40 Acres and a Mule

Saw this on MR this morning. What a great sounding paper this is.

Although over 140 years have passed since slaves were emancipated in the United States, African-Americans continue to lag behind the general population in terms of earnings and wealth. Both Reconstruction era policy makers and modern scholars have argued that racial inequality could have been reduced or eliminated if plans to allocate each freed slave family “forty acres and a mule” had been implemented following the Civil War. In this paper, I develop an empirical strategy that exploits a plausibly exogenous variation in policies of the Cherokee Nation and the southern United States to identify the impact of free land on the economic outcomes of former slaves. The Cherokee Nation, located in what is now the northeastern corner of Oklahoma, permitted the enslavement of people of African descent. After joining the Confederacy in 1861, the Cherokee Nation was forced during post-war negotiations to allow its former slaves to claim and improve any unused land in the Nation’s public domain. To examine this unique population of former slaves, I have digitized the entirety of the 1860 Cherokee Nation Slave Schedules and a 60 percent sample of the 1880 Cherokee Census. I find the racial gap in land ownership, farm size, and investment in long-term capital projects is smaller in the Cherokee Nation than in the southern United States. The advantages Cherokee freedmen experience in these areas translate into smaller racial wealth and income gaps in the Cherokee Nation than in the South. Additionally, the Cherokee freedmen had higher absolute levels of wealth and higher levels of income than southern freedmen. These results together suggest that access to free land had a considerable and positive benefit on former slaves

The author is named Melinda Miller, and she is on the job market this year from the University of Michigan. I'm really disappointed in myself for never thinking very deeply about how valuable the 40 acres and a mule resource transfer would've been for Black Americans post-Civil War, and specifically how important that would've been for longrun prosperity for them. It would seem that it could have had a plausibly large impact on their labor productivity, given the agricultural economy of the time, and therefore increased their relative wages, the quality outcomes of Black children, and probably increased human capital accumulation insofar as educated children are normal goods. All of which could have had big "catch-up effects" on Blacks in the longrun. More evidence that continually makes me cynical because of the systematic obstacles Blacks have faced historically the US.