Sharon Ann Holt, Making Freedom Pay: North Carolina Freedpeople Working for Themselves, 1864-1900. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2000. xxiii + 188 pp. $30 (cloth), ISBN:0-8203-2170-2.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Nancy Virts, Department of Economics, California State University, Northridge.

In this well-written volume, Sharon Ann Holt uses the public records of Granville County, North Carolina and personal histories of its residents during the initial period after emancipation to describe how newly freed blacks worked to better their personal economic condition and to create institutions to improve their community. She argues that home production, rather than income from tenant farming, played a crucial role in their attempts to accumulate wealth to buy farms, build churches and educate their children. Home production was a less conspicuous method of wealth accumulation, less likely to draw the attention of hostile whites and more difficult to expropriate. Unlike income from tenant farming which was often paid in goods, income from home production could be used in whatever way the family desired.

Holt describes in detail how home production and tenancy coexisted. The tenant contract gave black families access to resources that could also be used in home production, the garden plot, tools etc. Her examples suggest that families chose the tenure type that allowed them to make the best use of the available family labor. The purchases of families recorded in the account books of merchants suggest that freedwomen worked in the home sewing both for their own families and for others as well as engaging in other types of home production. The labor of women and children tended to be held out of the agricultural labor market until harvest time when wages were highest.

In spite of the importance of household production, most families were still forced to rely on the credit system. Holt's extensive research into the account books and other merchant records reveals a southern credit system that was much more complicated than the traditional view. Her account does not confine itself to the crop lien but also discusses the use the chattel mortgages and store accounts. Store accounts were a record of purchases secured by a crop lien. She finds that blacks did make payments in cash and goods to pay down these accounts before the crop was brought in. They also used chattel mortgages to pay for projects both small and large. Chattel mortgages were an alternative source of credit to crop liens. The terms of these loans, usually secured by tools and livestock, were more flexible than the crop liens. However there were risks in mortgaging means of production. If the loan could not be paid off, the family lost its ability to earn extra income. Even though the structure of the credit system was biased against blacks, some were able to use the system effectively to get ahead by acquiring land.

Holt finds considerable discrepancy between the number of black landowners listed in the 1880 Census and the number of blacks listed as paying land taxes in Granville County. Blacks who owned small farms and also rented or sharecropped were often identified as renters or sharecroppers in the census. Holt finds that once blacks acquired a farm, most did not add to it and their use of the credit system became risk averse. The hostility of whites seemed to limit blacks' willingness to acquire larger amounts of property.

Freedpeople also used the surplus earned from home production to build institutions to benefit their community, schools and churches. Holt argues that blacks were initially successful at setting up schools with the aid of northern philanthropists. Eventually these philanthropists allied themselves with southern whites to encourage the growth of public schools. As a result blacks lost control of schools to local whites. They were more successful at setting up independent churches, which become centers of community life.

The strength of this book is its careful use of detailed primary source material. This allows the author to paint a very detailed picture of how newly freed blacks shaped their economic lives. She shows convincingly that they made efficient use of family labor and the credit system available to them to accumulate assets to better the economic condition of the family and to finance schools and churches.

Ironically this book's strength is also its major weakness. It is difficult to judge to what extent its conclusions apply to other regions of the South. Granville County is located in the tobacco region. As Holt points out the conditions were more favorable to blacks here than elsewhere in the South. Tobacco could be grown efficiently on small farms. The productivity of women and children was high. Tobacco was not as vulnerable to pests as cotton.

In spite of this difficulty this is an important book which will be of interest to both economists and historians who study this period of Southern history. It provides a wealth of information about how blacks managed in the hostile environment of the South after the Civil War. It also suggests some potential problems with the use of census statistics, which should be considered by researchers.

Nancy Virts' publications include "The Efficiency of Southern Tenant Plantations, 1900-1945," Journal of Economic History, June 1991 and (with Kenneth Ng) "The Black-White Income Gap in 1880," Agricultural History, Winter 1993.