Strapped for Cash. Non-cash Payments on Louisiana Cotton Plantations, 1865-1908

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century two forms of non-cash payments existed on the Louisiana cotton plantations Lakeview and Theoda: non-cash payments associated with sharecropping, and payments in token money, which could only be redeemed at the company store. Such payments seem to confirm the reputation of the U.S. South as being economically and socially less developed than the Northern states after the American Civil War. The one-crop economy, sharecropping, and token money have been linked to the lack of economic development of Southern agriculture, and to 're-enslavement'. This study analyses non-cash payments on Lakeview and Theoda in the same way as similar practices in the Netherlands have been analyzed. It suggests a reinterpretation of the historical economic literature, in which non-cash payments in post-emancipation Southern U.S. agriculture are described as a pre-modern and re-enslaving method.