Suffrage , Schooling , and Sorting in the Post - Bellum U . S . South

This paper estimates the political and economic effects of the 19th century disenfranchisement of black citizens in the U.S. South. Using adjacent county-pairs that straddle state boundaries, I first examine the effect of voting restrictions on political competition. I find that each disenfranchisement law lowered overall electoral turnout by 8-17% and increased the Democratic presidential party vote share by 5%. Second, employing newly collected data on schooling inputs, I show that disenfranchisement reduced the teacher-child and teacher-student ratio in black schools, by up to 5% per year. Finally, I develop a model of suffrage restriction and redistribution in a 2-factor economy to generate sufficient statistics for welfare analysis of the incidence of black disenfranchisement. Consistent with the model, while the reduction in public good provision spurred black out-migration, disenfranchisement increased land and farm values (by 7% per decade). The estimated factor market responses suggest that blacks bore a collective loss from disenfranchisement equivalent to a 600 million current-day dollar decrease in income, much of which was transferred to landowners. JEL Codes: N30, O15, H70 ∗I thank Arindrajit Dube for numerous helpful conversations, and Morgan Kousser, Jeremy Atack, Jim Snyder, and Michael Haines for data. Jesse Driscoll, Oeindrila Dube, Ethan Kaplan, Claudia Goldin, Rick Hornbeck, Benjamin Lava, Bob Margo, Lindsay Mayka, Ted Miguel, Neal Richardson, James Robinson, and Noam Yuchtman all provided helpful comments. I also thank Edward Copenhagen and the staff at the Gutman Library Special Collections and Hi-Tech BPO. Monali Agarwal provided spectacular research assistance. All resulting mistakes are my own.