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Title: Destroyed By Slavery? The Effect of Slavery on African-American Family Formation Following Emancipation

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2010

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Abstract: For over a century, scholars have been debating the effect of slavery on African-American families after emancipation. In this paper, I introduce a unique sample that links people from the 1880 Cherokee Census to the 1860 United States Census Slave Schedules and the 1900 United States Census. By providing observations about a family's experience during slavery and two subsequent post-emancipation observations, the sample can be used to explore how slavery influenced black family formation. I utilize information about slaveholding, or the number of slaves owned by a single farmer or planter, to proxy for experiences during slavery. For the first generation of black families to rear their children after emancipation, slaveholding size did influence the chances that their children would live in single parent families. This result was robust to the inclusion of controls for human capital, income, and wealth. After two decades of economic progress and income growth, though, there was a decrease in the number of single parent households and little connection existed between family structure and slaveholding. The exception to the finding was single mothers in 1900 who did seem to have been influenced slightly by their own mother's slaveholding.

Url: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f606/d50136a56d2a02428f185338b000f37e5c43.pdf

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Authors: Miller, Melinda

Publisher: U.S. Navel Academy

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Family and Marriage, Fertility and Mortality, Race and Ethnicity

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