Roughly 50% of wealth in the antebellum South was held in slaves. Abolition initially reduced inequality—but only temporarily
took hold in America, John Steinbeck allegedly quipped, because the poor saw themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Yet in the case of southern slaveholders, who lost much of their wealth after the abolition of slavery in America and General William Sherman’s scorched-earth “march to the sea”, those millionaires who were indeed temporarily embarrassed seemed to recover quite quickly.
Before the civil war, the South was deeply unequal. Among white households, those at the 90th percentile of the wealth distribution owned 14 times as much as those at the median. By contrast, in today’s seemingly inegalitarian times, the ratio among white households is just 9.5 to one. Roughly 50% of the wealth in the antebellum South was held in slaves.
A long line of economists, from John Maynard Keynes to Thomas Piketty, have noted that wealth begets wealth. But an opposite dynamic has been observed in studies of black Americans more than 100 years after the end of slavery. A study of all Americans born between 1978 and 1983, by economists Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie Jones and Sonya Porter, found that even the black sons of wealthy parents exhibited extraordinary downward mobility relative to whites.
“The intergenerational effects of a large wealth shock: white Southerners after the civil war,” by P. Ager, L. Boustan and K. Eriksson."After abolition"
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