The North-South Wage Gap, Before and after the Civil War

Abstract

In an economy with 'national' factor markets, the factor price effects of a permanent, regional specific shock register everywhere, perhaps with a brief lag. The United States in the nineteenth century does not appear to have been such an economy. Using data for a variety of occupations, I document that the Civil War occasioned a dramatic divergence in the regional structure of wages -- in particular, wages in the South Atlantic and South Central states relative to the North fell sharply after the War. The divergence was immediate, being apparent as early as 1866. It was persistent: for none of the occupations examined did the regional wage structure return to its ante-bellum configuration by century's end. The divergence cannot be explained by the changing racial composition of the Southern wage labor force after the War, but does appear consistent with a sharp drop in labor productivity in Southern agriculture. I also use previously neglected data to argue that the South probably experienced a decline in the relative price of non-traded goods after the War.