Historians of the nineteenth-century rural South have long distinguished the antebellum agricultural system of plantations and gang-style slave labor from the family tenancy system that is thought to have developed only after the Civil War. In "Farm Tenancy and the Census in Antebellum Georgia," however, Frederick Bode and Donald Ginter demonstrate a far greater consistency in economic traditions than many historians have recognized. Through a detailed critical interpretation of the 1860 federal census, Bode and Ginter show that extensive family tenancy, and probably sharecropping, were...
Historians of the nineteenth-century rural South have long distinguished the antebellum agricultural system of plantations and gang-style slave lab...
