NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES BIOLOGICAL INNOVATION AND PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH IN THE ANTEBELLUM COTTON ECONOMY Alan L. Rhode WORKING PAPER 14142 http://www.org/papers/w14142 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 June 2008 A number of talented students have contributed to the collection and analysis of the data. Heading this list are Jeffery Graham and Janine L. Wilson who have served as the project's lead research assistants.
Amir Amadi, Raphael Avraham, Audrey Goodwater, Rowena Gray, Pablo Jenkins, Teresa Nguyen, and Joanna Parks at UC Davis; Edward Esau of UC Riverside and the Historic Natchez Foundation; Tiffany Hamelin, University of Mississippi; Peter Malaspina, University of North Carolina; Jeremy Meiners, Washington University; Kristi Barnes, Auburn University; and Eric Sumral, Millsaps College, have all spent countless hours poring over plantation records. We give special thanks to Shelagh Mackay, whose attention to detail and insights have left a positive mark on our research. Librarians across the South have been of great assistance in identifying sources. We would like to recognize Henry Fulmer, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina; Laura Clark Brown, Southern History Collection, University of North Carolina; Elizabeth Dunn and Linda McCurdy, Duke University; Tara Z.
Laver, Louisiana State University; Andrea Cantrell, University of Arkansas; Donnelly Lancaster, University of Alabama; Melissa Smith, Tulane University; Burt Altman, Florida State University; Clinton Bagley, Mississippi Department of Archives and History; and Jennifer Ford, University of Mississippi, for their special efforts. Mimi Miller at the Historic Natchez Foundation has been a font of information. Dale Flesher and Mary Jones both graciously opened their private records to us. We have benefited from the comments, assistance, and interest of Julian Alston, Lety Arroyo-Abad, Jeremy Atack, Louis Cain, Lee Craig, Gregory Clark, Peter Coclanis, Stanley Engerman, Price Fishback, Timothy Guinanne, Mary Jackman, Zorina Khan, Thomas Mayer, Stephanie McCurry, John Hebron Moore, Joel Mokyr, Chiaki Moriguchi, Thomas Mroz, Carl Pray, Richard Steckel, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright, as well as participants at our presentations at UC Davis and UC Riverside, Duke, Northwestern, Stanford, Vanderbilt, and Yale universities, the NBER-DAE Summer Institute, and the universities of Arizona, Athens, Carlos III, Pennsylvania, and Zaragoza and two anonymous referees.
This research is supported by National Science Foundation Collaborative Research Grants, "Seeds and Slaves: Technological Change, Plantation Efficiency, and Southern Economic Development," SES- 0550913 and SES-0551130. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Olmstead and Paul W. All rights reserved.
Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. Biological Innovation and Productivity Growth in the Antebellum Cotton Economy Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode NBER Working Paper No.
14142 June 2008 JEL No. J43,N11,N5,O3 ABSTRACT The Cliometrics literature on slave efficiency has generally focused on static questions. We take a decidedly more dynamic approach. Drawing on the records of 142 plantations with 509 crops years, we show that the average daily cotton picking rate increased about four-fold between 1801 and 1862.
We argue that the development and diffusion of new cotton varieties were the primary sources of the increased efficiency. These finding have broad implications for understanding the South's preeminence in the world cotton market, the pace of westward expansion, and the importance of indigenous technological innovation. Olmstead Institute of Governmental Affairs UC, Davis Davis, CA 95616 alolmstead@ucdavis. Rhode Economics Department Eller College of Management University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 85721-0108 and NBER prhode@email.edu Biological Innovation and Productivity Growth in the Antebellum Cotton Economy American slavery has long fascinated scholars.
Over the past 40 years few issues have so sharply divided cliometricians as the performance and nature of the slave economy. These debates have generally focused on static questions such as the relative efficiency of slave and free-labor enterprises. Much of this research has relied on the Parker-Gallman sample which provides a cross-sectional view of cotton farms and plantations as recorded in the 1859 census. We take a decidedly more dynamic approach.
Our goal is to explain the forces which propelled the rapid expansion of the American cotton economy and made the South the world’s dominant producer of the Industrial Revolution’s key raw material. In doing so we place the history of slavery and cotton plantations into the context of the more general literature on the sources of American productivity growth. Standard accounts treat the technology of cotton production as static following the invention and refinement of Eli Whitney's 1793 saw gin. Given that cotton cultivation remained a hand labor task throughout the slavery period and that no machines comparable to the reaper gained acceptance, this view seems plausible at first glance.
All early attempts to develop mechanical cotton harvesters failed. The stereotype of an “uninventive South” is reinforced by the region’s low level of patenting activity. Implicit in this treatment is the assumption that all Upland cotton was alike. But cotton was not cotton.
The qualitative accounts of planter-historian B. Ware, historian John Hebron Moore, and others, asserted that southern planters created superior cotton varieties that significantly increased cotton yields, fiber quality, and the amount of cotton that could be picked in a day. The surviving archival records of 142 plantations allow us to construct a panel dataset including 509 crop years and 704,800 daily observations of the cotton production activities of 6,200 individual enslaved African Americans. The data clearly document the revolution in cotton picking efficiency— between 1801 and 1862 the average amount of cotton picked per slave in a day quadrupled.
This rapid 1 growth in picking efficiency—2.3 percent per annum—was substantially faster than the advance in labor productivity in the overall economy. Although many have declared this period of the South’s history bereft of indigenous technological advances, the region was the undisputed world leader in the creation of superior cotton varieties. Despite concerted efforts, the British were unable to replicate the results in their far-flung colonial empire. The achievements of antebellum southern cotton breeders well surpassed those of northern wheat breeders.
Our findings shed light on these advances in cotton breeding, as well as the movements in slave, cotton, and land prices; the factors responsible for the growth of cotton output and the spread of cotton cultivation; the sources of the differences in regional production and productivity between the Old and New South; as well as the conventional static comparisons of plantation and non- plantation efficiency. The paper takes the following form. First, we explore the macro trends in the antebellum cotton economy. The data on cotton and slave prices, coupled with the observation that cotton output was growing at a faster pace than the labor force in the cotton-producing counties, suggest that labor productivity was rising between 1800 and 1860.
These macro trends suggest a dynamic South. Contemporaries, and many historians, viewed the introduction and improvement of large-boll cottons from Mexico as a revolutionary innovation that rivaled the importance of Whitney’s gin. We follow this lead by analyzing the creation and diffusion of Upland cotton varieties. Next, we introduce a new dataset drawn from the archival records of 142 plantations.
These data show that the amount of Upland cotton the typical slave picked in a day increased approximately four times in the 60 years preceding the Civil War. We go on to explore a number of hypotheses for the increase in picking efficiency, concluding that improved cotton varieties likely accounted for most of the change. We further argue that our measured increase in picking efficiency captures only part of the impact of biological innovation on cotton production because the new varieties also offered higher yields and rendered higher quality fiber than most earlier cottons. Finally, we note that due to increasing insect and disease problems, cotton yields and picking efficiency would have likely fallen in the absence biological innovation.
2 Neglected Signs of Rapid Productivity Growth Figure 1 plots the long-run trends in cotton production (in logs) along with the real prices of both cotton and prime-age male slaves. The data depict a dynamic and expanding economy. From 1800 to 1860, the quantity of cotton produced increased by 6.6 percent per annum as the real price of cotton fell by 0.5 percent per annum. Over a slightly shorter period beginning in 1804, the U.
slave population rose by 2.4 percent while the real price of prime-age male slaves rose by 1.9 percent per year. Obviously not all slaves worked in cotton and not all cotton was produced by slaves (although by the 1850s the overwhelming bulk of the crop was).1 We can develop refined estimates of the cotton labor force by totaling the Lee A. Craig and Thomas Weiss numbers of agricultural workers (both slave and free) for only those counties producing cotton commercially.2 As the growth rates for slaves and for all workers in Table 1 indicate, cotton output expanded faster than the number of workers over the 1800-60 period and for each of the subperiods, 1800-20, 1820-40, and 1840-60. For the entire antebellum era, the gap between the growth rates of cotton output and the enslaved agricultural labor force in cotton counties averaged 2.4 percent per annum.
Hints of rising labor productivity also appear on the dual-side (cost- function) of the production function. Slaves were a major input in the production of cotton, yet their real prices were soaring at a time when real cotton prices were declining. In Time on the Cross, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman recognized that productivity was rising: “The basic cause of this long-term decline [in cotton prices] was the steady increase in productivity. Among the developments which made cotton farming increasingly more efficient were the improvements in the varieties of cottonseeds, the introduction of the cotton gin, the reduction in 1 Foust, Yeoman Farmer, pp.
161, 233-37, reported that slave plantations produced roughly 95 percent of American cotton in the 1850s. 2 Craig and Weiss, Rural Agricultural Workforce. To identify the cotton counties for the 1800-40 period, we used the well-known cotton production maps of O. Baker, USDA, Atlas, pt.
16-17, and used Census of Agriculture data for the 1840-60 period as reported in Craig, Haines, and Weiss, Development, Health, Nutrition, and Mortality, and U. Censuses of Agriculture. Following Foust, Yeoman Farmer, we restricted the Census counties to those reporting 1,000 or more 400-lb. For a discussion of these maps see Whartenby, Land and Labor Productivity, pp.
3 transportation and other marketing costs, and the reallocation of cotton production in the more fertile lands of the New South.”3 This brief passage is the only acknowledgement we have found in the post- 1970 cliometrics literature of the impact of new cotton varieties. In subsequent cliometrics exchanges, the quest to understand the sources and timing of productivity growth in the southern cotton economy, as well as its role in making the region the dominant world supplier, took a backseat to addressing static questions such as the self-sufficiency of southern plantations, the distribution of wealth, and the relative efficiency of slave and free-labor farms. This emphasis was in part due to the heavy lifting done by William Parker, Robert Gallman, and their students in constructing the 1859 Census micro-sample.4 A handful of agricultural and economic historians have touched on the issue of long-run productivity growth. Noting the divergent movement of cotton and slave prices, Alfred H.
Conrad and John R. Meyer hinted to the importance of productivity increases, which they attributed to the movement of cotton production to more fertile western lands.5 Building on a long tradition of agricultural writers, John Hebron Moore argued that antebellum southern planters developed and adopted a succession of new cotton varieties that increased yields per acre, quality, disease resistance, and picking efficiency.6 Drawing on a limited sample, Franklee Whartenby estimated that between 1800 and 1840 cotton yields per acre increased 46 to 78 percent and suggested that improved varieties allowed slaves to pick much cotton in a day.
