By contrast, economist Robert Higgs, who researched the actual consequences of those efforts of white employers and landowners in the postbellum South, found that such organized efforts often collapsed, as a result of competition among white employers and landowners for black workers and sharecroppers.16 It might seem as if newly freed blacks—desperately poor, usually illiterate and unfamiliar with working as free people in labor markets—would be easy prey for whites united to enforce whatever wage and sharecropper conditions they wanted. But that ignores the inherent, systemic competitive
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