specific to each state and county. If they are not so made, then the aggregate income estimates, which are specific to each state and county, cannot be tested by Gunderson’s method. Gunderson moves around this difficulty by assumption; he assumes that wage rates were invariant across three broad regions of the South, the Upper, Lower, and what may be termed the Mid South.3 This is not a satisfactory procedure, since it assumes what must be demonstrated and because there is good reason to suppose that the assumption is contrary to fact. There is good reason to suppose that wage rates varied across space (for *There is another complication here. Gunderson assumes that Easterlin’s estimates refer exclusively to the year 1840. Actually, Easterlin’s agricultural price weights appear to consist chiefly of average prices for the period 184&46. Since prices, including slave prices, and presumably slave hire rates, were falling during this period, Gunderson’s finding that his residuals tend to be low may be partly a consequence of the fact that his hire rate data and the price weights of Easterlin’s income estimates refer to different time periods. 3Evans (p. 192) defines the Upper South as North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia and the Lower South as Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi. Gunderson alters this alignment slightly, including South Carolina in what 1 have called the Mid South, a region with a hire rate falling between the rates for the Upper and Lower South. Presumably Gunderson obtained this rate by interpolation, but the procedure is not described in his paper. Gunderson also adds Arkansas to the Lower South, Kentucky to the Upper South and Tennessee to the Mid South. Evans apparently provides no data on hire rates in these states. Gunderson appears to assume that the hire rates relevant to these states are the rates observed in the regions to which he assigns them. One may doubt the wisdom of the assumption, particularly in the case of Kentucky, where the hire rate appears to have been based entirely on observations taken in Virginia and/or North Carolina.

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example, the price levels implicit in Easterlin’s agricultural income estimates describe such variations) thus Gunderson’s assumption compresses the wage variations into his residuals. That is, his assumption tends to exaggerate the deviations in the residuals and, thus, to bias his results infavot of his conclusions. This characteristic of Gunderson’s procedure, together with the rather llimsy basis on which the hire rate estimates rest, make one very doubtful, indeed, that the residuals he obtains tell us much about the quality of Easterlin’s income estimates, and the underlying census output data. There are other respects in which the hire rate data, and Gunderson’s interpretation of them as wage rates open to the typical male agricultural slave, give one pause, e.g., the data were not assembled according to a systematic method of sampling, the universe from which they were drawn encompassed only a very small fraction of slave work time, the data may reflect premia for special skills and physical attributes, they apparently refer predominantly to rates obtained in nonagricultural work, they may include agents’ fees. But time and space do not permit me to explore them. I turn, therefore, to Gunderson’s use of the data. Gunderson maintains that his wage rate estimates (properly adjusted for age-sex premia and discounts) measure the opportunity costs of agricultural slave labor in 1840 and that actual income earned by slaves equalled opportunity cost. This is an argument that is very difficult to accept. The hire rate data were apparently drawn disproportionately from railroad construction activities, local in nature and of relatively short duration in any locality. It would be reasonable to suppose that labor demands of this type would tend to drive hire rates above the usual level of earnings of the typical Southern agricultural slave. Furthermore, even if hire rates accurately reflected opportunity costs and planters made the most vigorous and intelligent efforts to adjust operations in the light of going hire rates, the adjustment would be in terms of anticipated agricultural earnings, not realized earnings. Agricultural income is subject to uncertainties with respect to weather and markets and, consequently, in any given year one would expect to find that on some farms and in some counties and in some states, realized earnings exceeded anticipated earnings, while on others, they fell short. Thus even if hire rates accurately reflected anticipated agricultural earnings (which I find doubtful, for reasons partly given above) it is virtually certain that they did not accurately reflect realized agricultural earnings. Since the deviations between anticipated and realized earnings are likely to have varied regionally in size and sign, as the incidence of favorable and unfavorable weather conditions varied, the use of measured anticipated earnings to estimate realized earnings will almost certainly produce errors that vary regionally. Thus even if slave hire rates do accurately reflect planter expectations with respect to agriculture, Gunderson’s use of them

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to measure realized slave earnings almost certainly produces spurious regional variations in his estimates of residual income, variations that bias his results in favor of his conclusions. The previous comments refer to Gunderson’s estimates of slave earnings. It seems to me that the state and county income estimates he derives from Easterlin and the census are also subject to some question. Easterlin provides estimates of certain components of income, at the state level. Gunderson blows these figures up to incorporate all “personal income,” following procedures designed by Easterlin to produce regional income estimates. Now procedures reasonable at the regional level may not be reasonable at the state level, and one has the deep suspicion that this was Easterlin’s judgment; otherwise, one would suppose that Easterlin would have produced the full state estimates himself. If I am correct in these surmises, then Gunderson has not really tested Easterlin’s figures at all; he has tested his own figures, based on an extrapolation of Easterlin’s procedures, an extrapolation that may not be warranted. Gunderson indicates in one place an appreciation of this point (p. 164), but he does not take the matter into account in his interpretative remarks. Gunderson’s county estimates (agricultural income only) rest directly on census data and also on the following assumptions (among others): the national price structure is relevant to each county; the average of each of nine agricultural prices for the period 184&46 is identical with the price for 1840; the sum of the values of the eleven most important agricultural products (presumably the same eleven for each county) has precisely the same relative importance to the (rural? agricultural? the point is unclear) income of each county; all persons resident outside towns are in the agricultural sector. I do not believe that these assumptions are likely to produce relative income estimates that are accurate enough for Gunderson’s purposes. I do not mean to imply that Gunderson’s state and county income figures are without their uses. For some purposes, they may serve very well. But Gunderson’s purpose is to test the census data. Since these data have been heavily processed by Gunderson and since the test chosen is extremely demanding (for reasons given in the third paragraph of this section), the results of the test cannot fairly be said to tell against the census data, even if we are prepared to set aside the difficulties posed by the hire rate data and by Gunderson’s use of them to derive slave earnings, premises 1, for one, am unprepared to grant. III In the previous section I have taken the position that the form of Gunderson’s tests and the evidence he has used are not adequate to sustain the

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conclusions he has reached. In this section I will consider directly his chief interpretive conclusions. Gunderson contends that the agricultural returns of the 1840 census were markedly short in the South, that Easterlin failed to identify this deficiency and that, therefore, his estimate of Southern income is far too low. Gunderson believes that the census deficiency was concentrated in (perhaps confined to) the South Atlantic and East South Central Regions. On the other hand, he believes that the canvass of the West South Central, a region which, in 1840, was composed entirely of Louisiana and Arkansas, was probably reasonably accurate and complete. Several tests of these propositions can be made. I begin at the aggregative level, dealing with the South, as a whole. A substantial fraction of Southern money income was earned from the staple crops, chief among which was cotton. These crops left traces in records other than the agricultural census. They were exported in large volume and thus appear in the reports of the Secretary of the Treasury; they were processed by American manufacturers and thus are mentioned in the reports of the Census of Manufactures and in the publications of trade associations. By assembling evidence on these claims or drafts on staple output, one can obtain some idea of the ,degree of consistency between the data of the Census of Agriculture and independent sources of information bearing on agricultural output. For example, it can be shown (see Table 2) that exports of cotton in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1850 plus cotton Cotton

Output

and Drafts

TABLE 2 on Cotton Output, 1840

I-Output 2-Drafts on Output a-Exports b-Consumed in Manufacturing c-Total (2a + 2b) 3-Ratio, line 2c to line 1

1840, 1850, 1860“*b(mil

lb)

1850

1860

791

937

2,063

414-744

635

1,768

115 529-859

281 916

422 2,190

.978

1.061

.669-l

.087

“The years are defined as follows: output: the years ending May 31, 1840 (i.e., crop year 1839), 1850, and 1860; exports: the years ending Sept. 30, 1839 and 1840; the years ending June 30, 1850 and 1860; consumption: the years ending May 3 I, 1840, 1850 and 1860. bSource: Line (I), 1839. Seaman (1852), p. 453. 1849: Compendium of the Seventh Census, p. 174, bales converted to pounds at 383 lb per bale. (Hisforicnl Statistics, 1949, p. 90). The figure in the Compendium represents a correction of the figure published in the Quart0 volume. (See Compendium, p. 174). 1859: Historical Srufisrics (1949). Series E 218, p. 109, bales converted to pounds at 383 lb per bale (Historical Statistics, 1949, p. 90). Line (2a): Historical Statistics (1960) Series U-74, p. 547 (1840, 1850, 1860.). Line (2b): Historical Statistics (1949), Series J-179, p. 187, bales converted to pounds at 478 lb per bale (U.S.D.A. Technical Bulletin 703, p. 64).

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consumed in American manufacturing in the census year ending May 31, 1850 very nearly exhaust the cotton crop reported in the Census of 1850 (crop year 1849). There is the suggestion of a modest and plausible accumulation of inventories. Similar evidence indicates that drafts on the cotton crop of 1859 exceeded output and that inventories were probably drawn down by an amount equal to about 6% of the 1859 crop, a substantial figure, but not implausible. Thus the agricultural census returns with respect to cotton appear to be roughly validated by independent sources of evidence. Similar tests could be conducted with respect to other Southern staples, although less easily. Unfortunately, the test described above cannot be precisely replicated for 1840. At that time, the fiscal year of the Treasury Department ended on September 30, during the cotton harvest. Thus, the exports from the crop of 1839 (the crop that the officials of the Sixth Census intended to record) are partly captured in the Treasury Report for 1839 and partly in the Report for 1840. There is no way of distinguishing in these reports among exports drawn from the crops of 1838, 1839, and 1840. All that can be said is that the sum of exports in the fiscal year ending September 30, 1839, plus cotton consumed in manufacturing in the census year ending May 31, 1840, falls short of the cotton crop reported by the Sixth Census by an amount equal to about 34% of the reported crop; while if export data for fiscal 1840 are substituted into the calculation, drafts on output exceed the 1839 crop by almost 9% (see Table 2). While these two calculations yield quite different results, neither gives one much reason for believing that the cotton crop reported in the agricultural census was substantially below the cotton crop actually harvested. One comes away with the distinct impression that the census return of the cotton crop may very well have been accurate and that if the census did undercount the crop, the error is quite unlikely to have resulted in a major understatement of Southern income, of the type Gunderson describes. While a very large part of the money income earned by the Southern agricultural sector came from the staples, the sector also produced substantial amounts of other goods, chiefly food products. Hutchinson and Williamson recently tested the proposition that Southern production fell far short of Southern food requirements in the antebellum years, a proposition widely entertained in the literature. Using census data on output, animal inventories and population, together with estimated requirements per consuming unit, they calculated Southern levels of production and requirements in the three census years 1840, 1850, and 1860, by state. They found no evidence that in any of these years production fell far short of Southern requirements. At the state level, only those states with large urban populations, such as Louisiana, showed any sign of food deficits of any size (see Table 3). Quite similar findings have been obtained by Hilliard. It is difficult to square

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TABLE 3 Excess of Meat Supply over Demand or Demand over Supply (-), South, 1840, 1850, 1860, by State“ (mil lb) Virginia North Carolina South Carolina Georgia Alabama Mississippi Louisiana Kentucky Tennessee

1840 112.1 88.3 15.0 71.5 82.3 92.1 -2.6 251.6 243.2

1850

1860

73.2 139.7 33.5 124.8 112.2 94.3 2.8 213.6 233.0

22.1 85.6 -18.6 66.8 68.8 66.1 -25.6 134.3 136.6

“Source: Hutchinson and Williamson, derived from Table 7. N.B. Hutchinson and Williamson assume that meat was made from local feed supplies, after all requirements, including human requirements for bread crops, had been met. Thus the figures in Table 3 summarize the degree of Southern self-sufficiency in basic foods found by Hutchinson and Williamson.

these results with Gunderson’s belief that the 1840 census seriously underenumerated Southern agricultural output. Surely if that were the case some sign of it would have emerged in the statistics of food production and Hutchinson, Williamson, and Hilliard would have found clear evidence of output falling short of requirements in 1840. And if, as Gunderson suggests, the 1840 census were far worse than subsequent censuses, the work of the three scholars mentioned above would reveal a break in the record, perhaps large Southern food deficits in 1840, followed by balance between output and requirements in 1850 and 1860. But this break does not appear and one is driven to believe that Gunderson is mistaken about the Census of 1840. The evidence on the staples and food production does not support the belief that the agricultural census in the South in 1840 involved a wide and serious under-enumeration of Southern agricultural output. Recent work by Easterlin, of which Gunderson was unaware, tends to substantiate this view. Easterlin has reworked his 1840 figures, expressing them in U.S. average prices, rather than in state prices (i.e., they are deflated), and has assembled similar estimates for census years 1850 and 1860. One of his tables, showing relative regional levels of real agricultural income, agricultural labor force and income per worker, is reproduced here as Table 4.4 If Gunderson is right in supposing that Easterlin’s 1840 Southern income estimates are very much too low, due to the defective nature of the 1840 census, and if the 1850 and 1860 censuses were very much better, as he seems to suggest, then these facts should be reflected in marked improve‘I am grateful to Easterlin for permitting me to make use of this table and for discussing his work with me.

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TABLE 4 Percent Distribution of Agricultural Income Valued at United States Prices of 1879 and of Agricultural Labor Force, and Agricultural Income per Worker as Percentage of United States Average, by Geographic Division, 1840, 1850, and 1860’ Geographic division United States New Eng. Mid Atlan. E. No. Cent. W. No. Cent. So. Atlan. E. So. Cent. W. So. Cent. West

1840 (1) 100.0 8.9 24.3 16.9 2.9 21.0 21.1 5.0

Income 1850 100.0

1860 (3) 100.0

6.0 20.6 19.8 4.5 20.3 21.6 6.6 0.6

4.1 16.9 22.2 6.6 16.3 19.5 11.1 2.6

(2)

Labor force 1840 1850 1860 (4) (5) (6) 100.0 100.0 100.0 10.3 23.0 15.7 2.8 25.4 19.6 3.2

8.2 20.0 17.9 4.2 23.6 20.1 5.4 0.6

6.2 16.4 20.3 7.6 21.1 19.1 8.0 1.3

Income 1840 (7) 100 86 106 107 102 82 108 158

per worker 1850 1860 (8) (9) 100 100 73 103 110 107 86 107 121 106

76 103 110 86 77 102 139 201

“Source: Easterlin (1973), Table B-2.

ments in the relative level of income per worker in Southern regions between 1840 and 1850. But the data in Table 4 (columns (7), (8), and (9)) do not reveal these changes. Relative income per agricultural worker in each of the Southern regions is quite stable across the full period, 1840- 1860. There are no indications of marked improvement from one date to the next in the regions that Gunderson believes were seriously under-enumerated in 1840, the South Atlantic and the East South Central. The relative level in the West South Central falls between 1840 and 1850 and rises again between 1850 and 1860, but remains always well above the national average. These shifts may reflect the changing geographic content of the region or they may reflect the peculiarities of the individual census years; e.g., Louisiana reported only half as much cotton in the census of 1850 as in the census of 1840, a fact attributed by the census director (Seventh Census, p. 67) to ‘1. . . the terrible inundations of the Mississippi and its tributaries . . .” in census year 1850 (although a shift into sugar may also have borne some of the responsibility). But in any case, the data do not appear to provide support for Gunderson’s interpretation of events. They give no reason to suppose that the 1840 Southern income estimates are biased downward. IV In summary, while Gunderson’s effort to test the 1840 income estimates is ingenious, the form of test requires that conditions be met which, in fact, were almost certainly not met in the Southern agricultural sector of 1840. Furthermore, even if these conditions had been met, his test calls for data of a quality and richness not found in the evidence available to him. His con-

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elusions thus appear to be without substantial foundation. Finally, simpler but more powerful tests, which require less in the way of conditions and which lend themselves to a more straightforward interpretation, tend to show that his conclusions are in error. These tests yield no evidence that the agricultural census of 1840 in the South was seriously defective. They tend to support Easterlin’s original work and to give warrant to the use of his estimates in the study of antebellum Southern economic growth. REFERENCES Easterlin, Richard A. (1960). “Interregional Differences in Per Capita Income, Population, and Total Income, 1840 to 1950,” in Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, Trends in the American Economy in the Nineteenth Century, Studies in Income and Wealth, Princeton: Princeton University Press, Vol. 24. Easterlin, Richard A. “Farm Production and Income in Old and New Areas at Mid-Century,” dated January 1973,47 pp., Xerox. Evans, Robert, Jr. (1962), “The Economics of American Negro Slavery” in Aspects oflabor Economics, A Conference of the Universities-National Bureau Committee for Economic Research, Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey. Gunderson, Gerald. (1973), “Southern Antebellum Income Reconsidered.” Explorations in Economic History, 10, 151-176. Hihiard, Sam Bowers. (1972). Hog Meat and Hoecake, Food Supply in the Old South. 18401860. Carbondale and Edwardsville Illinois and London and Amsterdam: Southern Illinois University Press and Feffer and Simons, Inc. Seaman, Ezra C. (1847). Supplement to Essays on the Progress of Nations, New York: Baker and Scribner. Easterlin, Richard A. (1852). Essays on the Progress ofNations, New York: Charles Scribner. Seventh Census. (1853). Report of the Superintendent of the Census for December 1, 1852 Washington, D.C.: Robert Armstrong. Compendium of the Seventh Census (1854), Washington, D.C.: Beverly Tucker, Senate Printer. U.S.D.A. Technical Bulletin 703, (1940), Washington, DC.: U.S.G.P.O.