Дарон Аджемоглу - Why Nations Fail

The reason that the economic and political trajectory of the South never changed, even though slavery was abolished and black men were given the right to vote, was because blacks’ political power and economic independence were tenuous. The southern planters lost the war, but would win the peace. They were still organized and they still owned the land. During the war, freed slaves had been offered the promise of forty acres and a mule when slavery was abolished, and some even got it during the famous campaigns of General William T. Sherman. But in 1865, President Andrew Johnson revoked Sherman’s orders, and the hoped-for land redistribution never took place. In a debate on this issue in Congress, Congressman George Washington Julian presciently noted, “Of what avail would be an act of congress totally abolishing slavery … if the old agricultural basis of aristocratic power shall remain?” This was the beginning of the “redemption” of the old South and the persistence of the old southern landed elite.

The sociologist Jonathan Wiener studied the persistence of the planter elite in five counties of the Black Belt, prime cotton country, of southern Alabama. Tracking families from the U.S. census and considering those with at least $10,000 of real estate, he found that of the 236 members of the planter elite in 1850, 101 maintained their position in 1870. Interestingly, this rate of persistence was very similar to that experienced in the pre–Civil War period; of the 236 wealthiest planter families of 1850, only 110 remained so a decade later. Nevertheless, of the 25 planters with the largest landholdings in 1870, 18 (72 percent) had been in the elite families in 1860; 16 had been in the 1850 elite group. While more than 600,000 were killed in the Civil War, the planter elites suffered few casualties. The law, designed by the planters and for the planters, exempted one slaveholder from military service for every twenty slaves held. As hundreds of thousands of men died to preserve the southern plantation economy, many big slaveholders and their sons sat out the war on their porches and thus were able to ensure the persistence of the plantation economy.

After the end of the war, the elite planters controlling the land were able to reexert their control over the labor force. Though the economic institution of slavery was abolished, the evidence shows a clear line of persistence in the economic system of the South based on plantation-type agriculture with cheap labor. This economic system was maintained through a variety of channels, including both control of local politics and exercise of violence. As a consequence, in the words of the African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, the South became “simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk.”

In 1865 the state legislature of Alabama passed the Black Code, an important landmark toward the repression of black labor. Similar to Decree 177 in Guatemala, the Black Code of Alabama consisted of a vagrancy law and a law against the “enticement” of laborers. It was designed to impede labor mobility and reduce competition in the labor market, and it ensured that southern planters would still have a reliable low-cost labor pool.

Following the Civil War, the period called Reconstruction lasted from 1865 until 1877. Northern politicians, with the help of the Union Army, engineered some social changes in the South. But a systematic backlash from the southern elite in the guise of support for the so-called Redeemers, seeking the South’s redemption, re-created the old system. In the 1877 presidential election, Rutherford Hayes needed southern support in the electoral college. This college, still used today, was at the heart of the indirect election for president created by the U.S. Constitution. Citizens’ votes do not directly elect the president but instead elect electors who then choose the president in the electoral college. In exchange for their support in the electoral college, the southerners demanded that Union soldiers be withdrawn from the South and the region left to its own devices. Hayes agreed. With southern support, Hayes became president and pulled out the troops. The period after 1877 then marked the real reemergence of the pre–Civil War planter elite. The redemption of the South involved the introduction of new poll taxes and literacy tests for voting, which systematically disenfranchised blacks, and often also the poor white population. These attempts succeeded and created a one-party regime under the Democratic Party, with much of the political power vested in the hands of the planter elite.

The Jim Crow laws created separate, and predictably inferior, schools. Alabama, for example, rewrote its constitution in 1901 to achieve this. Shockingly, even today Section 256 of Alabama’s constitution, though no longer enforced, still states:

Duty of legislature to establish and maintain public school system; apportionment of public school fund; separate schools for white and colored children.

The legislature shall establish, organize, and maintain a liberal system of public schools throughout the state for the benefit of the children thereof between the ages of seven and twenty-one years. The public school fund shall be apportioned to the several counties in proportion to the number of school children of school age therein, and shall be so apportioned to the schools in the districts or townships in the counties as to provide, as nearly as practicable, school terms of equal duration in such school districts or townships. Separate schools shall be provided for white and colored children, and no child of either race shall be permitted to attend a school of the other race.

An amendment to strike Section 256 from the constitution was narrowly defeated in the state legislature in 2004.

Disenfranchisement, the vagrancy laws such as the Black Code of Alabama, various Jim Crow laws, and the actions of the Ku Klux Klan, often financed and supported by the elite, turned the post–Civil War South into an effective apartheid society, where blacks and whites lived different lives. As in South Africa, these laws and practices were aimed at controlling the black population and its labor.

Southern politicians in Washington also worked to make sure that the extractive institutions of the South could persist. For instance, they ensured that no federal projects or public works that would have jeopardized southern elite control over the black workforce ever got approved. Consequently, the South entered the twentieth century as a largely rural society with low levels of education and backward technology, still employing hand labor and mule power virtually unassisted by mechanical implements. Though the proportion of people in urban areas increased, it was far less than in the North. In 1900, for example, 13.5 percent of the population of the South was urbanized, as compared with 60 percent in the Northeast.

All in all, the extractive institutions in the southern United States, based on the power of the landed elite, plantation agriculture, and low-wage, low-education labor, persisted well into the twentieth century. These institutions started to crumble only after the Second World War and then truly after the civil rights movement destroyed the political basis of the system. And it was only after the demise of these institutions in the 1950s and ’60s that the South began its process of rapid convergence to the North.

The U.S. South shows another, more resilient side of the vicious circle: as in Guatemala, the southern planter elite remained in power and structured economic and political institutions in order to ensure the continuity of its power. But differently from Guatemala, it was faced with significant challenges after its defeat in the Civil War, which abolished slavery and reversed the total, constitutional exclusion of blacks from political participation. But there is more than one way of skinning a cat: as long as the planter elite was in control of its huge landholdings and remained organized, it could structure a new set of institutions, Jim Crow instead of slavery, to achieve the same objective. The vicious circle turned out to be stronger than many, including Abraham Lincoln, had thought. The vicious circle is based on extractive political institutions creating extractive economic institutions, which in turn support the extractive political institutions, because economic wealth and power buy political power. When forty acres and a mule was off the table, the southern planter elite’s economic power remained untarnished. And, unsurprisingly and unfortunately, the implications for the black population of the South, and the South’s economic development, were the same.