Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama

Fleming, Walter L.

doi:10.7312/flem90658

Cited by 38 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…13 Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790-2002 (ICPSR 2896). 14 Fleming (1905) complains that taxes in Montgomery County, Alabama, exceeded $90,000 during Reconstruction, which is consistent with the number in our dataset. than you, and whether they are he or she, is none of your consarns" (Merritt 2017, 342).…”

Section: County-level Age Heaping In the Censussupporting

confidence: 87%

Slavery, Reconstruction, and Bureaucratic Capacity in the American South

Suryanarayan

White

2020

Am Polit Sci Rev

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Conventional political economy models predict taxation will increase after franchise expansion to low-income voters. Yet, contrary to expectations, in ranked societies—where social status is a cleavage—elites can instead build cross-class coalitions to undertake a strategy of bureaucratic weakening to limit future redistributive taxation. We study a case where status hierarchies were particularly extreme: the post-Civil War American South. During Reconstruction, under federal oversight, per capita taxation was higher in counties where slavery had been more extensive before the war, as predicted by standard theoretical models. After Reconstruction ended, however, taxes fell and bureaucratic capacity was weaker where slavery had been widespread. Moreover, higher intrawhite economic inequality was associated with lower taxes and weaker capacity after Reconstruction in formerly high-slavery counties. These findings on the interaction between intrawhite economic inequality and pre-War slavery suggest that elites built cross-class coalitions against taxation where whites sought to protect their racial status.

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Section: County-level Age Heaping In the Censussupporting

confidence: 87%

Slavery, Reconstruction, and Bureaucratic Capacity in the American South

Suryanarayan

White

2020

Am Polit Sci Rev

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“…8 The Proclamation, however, does not specify the tax year for the taxable property assessment. According to Fleming (1905), the assessment was made on the basis of 1861 local tax records:…”

Section: Presidential Amnestymentioning

confidence: 99%

Amnesty Policy and Elite Persistence in the Postbellum South: Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design

Poulos

2021

Preprint

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This paper investigates the impact of Reconstruction-era amnesty policy on the officeholding and wealth of planter elites in the postbellum U.S. South. Amnesty policy restricted the political and economic rights of the planter class for nearly three years during Reconstruction. The paper estimates the effects of being excepted from amnesty on elites' future wealth and political power using a regression discontinuity design. Results on a sample of delegates to Reconstruction conventions show that exclusion from amnesty substantially decreases the likelihood of holding political office. I find no evidence that exclusion from amnesty impacted later census wealth for Reconstruction delegates or for a larger sample of known slaveholders who lived in the South in 1860.These findings are in line with previous studies evidencing changes to the identity of the political elite and continuity of economic mobility for the planter elite across the Civil War and Reconstruction.

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“…For the next 20 years, these journals – joined in 1906 by the American Review of Political Science – hosted substantial writing examining Reconstruction following the American Civil War and subsequent reaction among Southern states. A significant portion of this writing took form of apologia for the ‘brutality’ by which Northern political power imposed Black enfranchisement on the South (Smith, 1901; Flemming, 1905, 1906; Reynolds, 1906; Dunning, 1907; Thomas, 1907). Many of these declarations were published in the North, from scholars of Ivy League institutions (Burgess, 1902; Caffey, 1905; Phillips, 1907; Rowe, 1908) preoccupied with human talent and genius in terms of racial characteristics, lending intellectual credence to and justification for White racial supremacy.…”

Section: Under Veil Of Orthodoxymentioning

confidence: 99%