Southern elites legislatively dispossessed white yeomen, creating an agrarian proletariat.

Evidence

As Northern elites were forging an industrial proletariat of factory workers who would replace independent craftsmen, Southern elites, through the legislative and judicial branches they controlled, began creating an agrarian proletariat. In the mid-nineteenth century, planters denied farmers animal grazing rights on common lands, undermining the ability of poor white people to subsist on their own and making them dependent on large plantation owners. They could quit, but quit and do what? During the decade leading up to the Civil War, Southern planters buoyed by the tide of rising cotton prices squeezed white yeomen off their farms to expand their landholdings and plant more of the lucrative crop. The former freeholders often found work as overseers on the planters’ ever-expanding estates, driving enslaved Black hands. In Houston County, Georgia, for example, between 1850 and 1860, the number of households headed by overseers doubled, but the share of overseers who owned land declined dramatically, from 26 to 8 percent. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 590

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘quit and do what?’ coercion parallels the reader’s existing interest in how land access structures dependency; connects to Milgrom’s point that entry control substitutes for other constraints.