Reconstruction and Land Ownership
This government agency was created in 1865 to aid freedmen, including a plan to divide abandoned Confederate lands into 40-acre plots.
Freedmen’s Bureau
After emancipation, many freedpeople worked under this exploitative system, paying rent in crops.
Sharecropping
The study linked fathers in the 1880 Census of Agriculture to their sons in this later census year.
1900
This type of census provided detailed information on farms, acreage, and value in 1880.
Census of Agriculture
This 20th-century economist and civil rights activist emphasized that land was key to post-slavery freedom.
W.E.B. Du Bois
This president’s pardons to ex-Confederates effectively reversed land redistribution efforts.
Andrew Johnson
Du Bois argued that this was the single most significant indicator of freedmen’s economic progress.
Land ownership
Sons of Black landowners had a homeownership rate about this many percentage points higher than sons of Black laborers.
7 percentage points
The authors linked Census of Agriculture and Population records using these modern genealogy platforms.
Ancestry.com (and IPUMS)
Even sons of top Black landowners in 1880 had literacy and homeownership levels lower than White sons of this status.
Landless farmers
By 1880, approximately this percentage of Black households owned homes, compared to 55% of White households.
14 percent
Land ownership offered freedom from wage labor and this system of farming supervision.
Plantation oversight (or White supervision)
Even among Black sons of top-quintile landowners, literacy rates were this much lower than White sons of landless farmers.
20 percentage points lower
The linkage was crucial because this 1880 census type lacked property data, while the other lacked demographic information.opulation and Agriculture censuses
Population and Agriculture censuses
The study’s evidence shows that this type of wealth gap persisted despite modest mobility gains.
Racial wealth gap (or Black–White wealth gap)
This unimplemented land policy proposal symbolized Black Americans’ hopes for independence after slavery.
“Forty acres and a mule”
Despite facing barriers, Black property ownership increased between 1870 and 1900, while this group’s homeownership declined due to urbanization.
White Americans
The authors concluded that observed advantages came primarily from these mechanisms rather than geographic differences.
Within-family mechanisms
The study measured human capital through this simple but revealing indicator.
Literacy
The authors compared their findings to this economist’s 2020 study of freedmen in the Cherokee Nation.
Melinda C. Miller
The failure to redistribute land during Reconstruction entrenched these long-term racial disparities in wealth and opportunity.
Disparities in land-based wealth and economic mobility
Collins, Holtkamp, and Wanamaker found that sons of Black landowners were this much more likely to be literate in 1900 than sons of laborers.
11 percentage points more likely
Despite gains, the authors found that the advantages from Black landownership were small compared to this large economic difference.
Black–White gap in economic status
To control for location-based opportunity, the study used these regional fixed effects to test robustness.
State economic area (SEA) fixed effects
The authors concluded that Reconstruction’s failure to redistribute land perpetuated inequality that lasted into this century.
20th century (and beyond)