A Time (Not) Apart: A Lesson in Economic History from Cotton Picking Books

Abstract

I use the individual-level records from my own family in rural Mississippi to estimate the agricultural productivity of African Americans in manual cotton picking nearly a century after Emancipation, 1952–1965. On average, the Logan children were more than 95 % as productive as enslaved children from the same region in the late antebellum era, 1850–1860. Gender differences in productivity were smaller than among enslaved children and disappeared by late pubescence. Additional qualitative evidence answers questions about agricultural productivity that cannot be derived from the quantitative data. For example, the method of cotton picking was not the gang-labor system described by some economic historians, but an independent process. The qualitative evidence also shows that economic roles were deeply intertwined with racial identity.