Slave Property and the Distribution of Wealth in Texas, 1860

M ANY observers of the antebellum South-from well-known contemporary critics such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Hinton R. Helper, and John E. Cairnes to twentieth-century historians such as Eugene D. Genovese-have asserted that there was a high degree of inequality in the distribution of wealth among individuals in the South's free population. These writers, many of whom have been enormously influential in shaping historical views of the antebellum South,1 contend that this high degree of wealth concentration was the result of the slave system. "This system . . ., " Olmsted said of the cotton South, "tends to concentrate wealth in a few hands." Helper insisted that the "great majority of the Southern people" were "poor white trash"-"made poor and ignorant by the system of slavery." Describing southern "white trash," Cairnes wrote: