Description: Through a detailed critical interpretation of the 1860 federal census, Bode and Ginter show that extensive family tenancy, and probably sharecropping, were not the creations of Emancipation and Reconstruction, but instead were widely present before the upheaval of the Civil War.
Brief description: DONALD E. GINTER is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of history at Concordia University and the author of A Measure of Wealth: The English Land Tax in Historical Analysis.
Review Quotes:
A very thorough and detailed investigation of the data upon which much historical investigation has been based. The book is a model of how to proceed when data are conceptually ambiguous. It will challenge a variety of existing preconceptions about the nature of the antebellum South and also about the political economy of the postwar transition.
--Phillip Wood "Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science"