Sharecropping As An Understandable Market Response: The Post-Bellum South

On the eve of the Civil War southern per capita real income was eighty percent of northern. Treating slaves as property, real income per free southerner was four percent greater and growing at the same rate as its northern counterpart. Southern per capita income was but fifty-one percent of the national average in 1880, and only slowly began to relatively advance after 1900.