Inequality

I keep running across the phrase "Rich man's war, poor man's fight".  When the Confederacy instituted conscription in 1862, slaveowners even exempted themselves if they owned 20 slaves or more.  My question is:

Why would a Chatham county farmer in 1860  identify with wealthy slaveowners?

My instinct is that the yeoman with 100 acres and no slaves is struggling.  He has no access to the two most valuable cash crops - tobacco and cotton.  They're labor-intensive, and the labor is provided by slaves.  The small farmer can't even get a job hoeing tobacco, since the planters have free labor as a dividend from their investment in slaves.

With the primitive infrastructure of Chatham (un-navigable rivers, one plank road, one rail line) a crop has to be worth shipping in the first place.  No sense in sending beef cows to Raleigh, there are plenty of closer cows.

So I'm thinking small farmers and planters have little in common, and the little guy would see a bright future without the competition from free labor.

Except for human nature.  As HG Jones has told me, small farmers are working to get slaves, to enter the system that excludes them.  Here is some evidence.

In the free census of 1860 in Chatham County, 2665 people own Real Estate or Property ranging in value from $2 to $360,000 and totaling $9,411,376.  These 2665 are mostly heads of households.

For the sake of this discussion, I invented a new occupation - Planter - defined as a farmer with wealth of $50,000 and over.  Here is a table of occupations and wealth for the 2665 owners of real estate or property:
(Click headings to sort)



Planters are by definition wealthy, professions had high wealth, followed by farmers and tradespeople.   It's hard to know if there is a difference between 'Domestic' and 'Housekeeper', and there may be one, so I have left them separate.  Among professions, Teachers lag behind.

The top 1%, 27 people, accounted for $2,291,090, or 24.4%. of wealth.  This is somewhat less than 2010's 35.4%.  They owned 976 slaves.  They are:



I can`t locate any slave ownership for three people.

How do the occupations compare?  Here is a chart showing the percent of each occupation in six income categories.  "Unknown" includes some illegible entries, but is mostly people who do not have any occupation.  A few, like Martha B. Alston (above) have no occupation but have assets.   Anyway, the message in 1860 Chatham is: to get access to the most wealth, be a lawyer or a planter.


Actually, the farmers aren't doing badly.  Almost two-thirds of heads-of-households are farmers, and only 17% have zero wealth.  Only 9 occupations do better.  If farmers aspire to be planters, maybe it's realistic.  As long as the premise of slavery is OK, it works.