A New Federally Funded Anti-Southern Study

(May 12, 2019) The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) recently issued a new study that concludes the wealthiest slaveholding families returned to relative prosperity less than a generation after the end of the Civil War. The three authors provide a suitably dense title: The Intergenerational Effects of a Large Wealth Shock: White Southerners After the Civil War.  Here’s the abstract:

The nullification of slave-based wealth after the US Civil War (1861-65) was one of the largest episodes of wealth compression in history. We document that white southern households with more slave assets lost substantially more wealth by 1870 relative to households with otherwise similar pre-War wealth levels. Yet, the sons of these slaveholders recovered in income and wealth proxies by 1880, in part by shifting into white collar positions and marrying into higher status families. Their pattern of recovery is most consistent with the importance of social networks in facilitating employment opportunities and access to credit.

Although correctly concluding that this “pattern of recovery is most consistent with the importance of social networks in facilitating employment opportunities and access to credit” they offer no evidence that it is unique to the South. The same pattern likely applied across all of America following the Great Depression.  As shall be documented shortly, the authors evidently have another agenda by singling-out the South.

Democrat Historians Outnumber Republican Historians 17-to-1

While the study supposedly reveals that wealthy slaveholding families recovered better than equally wealthy non-slave holding ones, it is unclear how initial wealth equivalence is determined. An owner of 10,000 acres without salves, for example, probably did not have land as valuable as a slave owner with 10,000 acres. One likely grew cotton, while the other likely did not.

Although the official conclusion included in the abstract is logical, author Leah Boustan discloses her real mission in a series of mobile Twitter conversations. It’s all about portraying the South as a perpetual slavocracy, in a De Facto if not a De Jure context.

One Twitter respondent asks, “[T]hey rebounded on a trampoline of white privilege, elite networks & tacit knowledge?” Leah answers with a short video of a famous black comedian saying, “That’s it!” Another Twitter fan writes, “Losing only 15% of wealth after the Civil War ended says so much about how slaveholders shifted tactics to preserve aspects of chattel slavery.” Leah does not disagree even though there’s obvious contrary evidence. As late as 1940, for example, two-thirds of Southern tenant farmers were white and they earned no more than black tenants.

The NBER report is merely one more addition to an ever-growing mountain of agenda-driven taxpayer funded and academic research deliberately portraying the South as America’s evil twin that must be reformed by cultural genocide. Readers wanting to fight back have at least two options. One is to write their elected representatives in Washington objecting to any additional taxpayer funding for one-sided research. Another is to stop giving money to college alma maters and especially to shift legacy donations to other charities.