Continuity and Change

Abstract

Recent work on the economic history of the Southern United States has tended to argue that with emancipation, considerable degree of autonomy and freedom achieved by the former slaves. Gavin Wright's (1986) views in this regard are representative. Wright denies that Blacks remained in the because of heavy-handed legal barriers or debt peonage or the convict labor (p. 91). The South, he writes, was not prison and there no smoking gun to keep blacks and poor whites in the (p. 85). Efforts to recreate slavery, according to Wright, did not succeed. In this, Wright goes on, sharecropping, the new organizational form widely adopted after the Civil War in Southern agriculture, not system of coercion. Instead it represented a balance between the freedmen's desire for autonomy and the employer's interest in extracting work effort and having labor when it needed (p. 86). Wright concludes that all things considered, blacks made remarkable progress in accumulating wealth in the post bellum South (p. 101). In contrast, Gerald David Jaynes (1986) is not as sanguine. He details list of impediments to labor mobility which were present in the region and concludes that