Abstract

This paper documents the persistence of Southern slave owners in political power after the American Civil War. Using data from Texas, we show that former slave owners made up more than half of all state legislators until the late 1890s. Legislators with slave-owning backgrounds were more likely to be Democrats and voted more conservatively even conditional on party membership. A county’s propensity to elect former slave owners was positively correlated with cotton production, but negatively with Reconstruction-era progress of blacks. Counties that elected more slave owners also displayed worse educational outcomes for blacks in the early twentieth century.

Highlights

  • This paper documents the persistence of Southern slave owners in political power after the American Civil War

  • The end of the American Civil War brought the end of slavery, but it did not bring the end of the Southern planters

  • The high persistence in itself is remarkable. It echoes the high persistence of wealth in the Postbellum South and highlights an important mechanism in how the planter elite kept its de facto power: The former slave owners continued to exert control over the productive land, they remained highly influential in politics

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Summary

The Southern Planter Elite and Reconstruction

The Antebellum South was marked by great wealth inequality, and much of this wealth was in the form of slaves. In 1867, it passed the Reconstruction Act over Johnson’s veto This act divided the South into five military districts and stipulated that the Southern states would not be readmitted before they had accepted universal (male) suffrage The Democratic Party in the South reconstituted and regained several Southern states, often helped by increasing violence and intimidation of black voters and politicians.. The last Southern state governments fell to the Democrats, and Congressional Reconstruction ended Beginning in the late 1890s, Southern states introduced voting restrictions such as poll taxes or literacy tests These measures reduced the turnout of black and poor white voters, ensuring a political monopoly of the Democratic Party that would last until the 1960s Ferguson decision in 1894, propelled the enactment of Jim Crow laws and the resulting segregation of blacks and whites (Foner 2006, ch. 7; Naidu 2012)

The Case of Texas
Black officeholders
ASSESSING THE PERSISTENCE OF SLAVE OWNERS IN THE TEXAS LEGISLATURE
Share of overall terms as Unaffiliated
Slave ownership
Observations Clusters
Voting Progressively
Slave owner
Voting Yes
Committee Chair
Restricted sample
CONCLUSION
Findings
Restricted sample Observations Clusters
Full Text
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