Abstract
The pervasiveness of tenancy in the postbellum South had countervailing effects on marriage between African Americans. Tenancy placed severe constraints on African American women’s ability to find independent agricultural work. Freedwomen confronted not only planters’ reluctance to contract directly with women but also whites’ refusal to sell land to African Americans. Marriage consequently became one of African American women’s few viable routes into the agricultural labor market. We find that the more counties relied on tenant farming, the more common was marriage among their youngest and oldest African American residents. However, many freedwomen resented their subordinate status within tenant marriages. Thus, we find that tenancy contributed to union dissolution as well as union formation among freedpeople. Microdata tracing individuals’ marital transitions are consistent with these county-level results.
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Notes
Throughout the article, we refer to all three arrangements as “tenancy.”
Throughout the article, we use the terms “prevalence” or “share” interchangeably to refer to current marriage or divorce status ratios (e.g., the number of individuals of the relevant population group currently divorced per 1,000 members of that group).
In results not reported here, we estimated the effects of different types of tenancy, such as renting in cash or shares. Because all of these types of tenancy had similar effects on marriage and divorce, we pool them in our main analyses. The unreported results, like the results of all unreported supplemental analyses, are available from the authors upon request.
In the 1880 microdata, the presence of a spouse in the household was imputed based on the household record.
In supplemental analyses, we examined tenancy-marriage and tenancy-divorce associations for those who worked in agriculture versus those who did not. Tenant status was not recorded in the 1880 census of population. The census classification of agricultural workers is therefore an imperfect proxy. We found that the tenancy-marriage and tenancy-divorce relationships were larger among African Americans working in agriculture than among African Americans not working in agriculture, although the differences were not generally statistically significant. The difference in tenancy’s effect on white agricultural versus nonagricultural workers was substantially smaller than the difference for African Americans, indicating that the use of agricultural occupation as a proxy for tenant status may be noisier for whites than for African Americans.
Although we run separate regressions for each outcome, we denote each y for simplicity. We add 0.01 before logging in order to include in our estimation counties where marriage or divorce shares were zero because of positive denominators but zero numerators. Our patterns of inference and results are not sensitive to this choice, although the exact magnitudes of our coefficient estimates vary across different treatments of zeros.
We find that the percentage of farms worked by tenants related linearly to the log of marriage and divorce shares. Nonlinear specifications produce substantively identical results.
Data on the area of 1880 counties come from the Minnesota Population Center’s (2011) National Historical Geographic Information System.
We use a queen contiguity matrix, wherein a single shared boundary point meets the contiguity condition. Moran’s I statistics for models following Eq. (1) estimated using standard maximum likelihood to predict African American and white age-standardized marriage shares are 12.3847 (p < .0001) and 20.6074 (p < .0001), indicating that the null hypothesis that the errors are independent is strongly rejected. When we adjust for spatial autocorrelation, these Moran’s I statistics fall to −2.3077 (p = .9895) and −3.5836 (p = .9998), respectively. The corresponding Moran’s I statistics for age-standardized shares ever married and age-standardized shares divorced without adjustment for spatial autocorrelation are 15.0539 and 8.2262 for African Americans and 23.0260 and 4.6167 for whites, respectively (all p < .0001). When we adjust for spatial autocorrelation, these I statistics fall to −2.2269 (p = .9870), −0.5930 (p = .7234), −4.9735 (p = 1.000), and −0.6214 (p = .7328), respectively, suggesting that the adjustment renders the errors appropriately independent.
Because divorce was such a rare event, the small sample in the linked census data prevents us from studying transitions from marriage to divorce.
In addition, IPUMS excluded individuals with more than one possible link. For example, if the 1870 1 % sample included one John Smith born in Michigan in 1845 but the 1880 complete census recorded three John Smiths born in Michigan in 1845, this John Smith would be dropped from the sample.
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Acknowledgments
Authorship is alphabetical to reflect equal contributions. We thank Stanley Engerman, Claudia Goldin, Rosalind King, Suresh Naidu, Anthony Paik, Orlando Patterson, Stewart Tolnay, Melissa Weiner, Christopher Winship, William Julius Wilson, and anonymous Demography reviewers for helpful comments on previous drafts. We presented previous versions of this article at Harvard University’s Research in Economic History workshop and the annual meetings of the Population Association of America, the American Sociological Association, and the Social Science History Association.
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Bloome, D., Muller, C. Tenancy and African American Marriage in the Postbellum South. Demography 52, 1409–1430 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-015-0414-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-015-0414-1